The problem with the term "silver bullet" when used in these discussions is that it's used to dismiss any proposal for a technological solution. I can flip that around and say "a societal silver bullet would be cool but the reality is that we aren't going to convince people to reduce their consumption." Which I actually sort of believe. I think a technological solution has a much better chance of succeeding than a social one.

I'm not saying there's a silver bullet, I just think it's our decision as a society whether or not we invest in these technologies and do the work of developing them to the point that they actually have a chance of solving the problem. We were able to make rapid progress on nuclear in the 1940s and space flight in the 1960s. We have the resources, but it doesn't seem like we have the political will this time.

If someone came to you with a problem on a project, and you had a hard deadline of the end of the week, and you had two ways to go about it - 1) this is gonna be a pain in the ass to implement, you'll all be pulling 12 hour days but it's straightforward and crystal clear in how this directly addresses the problem, and 2) some completely unproven solution, that even when fully implemented the math/logic doesn't really work out in terms of it solving the problem, but there's some small hope that it might for some reason, and you'll get to wrap up the week on a Thursday no sweat (the honest reason), which do you spend the rest of your week pursuing?

Now imagine it's not just some meaningless project at your job but a matter of life and death for the majority of life on Earth, which do you pursue?

It’s a very bad analogy because we have no know working solution. We simply have never achieved zero carbon emissions given a modern world of 8 billion people.

We certainly do have a known solution to emissions, it’s to cut them. The most straightforward way to do that is to cut consumption, drop standards of living.

The solution is crystal clear, we have real life working examples right now all over the world, for example the people living in Bangladesh are at a level of consumption that would actually be sustainable for all 8 billion of us to embrace.

The solution is clear, it’s just that we don’t like it, so we readily embrace the magical thinking that we can have our cake and eat it too.

Cutting consumption isn't the only way to reduce emissions. The other way is to change the type of energy fueling the consumption with clean energy. It seems to me like it would be a lot easier to build a bunch nuclear reactors than it would be to convince billions of people to significantly reduce their standard of living.

We have in fact several known working solutions. You don’t have to implement a solution to know that it works. The problem is that they cost money to implement and nobody wants to pay.

Growing up biomass is a good way to eliminate carbon from the atmosphere. You can build or make product from the biomass, or even just throw it into a deep ocean trench.

The problem with this is scale and cost. We essentially need to unburn all the coal and oil were burnt in the last hundred years or so. That gigantic amounts of mass.