The problem is that, given we're failing the straightforward task of curtailment even now, what are the chances that we can successfully achieve curtailment and sequestering in the required time-frame?
Curtailment is a large task but we know what to do. Sequestering would also be a large task but what to do is uncertain. Curtailment so far has been a corrupt circus with "pledges" and other indirect inducements ("carbon credits") being most of what was done. These indirect inducements primarily served as speculative vehicles and advertising gloss.
And here, I just google'd up what you'd expect: A bitcoin-based platform for trading carbon credit. Now you can use the certainty of damaging the environment to make a promise to repair it.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/ibm-and-veridium-transf...
On the other hand, global fossil fuel use has not peaked yet. Global population has not peaked yet. Many countries have worse cost-and-schedule problems with attempted deployments of nuclear reactors than they did 40 years ago. We are barely reaching "maybe starting to flatten out emissions" -- actually trending down toward zero is just a mirage in the distance at present. The opportunity to stabilize the climate just by cutting emissions is now in the past.
I feel like humanity is moving toward making the changes it needs, and has a better toolset for those changes than before, but is changing much slower and later than it should have. We're out of completely safe options and have to try to navigate between various risky options. I can understand the perspective of people who feel like we're acting too late and there is no chance of industrial civilization surviving into the 22nd century, even though I don't share that perspective.
Indeed, but if solar power is now the preferred energy source, solar power could be being used for all new energy need as well as help us cut back on fossil fuel's original usage.
But it's not. That's a world-killing problem.
What we're out of is laize faire options. Neither sequestering nor dramatic winding down of fossil fuel consumption is going to happen without a world level authority dictating things. Sadly, that seems unlikely.
Another way to put this - we're not out of safe options if we're not doing the safe options. We may need to do risky options once we are fully engaged in doing the safe option but today, now, we have not yet acquired the ability to even do the safe options consistently.
Sure, maybe the risky options will be necessary but if efforts to do the safe get pissed away with corrupt deceptions, how are we expecting efforts to do the risky efforts won't suffer the safe fate?
That some amount of CO2 production is being reduced almost at random isn't much of an argument that human society has the ability to choose a path and follow it effectively. How many fake versions of sequestering do you think scammers will come up with if the money ever appears?
A regulatory body capable of doing CO2 reduction might have the competence to then regulate sequestering. Random activity by supposedly concerned citizens or something just invites abuse.
And it’s not as if the world has been standing still over the last decades, huge progress has been made and many technologies are at the borderline of being economical or cheaper than the alternatives, and are continually falling in price. Once we push the boulder over the crest of the hill it will roll down unaided. The economy can change much quicker than we think.
I agree that many technologies for replacing fossil usage have now achieved or are close to economic superiority, and that change can come very rapidly with economic superiority. But I also think that reaching this point has taken too long and now we will need active measures as well as emissions cuts.
If you do something fairly extreme for curtailment, like a tax on fuel that motorists really notice, the other party will get voted in and they'll undo it. Now you've got kicked out of office, with no environmental benefit to show for it.
And if you go further with something like a ban on pet dogs or ban on meat-eating? Same thing but faster and with more certainty.
The world needs to declare a WAR ON CO2 and put it on a war-time footing. Further considerations of tinkering around with an environment we've already de-stabilized only shows we haven't learned our lesson. We don't know enough to know what's safe... except the way things were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
Given more time I'm sure he would have come up with other world destroying chemicals.
