An extreme ice-age climate 700M years ago

Unfortunately, you're both right.

Decarbonization is the best thing to do by a large margin, both in a cost-benefit sense and in a net impact sense. It's stupid to burn coal to produce $X worth of electricity and then spend many multiples of $X just to remove a tiny fraction of the carbon.

But you're also right that decarbonization won't occur in the amount required by 2060.

Which, quite frankly and plainly, just means we're fucked. Not even going into positive feedback loops of natural methane emissions due to warming arctic and tropics.

> We're still building net-new coal plants

I wonder about that. Will they be subsidized? At the same time are also closing down functional coal plants because their operational cost can't be recouped now that they compete with renewables.

(Yeah, in all likelihood, everybody involved is actively refusing to think and talk about that on the hopes that they will have left this job by then. And the people putting money there are probably trying to sell their shares away to another loser before it.)

Any way you cut it, those new coal plants will only get operational at all if people decide to constantly burn some money in them.

> However the lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and power plants being built today range from 20-50 years.

Yes, and that means we can replace up to 5% of our transportation emissions by year without increasing our capital depreciation. That is in stark contrast to the norm in that you are supposed to do some net investment to adapt to any random change.

If you decide (by regulation, morality, or whatever) to actually sink money on the change, you can get there much faster.

That sounds pessimistic give the exponential growth in solar (3 year doubling) and the like and that "Renewable capacity will meet 35% of global power generation by 2025, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA)."

The existence of coal plants doesn't mean you have to run them most of the time.

We're about to enter a world where wind solar EV have the clear economic advantage over coal gas ice. Production is semi scaled. And yet it is slow as molasses.

Yet the carbon capture people think a cost line item no advantage except regulatory requirement will scale out faster? Yeah, ok.

Carbon capture and hydrogen cats, science and engineering aside,Val ways trace back to oil and gas media and lobbying. Its just fud at the policy level.

Conversely, hyper focusing on the top two can also be a distraction. There isn't a single pool of resources and labor that is being managed by a single entity. The people spreading rocks on fields are not the same people building solar panels or producing electric vehicles. Reducing funding spent on carbon capture does not inherently increase the funding for renewables. Researching cleaner concrete manufacturing does not inherently decelerate coal plant phase out. While reducing CO2 emmissions from the two biggest sources would be a huge win, people have been trying to achieve that for decades, and even in the most optimistic scenario it's a battle that will continue for another few decades. In the meantime there is a lot of other stuff that can be worked on in parallel. Waiting around for a silver bullet to solve everything is a great way to get nothing done, and so those who want nothing to get done point out the limitations of various proposals without putting forward options that put those specific resources to better use. Further, when you tell people that everything is insignificant compared to this one great challenge, and that challenge is something that people don't see much rapid progress on, it leads to defeatism - why should I buy an energy efficient heat pump when people on the other side of the world are currently building hundreds of coal plants? Again this is taken advantage of by malicious actors who turn that defeatism into resentment of even trying to make things better.

Well, not on this one case.

Spreading CO2 capturing material is a very viable way to help. And we must research capture anyway, because we surely will need it.

This kind of action is the carbon credit system working like it was supposed to work, and a really good example to use to turn it into a tax that gets negative to whoever is capturing.

But I do agree, one has to always be careful not to fall for polluter's propaganda.

Thats right. Unfortunately, most people have they mindset fixed on never ending growth. We need more people, more cars, more everything. Yet, those people seems to barelly understand basic math and physics. Numbers do NOT lie. All that cool stuff that happened post WWII was because if cheap energy, very cheap. But its going to end. You can either have 10B ppl living in poor conditions or 200M people living in good conditions.

> We also need to get to a place, culturally, where we can have calm rational conversations about how many people we can reasonably ask this planet to support.

I disagree, that's a dangerous trap. Oh, sure, it seems reasonable and sagacious at first glance, but that's what makes the eventual misdirection/procrastination so insidious! Long-term planning is not automatically wise planning.

________

To illustrate, imagine that:

1. There's a local park with houses around it.

2. Some people periodically dump their trash in it.

3. The trash-piles are getting kind of big and stinky now.

4. A well-meaning neighbor says: "What we really need is to get a place, as a community, where we can have calm rational conversations bout how many people can live near this park."

5. (Bonus) Many of the biggest trash dumpers agree: "Exactly, literally everybody here is to blame, and especially people moving in and/or having too many kids! The only way forward is a very thorough and lengthy symposium with multiple committees to develop recommendations to stop that kind of thing."

