The World Solved Acid Rain. We Can Also Solve Climate Change

Re:The World Solved Acid Rain. We Can Also Solve Climate Change by Veliladon on Thursday October 26, 2023 @01:02PM (#38028489)

We could solve acid rain within the confines of capitalism because we could make money doing it. You could sell large scale market solutions (catalytic scrubbing of exhaust gases) that could entirely solve the problem and have the small costs be passed on to consumers universally in the form of slightly higher electric bills and slightly higher car costs.

We could solve climate change within 3 years. We could make a concerted effort by humanity to universally move the world to clean energy. But it's not going to happen, or at least happen way slower than it should, because of capitalism. You can't do what we did with acid rain and transpose it to climate change because it threatens some of the very largest owners of capital and they're not giving up their wealth extraction machine without a very dangerous fight.

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Re:The World Solved Acid Rain. We Can Also Solve Climate Change by RetroTechie on Friday October 27, 2023 @04:16PM (#38043352)

Solving acid rain & CFCs was (relatively) cheap & easy to implement. And: effects visible within decades.

Decarbonizing our world's economies otoh is a much much bigger project. Running across many sectors & involving big upfront investments. And even if GHG emissions were cut to 0 today, effect of higher CO2 will last for centuries. If no irreversible tripping points are hit.

Note that in any case NO effort was made to remove substances from the environment. Only cut emissions.

So yeah, one can be hopeful. But we'll be in for a rough ride anyway.

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