I'm afraid you're right, but I'm also afraid that no one has the necessary combination of money, technological skill and military might to undertake that kind of geoengineering unilaterally.
This paper estimates the cost at ~$2.25B/year, and notes that more than 50 countries have military budgets exceeding $3B: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d#... They point out the plan assumes you can launch planes from a few different points around the globe. You don’t need global agreement, but at least access to some foreign airports.
>This paper estimates the cost at ~$2.25B/year, and notes that more than 50 countries have military budgets exceeding $3B
An utterly meaningless comparison. None of those countries are going to simply stop spending all of their money on their military overnight.
Government restriction of the biologic imperative to reproduce would represent perhaps the most extreme interventions into the private lives of individuals that one could imagine.
Again, why? There are many dozens of rights that I value more highly than the right to reproduce in the face of global ecological catastrophe.
Your personal values are eccentric and not representative of the norm.
> If the human population were limited to one-child per couple for a few decades, then everyone can have a family, and the population still declines. Yeah, you can fuck right off. I may consider stopping at 3 kids. Or I may not.
Structuring tax policy so there was a steep break for one child, a marginal break for 2, and none for any more, would be fairly likely to achieve this goal.
Almost half of all children live in low income families. Are we going to eliminate tax breaks for those families? And even if we could do that, it would be a ghastly misanthropic policy nonetheless.
I agree. Sooner or later, we'll need to have a serious discussion about nuclear energy. It's the best way out of this mess.
Annnnnd the downvotes start. What is it about nuclear energy that terrifies the ycombinator crowd?
Proposing nuclear power is an easy knee-jerk reaction. But it ignores a few critical facts. First, nuclear plants are impractical due to NIMBY and out-of-control building costs. Second, the pesky problem of nuclear waste has not been solved yet.
All indications are that renewable power is more practical at this time than nuclear.
So much I want to say here... I'm part of the choir to whom the author is preaching but I find this weak tea. (Although he's not preaching, he's RFC'ing his assumptions.) If we grant that fusion isn't around the corner (and I don't, see "Fusion in a magnetically-shielded-grid inertial electrostatic confinement device" https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.01788 abstract: "Theory for a gridded inertial electrostatic confinement…
Ignoring the ridiculous notion of killing people to stop population growth, that isn't true at all, especially if you consider that it takes one bullet to kill someone and thousands of condoms to prevent the birth of a child.
Bullets carry significant externalities. How many of today's regional conflicts can be traced back to mass atrocities? Birth control doesn't create survivors perpetuating rage based on past martyrs. Even if the immediate efficacy approaches your suggested value. In truth, it's almost certainly closer to 100s.
Wars lead to even greater population reduction. However, once one baby sneaks past the birth control, then you have to start all over again with that new person to teach them to not create yet more babies. War and vengeance is a viral population reduction method.
Again, why? There are many dozens of rights that I value more highly than the right to reproduce in the face of global ecological catastrophe.
Your personal values are eccentric and not representative of the norm.
I'll grant you that. I don't think it changes the argument at all. The government should not treat any right specially compared to any other, and it's the long standing practice of the government to regulate and place limits on rights.
The article directly addressed this point & why it is a wash, at best. New demand every year is at parity or maybe outpacing the new production of wind & solar. Not to mention the huge amounts of glass, plastic, concrete (which by the way, we are apporoaching a shortage of suitable sand for making it), and rare earth metals required to build wind & solar infrastructure. Dont get me wrong, I'm with you. I want to beat…
It's fixable by concentrated arcologies, central heating and further electric plus hub and spoke transit and transport systems. But social change for energy efficiency is slow. Especially if you cannot convince the majority that it matters. Not easy to fix air travel either. Metals, glass and concrete are easy enough to make (the shortages of sand are mostly driven by economics of mining and not availability), the ra…
By the way, a major problem that cannot be fixed is transport of basic resources for processing and manufacturing. Localization makes no sense as you have to transport the raw resources to where they're needed anyway and it is almost impossible that you have the necessary materials or parts on hand. Concentration works better as you can use bulk transport, cheaper per unit. But reducing consumption and replacing materials with locally available equivalents is king. In this regard, most plastics can be made locally (or the equivalents) so local assembly would win, but for advanced technologies or metal products there's no way most of the time to replace it. We can use less - plastic cars, earthworks and plastics (esp. biopolymers) rather than glass and concrete for structure as much as possible and more.
Did you read the articles (there are two)? They address renewables in depth.
I did. I prefer to read what scientists and engineers have concluded, and have for decades. I like this: https://thesolutionsproject.org/resources/ Consider if we had acted and done in the same short period what India has done , we'd now have the equivalent of 130 nuclear plants online ... ready for a mandate to move to electric transportation. The future cost of continued reliance on fossils completes the calculatio…
Thousands of green installations are two orders of magnitude behind in energy generation than hundreds of nuclear plants. And we're not even talking about economies of scale which renewables enjoy but nuclear plants do not yet.