It’s going to be very funny in like 2070 when 90 % of the world has “net zero carbon emissions” and somehow the ppm keeps going up
Modern civilization cannot last until 2070 at this rate
honestly at this point we probably do need some bazinga tech miracle to save us
it’s already far too late for structural and systematic policy changes
Even this isn’t a magic bullet because it only solves one aspect of the issue. The environmental damage is staggering already and we’ve been destroying forests and land all over the world. We’re breaking down the biosphere on a fundamental level
That’s actually my thinking lately as well. Geoengineering gets shit on for good reason when simply reducing emissions is vastly more effective, but shit’s still going to get fucked up real bad even if we reduced emissions to zero right this second. And we’re not going to get anywhere close to zero emissions until the day communism becomes globally hegemonic. That could happen, but it’s certainly not going to happen soon enough to be worth a damn when considering our options.
So it’s looking to me like geoengineering is most likely our only realistic chance at taking action soon enough. I’m not sure if carbon sequestration will ever be viable without nuclear fusion, and wide spread nuclear fusion is also too far off into the future to save us.
That leaves blocking out the sun, either by particulates or by constructing some kind solar shade at the L1 Lagrange point to at least buy us some more time to reduce emissions and work on sequestration. The latter is just so obviously a pipe dream. So particulates it is, I guess. And who knows what horrific unintended side effects that will have on the global ecosystem.
Basically, we’ve fucked up. The events of the 21st century are going to spill a sea of blood orders of magnitudes deeper than anything else in literally all of human history. What luck we’ve been born at just the right time to witness it.
Honestly the only hope I have is for a breakthrough in nuclear fusion as power generation coupled with carbon removal tech.
If we manage to nail fusion then we would essentially have free energy which would do away the major limiting factor on carbon removal - specifically that it’s an energy intensive process and the net effect is that carbon removal tech currently produces more carbon emissions than it can recoup.
Obviously there are structural issues that would have to be addressed globally too but there’s a slim chance that fusion is going to save us at the eleventh hour. Better than no chance, I guess.
My nonsensical-miracle bet is a plucky team of three to four Post-scarcity Socialist Space Explorers make a stealthy trip down to Earth (though due to a cultural archive misunderstanding they’re all dressed like 20’s gangsters, and one of them needs to hide their tentacles under a veil) to offer a gentle nudge to a frazzled pair of fusion scientists.
Otherwise, nanotech isn’t really possible in the miraculous Drexlerian sense, microtech isn’t going very fast and probably can’t scale, biotech could do everything needed but the research is slow and heavily impeded by policy, fusion is unknowable but probably just distracting from achievable research, room-temp superconductors could have massive impact if affordable, and shade/cloud geoengineering also has the problem of less sunlight reaching crops (which should be correctable by adding a set of orbital solar mirrors, like the USSR tried)… but obviously tech miracles do nothing to alter the underlying structure, merely pushing the deadline away a bit while another threat builds up.
A miracle would be great, but only in that it gives time to work change on the actual problem.
One of the current problems is that clean, renewable energy sources are not replacing fossil fuels, but being added on top of them. The capacity is inducing demand, in the absence of any regulation.
A few years back before the crypto collapse, it’s production increased electricity demand enough to negate all solar and wind power on earth. Like decades of bs green washing was wiped out for funny money
what’s the carbon cost on a global conflict which definitely won’t happen I wonder
There’s a brick on the gas pedal and the rate of acceleration of emissions isn’t going to stop until he hit a wall. Sucks but that’s what we’re dealing with for the time being.
