His conclusion that oh the soil can recapture carbon also reminded me of generally smart & accomplished but non-expert people online these days that lean on unrealistic tech solutions they just heard about as being an adequate mitigation for climate change. 'Oh just have ships burn bunker fuel again to put sulfur in the air', 'we can seed the clouds', 'we'll surely build technologies like carbon capture that will solve this'.
Rather than fall into the nerd snipe trap of trying to analyze these technologies and their deployment and effect, it's far easier to see it for what it really is: cope. People don't want to face up to how existentially scary and out of control things are in our climate, so they rationalize their fears away. It's understandable, but it's also not sound analysis, and can be safely dismissed as such.
Been there
Done that.
Driving my car. That is it. I do need to get an electric car for taking the dog (and me) to the beech, then I am done.
* The vast majority of my food is local
* My clothes are natural fibres
* My electricity is > 80% from renewables.
The real problem is not lifestyle, it is systemic. I think it is bad form to blame people, who unlike me, have no way out of burning fossils. If we stop burning fossils, for most of us, our lives will get better, not worse.
Some very rich people will be less rich. That is the real problem
Entire generations were sold on those being middle class ambitions, and we don’t have a viable path where that’s sustainable. That doesn’t mean we live in abject misery, but most of it is something which most adults were told was a sign of how much better we have it than our predecessors so it feels like failure.
This is, of course, a notorious intellectual pitfall for both physicists and elder scientists but I think in this case it’s more a question of insufficiently vetting information. He wasn’t just wrong in some novel manner but in exactly the ways that the fossil fuel industry’s propagandists were saying in the 90s and early 2000s, down to the decoy concerns about public health and disaster relief (both of which are becoming much harder due to climate inaction). This essay seems like a good example for how susceptible smart people can be to the message that they’re savvy enough to see something most people missed.