As long as these young people vote out the climate change deniers, and society get serious about not rewarding people who generate externalities there will be jobs aplenty, that will be taken by people who just want the money. If they don't then it won't matter what they do.
Support political candidates and run for office in order to put those who understand the science behind and believe in climate change and who will commit to policy to contribute towards solutions (and tilt the scales away from fossil fuels). Otherwise everyone working towards the cause is swimming upstream.
The gigantic problem is that we can’t. Old people have by far the most voting power.
And in the US those seem to be pretty securely glued to their TVs running Fox News (I know my american relatives were).
Imagine that one of the many nuclear zealots on HN invents a nuclear plant that is cheaper than fossil fuels, but only if you include the cost of carbon externalities? They wouldn't be able to build a business on that without societal support.
SPOILER: existing nuclear plants are already cheaper than fossil fuels with reasonable carbon fees [1]. Why haven't they been rolled out more? Because carbon fees have been fought by fossil fuel interests who spend a lot of money convincing young people that it was all the treehuggers fault.
1. https://www.oecd-nea.org/jcms/pl_14674/carbon-pricing-power-...
https://www.shell.com/energy-and-innovation/carbon-capture-a...
https://www.worldoil.com/news/2021/7/13/shell-sees-a-profita...
Carbon sequestration is probably going to be important, but if it in any way enables more fossil fuels to be burnt, then it's probably a net negative. We need it to take stuff back out of the atmosphere, not extract and then store yet more fossil Carbon.
CCS at the extraction point is just propaganda to keep extracting more CO2. This is not a solution it's just an excuse to keep pumping CO2 out of the ground and into the air. The end result of CCS is just more emissions. Both because they don't capture every CO2 released during extraction and because they can't address the usage of the extracted material that will release more CO2.
We know what the solution is: renewables + storage and/or nuclear.
The solution is not to get more CO2 out of the ground.
Meanwhile, on that page that you are quoting, all of those projects are on the ballpark of a million tons (a billion kg) per year. With luck, all of those projects put together (by the most ""climate responsible"" oil company nonetheless), each year would cover 15 days of Shell's carbon extraction. And that's without taking into account the fact that these projects have emissions of their own, which are definitely not taken into account for these totals.
Carbon sequestration is an interesting effort for sure, but the only use it has is give oil companies excuses for their existence.
[0] http://priceofoil.org/2019/05/20/shell-emissions-still-going... [1] https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...
There are groups that assume fossil fuels will still continue in some capacity regardless for some time, so if technology can be developed (without generating vast amounts of emissions in the process) to reduce undesired side effects of fossil fuels continued use, it's worth exploring. It may also become useful on the global stage where certain states don't seem to care at all about developing clean energy (e.g. China). If you do develop an effective cheap way to sequester carbon emissions for fossil fuels, you have a much better chance at persuading China to use and adopt it than telling them to shutdown all their coal fire power plants.
For a practical example, the government of the UK likes to claim that they are on track to be "zero emissions"[0] -- great effort on their part. However, here all the imported manufactured products that definitely are not "zero emissions" aren't counted. All these emissions were exported to China, and then they have the gall to complain that China's emissions are too high.
[0] https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-uk-is-now-halfway-to-me...
I do agree that we also need some kind of technological carbon sequestration. I'm skeptical of the "pump it underground" approach and think that things like CO2-negative building materials and processes would be a way to couple CO2 extraction and economic incentive.
[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
[2] https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_chapte...
It's not an either/or proposition: we need to do all of these things:
- restore the ecosystem's ability to consume CO2
- decrease our production of CO2
- develop technology to artificially sequester and consume CO2
Alongside other, non-CO2 related things like restoring biodiversity and ecosystems (where possible, mass extinction is still a thing), reducing our chemical output and destruction of nature etc.
Grid operators will balance variable supply with variable demand, and storage will grow as battery costs come down as manufacturing for battery cells scales up to meet EV demands.
I can call Tesla today and have a Megapack installed in a few months. Same for solar and wind utility scale installs. If I break ground on a nuclear reactor today, it will be at least a decade before you see the first kilowatt generated. Georgia's Vogtle units 3 and 4 nuclear generators are six years behind schedule and costs have ballooned to almost $10 billion [2]. $10B buys a lot of renewables and batteries.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f4/NE...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vogtle_Electric_Generating_Pla...
"you really think it'll be cheaper to lay power cables under the atlantic ocean" -- TremendousJudge
It would be nice (despite the irony of suggesting a bureaucratic task) to see some analysis or thoughts about what jobs have the biggest real impact.
For example, I wonder how many people are looking at becoming farmers or builders or other sustainable trades, vs who wants to do software development or data science.