I’d be completely happy with technological innovations that allowed us to restore heat balance (solar radiation management, marine cloud brightening, etc). That can buy time for transitioning from fossil fuels.
https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-...
This is the answer to carbon storage by the way, people just do not know about it. There's more than enough reactive mineral sites on the planet. The process is basically just dissolving CO2 into water, heating it, and soaking basalt in it to allow crystals to form. The water becomes heavier than ground water and can simply be poured into the Earth. The unsolved problems are optimization problems: direct air capture of CO2, using saltwater, that sort of thing.
If the world's billionaire class decided to buy carbon sequestering, we could have global CO2 levels returned to 1900 levels within a decade or two. The technology exists, the economic willpower does not.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43789527
> Potentially, basalt could solve all the world's CO2 problems says Sandra: "The storage capacity is such that, in theory, basalts could permanently hold the entire bulk of CO2 emissions derived from burning all fossil fuel on Earth."
Having said all of that, this is likely the most dystopian option. It's the "tech bails us out, yet again" solution because we could deploy it thoroughly enough that we can solve climate change without addressing any of the existential issues that got us here. The right combination of corporate+government partnership commercializing this technology and making it mandatory is a very plausible way to arrive at "there's 4 corporations on Earth that run the show" a la Aliens.
Not only is there no way to hide trying to do something about it at that scale, there is no single site (or even multiple sites) that could handle that amount of sequestration - we’re talking hundreds.
And even Elon Musk could not afford it, even if he dumped everything he had into it.
I think you could prove it out at a scale that people could measure on planetary CO2 sensors for a couple dozen billion dollars, then take that data to a sitting POTUS you're friendly with and work out a multi-trillion dollar commercialization plan, using the USA's global bullying power to immediately establish a global monopoly.
A particularly cynical view would be this CEO buying global laws that dictate carbon neutrality while simultaneously also making it impossible to achieve without his CCS. Then merely canceling a sales contract topples a regime and you've arrived a global corporatocracy.
> Mind doing some math and showing your work?
I don’t see how anyone could spend tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in secret, so I’m not sure how important it is to show their work. I found the premise a bit absurd.
The other options mentioned like messing with the atmosphere to make it reflect more heat into space will likely cause wars due to lack of global consensus
Who would attack who? Let’s say we are putting calcium carbonate into the upper arctic atmosphere to stop Greenland melt.
Who attacks?
TBH, I don't understand anti geoengineering logic…
At some point countries will just start doing it out of desperation, but folks are rightly nervous to be the first.
There's a sibling with the long-form reasoning. The problem is that we are pushing a lot of new carbon into the atmosphere, you just won't be able to scale anything enough and there's a really big opportunity cost to try to push the tide away.
In 2022, international policy cleaned up shipping fuels. Without the sulfur, however, the “ship tracks” ceased. Without the marine clouds seeded by dirty fuels, the warming impact of shipping increased by 30%.
We could reduce it again by 70% or more without dirty fuels, with approaches like aerosolizing salt water.
Global warming mitigation will take a lot of little things. It’s not one big effort—and people won’t sue for the same reason oil companies aren’t liable for weather.
My point is that it can’t just be about carbon. That’s not actually the root cause. It’s the heat balance. We can either absorb less or radiate more. Both offer solution spaces.