Comment by ben_w
> but we will be pumping carbon underground faster than we are extracting it now!
While I know about "we need to sequester carbon", I thought the assumption was more for the last 10% (which makes sense, last 10% of anything is often expensive), not >100% of current?
> And that's with the IPCC models which tend to be optimistic (we measure that every year)!
Indeed, unfortunately.
> entirely relies on oil
I don't believe "relies on" is correct: while I would agree that e.g. plastics are made from oil, that oil currently powers some of the energy generation capacity used for the manufacturing plants that make the panels, that shipping and air transport are at present almost entirely oil-based, these are not "entirely relies on oil", they are "the economy in which they emerged happens to have been built on oil".
This is importantly different, because as renewable energy ramps up, the CO2 emissions resulting from each of these steps also goes down — even for the plastic, as the carbon in the oil itself is much more valuable as plastic than as a fuel waste product.
> By any account, this means that billions of people will have to relocate, which means global wars (with entire countries moving with their entire armies).
Aye.
Lots of room for massive disasters there, even if it were not for the fact that at least one affected area already has nukes.
> not >100% of current?
I am not completely sure about the exact numbers, but my understanding is something like this: currently we extract 7 billion tons of oil (or is it fossil fuels in general?) per year, and the IPCC scenario for 1.5C says that in a few decades we will have to not only be zero emissions, but also sequester 10 billion tons per year. So yeah, that's another way to say "impossible".
> "the economy in which they emerged happens to have been built on oil"
Sure, but... it's not clear at all if globalization the way it is now is even possible without oil. We currently use oil for transports because it is much denser. We can't move a supertanker with PV, for instance. Extrapolating the evolution of renewables from the last decade is definitely optimistic because we will have (that's just natural limits) and must use (if we don't want to reach 4C) less fossil fuel, so it will most definitely become harder and harder.
I believe that we need as much renewables and nuclear as we can, because even that will not compensate for oil. So we will live in a world with less energy and a harder climate, that's a fact. The challenge now is to deal with it, and do as much as possible to keep as much energy as we can while preserving the climate as much as we can. This is the biggest challenge in the Human history, by far. And instead of focusing on that, we try to send a few people to Mars for no good reason...