The people who can afford to pay for this can also afford to avoid the worst effects of climate change, probably much cheaper while throwing the rest of us under a bus.
They think they can avoid the worst effects of climate change, but I'd wager they're shockingly wrong about that. They'll more likely only delay their misery for a while longer than the rest of us.
You're 110% right that they'll surely try their very best to "throw everyone else under the bus" though. They've already show their true colors pretty clearly. No reason they'll suddenly get their shit together and grow the hell up now.
Yep, but they will have died of natural age. So for the coming decades, people with money can avoid the effects (they can just move, buy more cooling/heating/electric, get food anyway etc) and then they die. The next generation will be similar, and so on, until even the rich cannot get away.
Many people who care and want to change cannot do anything or at least feel they cannot (a child-less one-Prius family driving less is not exactly a feeling of impact).
This isn’t going to happen soon. The developing economies can’t get out of poverty without burning cheap fuel.
Why are companies buying them? Do these companies get tax write offs? Does it help with employee retention? To deflect other bad press?
So if
Making things profitable just requires policy changes. Just look at the IRA in the US right now incentivizing all sorts of things that would otherwise not be that profitable right now rather successfully. Whole industries bootstrapping themselves because of it. And the best part is you can fund it through debt. There was no tax raise to pay for the 1 trillion $ IRA budget. And it's not a zero sum game of course. It's not a hand out but an investment with a positive return on investment. The investment is long term profitable.
Terraforming is going to require large scale investments and there will be plenty of opportunity to profit from that. All it requires is some policy. How do you think people got to the moon? Frugal people counting pennies or people just going for it and moving extreme amounts of funding to make it happen? History is full of moonshots.
Whether there would still be appetite for the larger price tag of carbon sequestration once there was a band-aid for warming is another question though.
This is not universal physics.
Same for the "Limited Liability Corporation", protections from Ex Post Facto law enforcement, and the like. Political constructs.
Should people get pissed off enough, they won't matter. Now, the rich are good at not being the focus of the angry mob ... usually.
But the point is, the rich are playing games with the core stability of the world, to say nothing of the viability of the interconnected web of species on the planet. It's frankly pretty nuts.
The rich are insane. Sane people would not be doing this.
This is a dangerous idea to spread, because if you truly believe it then the only solution is dismantle capitalism. The irony is that regulated capitalism in the West has been the most effective at reducing emissions. The places with the worst emissions have the same economic incentives, but different policy (such as China).
[0] https://www.chinawaterrisk.org/opinions/what-lessons-do-the-...
The Chinese don’t emit less because they are good global citizens, it is because they are less wealthy. If emissions per capita is our judge, we should be congratulating all the countries in the worst poverty, since they use the least amount of energy.
But the Chinese are also poorer, on average, and since poorer people tend to live a simpler life (not that it is a bad thing), emission per capita may not be a good indicator.
An alternative is to compare tons of CO2 emitted for each USD of GDP produced, which, using the numbers the world bank [1], turns out to be 0.6 for China and 0.2 for the US (using figures from 2021 for GDP and population, and 2019 for emissions, but the results hold qualitatively). Roughly speaking, this means that the same good/service required, on average, three times as much CO2 to be produced/offered in China compared to the US (using USD to measure the "quantity" of goods/services).
China's emissions aren't even all that high when you take into account their absolutely massive population. Oil states, tiny states, and western(ised) states are still the top polluters. Per capita, China is about on par with north-western European countries. The average person in China emits between half to two thirds of the carbon emissions the average American citizen emits, and countries like Canada and Australia carbon footprints similar to the USA.
The Chinese carbon emission reduction industry has been so effective that their solar panels had to be taxed extra or even banned from import into the EU because their cheap solar power was killing the European industry and creating an economic dependence on China. While the west is working hard on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, upcoming economies like China and India need to deal with prevention as much as reduction. Frankly, it's amazing how much these economies have managed to limit their carbon footprint despite their massive population and rapidly increasing wealth.
I agree the West is higher on a per capita basis, but the important measure is the change. The West is cutting emissions per person, and China is increasing them.
It’s significant that China is mostly selling their panels to the West. If they are such world leaders, why do they continue to accelerate coal and gas generation? If they have the cheapest panels, why don’t they just use those? Because their policy is to maximise economic power and practically ignore emissions. Unless the west finds a way to incentivise reductions in the east and developing world (eg green investment, tariffs based on emissions), our sacrifices will have been in vain.
(Not that I think terraforming earth is a good idea at this stage, though)