this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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collapse of the old society
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Well, it has to be repeated indefinitely until we actually manage to find a way to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere significantly. Which, yeah, that might be forever, but it could also be somewhere around the corner. Personally, given the trajectory we're on it seems like a reasonable stop gap that might actually help cool the planet somewhat, but it's not up to me.
Conservation of mass and conservation of energy gives a very easy planetary scale answer to this question.
From an energy standpoint, what it costs to bottle up the CO2 is equal to the following:
Take all the energy (heat + work) that was chemically embodied in all the historical fossil fuels. We need to run all those chemical reactions that released energy again, but this time backwards.
We need to also add the energy it would take to run the thermodynamic change backwards, because the original energy was in concentrated high density form, and now the carbon has dispersed to a low coherence state where it's stuck in air, ice, water and vegetation all over the place. It all has to come back out which involves major material movements and filtering / transformation
In conclusion, this is more expensive than all the money and energy and materials in the entire human history put together.
Unless....
Do you know of any magic?
That may well be the case, but it's always a mistake to assume we know everything. That's how we got into this mess in the first place. It wasn't long ago that we didn't know what germs were, didn't have electricity, didn't understand things like relativity or quantum mechanics. We don't know what we're going to learn tomorrow, or next year, or 50 years from now.
If there's an option A in which we both fail to do anything to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and also fail to do anything to cool down the planet and an option B where we for now fail to do anything to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere but manage to cool it down enough to provide a stop gap, option B might get us to a point where we can actually do something. At the very least it could give us a little more time before we fully run out of options for survival. Option A doesn't give us that breathing room and doesn't make things better in the mean time.
Saying that neither option can fully solve our problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing the thing that makes the immediate issue less severe. It's a bandaid, to be sure, but sometimes a bandaid is what you need to slow down an infection until you can get somewhere where you can actually heal.
I don't know the long term answer. I don't think anybody does. But I also don't think we can say with honesty, given the history of human knowledge and technology, that we actually know whether or not an answer will exist in the future. In the mean time, we should probably be acting to create the possibility that we can make use of an answer if we find one.
To be clear on what's required, we would need something like a free infinite energy source that doesn't pollute at all. It also would have to be rapidly scalable within a decade or so. At that point we could have a giant vacuum cleaner sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere. We need to discover this new technology yesterday and it needs to clean the whole planet in about 20 years.
At this point in the story, we are adding about 1% to the CO2 pollution per year. Given the vast scale of the solution we will be coming up with, do you think this extra 1% or 25% will be somehow pivotal?
To me, this is like having pancreatic cancer that's untreatable by medicine and deciding if you are going to quit smoking or not. Yeah, smoking doesn't make it better, but in the face of the only cure being basically a miracle, is it actually meaningful to ask this question?
Like, a miracle that can cure an unfixable problem is so huge that do a few extra cigarettes hang in the balance?
I mean...of course you're right. Slowing down CO2 pollution is very very important. In 1950.
(We do not have 50 years. Lol.)