I didn’t read the article but I did scan it and I saw this…
Oil and gas companies lobbied for the direct air capture money to be included in the law, arguing that the world could continue to burn fossil fuels if it had a way to clean up their planet-warming pollution.
We’re going to need technologies like this, but these technologies can’t be used as an excuse to keep polluting.
Better than this idea though seems radiant sky cooling.
I don’t think technologies are going to get us out of this mess, except where they transition us off of fossil fuels. literally all of these proposals either a) be net positive on carbon emissions - cf carbon capture or b) would have drastic consequences for life on earth - cf the proposal to spray matter into the atmosphere to dim the incoming sunlight. these proposals are psychotic in the face of what we actually need - to immediately cease usage of fossil fuels.
I agree with you, I’m not claiming we can just keep going with our fossil fuels as long as we build some carbon capture machines – seems like everyone leftish on social media can hold exactly two postitions in their heads, “you either agree with me as I’m 100% correct or you’re wrong/totally misinformed and obviously think all solutions require more capitalism” .
Think about some hard drug user that’s fucked up their body over the decades and is in very bad health. Now of course, stopping hard drug use is THE solution to their problem. But does that mean stopping drugs is the only thing that can help them live a long healthy life (which is the reason for quitting right?)? No, they can eat some real food to help their body heal, start reading some books to learn, etc.
This is the same with our climate. I’m not saying we don’t need to get off fossil fuels ASAP, I’m saying ignoring or denigrating other things is as good idea as telling someone trying to recover from hard drug addiction that healthy food and exercise are pointless. It’s clear that abusing hard drugs and eating healthy is not enough.
Even if we stopped using fossil fuels today. No more driving at all. All agriculture uses non-fossil fertilizers, etc. climate change is still happening and on track to cause massive amounts of harm. We need to try to reverse some of the damage we’ve already started.
And radiant sky cooling is not a rich person’s technology (kinda replying to another commenter here, but still, look it up, I bet you don’t know what I’m talking about). I’m making panels with chalk as the key ingredient. This technology has great promise and could save lives ultimately, why is bad, it’s not being proposed as an alternative to eliminating fossil fuels.
Move away from false dichotomies and look for holistic practical solutions
where in my reply did you get this from?
it’s got more in common with “you will die in a year if you don’t immediately stop the drug use”. eating healthier won’t stop your imminent death. we’re talking about an extinction level event for most of the biosphere on a timescale of mere decades and the damage will be incredibly hard to undo because of positive feedback loops that will outpace our own emissions in a few short years. life will continue but it will look substantially different. our present society is doomed if we don’t stop emitting CO2 - there’s no long healthy life until we get to net-zero emissions.
as to radiant sky cooling, how much of the earth’s surface would we need to cover in order to lower the Earth’s temperature by, let’s say 1 degree? I think the piece that’s missing here is the runaway greenhouse effect from methane/other greenhouse gasses getting released out of the permafrost - we’re potentially staring down 6+ degrees of warming once we get up over 2 degrees. and we’re likely to be at 1.5 before 2032. generating electricity this way is very cool and it will help but I’m worried about the scale of the problem.
to be clear, I’m not saying we shouldn’t work on technologies that might mitigate some of the damage. I’m saying presenting these as a solution to climate change oversells their actual capabilities and the scale at which we can feasibly implement them. all it would take to switch to solar today is sufficient money. but that’s a project that would require most of the large economies on the planet to change their productive capacity over to solar panels, batteries, transmission lines, etc., but that’s exactly what’s not happening because of powerful lobbying interests and a belief that the private sector must fix the problem. I’d bucket radiant sky cooling in the same category - very cool if it works and the governments of the world fund massive development projects, but unlikely to actually be implemented.
there’s a kind of soft climate denialism where people admit human-caused climate change is happening but act like bandaids will solve the issue, failing to grapple with the scope of the problem and the need for immediate, decisive action.
as for capitalism, I think one way or another, climate change spells the end for capitalism. the only question is how many of us die with it.
Then why are we arguing?
I made a comment saying people are presenting these solutions as if they’ll solve climate change and you made an analogy about drug use?
You know what analogy means?
yes, and I pointed out why it doesn’t work already
It does not work. Its a scamm. It costs energy to get the co2 out of the atmosphere it costs even more energy yo turn it into a solid or liquid, about the same amount as you get from burning said solid or liquid. So in the end you pollute more by doing this. Unless you have unlimited nuclear plants.
This is true of carbon capture (at least as we know it now), carbon capture is not the only technology that can help us with climate change. You might notice I mentioned “radiant sky cooling”, do you know what that is?
I know what radiant cooling is. I guess you want to change the earyhs albedo by using aerosols. Or something?
I see you don’t know what that is.
Clearly. My first post inthis thread is asking that.
Ah sorry, after making controversial statements I had so many comments I ended up getting them mixed up in my head.
Radiant sky cooling is some cool shit, it almost seems like magic. But first I’ll be clear that I don’t think of this as an alternative to the real solution to climate change, i.e. stop using fossil fuels. I’m not proposing we cover the Earth with it or use in attempts to manage global temperature. While it does have tiny global effects, like a normal solar panel, I’m speaking of their local use, where it can save lives and make the climate change we’ve already caused tolerable to those who use it.
So, you may have heard in recent years about super black paints or super white paints? I’m I’m sure you’re aware of the “heat island effect” and how black roads get very hot vs the white sidewalk.
So those color based effects caused by absorbing/reflecting more or less visible light. Now, no matter how white the paint is, even 100% reflectivity, at best it could absorb less heat. If you measure it it’s going to be the temperature of the environment.
Now you are likely also aware that everything, you, your shoes, a rock, a book, everything emits infrared energy, and we can see this with an infrared camera, I’m sure you’ve seen images on tv or whatever. Now, if everything is emitting energy, why doesn’t everything get cold? Well because everything in the environment is radiating energy back at everything else causing equilibrium.
So here’s the super cool part…
There’s a small window in the electromagnetic spectrum within the infrared range that is able to pass through the Earth’s atmosphere without being absorbed. This happens all the time, it’s why clear nights are colder, because the Earth is able to more effectively radiate energy out into space.
Well certain materials emit most of their infrared energy within this spectrum. First we found some barium based compounds but they were hard to produce and are not really for sale yet.
But calcium carbonate – chalk – also works, almost as good. Using chalk (and you can make it into paint but it has to be done in special way to control particle size to prevent light from passing through and heating up the surface) you can radiate more infrared into space than is absorbed by the environment, cooling the surface to well below ambient temperatures. If you paint the roof of a house with this stuff (and testing and math has been worked out by scientists here) it can have an effect on the level of runnning an air conditioner! Using 0 energy and some chalk! And it works at night even better because it doesn’t work by reflecting sunlight, it’s radiating infrared directly into space, losing energy to space and cooling down.
Ancient peoples were able to actually make ice using this technology.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KDRnEm-B3AI
Technology in the hands of the rich and the states they own will not help us. Even if this stupid scam was a miraculous success, all it would do is embolden industrialists to pollute much, much more aggressively because “it can be fixed anyway”
Move away from false dichotomies.
Move away from billionaire PR