Honestly, at this point tech is probably the only way climate change will be fixed. You won't get people to agree to make their life worse for the sake of the environment, no matter how much activists keep trying to push that. And so if drastic measures like this are what's needed, then those are what's needed. We can either argue about responsibilities and sustainability for years with little effect, or accept that technological methods are probably going to be the solution here.
Plus it's not like this would have to go on forever. Once all sources of energy are 'green' and carbon capture has removed enough of the CO2 from the atmosphere, then any means of reflecting back sunlight or reducing the amount that reaches Earth can be gradually scaled back.
The driving cost for solar pv is the structure and the land, the panels are now so cheap (and getting cheaper) that the economic recommendation is to install 3x the generation capacity of the inverter. Sizing for hitting capacity on the darkest days basically.
Living in a draft proof, highly insulated home with mechanical air filtration and heat recovery, driving an EV that’s powered by the roof of your house doesn’t sound like any kind of worse life to me.
Abundant, locally generated electricity is a game changer. You can even extract drinking water from the air inside your house in all but the driest of locations.
Mmm ok, so everyone lives in a house in an American suburb with American population density levels? Yeah, it sounds like you really don’t get how most of the world’s population lives.
Cities have far more potential for efficient energy generation and use than houses.
Let's take one poor country: Brazil. 80% of electricity is from renewable resources.
You cannot buy pure gasoline at the pump, it's all mixed with renewable ethanol and the percentage goes up by law every year. Since the vast majority of cars run on pure ethanal which you can get at all fueling stations, some people choose to never buy fossil fuels for their car.
All diesel is mixed with renewable biodiesel by law, and that percentage goes up every year.
So if a poor country with the largest city in the Southern hemisphere can make such rapid progress, you're really out of excuses. The technology and prices are there. The question is electing the right people who will encourage it to happen.
Some will mention that Brazil is lucky to have a lot of hydro which is true. So go look at their huge investment in solar and wind which isn't luck. And then you need to explain the progress in transportation moving away from fossil fuels. There's a lot to learn from a poor developing country with huge cities.
Those massive investments are made in the hope for return, not the current elected people’s green goodwill. Brazil has lots of land and water which makes ethanol (financially) profitable and many mines that are better driven for national solar panel production than going to international market.
> Those massive investments are made in the hope for return, not the current elected people’s green goodwill
Could you please share the evidence you have of the motivations of the elected people? Anyone can make guesses and it would be easy enough for me to come up with a list of reasons that your guesses are wrong. I'd prefer a more evidence based approach. Lacking evidence, guesses like this can be ignored.
I'm also not sure why the motivations are even important if the end result is renewable energy, and especially energy that is more carbon neutral than burning fossil fuels.
Which chart are you looking at? I don't see a chart for electricity sources on that page. When I go to the page for electricity mix (https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix) and choose Brazil in the chart, I get a total of 77.46% of electricity coming from renewables (not including nuclear) for 2021. If we include nuclear, it's 80%.
It's usually higher than 80% without including nuclear, but 2021 had significantly lower hydro due to drought. Fortunately the huge investment in wind and solar kept that number close enough to 80%. Had that investment not happened, the numbers for 2021 would be much lower.
There were multiple decades in Brazil where 80% of electricity came from hydro alone.
I was specifically addressing "You won't get people to agree to make their life worse for the sake of the environment, no matter how much activists keep trying to push that"
> so everyone lives in a house in an American suburb
How about we get started on those and see how we go? You can also put solar panels on the roofs of appartment blocks and the distributed cost and maintenance gets even mroe compelling even if you dont generate 100% of the usage.
> Living in a draft proof, highly insulated home with mechanical air filtration and heat recovery, driving an EV that’s powered by the roof of your house doesn’t sound like any kind of worse life to me.
The problem is that even if everyone did that it wouldn't come close to reaching net zero. Personal transportation, electricity use and heating are a fraction of the total emissions. Transportation, electricity and heating for commercial and industrial sectors are much larger and then you need to add on top of that direct emissions by industry and agriculture. So a lot of what people are arguing for when they say they want to cut emissions is a reduction in industry, agriculture and commerce which would indeed make life much worse for everyone.
It's a dehumidifier welded to a water filter. Simple tech. Bonus if you're in a cold climate, it helps to heat your home up too.
I wish these guys, or someone would get beyond the 'call us for pricing' vaporware stage and actually start selling to retail customers: https://www.watergen.com/home-office/
Dehumidifiers come in a variety of capacities. Extraction of 4-8L per day with a 400W power consumption is typical, more if humidity is high. Larger communal units would be more efficient. If you have abundant power literally coming from the sky, why not use some of it to make clean water?
They are far from an abundant source of water, like you said.
