Really. Just use that energy to absorb CO2 via CaO to CaCO3 and convert it into long chain hydrocarbons using water . Iceland is surrounded by water, after all. Just don't take too much CO2 out of the environment with that limitless energy :)
Fuel made from atmospheric CO2 using clean energy is essentially a disposable battery for storing that clean energy that automatically recycles itself when it is used.
The issue with burning things is the pollution it can cause if not filtered properly before emissions released into the air. CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life.
An incongruence in the West vs. the East's strategy is that we in the West have avoided nuclear - which generates zero CO2 - whereas the East's CO2 production (via building new coal power plants weekly) - has been skyrocketing:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-...
In this scenario with China doing the opposite to the rest of the world, there are exactly zero gains for CO2 reduction - far outweighed by the increase in CO2 production. And in this scenario as well the "polluter" or generator of the most CO2 is being rewarded for their behaviour by producing the cheapest energy possible, which allows their cost of production to be lower than the West, which allows their profits to be higher - for us to buy cheaper products to not only perpetuate but accelerate these current conditions.
The rest of your argument is orthogonal to the issue. Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere works globally, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t reduce emissions.
There may be a delay but then the CO2 gets absorbed and stored in the plants, and then in more animals that will be added mass to the cycles - the plants dying then goes into the soil, to support more growth, and eventually over millions of years that Earth gets compacted - turned into rock, then arguably more oil will be formed.
Your point doesn't argue anything because you stopped-didn't think exponentially through the cycle after they "die" part in the cycle - what happens next?
"The rest of your argument is orthogonal to the issue. Taking CO2 out of the atmosphere works globally, it doesn’t matter who does or doesn’t reduce emissions."
So you don't think the West "being responsible by reducing CO2" - getting hurt by costs going up - while the East massively increases CO2 production and gets rewarded by doing so, doesn't have an impact?
Please actually address my specific points, rather than just making a general claim if you want to continue discussing this.
Yes, the planet and life on earth will do just fine. The problem is can our civilization survive? Like, can our current civilisation survive the next 100 years of worsening conditions? Humans will survive, we are the most widespread species already (from hottest to coldest places on earth). Some areas will be a little too unhabitable of course, billions will die, but who cares, right?
[0] Of course, many of them won't be able to migrate at all and will just die (I'll posit that's also bad).
[1] Do think through this for just a second. Our current economic systems include property ownership, and basically all land on earth is owned by somebody. If the land owned by 3B people becomes worthless (both in an economic sense and also in that they can't live there anymore), they'll have to either die, or they'll have to start using land owned by other people. Suppose no significant numbers of people move till they have to (since if we can't coordinate on CO2 sequestration/production, we probably can't coordinate on mitigating the harm from that initial lack of coordination). There are solutions, but they all represent at best a global transfer of resources. Is solving that problem easier than handling CO2 correctly to start with?
I think rational-reasonable people, who are usually the most competent and resourceful - aside from industrial complexes with wealth and willingness to do bad in order to achieve regulatory capture to selfishly benefit themselves - will and are landing on that CO2 is an issue to address but how urgent and how close to castrophou we are is the question, but that also then has to be balanced by how harmful could or will the response be to it, e.g. increasing energy costs by adding a CO2 tax will then kill off how many millions around the world, slow how many more millions from getting out of poverty sooner, and how much natural forest environment gets destroyed from people now needing to cut down forests unsustainably because they need a cheap fuel for heating and cooking?
The issue is "armchair" conversations like this, where most people aren't accounting for or factoring everything necessary for a balanced approach - and there seems to be a big ideological divide and vast amount of teaching to happen, whether people are even calm enough to be willing to listen - or if they're fixed and avoidant, succumbing to whatever hysteria and fear mongering propaganda that they may have been misled by (not to claim everything they believe is false).
A bigger threat in my eyes are authoritarians who want to use climate alarmism to manufacture consent to implement further authoritarian-lockdown type policy.
No, modern decomposes are more effective than ancient ones. Rare events like landslides might bury carbon effectively, but for the most part it will be returned to the biosphere long before it ends up resembling oil.
For instance, here in Colorado we're seeing a lot of our wood turn into CO2 due to an invasive beetle. I can't say for sure if the warming climate is what catalyzed the invasion, but it's plausible.
My point is just that it's uncharted territory, which is inherently more dangerous than charted territory. The system will surely find a new equilibrium eventually but there's no guarantee that we're going to like the path it takes.
> CO2 feeds plants to grow, which in turn provides more food and habitat for more life.
Yeah, unless they can't synthesize it because it's too hot and they didn't had a chance to adjust to new temperatures yet. It takes some time and will happen, but we pump CO2 a little too fast.
> In this scenario with China doing the opposite to the rest of the world, there are exactly zero gains for CO2 reduction - far outweighed by the increase in CO2 production.
Oh yeah, someone litters on the street, let's all litter and get rid of the trash cans. Alternative solution: we should stop buying from them so they will not generate that co2.
And yes, there will be a delay as part of evolutionary process for when plants and wildlife can adapt - for plants that are better adapted or capable of adapting to hotter temperatures-different climate will adjust - so indeed at minimum reducing the pace at minimum can be useful; and deploying technologies to slow down the increase we have arguably bumped up at least a little bit [remember the distance that Earth to the sun we are is the biggest factor of temperatures, and where are we in that 1000s of year cycle at the moment?] will help, but we could also prepare to pollinate and manage new growth areas with plants/life we know can adapt; the US policy makers on the side of believing climate change is a life-or-death urgent consideration want to spend $40+ trillion "fighting" it - so getting simply helping the Earth adapt, which is what we should be doing because it's unknown exactly how much our changing CO2 levels will actually impact things, is a no-brainer to do regardless - to create more life, to maximize it; and I also believe Elon is correct that Earth can sustain another 10x the current human population - however that will require succeeding in battle against industrial complexes and authoritarian wannabes who're involved in regulatory capture.
