this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
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I wonder how much CO2 would be pumped into the atmosphere from creating a 1 million km^2 mirror? The electricity required just from manufacturing and researching and engineering alone would be immense, before considering CO2 from the labour, material production, putting it in the right place etc.
How much CO2 would be worth paying for how much gain this project would provide? I guess it would be less CO2 than giant air scrubbers would require for power at least.
How do you even maintain an ultra thin film mirror when space has high-speed space debris constantly flying around?
Surely it's clear enough by now that adding fuel to fires doesn't extinguish them. The amount of CO2 needed to build, let alone maintain, a mega-project is just going to be high envirinmental cost, low-certainty reward.
A quick short term implementable solution is to tax companies for carbon footprint. Proper tax, not "oh sorry we have no cash we spent it all on global domination... I mean... operating expenses." sort of tax. The kind of tax which makes businesses pause production like they paused production during peak Covid and made an appreciable difference.