But that might damage the Amazon rain forest.

http://www.techtimes.com/articles/35172/20150225/how-the-sah...

>I don't think it's as easy as you think it is to cut emissions by that much, and it certainly wouldn't be humane.

No, seriously, it really is that easy. The average cost of a new car in the US is $30k, the model 3 is 35k. Every single passenger road vehicle could be replaced with an electric car for ~$1 trillion. It would cost even less to upgrade the grid to full battery-backed solar power and replace gas heating with electric. Over ten years thats 200 billion annually to eliminate 85% of the co2 released by the US and 50% of the methane.

In terms of threats to the country that barely registers as spending. The iraq war was 10+ trillion dollars, we shipped 12 billion in $100 bills on pallets and lost it. Renewable energy is near price parity to fossil fuels, even if you adopt it stupidly it still isnt that expensive.

You make china stop burning coal by buying them solar panels. Nobody says no to free electricity.

Your comment equates cost with ease, and obviously that's not necessarily going to be the case. Eg something might be relatively cheap but politically difficult.

At some point we as a species are going to have to start taking responsibility for solving the problem or a solution will never happen.

Also, you miss the context of GP's comment by pointing the discussing in this way. They were replying to another comment that claimed cutting emissions was a difficult problem for reasons that are more... physical, I suppose you could say. GP was merely pointing out that technical challenges are not the obstacle holding us in our current predicament.

I don't disagree with you in that the real challenge we face is our species' collective insanity, but I hope you see that in asserting this point that we are both in agreement with GP here.

> Also, you miss the context of GP's comment by pointing the discussing in this way. They were replying to another comment that claimed cutting emissions was a difficult problem for reasons that are more... physical, I suppose you could say. GP was merely pointing out that technical challenges are not the obstacle holding us in our current predicament.

I don't agree with that. I don't see anything in the comment indicating that they saw the problem as anything other than easy to deal with. Have a look at the reply they made to me, where they said "if we would collectively stop chewing our cuds, it would be cheap and simple to do those things". That's still trivialising the social/political component, making it out as if somehow it's just a matter of making a choice as a society. You can't just wish for society to change its attitude, and while it's easy to talk about making such changes, there's the very difficult process of actually making those changes happen.

You might as well say "if we would collectively invent an infinite, completely clean source of energy, it would be cheap and simple to solve the problem." Well, sure. But that's just stating a goal. It doesn't mean it's easy to reach that goal.

The space sail idea is already designed for a scenario in which global warming becomes an even clearer and more urgent existential threat, causing countries to get together and devote a trillion dollars and a team of scientists to a radical solution. Given that context, I think it's reasonable to point out that in a scenario with money and collective will, we should stop polluting, whatever other steps we take.

Well yeah, thats why its in the subjuctive. To express that if we would collectively stop chewing our cuds, it would be cheap and simple to do those things. My intended point is about the simplicity of scaling production, the abundance of the necessary resources, and the low cost of existing technology.

In multiple comments, you've point blank said it would be really easy. If it's really hard to get the political will to spend the money to do the technically cheap and easy thing, then actually the task is hard.

Political will is not an engineering complication. It applies to any solution to global warming. Im comparing cutting co2 to other solutions, not as a problem in general.

My frustration comes from seeing cutting co2 as somehow harder than seeding chemicals into the atmosphere over the entire planet, or building a tube to the stratosphere, or lanching a sunshield into space. Those solutions are an insane level of difficulty above cutting co2.

> Political will is not an engineering complication

Yes. Both need to be addressed.

I'm not ignoring the political difficulty here, that's specifically what I'm complaining about. Its obviously hard on some level or we would have done it already, like how the ozone layer is being repaired. These unworkable solutions destroy the political credibility of CO2 reduction.

Saying "the problem is easy besides the political component" is not the same as saying the problem is easy. It's an intensely hard problem but the focus needs to almost entirely be on politics, because the rest is easy in comparison. I'm not drawing attention away from the political difficulty by emphasizing how easy the technical side is, i'm drawing attention to the difficulty of the political side.

You think electricity is not made with CO2 ? no country is 100 percent nuclear or solar and batteries are not made using a clean process either. There is absolutely no free lunch and pretending thIngs are easy is ignorant at best.

I said converting the grid to battery-backed solar. Batteries are clean. Cobalt is a heavy metal but when mined sustainably and built with renewable energy the pollution from a producing a battery is very little.

There are plenty of countries whose power is 100% or close to it "made without CO2", usually with help from hydroelectric (e.g. Norway). Solar panels are becoming cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. The situation is closer to free lunch than you imply!

The making of a new car is an extremelly CO2-intensive process. Ecologically damaging, too.

The most green car is the one you already have, as long as you do, even if it's a SUV.

Over medium time scales people switching to smaller vehicles won't really show up as additional demand and thus won't drive any increase in supply.

If people downsized in large numbers it might even move some buyers away from new large vehicles (if the anticipated resale value of large vehicles dropped).

replacements over ten years means replacing cars at end of life. Additionally, 90% of a car's total life cycle CO2 emissions are due to fuel use[1], so its actually very quickly worth replacing a car. With the current grid it's between 30-60k miles, with a fully green grid it's as low as 7k miles.

[1]: http://www.ucsusa.org/clean-vehicles/electric-vehicles/life-...