>There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solutions

OK but I think there will be.

* * *

Technically there might be. There is plenty of brains around to explore all possibilities and there are far worse ways to waste talent. Just don't bet the planet on it, don't create a sense that a painless fix is just around the corner and then we can simply go on.

There's no other possibility except a technical solution. Expecting humans to change their behavior collectively, across the globe, is magical thinking.

And yet the birth rate keeps declining. Maybe we're collectively smarter than we fear.

Here’s the thing: actually, we need the behavior of a _very small_ number of humans to change: the rich. Not only is their personal CO2 consumption the majority of personal CO2 consumption, but the capital they control drives the behavior and policy of everything else. This is a far easier problem to solve. I’ll leave the solution to your imagination.

Sadly, many of them would rather plan to ruin the world and then flee to a (cough) "safehouse" (cough) in New Zealand than in any way get a clue.

Kinda, but most people on this website are in the global top 1%, and 1% is both a small percentage and still 80 million people.

That's actually completely and entirely untrue. The largest delta of CO2 in the coming years will be coming from developing countries as they rise up to modern standards.

But when you say:

> This is a far easier problem to solve. I’ll leave the solution to your imagination.

It pretty clear you're not really arguing in good faith. Dog whistle is pretty loud.

How? Unless you get a breakthrough with fusion, I just don’t see us finding the energy to make carbon removal feasible. You either need huge tracts of land to power forests, or massive amounts of energy from another source to do it with tech, and neither of those is going to be the easy fix people believe is coming.

There's a nice handy fusion ball in the sky; but that isn't sufficient for CO2 removal, and if we do have a genuine incentive to remove it, I wouldn't want to bet that the incentives stop at any particular level and thus would give equal a priori credence to us ending up with too much or too little atmospheric CO2 with such technology.

This is exactly where I sit too.

We currently have financial incentives for producing CO2, which are proving almost impossible to reverse.

But let’s say we reverse them and create incentives for CO2 removal.

How are we going to change the incentive yet again, when it’s time to stop? By the time this happens, the CO2 removal lobby will be strong. Think about the jobs! The taxes! The communities!

It's hard to imagine how someone can look at the track record and then think "impossible! we will never figure it out!" when human history is basically a detailed record of us constantly "figuring things out" that previously seemed impossible. When something has yet to be figured out you are supposed to be baffled because the part where it all make sense doesn't come until after we figure it out. It doesn't guarantee we will figure out this or that specific challenge, but the well-established pattern gives ample reason to be optimistic.

I appreciate the case for optimism, and I agree that as a species we can be quite clever. We can also fail to address important issues with simple and obvious fixes in ways that boggle the mind (e.g. getting vaccinated or wearing masks during COVID). Whereas I might have once thought that our ingenuity would rule the day, it seems like a functional society requires more than just technology.

Getting vaccinated wasn’t an option during the halcyon days of Covid and like 95%+ of people I saw at public businesses in my red state were wearing masks (or at least attempting to) during that time period. But unfortunately people still needed to eat, work, purchase necessities, learn, get treated, etc. This all to say that I don’t really think your analogy really holds up in this context.

Survivorship bias. You're missing the big graveyard of civilizations that thought they could persist in the face of changing external circumstances but miscalculated. Many of those are buried in what are now deserts, created by their misguided land management.

We shouldn't be operating under the assumption that there will be.

The problem lies with carbon's essential role as part of the energy cycle that powers the majority of this planet.

H2O + (Solar) Energy + CO2 => Useful hydrocarbons (everything form sugar to gasoline)

O2 + Hydrocarbons => Useful Energy + CO2

When you burn a log you're really using a solar battery that took potentially decades to charge and roughly 25x the energy you feel from the fire (photosynthesis is only 4% efficient).

The same process that feeds us powers the global economy, but at the cost of emitting CO2 in direct proportion to the energy we're using and benefiting from.

This is why "miracle" solutions are so unlikely. Because they require a major disruption of this process in a way that it's not clear is fundamentally possible. Anyway to massively remove CO2 from the atmosphere is fundamentally going to require energy. And because of the nature of inefficiency, will always be a poor use of any energy you used to create the problem.

