I mean it's not exactly in the moneyed's interest if crops start failing and their valuable real estate is permanently underwater.

It can be also crowd funded!

(Not that I think terraforming earth is a good idea at this stage, though)

There are countries other than the U.S.A.

Nuclear winter can reverse global warming. We can sacrifice a country to save the planet.

We just need to blow up a huge volcano.

Well, there's always Yellowstone...

You are thinking too small at the level of a penny wise miser.

Making things profitable just requires policy changes. Just look at the IRA in the US right now incentivizing all sorts of things that would otherwise not be that profitable right now rather successfully. Whole industries bootstrapping themselves because of it. And the best part is you can fund it through debt. There was no tax raise to pay for the 1 trillion $ IRA budget. And it's not a zero sum game of course. It's not a hand out but an investment with a positive return on investment. The investment is long term profitable.

Terraforming is going to require large scale investments and there will be plenty of opportunity to profit from that. All it requires is some policy. How do you think people got to the moon? Frugal people counting pennies or people just going for it and moving extreme amounts of funding to make it happen? History is full of moonshots.

We need to implement a global market for CO2 emissions. If the supply of rights to emit C02 is low enough (e.g., negative), the price will raise so high that these people can make a profit of removing CO2.

CO2 accounting is hard and easy to corrupt. And I don't believe that market value alone is a strong enough utility signal to be used to prioritize the important aspects of life.

It has precedent as has already been implemented to limit SO2 emissions to prevent acid rain https://www.epa.gov/airmarkets/2022-so2-allowance-auction

I’m not sure how globalizing the corruption and questionable accounting practices of carbon credits worldwide will actually help matters.

That’s basically “carbon credits” except that companies only buy it to reach “green” status.

Does any meaningful segment of consumers actually boycott companies for not buying carbon credits?

Why are companies buying them? Do these companies get tax write offs? Does it help with employee retention? To deflect other bad press?

> We need to implement a global market for CO2 emissions.

This isn’t going to happen soon. The developing economies can’t get out of poverty without burning cheap fuel.

I used to think this, but if you look at the history of environmentalism, many unprofitable changes have been made (e.g. CFC production reduced, leaded gasoline replaced)

This is a dangerous idea to spread, because if you truly believe it then the only solution is dismantle capitalism. The irony is that regulated capitalism in the West has been the most effective at reducing emissions. The places with the worst emissions have the same economic incentives, but different policy (such as China).

Change is definitely possible, but unlike with CFCs some very rich, powerful, influential people are meddling with the affairs of every government around the world. Reducing CO2 is affecting the bottom line of some very important people and that's what will cripple many countries more than any real economic ideals.

China's emissions aren't even all that high when you take into account their absolutely massive population. Oil states, tiny states, and western(ised) states are still the top polluters. Per capita, China is about on par with north-western European countries. The average person in China emits between half to two thirds of the carbon emissions the average American citizen emits, and countries like Canada and Australia carbon footprints similar to the USA.

The Chinese carbon emission reduction industry has been so effective that their solar panels had to be taxed extra or even banned from import into the EU because their cheap solar power was killing the European industry and creating an economic dependence on China. While the west is working hard on reducing our dependence on fossil fuels, upcoming economies like China and India need to deal with prevention as much as reduction. Frankly, it's amazing how much these economies have managed to limit their carbon footprint despite their massive population and rapidly increasing wealth.

CO2 is harder to limit than CFCs, but my point is that there are existence proofs that policy can trump economics.

I agree the West is higher on a per capita basis, but the important measure is the change. The West is cutting emissions per person, and China is increasing them.

It’s significant that China is mostly selling their panels to the West. If they are such world leaders, why do they continue to accelerate coal and gas generation? If they have the cheapest panels, why don’t they just use those? Because their policy is to maximise economic power and practically ignore emissions. Unless the west finds a way to incentivise reductions in the east and developing world (eg green investment, tariffs based on emissions), our sacrifices will have been in vain.

How do you figure China is an exemplar for worst emissions? They emit less per capita than the US today as well as historically. They are investing $450 billion over the next 15 years to build 150 new nuclear reactors, more than the rest of the world has built combined over the past 35 years. They're a leader in solar and are learning from the recent hydropower shortages they experienced [0].

[0] https://www.chinawaterrisk.org/opinions/what-lessons-do-the-...

The relative rate of emissions reduction: Chinas emissions accelerate while the wests plateaus.

