RE: If you could
December 25, 2018 at 12:16 pm
(This post was last modified: December 25, 2018 at 12:25 pm by Alan V.)
(December 25, 2018 at 6:28 am)pocaracas Wrote:(December 25, 2018 at 6:06 am)Thoreauvian Wrote: I would build enough machines worldwide to bring the CO2 in the atmosphere down to 350 ppm or below again, thus solving the climate change problem.
And how would you power those machines?
There is certainly a big carbon footprint for both building all those machines and powering them without a renewable infrastructure currently available, but it's a given that we will have to spend a fair portion of our remaining carbon budget to build such infrastructure anyway.
The question then becomes, "Can we build machines which remove more CO2 from the air than they generate in their lifetimes?" And the answer is, most certainly. The technology already exists waiting to be scaled up. So the real questions are, "How much will that cost and how quickly can we build them?" If cost is no problem, as the wish-granting question would have it, then we can spend the required money in the necessary time to stop climate change.
In reality, however, there are more cost-effective ways to deal with climate change. So the necessity to build such expensive technology only comes up when we see we are going to overshoot our carbon budget to remain below 2 C.
(December 25, 2018 at 11:59 am)onlinebiker Wrote: Where' s the cheap in that electric????
Battery development is progressing so rapidly that electric cars should be cost competitive sometime in the next decade. Plus, without a realistic carbon tax, the cost of gas is much less than it should be. Figuring in the global costs of tax credits, subsidies, and military support for big oil companies would make a gallon of gas cost another $2 by one estimate I read, and that's not even considering the externalities of damages caused by climate change.