This is obviously where things like nuclear fusion do provide the possibility of breaking this process because they create a lot of energy outside of solar powered carbon cycle.

There is a LOOoong... distance between "I think there will be" and "there is and it works"

Plus, climate change is not the most existential threat.

That would be the biodiversity apocalypse in every part of the bio-web being caused by a myriad of pollutants, pesticides, monocultrue farming, habitat destruction, light pollution, and hundreds of other scaled-up human activities, all leading to the breaking of the food web.

When the food web fails, it'll be nonlinear, and humans will not do well.

Ok - why, specifically? Or is just ... this feeling you have?

In the context of the post you're replying to, that's like believing there will be a miracle pill so you can eat whatever you want, however much you want, drink as much alcohol as you want, and the magic pill will prevent obesity, cancer, heart disease, and liver failure.

And even if such a miracle drug did exist, if seems like the better solution is to simply lead a healthier lifestyle to begin with.

Fusion is the key. Replace all of our dirty energy, and produce enough surplus to sequester carbon.

We should be pursuing fusion as if the survival of the planet depends on it…because it is likely that it does.

What if fusion is impossible though, from an engineering perspective? Why not continue to pursue fission using safer, modern reactor designs? It works. The timelines for fusion, if it ever works, are too long.

Most polluting regions are also the least politically stable. Today at any moment disaster could happen on largest nuclear power plant in Europe because madman decide to play a conqueror.

People can hardly be trusted with a dangerous nuclear power.

We already have a conveniently-placed fusion reactor that's boing to be operational for a few billion years.

Still need to be concerned with the amount of latent heat generated on the planet surface

Eventually yes, but that's not the immediate problem.

400 years to boil the oceans, but that kind of timescale means we can have 300 years of business as usual followed by using a von Neumann probe to rearrange Mercury into a Dyson swarm, at which point the Earth's temperature is under total external control because we can switch the sun off when we don't like the heat.

OK, so more like "hiding" the sun — switching it off is still possible with a Dyson swarm but I don't know how long that takes — but from the point of view of Earth it might as well be switching it off.

Latent heat can be radiated into space, and offset with a relatively small, invisible shade at the earth-sun Lagrange point. 10,000 1km aluminum foil and Mylar sails surfing that point would make earths temperatures completely controllable and would be measurable only as a dimming of the sun imperceptible without sophisticated measuring apparatus.

Starship can carry 2 per trip. Inflatable, polymer hardening, weigh-shift controlled kites gliding just beyond L1 on the solar wind. We would have to launch 3 a day indefinitely, so we would still be encouraged to sort out our CO2 situation.

OK but based on what?

The Planetary Boundaries framework, extended from the original article in Nature [2] in 2009 is a good way to look at multiple of the Anthropocene symptoms.

[1] https://www.stockholmresilience.org/research/planetary-bound...

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/461472a

In the modern era (and for Western cultures) there was a cognitive revolution that started around the time of Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot moment.

The Planetary Boundaries concept is in a sense the evolution of that initial internalization, the beginning of a more analytical approach towards long-term sustainability (a first UML diagram of our predicament if you wish).

A quote from the book overstory comes to mind: "we're seeking technological solutions to a social problem."

yes, and the scale of that social problem is unprecedented and fractal in nature (repeating in all scales within and across regions and peoples).

the shape of humanity on the other side of this challenge (assuming it exists and we will somehow reach it) will be remarkably different from our current narratives and infatuations

The core of the issue is that we are polluting and not managing externalities as we should right now. It means we need to fix what we are doing not that we have to go back to the pre-modern world.

The projection of multiple agenda only tangentially related to the the actual issue we are facing is not helping.

I'm dubious that we can do more with less or that doing less is actually even in the cards at all. I see no way to control that on a worldwide basis.

To me this implies the wizard spells (technology) are the only way out. We need to be able to control the climate through direct intervention.

Do you have any evidence whatsoever that your claims are true? It looks like you have an agenda to push but no sources to support it. Is there any scientific backing to these ideas? (not to climate change, but ideas like "Climate change is but one symptom of the anthropocene")

...not to mention the extremely emotional language meant to manipulate instead of argue with evidence.