Technology

Instead of UBI, we should give every citizen carbon credits that they can then either use themselves for cars over certain (adjusting) emission limits or more likely sell to companies. Every company has to pay for their CO2 (and downline for imports)

The interesting thing would be people not necessarily spending their carbon credits like they do money. As there is no real incentive to sell to one company or another, other then tiny rate differences.

Also... always peg the price to what it costs to clean the carbon out. That creates a greater incentive to not skirt, as it might get cheaper over time.

People won't even rise up for their own sake. gestures in every general direction

Governments will fail. Wherever unpopular "Green" Measures are implemented, the right-wing cockroaches appear, destroying any discourse.

The consequence will be a global war by stupid populists who think that is one solution (which it kind of is,... Dead people won't emit CO2)

We’ll have a big environmental 9/11 moment where a major American city becomes permanently uninhabitable and then there will alot of handwringing about “What could we have done!?” Then we’ll start getting lukewarm serious about it for maybe a few years, but by that point it’s way too late.

It's the parable of office pizza: some people take 1 slice because there are many people to feed.

some people take 3 slices, because there are many people to feed.

“Fuck it, might as well keep doing what I’m doing.”

And that last group is going to be angry when they can't keep doing their stuff when insurance rates go insane so they can't buy houses or cars, or when food prices keep going up even faster than they are now.

And also irreversible is The decline of biodiversity. Once a species is extinct it won't come back.

There's a point made at the end of the article that most people seems to have missed entirely:

Existing facilities that can filter carbon dioxide out of the air only have the capacity to capture 0.01 million metric tons of CO2 globally today, costing companies like Microsoft as much as $600 per ton of CO2. That’s very little capacity with a very high price tag.

“We cannot squander carbon dioxide removal on offsetting emissions we have the ability to avoid,” study coauthor Gaurav Ganti, a research analyst at Climate Analytics, said in a press release. The priority needs to be preventing pollution now instead of cleaning it up later.

It's obviously a matter of "why not both?", and both the article and the scientists behind the report agree on it. However, a lot of people are betting their eggs on the idea that climate reversal technology will suddenly become a lot more effective and cheaper than it is right now. And sure, that may be the case, or not. For how many years have we heard of flying cars or self-driving autonomous vehicles and predicted that they were just around the corner, at most a few years away, but nada so far? Betting on the invention of a new technology that'll make a very expensive process today way cheaper is a VERY naive and bad approach.

There are many tipping points, and we dont always know if we've hit one yet or not. The drastic increase in sea temperature the last two years is possibly a tipping point we've passed, esp since the warmer the water is, the less co2 its able to absorb. OMAC shut down (if it happens) is possibly a tipping point, which will only feedback loop into warming waters.

Honestly, the permafrost melt is more likely to be the KO punch after one or more other tipping points accelerate it.