this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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The interesting part are those who still don’t write letters to their congressmen and still vote for climate deniers. I just can’t.
It would be insanely easy to solve: Not one of the billionaires out there would recognize if they only had 999 mil left and neither would anybody else. That‘s a cool 10 trillion to pay towards climate change. You‘re welcome.
That money was earned using earth, so to saving earth it goes back (because no earth, no money and our billionaire overlords suprisingly havent saved us yet.)
Though I agree with you on taking money from the rich people, that's mostly not how it works. Most rich persons has most of his "worth" in stocks. Even scammer musk's worth mostly is "worth" because of his ownership of Tesla and the such. He doesn't actually have that money.
Most importantly: It's not insanely easy to solve, Sven if you pump in trillions. 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.
The problem with is that the extra CO2 in the air comes from energy we took from burning fossil fuels. If we want to capture it back, we need to spend the same mount of energy that the world spent for the past, say, 2 centuries, from non carbon sources to get that done. This energy does not include the energy that the world needs to function.
That is an insane amount of energy that, again, has to come from non carbon emitting sources.
Also, until all energy comes from non carbon emitting sources, carbon capture is useless because if both you'll spent 100 carbon for each, say, 50-70 (optimistically) carbon you capture.
If I say "Were not even close to 100% non carbon emissions in energy creation" it's a huge understatement. I believe something around 10% of our energy production is non carbon emitting. Cars are not included.
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 want to actually solve this?
Make ALL our electrical generation non CO2 emitting in the next 10 years. Air and solar are cute, but fractional and will remain that, probably for ever. We need nuclear power plants like there is no tomorrow in all countries, even the "bad" ones.
This obviously isn't going to happen.
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
Either way, you and I will NOT see the end of this, that is for our children's children
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, it would stop making it worse indeed. I'm not saying we shouldn't stop, I'm just saying that stopping alone won't solve the issue
Global warming is an ENORMOUS problem that will require generations of people all over the world working together to fix it and I smjsut don't see that happening because face it: politicians and rich people don't give a shit.
I don't overestimate gas engine efficiency, they're about as efficient as it gets and the same goes for fuel burning in other places. Gas / coal / fuel power plants really aren't much more efficient and now you have energy centralized and Ned to transform it, transport it, transform again, store in batteries so more and more losses that altogether makes driving electrical really not that much better for climate change.
I know nuclear reactors are hugely expensive but I honestly don't see we have another option here. We can't continue with coal or gas, we need a HUGE amount of STABLE electrical energy that solar and wind simply won't be able to supply, not to mention the amount of money that goes into building solar and wind farms that gives the same energy as nuclear. That also ignores the amount of mining required to build solar and wind farms. Those alternatives aren't all that "clean" once you get into the nitty gritty details.
I fully agree with you about this, something must be done, but here is the realest problem of them all: Nothing will be done. A few token things will be done to say "look at us! Aren't we awesome politicians?" There will be a lot of clapping and patting on backs, and nothing changes. The Paris accords were a joke and even that joke wasn't followed up on anyway by most parties.
The way that I see it is that we're fucked. I'd love to slice it if I could but I can't. Neither can you. All we can do is hope (or pray of that's your thing) that our leaders will get it into heir heads that humanity is dying and start doing something real.
This guy gets it!
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.
Once a major stock holder starts selling his stock like crazy, that stock will nosedive. See Elon "I'll be the last one to sell tesla stock!" Musk dumping tesla stock and check it's current value.
And governments should not ask not to buy SUV's, they should ban SUV's. Yes, ban. They are horrible for the environment, horrible for safety of the driver, horrible for the safety of others, horrible in every aspect and they only exist because car manufacturers want to sell more so they told people they look cool.
Start taxing the crap out of cars, all short distance travel (< 5 - 10 kms) should be by bike, with Electrical the engine support in mountainous areas.we use 2 tonnes of steel and plastics to mostly move single 50-100 kgs persons around. That. Is. Insane. It's unsustainable. Redesign American cities (American being the continent here, not just the country) to no long have these horrible suburbs, make all cities human Centric, not car centric. People should be able to walk to 50% of local stores and cycle to 95% of stores. It makes for wonderful safe cities to live in (see every single city, tiny and large in the Netherlands), makes people healthier due to more exercise, makes healthier air (no car pollution) bad lowers CO2 output by a literal fucktonne.
This would make everything better, which is why it not only will never happen, politicians will beber talk about it because big oil, big car and big whatever the fuck need more bigger cars polluting more because WE WANT MONEY AND POWER.
The world is fucked, sorry.
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!
Did I say that?
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!
How else? How about not? You simply don't because you can't. Barring some weird exceptions, no country will be able to be carbon neutral in 10 years, let alone the entire world.
Yes we need to do loads of work, and yes, nuclear will form a huge part because we don't have another choice. Nuclear will cause CO2 too, yes, during building mostly and nothing near what coal or similar plants do.
I'm simply saying we can (and must) do nuclear next to solar and wind.
Either way it doesn't matter since entieht you nor I make those decisions and those that do mostly don't give a shit as long as they get their paycheck
Edit: you want to make a real change?
Increase taxes on carbon fuels significantly every year. Prohibit the construction and sale of useless throwaway products like fashion that lasts 3 wears until it breaks, phones that will work for only 1-2 years. Invest heavily in improving recycling so that we can recycle everything. Invest in alternative nuclear fuels like thorium so that more countries can go nuclear without having to worry about bombs. Stop the "delivery in one day! " economy, which basically requires alAmazon to be destroyed . Redesign American continent cities completely to no longer be car dependent so that people can walk and cycle for 95% of their needs and use public transportation or shared cars for the rest.
Those are some insane but required solutions if we want to stop climate change.
Car dependent cities are unsustainable, financially and environmentally. Our throwaway economy is unsustainable. Our dependency on fossil fuels in unsustainable
No I did not.
Well, I don't have a congressman, which would make that hard :-P
But yes, while I don't agree that our civilisation's issues could be easily solved by a one time very minor global redistribution of wealth, I do agree with your overall argument, for sure! 100%!
These issues will only be fixed with a complete societal personality change. We'd have to completely rethink who we are, what we want in life, what our priorities are, as a civilisation and individuals. In a way fundamental enough to completely change how we distribute wealth and power, how we interact with nature and each other, the lens through which we view everything.
I don't think those things will happen until there's a change in civilisation, as ours passes and the next one rises (which, while a turbulent time in history, will not be the end of the world, all civilisations come and go eventually, on the timescale of humanity), that's usually when such sweeping and complete fundamental changes in how we think and structure our entire society are allowed to flourish.
It's sad that we won't live to see it. Maybe in the mean time we could cheer ourselves up a bit, by eating the rich? nomnom
I really like your way of thinking. Thanks for sharing it with me today. Made my day a little better.