this post was submitted on 25 Aug 2023
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Carbon extraction, for the moment, is useless.
Most energy production still emits carbon. Adding in loses, you'd spend 100 carbon for each maybe 50 carbon you captured. You'd literally be making it worse.
Same goes for electrical cars. Car engines are pretty much as efficient as burning fuels get, so with electrical you have extra losses (losses in electrical transmission, extra conversions, storage in batteries, then the electrical engine itself) so they may actually end up emitting more carbon than fuel cars.
Want to stop this? Make all electrical generation carbon frer
Air and sunlight are cute but fractional and likely will remain that forever
We need nuclear power plants, and loads of them. Spent fuel there IS a problem but it's a manageable one.
Even if we replace all cars and powerplants for non carbon within the next ten years, it'll still take centuries for the atmosphere to return to normal.
Want to carbon capture? That is HARD because of loads of technical problems but one to keep in mind: all that carbon (yes yes, CO2) in the air is because we took energy from a system and used it. CO2 was the result. You want to take out that CO2, you need to spend the same amount of energy to take it back. With losses in conversion, you'll need to spend probably double that. With what nature can remove by itself, you mght get a 10% discount.
What does this mean? We need to spend the same amount of energy as we generated over the past two centuries on top of the energy we need every day to be able to capture all that CO2. That is a metric shit tonne of CO2 and capturing it requires first and foremost that ALL our energy production is CO2 free.
Ah also: for technical reasons airplanes will never be electrical, cargo trucks neither. Yeah yeah, tesla truck blah, nobody will use it and musk, besides being an absolute moron, is also a scammer. Electrical trucks are not worth it because of battery weight. Think batteries will magically become 2000% more efficient? They won't. Batteries are pretty much elat the roof of what's possible and barring some revolutionary new energy storage that may or may not exist, batteries won't become much more efficient beyond maybe tops 30% more than we have today. Either way, cargo trucks d Airplanes need light batteries and even li-ion batteries (lithium being the lightest metal) won't cut it. Cargo trucks would lost most of their cargo capacity in batteries or would require recharging (and waiting for hours) way WAY too many times. Fuel based trucks lose their gas whilst driving and become lighter. This adds range and cargo weight. Electrical ones don't. Electrical (heavy) trucks aren't practical and won't be used.
Also, battery fires are a BITCH and are almost impossible to put out. All it takes is one electrical fire from a car in a tunnel that will kill a few hundred people to make people reconsider battery cars. Now imagine trucks.
Same for airplanes. A laptop battery in and airplane is risky. An electrical plane would require 50-70% of it's weight in batteries (so we transport 100 people instead of 300) and of that thing catches fire, which happens a lot, those 100 people are screeeeewed.
Hydrogen also won't work as the atoms in the gas are so small that they escape though just about everything. You'll need very heavy tanks to transport it compressed enough so you'll again lose the "weight war", if you will.
So we'll continue puahing CO2 in the air with airplanes and trucks, but cars are doable. Powerplants are doable.
But look at the will of politicians. More and more politicians are willing to lie about climate change because that's what their conspiracy theory believing base believe, so they'll happily parrot that bullshit because they'll watch the world burn if it means they can rule the ashes.
Then there are the millions of scammers with perpetual motion machines or their magic clean water from air machines or their Hyperloop ideas that were refuted over a century ago yet we spend literally billions into that because humanity is stupid and dickish...
I dunno. This can be solved if we wanted to but I think humanity in part doesn't care. The young just watch TikTok, the old are too dumb, somehow.
Call me cynical all you like but I see a humanity ending problem in front of us and it can be solved but share holders and the rich must be kept happy before that! And if you try to say anything about that, you get the army of trained retards (yes, that is the acceptable word for people that have a good brain but refuse to use it) yelling over you that theyr read a Facebook post saying that science is evil.
In a sidenote, various diseases that were nearly eradicated are coming back as well because of anti vaxxers now. Humans suck.
So before you can even start thinking about solving this you first need to fix the retard problem. People need to start believing in science and reality again because too many people are now with their heads stuck in fantasy world where "god would never allow this" or "scientists are evil because EVERY GODDAMN TV SHOW AND MOVIE NOW SHOWS EVIL SCIENTISTS.
/rant.
But I do encourage you to tell me I'm worng in anything I said. Please, if you think there is a solution, please please tell me
Non sequitur. Nobody said we had to turn atmospheric carbon back into the same fuel it originally came out of.
This is only an issue for long-haul trucks, so, obvious solution: electric trains. No battery required.
There are plenty of EVs on the road already. If that was as likely as you're trying to make it sound, it would have happened many times already.
Yeah, lithium-ion batteries are volatile, but they aren't that volatile. Solid-state batteries are even less so.
I won't comment on whether it's acceptable, but it definitely isn't correct. The R word refers to people whose brains are impaired, not merely underused.
That's the real problem, not the technology. We can solve this problem. We don't even have to sacrifice our modern civilization and creature comforts to do it. But we won't, because some very lucrative businesses would become obsolete in the process, and their owners would sooner burn down the world and rule over the ashes than tolerate the loss of their wealth.
No it's not. If you want to lower the CO2 in the atmosphere then you need to break up the carbon bonds, that leaves you with carbon. For all I care you make diamonds out of it, it's irrelevant. If you want to break CO2 in O2 you need to spend that same energy. That was my point. If them youale fuel or whatever out of it that is a wholly different story that too will require yet more energy.
Trains indeed resolve the long haul truck issue but they're hardly anywhere in the US. Good luck with building new train tracks there.
We haven't had an electrical fire in a tunnel yet. Fires in tunnels are bad but can be controlled. Electrical battery fed fires are a nightmare as they have all the ingredients to keep going all by themselves. This is why fire departments see these cars as a problem as they require more water to put out than they can carry.
Li-ion batteries are indeed volatile and no they won't explode by the thousands but if you have hundreds of millions of them, then statistically yes, you will get thousands of fires world wide every day. Tunnel fires are just a waiting to happen. I'm not saying there is no solution, but it IS a huge problem.