Taking 400W *24/7 is quite a lot of energy, and I'm not really believing the 4-8L output.
At 17° Celsius and 38% humidity, you get 0.008g of water out of 1L of air. There are physical limits to this, of course.
The dude in the video does the calculations, and it's far from "no problem to make water out of air". It would be better to use the energy for something else.
If it was so easy to do, there would be no problems with water shortages around the globe (and soon maybe "water wars") just take it out of the air with solar.
>>Taking 400W *24/7 is quite a lot of energy, and I'm not really believing the 4-8L output.
I run a dehumidifier in my British house(in the conservatory) and it easily fills up its 10L tank every 2 days. Also indicentally it does use 400Wh(which yes, is a lot of energy).
I think it might get a bit more buy-in if there was some acknowledgement of the biggest producers of these problems. At this point a certain part of society gets to profit from these policies and it's worse for everyone else. It's always easy to get OTHERS to make sacrifices for you.
Yes, but I have this circular from Big Polluter Inc. that makes it clear that they are not to blame and it is just the centerists/alt right/leftists/green/blm/nra/anti-gun/foreigners/locals/state/deep state/vested interests/think tanks/academics/regulators/lobbyists/dea/cartels that are behind it all.
So excuse me it I dont buy into the lies because I know the truth.
> You won't get people to agree to make their life worse.
Agreed.
> Honestly, at this point tech is probably the only way climate change will be fixed.
Disagreed. I think it would be a really bad idea to ignore the power legislation has. People don't exactly agree on taxes. They just don't disagree enough to want to suffer the consequences (direct and societal)
Legislate things that people don't disagree with too much.
Legislation doesn't work on global level, unless you are ready to go to war. And I think world war 3 will kill more people than climate change could. At the very least Russia and China will flat out deny to follow any legislation related to this, with even US not very keen to legislate themselves.
China will. They're an importer of energy and they're suffering from air pollution. They show no ideological opposition to reducing CO2.
Russia won't, but they're a smaller country and the impact isn't as big.
Also, legislation isn't a thing on a world level. You have treaties and agreements. And if that doesn't work, you impose a carbon tarriff. There won't be a need for war.
The problem with that is that anything that most things that have the biggest effect here (not eating meat, not travelling a ton, etc) are also things that no government in the world would have support for limiting, and if they tried to regulate them, would probably get destroyed in the next election.
Could you regulate some stuff? Sure, but anything that's remotely unpopular feels like a recipe for the opposing party to win by a landslide just by promising to remove said regulation. Or for someone who doesn't give a toss/is basically anti environmentalist to get elected, ala Bolsonaro in Brazil.
> You won't get people to agree to make their life worse for the sake of the environment, no matter how much activists keep trying to push that
You left out a word: wealthy people.
The lower 50% of the world's people income-wise are responsible for 15% of global CO2 emissions, and the top 10% for 34% of total emissions.
It won't matter how many people are riding around on e-bikes instead of cars if we have rich assholes flying half-way around the world 3-4x a year for vacation.
>Frequent-flying “‘super emitters” who represent just 1% of the world’s population caused half of aviation’s carbon emissions in 2018, according to a study.
>Airlines produced a billion tonnes of CO2 and benefited from a $100bn (£75bn) subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, the researchers estimated.
> You won't get people to agree to make their life worse for the sake of the environment,
This. The sooner we understand this, the sooner it will be possible to have useful propositions.
> no matter how much activists keep trying to push that.
A huge part of the problem are the (usually) most vocal among the activists, who spit utter idiocies like: "It's too late: run!"
No! If it is too late, there's no point in running. If global warming is irreversible, there's no point in freaking up the whole word economy. Propose something that works and we will discuss the benefit-cost ratio. Going around howling nonsense only creates noise and lessen the credibility of the great people who are trying, with their heart, to solve the biggest problem humanity has ever had to deal with.
> Surely the close the blocking object is to the sun the better how close could we get a parasole?
Moving an object closer to the sun will enlarge its penumbra, but this does not mean that it will block more light. Because its apparent size relative to the sun will also get smaller.
For example, mercury and the moon are roughtly the same size. Yet a Mercury transit will not block much light; it looks like a small dot moving across the sun[1]. While a solar eclipse caused by the moon will block a lot of light.[2]
That doesn't mean that a space sunshade is completely infeasible. But you do need something very large, e.g. a 1000km diameter object (or cloud of smaller objects) placed at the L1 Lagrange point. It would probably cost at least trillions of dollars[3].
Plus it's not like this would have to go on forever. Once all sources of energy are 'green' and carbon capture has removed enough of the CO2 from the atmosphere, then any means of reflecting back sunlight or reducing the amount that reaches Earth can be gradually scaled back.