Technology

I feel you. There is this little bit oft hope, that all my effort actually achieves something. But its like hoping for thr existance of god it feels like

It's simple, you have a shared resource running out, nobody wants to grab less of it.

Grab less of it yourself - the others will compensate for you. Produce some of that resource - the others will just profit from it for longer.

The biggest emitters are too strong to be climate-crusaded, the smaller ones do successful bribing and greenwashing, but I think there will eventually be climate crusades - against those poor bastards who formally fail to do something right, but don't really contribute meaningfully to emissions.

Other than finding some wonderful (like in Total Recall) process to turn fossil fuels into matter practically not separable and not usable as fuel, I don't know what one can do.

Profitable personal mobile nuclear batteries are still not reality.

Some new magical principle of producing energy, sufficiently decentralized (here go big NPPs). There's none, so prepare for dark future.

Instead of UBI, we should give every citizen carbon credits that they can then either use themselves for cars over certain (adjusting) emission limits or more likely sell to companies. Every company has to pay for their CO2 (and downline for imports)

The interesting thing would be people not necessarily spending their carbon credits like they do money. As there is no real incentive to sell to one company or another, other then tiny rate differences.

Also... always peg the price to what it costs to clean the carbon out. That creates a greater incentive to not skirt, as it might get cheaper over time.

Things that reduce consumption are frequently successful in capitalism. Generally, using less, costs less. There are always those selling a thing who are trying to increase the consumption of that thing, but often at expensive of those selling a competing thing. One successful way of doing that is to be cheaper to buy or run or both, by doing more with less.

However, sometimes we want something to be made with more a bit more to last longer and be repairable.

Raw capitalist won't do all this on its own. The invisible hand isn't very good at planning long term. Governments need to structure markets for outcomes they want, and keep measuring and correcting.

Carbon capture does not make money, wtf?

People won't even rise up for their own sake. gestures in every general direction

And also irreversible is The decline of biodiversity. Once a species is extinct it won't come back.

We’ll have a big environmental 9/11 moment where a major American city becomes permanently uninhabitable and then there will alot of handwringing about “What could we have done!?” Then we’ll start getting lukewarm serious about it for maybe a few years, but by that point it’s way too late.

Governments will fail. Wherever unpopular "Green" Measures are implemented, the right-wing cockroaches appear, destroying any discourse.

The consequence will be a global war by stupid populists who think that is one solution (which it kind of is,... Dead people won't emit CO2)

There's a point made at the end of the article that most people seems to have missed entirely:

Existing facilities that can filter carbon dioxide out of the air only have the capacity to capture 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 globally today, costing companies like Microsoft as much as $600 per ton of CO2. That’s very little capacity with a very high price tag.

“We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” study coauthor Gaurav Ganti, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, said in a press release. The priority needs to be preventing pollution now instead of cleaning it up later.

It's obviously a matter of "why not both?", and both the article and the scientists behind the report agree on it. However, a lot of people are betting their eggs on the idea that climate reversal technology will suddenly become a lot more effective and cheaper than it is right now. And sure, that may be the case, or not. For how many years have we heard of flying cars or self-driving autonomous vehicles and predicted that they were just around the corner, at most a few years away, but nada so far? Betting on the invention of a new technology that'll make a very expensive process today way cheaper is a VERY naive and bad approach.

It's the parable of office pizza: some people take 1 slice because there are many people to feed.

some people take 3 slices, because there are many people to feed.