I don't think anyone questions that humans will survive. It's just unlikely that the complex global supply chain that gives us complex tools like microchips etc will survive. And may be massive famine etc after just a few harvest failure, or after the grain can't go down the rivers to the sea any more. Naturally not for the very rich, you can probably buy a bag of rice at a price. It's not survival that's at stake, its civilization and all that.
hotair
joined 1 year ago
The rest of the world always follows. It's been weird. Catalytic converters, efficiency standards and all that.
Maybe for a long tail - but I think there were a few reports from other places that phaseout can happen faster than expected :) I am just worried that fossil prices drop because nobody buys them, making it super cheap again.
I suppose that's pretty much guaranteed. I am worried that the supply chains stop working before we get serious about climate repair. It'll be interesting to see what happens to the fossil fuel companies when the "proven resources" in the ground become worthless because there are barely any buyers anymore and borrowing against it is no longer possible. I don't know how much they do that - but it would have implications for the finance people.
So you propose a sort of metric of "energy utility"?
Or, combined with the other idea to move the harvester; grain pirates! The small airship swoops down at night and picks up a some strip worth of grain, and is gone in the morning.
It is conceivable that unlike boats, autonomous airships may not need to be super big - they scale linearly. So a continuous swarm of small, lighter than air evacuated diamond foam devices could come, pick up stuff, and depart for local targets or far away targets via the jet stream. That also removes the need for the tower - they could pick stuff up right from the harvester.
I love it, this is really nice. Thank you!
Maybe this will change once the insurance tables update their pricing to include the new risks?
Solution is a maybe an overstatement, but
- destroy the methane. That's energetically favorable, so it can be done more easily. Makes some CO2 but it's 50x less bad that way.
- get the carbon back out and stick it into the ground. We'll be on our way when the Mauna Loa CO2 curve bends and goes down for a year or two. That's energetically expensive, but we'll figure out a way (hopefully) to do it wherever we have solar overproduction.
Trees are nice, but it's nowhere near enough to do that.
I suppose it helps to qualify what you say. But then it may become quite unreadable.
Even "Today is Thursday" is questionable. Where is it today? Do you mean right now, right here? What calendar? Somewhere it's already Friday. The "day" is just rolling around the earth, etc. It's more defensible to say at the time of posting this it is Thursday in California.
The philosophy people have a thing where you posit a thesis and then present counter arguments, and then counter these again (and, in medival time, counter the ones that are non-dogmatic once again to make sure you don't get burned alive).
The Chinese had a seven legged essay, I think it went back and forth 7 times, and the conclusion was left up to the educated reader, in contrast to scientific paper standard today where we explicitly state the conclusion.
Exploring and to some extent preempting counterarguments may be helpful in any case.
Two obvious things: China has 2-3 x the people. Maybe adjust to a per person basis? Or a per GDP ratio if you are so inclined. Also, most of the stuff for sale comes from China - so we just moved our emissions there. This is super hard to adjust for, but should be considered a bit.