The Chinese don’t emit less because they are good global citizens, it is because they are less wealthy. If emissions per capita is our judge, we should be congratulating all the countries in the worst poverty, since they use the least amount of energy.

> How do you figure China is an exemplar for worst emissions? They emit less per capita than the US today as well as historically.

But the Chinese are also poorer, on average, and since poorer people tend to live a simpler life (not that it is a bad thing), emission per capita may not be a good indicator.

An alternative is to compare tons of CO2 emitted for each USD of GDP produced, which, using the numbers the world bank [1], turns out to be 0.6 for China and 0.2 for the US (using figures from 2021 for GDP and population, and 2019 for emissions, but the results hold qualitatively). Roughly speaking, this means that the same good/service required, on average, three times as much CO2 to be produced/offered in China compared to the US (using USD to measure the "quantity" of goods/services).

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/?locations=US-CN

There were less crazy people back then. Or more to the point, they didn't have internet connections and could bully and hector elected officials and scientists and thus stall progress in those space. Things are different now.

> "The people who can afford to pay for this can also afford to avoid the worst effects of climate change, probably much cheaper while throwing the rest of us under a bus."

They think they can avoid the worst effects of climate change, but I'd wager they're shockingly wrong about that. They'll more likely only delay their misery for a while longer than the rest of us.

You're 110% right that they'll surely try their very best to "throw everyone else under the bus" though. They've already show their true colors pretty clearly. No reason they'll suddenly get their shit together and grow the hell up now.

> They'll more likely only delay their misery for a while longer than the rest of us.

Yep, but they will have died of natural age. So for the coming decades, people with money can avoid the effects (they can just move, buy more cooling/heating/electric, get food anyway etc) and then they die. The next generation will be similar, and so on, until even the rich cannot get away.

Many people who care and want to change cannot do anything or at least feel they cannot (a child-less one-Prius family driving less is not exactly a feeling of impact).

So is the solution to reate ways for people to live for 300 years?

Eh, there’ll be a pretty sharp turn within the timeframe of 20 years or so, maybe, but nothing real drastic is going to shift over the course of a year - I mean, short of a nuclear attack. Thing all just get measurably worse, poor people will get gut with the worst of it. I don’t think it’ll be bad enough for the jet set crowd.

This is a reflection of the political policy of the day. Economics and capitalism being political policies dressed up with quant models and endowed academic chairs to rubberstamp the distribution of money.

This is not universal physics.

Same for the "Limited Liability Corporation", protections from Ex Post Facto law enforcement, and the like. Political constructs.

Should people get pissed off enough, they won't matter. Now, the rich are good at not being the focus of the angry mob ... usually.

But the point is, the rich are playing games with the core stability of the world, to say nothing of the viability of the interconnected web of species on the planet. It's frankly pretty nuts.

The rich are insane. Sane people would not be doing this.

$20/ton CO2 for 1T tons is $20T. Paid over 40 years, this is less than the interest we in the US pay on federal debt.

From the article:

> Overall costs could drop below $20/T-CO2, which means we can soak up one of the two excess teratons of CO2, returning atmospheric CO2 to about 350 ppm, for about $400b/year over the next 40 years

Someone will definitely make money. The people who can afford this now will likely have world governments paying them back for much longer than 40 years.

Once you're talking about millions a year rather than billions or trillions I don't know if that's true. A government (or a group of several) could decide to do it because their citizens would benefit from a reduction in warming.

Whether there would still be appetite for the larger price tag of carbon sequestration once there was a band-aid for warming is another question though.

I don't agree with this line of reasoning. I would not expect a random commercial company to decide to do this on their own. I would expect the population and politicians of a country to realise this is what needs to be done, and to put into law public-funded initiatives to work towards these goals. In the non-US country where I live, we already do this with sustainable energy sources and vehicle types. We tax usage of fossil-fuel vehicles, and give subsidies on using 'clean-energy' vehicles. We execute policies on windmill farms and solar panel areas. We also publicly finance e.g. the common shared road network of asphalt, without having an owning commercial company directly profiting off our road network. The only reason I can see this would break, is to the extent public government law turns into a lobbying nightmare, where all law-making is reduced to paid-for-by-lobbyist initiatives. Outside the US, that is not where we are yet (though I am aware of the risk - money and power perpetually will corrupt). I don't see the problem as mainly a billionare-problem ('this is not a problem for billionaires.') Instead, I see the problem with countries that disagree on these policies - country A spending 100s of billions to fix climate issues, at the same time country B ignores it all and behaves like, well, the US and Russia.

So if