this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2024
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Well yeah but...
Even if tomorrow we start really working on getting the CO2 levels down (protip: we won't), humanity will be spending half their world energy budget for the next 50-100 years at least to get CO2 levels back to what they should be (pre industrialized levels). Even if we go for something more semi reasonable, say pre 1980 levels, we'll still be spending half our entire world energy budget on this for like a decade. This ain't an easy problem
No not easy. It's way cheaper to avoid making it worse than it is to try and put things back the way they were.
The next generations after us are facing shit storms. This all boils down to thermodynamics. We took energy at the cost of generating CO2. Taking that CO2 back, aggregating, filtering, converting, storing... Add in losses (be generous and take 50% conversion rates), we will need multiple times all the energy we took over the last two centuries to take all that CO2 out.
When I said decades of spending half our energy budget, I was very VERY generous. Reality is that we might have to be doing that for centuries, maybe.