Re:Climeworks lays the foundation to scale up carbon dioxide...
by zaroth on Tuesday September 08, 2020 @01:49PM
(#24410816)
> We are looking at billions of deaths from climate change if we stopped producing CO2 tomorrow and tens of thousands of years until the climate returns to pre-industrial levels.
This seems to me to be the more absurd position. The challenge of “returning the climate to pre-industrial levels” is easily solvable without any magical technology with merely tens of trillions of dollars. Given a few decades additional progress in rocketry, perhaps only a low single digit trillion dollars per decade (indexed to current real value).
Assuming a materials science advancement which permits a functional space-elevator, or the ability to do some manufacturing on the moon, it gets significantly cheaper even than that.
This seems to me to be the more absurd position. The challenge of “returning the climate to pre-industrial levels” is easily solvable without any magical technology with merely tens of trillions of dollars. Given a few decades additional progress in rocketry, perhaps only a low single digit trillion dollars per decade (indexed to current real value).
Assuming a materials science advancement which permits a functional space-elevator, or the ability to do some manufacturing on the moon, it gets significantly cheaper even than that.