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Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration

arxiv.org

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Re: Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration

#31

Post by EGreg »

beeflet wrote: post #24
mangecoeur wrote: post #20

The lengths people go to not to make walkable cities (and insulated buildings, fast trains.. you know, all the stuff that actually exists and works)

cities are made of concrete and steel, both of which emit carbon in their production. nearly everything from pharmaceuticals to clothes to computers is made with petrochemicals. It's not just a matter of civil design, and we don't have the answers.

We do have the answers. Pigovian taxes. Government and industry work together to distract people so they don’t organize to demand the actual answers be implemented.

1) Universal basic income funded by taxes at the point of extraction or emission. See: Alaska (Permanent Fund)

2) Use the taxes to pay down the debt, give UBI since you’ll have to print money anyway.

3) Also raise taxes on non biodegradeable plastics and forever chemicals.

UBI can shift the Overton window from people protesting raising taxes on fossil fuels (eg Yellow Vest protests) to actually embracing them.

Rather than telling individuals they cant have a bag or a straw, the government should put the pressure on bottling companies and clothing companies which continue to use plastics and PFAS everywhere… “recycling” is just another scam to keep individuals distracted. It turns out they were just shipping it all to China for decades.

Re: Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration

#32

Post by beeflet »

khalic wrote: post #27
beeflet wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cities are made of concrete and steel, both of which emit carbon in their production. nearly everything from pharmaceuticals to clothes to computers is made with petrochemicals. It's not just a matter of civil design, and we don't have the answers.

We don’t have the answers to what?

The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.

Re: Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration

#34

Post by khalic »

EGreg wrote: post #31
beeflet wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cities are made of concrete and steel, both of which emit carbon in their production. nearly everything from pharmaceuticals to clothes to computers is made with petrochemicals. It's not just a matter of civil design, and we don't have the answers.

We do have the answers. Pigovian taxes. Government and industry work together to distract people so they don’t organize to demand the actual answers be implemented. 1) Universal basic income funded by taxes at the point of extraction or emission. See: Alaska (Permanent Fund) 2) Use the taxes to pay down the debt, give UBI since you’ll have to print money anyway. 3) Also raise taxes on non biodegradeable plastics and…

Just because the US doesn’t recycle/upcycle doesn’t mean the rest of the world doesn’t…

Re: Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration

#35

Post by wongarsu »

lejalv wrote: post #18

This would only give a 30yr break on just one factor of the ecological collapse. I get it's tempting to think of a technological fix (even one as risky as an Earth-shattering nuclear explosion), but we have to question ourselves more.

A 30yr break on an exponential process with dangerous tipping points seems like an awesome deal

Of course it doesn't work as the only fix, and there is the danger that it could be used as an excuse to slow down necessary changes. But the situation we currently find ourselves in is one that moves in the right direction (per-capita CO2 emissions peaked in the late 80s in the EU-27 and the 00s in the US, and many lower-emission solutions now have better economics than their established counterparts) but inertia an an ill-timed increase in the standard of living of China and India mean we are not moving nearly fast enough. More time is one of the most valuable things we can get in this situation

Re: Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration

#36

Post by spwa4 »

mangecoeur wrote: post #20

The lengths people go to not to make walkable cities (and insulated buildings, fast trains.. you know, all the stuff that actually exists and works)

You do realize the effects of climate change will not be something for which you can just isolate your bedroom for, then move on.

Everyone needs water. Directly, and for food production. The most populous regions in the world run on meltwater. The Indus Valley. Pakistan. Bangladesh. Indonesia. California. Central China. There are thousands such locations as well, by the way, just smaller. Meltwater that only comes if not only the planet is hot, but is hotter this year than last. If not, ZERO meltwater comes. Not a little bit. Zero. If you stop global warming 2 billion people need to be relocated.

To make matters worse, one of the "points of no return" which is coming global warming will switch from pumping water INTO the atmosphere to pumping water OUT of the atmosphere. This will turn the "inside" (any location sufficiently far from a coast) of countries like India, Africa and China back into the deserts they were 500 years ago. Except, it will do so rapidly. We don't know, of course, but certainly less than 100 years. Potentially much less.

If you calculate energy required, you will conclude that lifting water is a nonstarter. With current energy generation we cannot bring water to these locations. Never mind that most don't even have railway connections, never mind electrical power to the trains. We cannot realistically use desalinated water at elevations above maybe 300 meters. It's just not happening.

To make matters worse, both things are tipping-points. There is very, very little change while you get closer to the tipping point, then all the builtup change happens VERY suddenly. And this will happen twice, a two-punch situation, maybe a decade or two apart. First meltwater will stop, entirely, in one or two years, and it will not come back for tens of thousands of years and then a decade or so later rains will stop.

Walkable cities and isolated buildings do exactly nothing to stop any of this.

Re: Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration

#37

Post by arresin »

khalic wrote: post #30
aydyn wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no fix other than a technological one. Modifying the collective behavior of 8 billion people is just not going to happen.

The problem will fix itself when we lose food security. The only other way is to curb the carbon emission by stopping the burning of hydrocarbons. It’s always been the solution, and will always be

> The problem will fix itself when we lose food security.

But then you’re still relying on the world at large connecting the cause and effect correctly.

Re: Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration

#38

Post by beeflet »

EGreg wrote: post #31
beeflet wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

cities are made of concrete and steel, both of which emit carbon in their production. nearly everything from pharmaceuticals to clothes to computers is made with petrochemicals. It's not just a matter of civil design, and we don't have the answers.

We do have the answers. Pigovian taxes. Government and industry work together to distract people so they don’t organize to demand the actual answers be implemented. 1) Universal basic income funded by taxes at the point of extraction or emission. See: Alaska (Permanent Fund) 2) Use the taxes to pay down the debt, give UBI since you’ll have to print money anyway. 3) Also raise taxes on non biodegradeable plastics and…

Any nation that implements a carbon tax will be at an competitive disadvantage, since you're compensating to reduce a global externality. It's a tragedy of the commons.

Re: Nuclear Explosion for Carbon Sequestration

#39

Post by spwa4 »

khalic wrote: post #34
EGreg wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do have the answers. Pigovian taxes. Government and industry work together to distract people so they don’t organize to demand the actual answers be implemented. 1) Universal basic income funded by taxes at the point of extraction or emission. See: Alaska (Permanent Fund) 2) Use the taxes to pay down the debt, give UBI since you’ll have to print money anyway. 3) Also raise taxes on non biodegradeable plastics and…

Just because the US doesn’t recycle/upcycle doesn’t mean the rest of the world doesn’t…

However, there's 2 huge problems with that. First, stopping CO2 additions at this point will just cause a marginal delay in the progress of global warming.

Second adding CO2 will stop. Fossil fuels are finite and will stop this century. All regulation can hope to do is stop it a bit faster. A few decades at best. Which just doesn't matter. Plus oil producing countries, the only ones that have any hope of doing this will never cooperate.

Even nuclear winter will pause global warming, but it won't work to prevent it's consequences, because of water. So will any other mechanism that lowers temperatures.

I'm not saying there aren't other advantages to ecological policy, but stopping global warming just isn't one of them.

Global warming cannot be stopped by regulation. It cannot be stopped by humans at all. That's what the IPCC models say. We need to adapt to it. That means moving billions of people, frankly, out of the way. At an extremely high level what needs to happen is that billions of people need to be moved a LOT closer to a coastline.

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