Like many who visit HN, I am an atheist. I am coming to believe, however, that the production of CO2 is the greatest sin, in the religious sense, that exists today. It dwarfs all other problems -- Syria, terrorism, the NSA, class and economic disparity, all of them.<p>Being technologists we tend to assume (hope?) that some solution will present itself before it is too late. I am growing increasingly pessimistic that such a solution will arise. The powers that be in our world are dedicated to economics, not science, and certainly not to the environment. Their altars are derivatives and overnight lending rates, of war and spying, of realpolitik and power.<p>Humanity, I do not think, is likely to survive this coming apocalypse without widespread civil uprisings against the current power establishment, and with it a sea change in what is viewed as unethical or sinful: unnecessary CO2 production being viewed as the great evil that is is, an existential threat to every extant political, religious, and economic group.<p>Instead we have the Koch brothers, Apple vs. Google flame wars, and the expenditure of almost unbelievable energies on wars and political positioning.<p>It's insane. I don't think humanity will survive into the 22nd century, and it will be our own damn fault for not rising up and removing those power structures that lead us to this point.
The most important component of a strategy to reduce CO2 emissions is a carbon tax, which is economically equivalent to a cap-and-trade system. However, people involved in tech seem to be especially prone to what I call a "problem solving" bias: discrete problems require discrete solutions, and we just have to figure out if the right solution is solar, nuclear, or the Savory Institute. The (correct) economic point of view is that there are many possible solutions, and a carbon tax properly incentivizes implementing all of them.<p>On the issue of China, because their <i>per capita</i> emissions are so low, and any reasonable global cap and trade system would allocate CO2 emissions rights to countries on a per-capita basis (or at least per-capita indexed to some base year like 1960), China is not actually the bad guy, and under a fair cap and trade system they would be net sellers of CO2 credits not the other way around. However too many people are blinkered by anti-Sinitism to accept this fact.
Nicely done media-rich layout for an extremely important, if thoroughly depressing subject. Personally, I had a hard time slogging through it, due to the overwhelming nature of it all. We need more great coverage like this. Great job, Seattle Times!
What can I, as an individual with no money nor power, do to help stop this?<p>I can reduce my energy use as far as possible. Apart from the online stuff I'm pretty low CO2. I can reduce, reuse, and recycle. (I need to get better at that.)<p>But what else can I do?
Is the problem that we're simply creating more CO2 than can be manufactured back into O2 by plants? Would the practicality of a "CO2 vent to space" work? We vent the excess but obviously not everything considering we wouldn't want to destroy all plant life on earth (and subsequently our own in the process). The one major downside is if this wasn't tightly controlled and a "leak" happened we could foster the end of life on the planet. It looks like ocean acidification would do that already so if it'd be the lesser of two evils I'd go for the one we could control.<p>The more obvious choice is to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. How's that really been going all this time? Yeah that's what I thought. Rock? Meet Hard Place.
Just out of curiosity, is there anything objectively <i>better</i> about colorful coral than the drab and dreary sea-life? The implication is that we should be upset that our sea life is about to get less pretty.
So, how do we build solar faster?<p>The energy is there, there is ~89 petawatts of incoming solar hitting the ground and we apparently use ~18 terawatts and it looks technically achievable using current technology, so the main restriction would seem to be production capacity and capital costs.
Wow! This is a sea change for the Seattle Times, too. The Times is a newspaper. This is the first time I've seen anything approaching this quality in video form from them. Strong work.
<i>Like many who visit HN, I am an atheist. I am coming to believe, however, that the production of CO2 is the greatest sin, in the religious sense, that exists today</i><p>Yes, global warming has become the religion of leftists.
Since regulating CO2 is such a useful political tool, it's not surprising that a new hypothesis justifying regulation has been making its way into the mainstream as the global warming movement collapses.<p>I doubt that the researchers involved are interested as much in the politics, but it's fair to say that they wouldn't be getting a fancy new media campaign if their results didn't support the movement. Remember Marcott et al?