> The only path forward is technological innovation to reduce or remove carbon emissions.
I’d be completely happy with technological innovations that allowed us to restore heat balance (solar radiation management, marine cloud brightening, etc). That can buy time for transitioning from fossil fuels.
I mean, if I had Elon Musk money, I'd build some kind of giant carbon capture mechanism. Perhaps I'd buy the largest basalt quarry I could find and start sequestering carbon at a planetary scale. It would cost a ton of money, but I'd do it in secret. If it worked, eventually it would show up on the scales, and I'd emerge from the shadows. This particular method of carbon capture could potentially work at a planetary scale and could potentially be done in secret, at huge cost, but the only blocking factor today is money.
https://eos.org/articles/basalts-turn-carbon-into-stone-for-...
This is the answer to carbon storage by the way, people just do not know about it. There's more than enough reactive mineral sites on the planet. The process is basically just dissolving CO2 into water, heating it, and soaking basalt in it to allow crystals to form. The water becomes heavier than ground water and can simply be poured into the Earth. The unsolved problems are optimization problems: direct air capture of CO2, using saltwater, that sort of thing.
If the world's billionaire class decided to buy carbon sequestering, we could have global CO2 levels returned to 1900 levels within a decade or two. The technology exists, the economic willpower does not.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-43789527
> Potentially, basalt could solve all the world's CO2 problems says Sandra: "The storage capacity is such that, in theory, basalts could permanently hold the entire bulk of CO2 emissions derived from burning all fossil fuel on Earth."
Having said all of that, this is likely the most dystopian option. It's the "tech bails us out, yet again" solution because we could deploy it thoroughly enough that we can solve climate change without addressing any of the existential issues that got us here. The right combination of corporate+government partnership commercializing this technology and making it mandatory is a very plausible way to arrive at "there's 4 corporations on Earth that run the show" a la Aliens.
It's very much the wrong time to scale carbon capture. Doing some pilot plants for research is a good idea, but if your goal is to see the effects on the global plots, you should be working on something else.
There's a sibling with the long-form reasoning. The problem is that we are pushing a lot of new carbon into the atmosphere, you just won't be able to scale anything enough and there's a really big opportunity cost to try to push the tide away.
Carbon capture is probably the only geoengineering thing you could do that isn’t going to be massively controversial. Probably not practical though.
The other options mentioned like messing with the atmosphere to make it reflect more heat into space will likely cause wars due to lack of global consensus
I think you don’t understand the true scale of the problem. Just the additional fossil carbon being put in the atmosphere by the US alone is trillions of KG/yr.
Not only is there no way to hide trying to do something about it at that scale, there is no single site (or even multiple sites) that could handle that amount of sequestration - we’re talking hundreds.
And even Elon Musk could not afford it, even if he dumped everything he had into it.
No, but you could do enough of it in secret with Elon Musk resources to prove that it's both planetarily viable and doesn't cause catastrophes by existing and then lend your political weight to having it scaled up globally. By the time the public heard about it, it would already be a done deal.
I think you could prove it out at a scale that people could measure on planetary CO2 sensors for a couple dozen billion dollars, then take that data to a sitting POTUS you're friendly with and work out a multi-trillion dollar commercialization plan, using the USA's global bullying power to immediately establish a global monopoly.
A particularly cynical view would be this CEO buying global laws that dictate carbon neutrality while simultaneously also making it impossible to achieve without his CCS. Then merely canceling a sales contract topples a regime and you've arrived a global corporatocracy.
The moment anyone tries anything on that scale of geoengineering, they will immediately be blamed for whatever weather-based natural disasters that follow. I just don’t see how this can work without creating massive diplomatic tensions.