________

In that analogy, it's easier to see that your neighbor's proposal is--er--less than practical, because (A) the immediate problem isn't actually total visitor count,(B) we'll never reach full consensus, and (C) any consensus number would still meaninglessly unenforceable.

So it can't really help, but it can harm by creating unnecessary discord and will prevent/delay practical changes like "Anything you bring must be taken back out", or "Littering: $X fine."

Why is this being downvoted? What is the argument for unregulated populations?

> It kind of feels the same as when governments in California harp on personal water use and restaurants giving you a glass of water with your meal when the largest consumer of water use by a large margin is industry and farming.

Except that it isn't:

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1185535/transport-carbon...

> when probably the most number of people stopped driving and individual energy needs plummeted, our CO2 emissions and fossil fuel energy use dipped marginally.

Because the reduction was a percent of half of less than a third of CO2 emissions. People stopped commuting to work but they still went to the store, or had more things delivered from the internet in a giant UPS truck.

> I think the reason is that shipping, airline, and commercial transportation (ie trucks) consume the most and those aren’t getting off fossil fuels any time soon.

Why not? Trucks can do in the same way as cars. Rail is the easiest to electrify -- a "diesel locomotive" is actually an electric locomotive with a diesel generator on it. Add a third rail or electric gantry and you don't need the generator, and put some batteries in the locomotive and you can get by partial coverage. Container ships are predominantly cargo by weight and have some significant leeway in terms of generation methods with a poor energy density -- or you can go the opposite way and use a nuclear reactor as you say.

The hard one is aviation, but it's only ~2% of total CO2 emissions and the worst case scenario is biofuels, which would be more expensive but is a known working technology in the absence of any lower cost alternative.

The really hard one is heating in the winter, because it's a large proportion of CO2 emissions but is inversely aligned with solar generation and can't be significantly scaled back on a cold day to account for intermittent generation from wind. That's the thing where nuclear seems like the best option.

But you don't have to solve the hard problems before adopting the known solutions to the easy problems.

> ...restaurants giving you a glass of water with your meal...

Seriously?

The average person in the westernised world probably uses something between 100 to 400 litres of water for washing and flushing per day, personal use actually in their house. And drinks around 2 litres in the same amount of time. External water use on behalf of that person for example for growing food and manufacturing things is even more. Having a glass of water wasted at a restaurant is a complete negligible non-issue. How ridiculous.

Well, I meant it by cost.

The marginal costs for those top 2 are quite public. For electricity it's negative, electric cars cost some 30% more than normal ones.

They are reasonably easy to estimate for things like spreading carbon-capturing rocks around (or you can use the price of phosphate-rich rocks, it should be similar). It's not a very expensive thing to do, but way more expensive than those 2.

Marginally, there isn't a lot of synergy between those different options. But if you push them to levels much higher than the ones we have now it becomes clear that decarbonizing electricity will become a bottleneck to almost everything.

Except that this makes the entire concept bunk, because what the company cares about is the ability to claim carbon neutrality in their PR, which they'll do by choosing the credits that are the cheapest, which will be the ones that are a fraud.

The actual way to fix this is to price carbon. You don't get money for not burning down a forest, you pay money if you burn down a forest, or burn coal. Then you refund all of that money to the public so it isn't a net tax, it's just an incentive to not emit carbon, because only the people who emit carbon pay the tax but everybody gets the refund.

> Rocks are very dense

Slighty off-topic, but I'm curious: what do you think requires more energy to move, 35 billion tons of steel or 35 billion tons of feathers?[*]

[*] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg

The material already is somewhere. Why would it need to move?

OK point taken, but that’s actually a very small point when you run the numbers.

Industrial scale direct air capture technology right is ~1200KWh per ton of CO2. And this energy cost is non linear - as we scale up, the lower CO2 concentration in the air will result in higher energy costs being needed to extract the remaining. I don’t think exposing the rock will be cheaper or can even scale as a process but harder to say. But that energy used is largely waste - sure we’ll maybe find a use for some of the co2 but then that’s also not sequestration and will release some of the captured co2 back into the air.

Using those numbers means we’d need to be spending 48TWh to capture the carbon we emit each year, which is almost half of our current global energy production. Those are massive numbers. Of course you could overbuild less and slowly extract the co2, but then climate change gets even more baked in.

But learning if those climate changes can/could be prevented is valuable lessons. If an asteroid impacted caused the changes, preventing an asteroid strike is close to possible now. Super volcano eruption would be much less avoidable. Maybe in a few hundred years someone can look back to see if the mechanization of man made a preventable difference. It just might not be man that is doing the looking.