• argv_minus_one@beehaw.org
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      1 year ago

      Even if we stop pumping carbon in the air tomorrow it will still take centuries until the atmosphere is back to normal, barring any carbon capture.

      That would, however, stop it from getting any worse, which is kind of a big deal because it’s getting worse at a frightening rate.

      Making all out cars electrical is also cute. It’s a nice thought if it weren’t that all that electricity still mostly comes from CO2 emitting sources so including conversion losses electrical cars may actually send more CO2 in the atmosphere.

      You severely overestimate the energy efficiency of gasoline engines. A big reason to get rid of them is not only the fuel they burn, but how much of it they waste.

      We need nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow in all countries, even the “bad” ones.

      You severely underestimate the resources required to build those. It costs some $20 billion to build one nuclear power plant. There’s a reason everybody’s focusing on solar and wind.

      Small modular reactors may be cheaper, but they also generate huge amounts of radioactive waste. Radioactive waste isn’t a serious problem now, but it will be if we start powering everything with SMRs.

      Atom cracking will not save us. Not unless there’s some kind of breakthrough.

      We will likely end up with some form of atmospheric engineering where we’re going to meas with the atmosphere, seeding clouds, or pumping other chemicals in there that negate the effects of CO2. I’m unsure what the results of that will be though

      1. It works.
      2. Big Oil chants “spray, baby, spray!”
      3. It works too well. Global freeze occurs. Everybody dies. Game over.

      Either way, you and I will NOT see the end of this, that is for our children’s children

      Have you stepped outside at any point in the last several years? Global warming is no longer a looming future threat for someone else to deal with. It’s here and now.

    • JustLookingForDigg@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I’m surprised this got so many upvotes, a lot of it is factually incorrect! For instance many grids worldwide are over 50% renewables. You can scrub carbon with a net carbon loss if you use solar powered to do it.

      There’s also no reason that capturing the carbon would cost all the energy that was released by burning it (you don’t have to make it into the same fuel molecule).

      Honestly this sounds like climate change denier shit, “it’s too late there’s nothing we can do, buy more oil.”.

      On the positive side, I agree that nuclear is great!

          • matlag@sh.itjust.works
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            1 year ago

            Sorry to ruin this dream, but not a single developed country (and most likely not a single non-developed either) has a remote chance of being carbon neutral in 10years.

            Reason number one is “carbon-neutral” is yet another greenwashing marketing idea involving emissions compensations that are just not there.

            We’ve seen now that planting trees will probably not do any good: we already see trees growing failure rate increasing due to excessive heating. They grow slower already, making all compensation calculations wrong, and they’ll burn in wildfires in summer, releasing all the carbon they captured.

            The second reason is the insanely high dependency we have to cheap oil. You need to convert haul truck, small trucks, buses, etc. to electric all while you turn the grid to 0 emission.

            You need to convert cargo ships to electric otherwise your net neutrality will need to conveniently ignore all importations and exportations.

            You need to convert all farm machines to 0 emissions and abandon quite a lot of the chemistry considered for granted today, which means yields will drop.

            You need to convert blast furnaces to alternative energies. Today, there is almost nothing done there other than “we’ll get hydrogen” that everybody know cannot be produced in the volume they need, let alone at an acceptable price.

            And no energy source whatsoever is carbon neutral!

            Solar panels need quite some metal and semicon-based manufacturing techniques. Wind farm need concrete for their anchoring, and use advanced materials to build. They both have a limited lifespan, after which you need to recycle (By the way: noticed that when “recycling” is advertised, no one mentions if it’s rectcling for the same usage and not recycled to lower grade material we can’t use back to produce the same device? That’s because we just can’t get them back with the same purity level…) and make some replacement, that will again have a share of emissions.

            Short of producing absolutely everything in the chains of supplies locally, you will import emissions from another country

            Any human activity is basically emitting or causing greenhouses emissions.

            And while you think all of that can be managed, we already have all signals to red on the natural resources: we can’t extract lithium fast enough, and we may not want to given how dirty the mines are. We may run out of some metals we rely on.

            And most of these issues are eluded in the great plans, because it’s too complicated or we simply have no solution and no one wants to say it up and loud.

            Now, the good/bad news: all of this will end because we’re also running out of cheap oil.

            It’s a good news because that will put a break in humans activities and so greenhouse gas emissions.

            But it’s bad because not a single country is preparing for the aftermath, and that means… they will collapse!

    • Haui@discuss.tchncs.de
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      1 year ago

      That’s a disturbing but interesting take. Thank you very much.

      The funny thing is that you can sell stocks. I know that a billionaire does not have dagoberts vault at home (maybe some do).

      But their net worth is calculated somehow and in selling all assets above 999 mil, you get exactly what I‘m talking about.

      I get that this is a long undertaking but we are still on the way up. This needs to stop now so we do it now. Use the money to stop the gravest polluters first and by the time you run out of money, you‘re a lot better on the scale.

      Btw the estimated cost to 2030 to stop climate change is 90 trillion. So this does part of it.

      Just wanted to put that out there. It’s surely gonna be a big job since most of us lack vision.

      Not like we could start working only on that since we need to make stuff nobody needs to impress people we dont like./s

      Also, my personal favorite in idiotic ideas is telling citizens to just not buy and suv. Just outlaw the production you maggots! We saw with covid how well voluntary behavior helped.

      Yes, I blame governments for not doing what needs to be done to save the fucking planet. A mass of humans is easy to manipulate if you’re rich and can not be given this much responsibility. We elect people for this.