"Alternative solution: we should stop buying from them so they will not generate that co2."
Absolutely a good strategy to stop rewarding that behaviour, if that's the best course of action to not destabilize the world too much - which may not be a good idea to potentially force the CCP-China's hand into highly aggressive or bad-harmful behaviour.
But do you think the inflationary policy, money borrowing, $34 trillion in debt, and people currently struggling in the US and West in general will be able to handle the massive increase in costs of goods that will happen if that happens?
We will have more life, but less humans and probably our civilisation will not survive. Apart from that, earth will be fine, so we should do as we please and put as much pollution as we want to?
We may survive as a species. But our civilization will not survive the destabilization it causes.
E.g. folks depend on fish for a large part of the planet, from coastal waters. Kill the reefs (which we've made a good start on), the coastal ecosystem collpases (california crab anyone?) and not thousands, not millions but hundreds of millions of people starve.
Then what? Some kind of global rescue effort? Not hardly. Look at the last wave of 10,000 refugees, how every European country was winging about 'we can't accept a thousand! It's too much!'
Now add four zeroes to that number. Get the picture?
This is a straw man argument. I didn't say it costs too much, I was stating options for how and where money may be better spent.
And if you haven't observed yet that the free market - save for regulatory capture - is far more efficient than government at most efficiently distributing resources where needed, then "you" aren't paying enough attention.
Solving problems like this are precisely where government, with all its flaws, is essential to doing it at all.
It starts with industrial complexes forming an unfair advantage, leading to regulatory capture that selfishly sets up rules to benefit the industry's profits at the cost of people, society, the environment. As part of that regulatory capture the industries lobby to get politicians of their choosing into positions of decision making, those politicians progressively are more clever-deceptive and more authoritarian. These two sides of the same coin is fascism.
The namecalling and villain-choosing is pointless. It's a system that must be designed, one that works with rules and forces in a useful direction.
You seem to be assuming, and wrongly assuming who I'm including in my referencing bad actors.
Where did I name call? Saying bad actors isn't name calling, firstly, and where the terminology to differentiate who exactly I'm referencing isn't clear enough - and you want to just jump to designing a system, but you need to base that design on who is either forced to into certain behaviour to maintain competing vs. those who are doing far more than just forced into certain behaviours, let's say a scenario where politicians are assassinated in worst case scenario - or where prior to that the bad actors fund politicians who will do exactly as they say if/when elected.
If you're willing to implement policy that increases the cost of energy then you're also in support of killing off the poorest, right? Jordan Peterson has regularly brought this up in this argument points against the current strategy of CO2 taxes, etc - which are actually worse for the environment because then people can't afford the less polluting energy sources, and then they burn wood - worse for environment for pollution, worse for their own health, and it destroys forests.
There also is legitimate research showing that once people earn "$5,000" per year minimum then they are able to actually start caring about non-selfish, holistic-society wide problems - otherwise survival rightly has them concentrating on themselves; which I hope logically makes sense to you, and you don't require me to dig up the link(s)?
Second, what source(s) are acceptable-authoritative to you, e.g. what source(s) will you actually believe?
Do you also think those people are properly or correctly accounted for?
It's why we should work from first principles of logic, and where zero or very near zero people (and I don't mean millions of lives being an acceptable number) are ; do no harm.
You're right, provided you're willing to wait a few million years for everybody to adjust to the new norms. That might be quite an uncomfortable transition though, it's not clear what would survive.
Biodiversity holds secrets which we have a much better shot at discovering than we do at inventing (e.g. novel protein structure and function). Committing to a large scale terraforming project means clobbering the unknown with the known and shutting the door on those secrets forever. It may be one day necessary but it's an outcome that we should avoid at all costs.
The best solution, most efficient, and most harmless solution appears to be driving for abundance so more and more people have more money to pay for what's minimally necessary for products-services that follow minimally acceptable processes; raise the floor for everyone, but not while opening up major cracks hurting or killing off millions or potentially billions if a societal-economic systems collapse and ensuing chaos/disorder - virtue signalling it's for "the greater good" while killing off those who are out of sight and out of mind of the constituents voting them into power [assuming democratic-fair election process - even if gamed unethically to win, still needing to keep up appearances to their ideological mob voter base].
Otherwise currently, for example, Canadians are suffering with the increasing CO2 tax - while the East is skyrocketing their CO2 emissions - where arguably the majority of Canadian products bought come from; making Canadian produced goods more expensive due to the CO2 tax, making Chinese goods cheaper to produce - and therefore not only ceding power to China but also destroying more ethical production-manufacturing of goods here in Canada.
If economically significant markets implement this then it can have a real global effect. Implementing a local tax only makes the local markets only less competitive and will favor imports from countries that do not implement proper measures.
0: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220119121411.htm
1: https://carbon.xprize.org/prizes/carbonEssentially it's either going to be so cheap that trying to use it as currency is impractical, like carrying around pennies, or so overvalued that you'd surely destroy the economy? You'd have to use paper currency backed by tonnes of carbon - which is just a roundabout way to arrive at carbon credits!