16 Comments

There's always reducing consumption. Make it a baby elephant.

Radical idea, I know. The Anglosphere is 70% overweight or obese. "Consume less!" probably isn't an election-winning slogan.

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85% of new power demand comes from developing countries. To work, your radical idea wouldn't have to hurt those 70% of Americans, it would hurt poor people in poor countries.

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I don't give a damn about Americans. Debt, massive crime, warmongering, corruption in government and the judiciary, a sclerotic political system, declining literacy, declining life expectancy (soon to decline further with removing vaccination and raising healthcare costs), and cities burning from climate change and rioters. You're a lost cause.

One of the ways we can tell is that you always disavow responsibility for anything. "But... developing countries!" It's cowardly and childish, and what we expect from some tinpot African dictator, not a Great Power democracy. The world's given up on America.

I'm talking about civilised countries. Developing countries tend to follow the example of the First World. And currently our example is one of profligate waste and declining human rights. We can do better. You can't do better, but the rest of us can - and should.

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So many good points. Question: Would something like iron fertilization work in tanks?

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Not sure I understand what that means...they've done plenty of test tube experiments with iron, and yeah if you put a tiny bit of iron into a test tube of ocean water and leave it in the sun you'll see lots more plankton growing in there but that's not a climate solution, that's just research!

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I was thinking that if the objection to iron fertilization is *possible* ecosystem effects, and the mechanism to capture carbon is to be store it in diatoms, maybe that could be done in big tanks? I guess I'm not sure if the carbon is pulled out of the sea water or air... And obviously you lose a lot of cost benefits this way, but maybe it's still *pretty* cheap

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Cool!! Thanks for the link!

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I don’t know that anyone’s worked out a full proposal along those lines, which doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done of course.

My gut says the ecosystem effects of fertilizing the very top of the food chain are one of the biggest things OIF has going for it. Many ocean dead spots are dead because whaling got rid of one of the key ways nature used to bring nutrients up from the ocean depths back to where diatoms can get at them: whales diving deep and then coming back up for air, stirring up nutrients that had settled. Restore food chains in now dead zones and you might even bring the whales back, which could gradually lessen the need for ongoing fertilization.

The other thing is that we shouldn’t confuse the rationalizations people offer for opposing these techniques with the real reason they oppose them. Address one concern and they’ll move the goal posts because the reasons given for opposition are cover for a deeper, and different, agenda.

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What would be the cost if we were able to convert everything to 100% clean energy (not including drawdown)? And wouldn’t we need to factor in the economic benefits of paying people and companies to do the work of conversion? As well as the longer term benefits of having a more efficient energy economy as solar, storage, wind and other solutions scale up?

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You'd have to define clean energy. If you mean solar+wind, the answer is it can't be done at any price. If you mean solar+wind+storage/hydrogen, that's one of the hottest controversies out there: it's hard to get proper cost data, because these markets are all so heavily subsidized that prices are insanely distorted. If you mean nuclear, then yeah, _that_ we could afford.

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In your opinion, would it make more sense to end all wind/solar subsidy in favor of nuclear?

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This is a fabulous distillation of the unaffordability of emissions reduction and carbon sequestration as short-term strategies to avoid climate tipping points compared to economically feasible short-term strategies like sunlight reflection and ocean fertilization. Affordability and potential effectiveness should drive research as well as carefully controlled field trials of these technologies on a larger scale than at present as well as a global conversation about how deployment of such technologies, if judged to be sufficiently low risk, should be governed.

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Nothing said after the phrase "We evolved on the edge of an African savannah" is going to be heard favorably by the very large segment of the populace that are religious. If you want to reference contemporary research showing that people are bad at conceptualizing large numbers, that's fine, but unnecessary and frankly irrelevant references to evolution are just going to cost you part of your potential audience and distract from your intended main point.

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Sorry to offend. I grew up Catholic, we made our peace with evolution back in 1950. It was clear to the Church already back then that this was a losing battle —there's just too much evidence— so we're taught there's no contradiction at all in saying the human soul is created by God and the human body shaped by evolution.

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Yeah... That's not the take on it I've ever heard from any of my Catholic friends, but YMMV. Responses vary by denomination, but AFAICT Evangelical Protestantism generally has NOT made any peace with the THEORY of Evolution and calling it a "fact" will often start a fight faster than calling a Catholic a polytheist with a mother complex. My religious background is Young Earth literal 6 Day Creationism. I'm happy to actually debate the evidence, but most Evangelicals I know from ANY denomination pretty much just say "Evolution is the Devil's Lie" and leave it at that.

If your point doesn't REQUIRE that evolution be true for the point itself to be correct, I'd suggest not opening that can of worms. Evangelicals are voters and tax payers too, with significant political clout. Don't pick a fight on a hill that you don't actually need to reach your objective.

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