this post was submitted on 05 Jul 2025
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collapse of the old society
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Many people have been manipulated into thinking of this whole problem as a "flow" or "rate" problem.
"If we could only slow down carbon..."
The thing is that what we have is a "sink" or "stock" problem where it's how much carbon is already in the system -- it's past actions that are already closed off to further change that are influencing things now
The rate of change in climate isn't from the rate of this year's contribution of 4ppm of CO2, it's from having 423ppm in the system all together forcing a very large shift in energy imbalance.
There is no solution space where slowing down the rate is meaningful. Going to zero or net negative for the ANNUAL rate next year is too small a lever against what work would need to happen to make a meaningful difference.
The TOTAL HISTORICAL carbon that is already there would have to be entirely removed and even that wouldn't put the system all the way back due to inertia and other nonlinearities.
What you're feeling today in the climate is actually geared to the emissions levels that were already achieved no more recently than 15 years ago in the past. What we do today will have effects that will only start in 15 years and take a long time to fully play out with effects still coming into play 100 years from today. This is a very very long lag time that confuses everything in terms of human feedbacks and human proof and human priorities.
A great number of people think we know what to do but we were too greedy and corrupt to do it.
I disagree. I think we have no idea what to even do. Humanity does not have the technology or capability to be sustainable. And so we think and talk about it wrongly because we do not want to accept that we are doomed.
Just to back up what your saying MIT have a nice explainer on carbon lifetimes[0].
I don't know if I feel as doomed as you though. There is a lot of technology to reduce carbon (renewables etc). And moreover, a lot of the carbon use today is completely unecessary consumerism.
We've had 30 years of political inertia since Regan/Thatcher/etc so political change seems impossible to a lot of folks. Historically that's just not the case. Before then, voter rights, civil rights, women's rights all made huge political changes. If there's any silver lining to the horror show of US politics at the moment, it should be that there is at least proof that massive structural change is possible in today's political climate, and I genuinely believe that can be harnessed for good.
I don't think there's any guarantees, but it's still a lot too early to give up.
[0] https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-do-we-know-how-long-carbon-dioxide-remains-atmosphere
You're only talking about reducing the rate of increases. That's irrelevant. Carbon would still be growing, not shrinking.
As I stated, we need a way to decrease the existing carbon, which is a different, much larger problem, with no technology and nothing waiting in the wings. We have no ideas. Renewable or rebuildable power systems could be useful, but how does that power suck fossil carbon out of the biosphere, what's the tech for that?
The closest thing I've heard of is sulfur dioxide injection, which could apparently reduce greenhouse effects. However, if we implemented this and ever stopped doing it before decreasing the current levels of carbon, it could result in more rapid heating, which would be more damaging to wildlife due to the greater speed with which survivors would have to migrate.
That's geoengineering to reduce the strength of sunlight to get heat down. It has to be repeated indefinitely, forever, or heat increases again.
Also, it doesn't reverse what's causing climate change by removing carbon.
Well, it has to be repeated indefinitely until we actually manage to find a way to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere significantly. Which, yeah, that might be forever, but it could also be somewhere around the corner. Personally, given the trajectory we're on it seems like a reasonable stop gap that might actually help cool the planet somewhat, but it's not up to me.
Conservation of mass and conservation of energy gives a very easy planetary scale answer to this question.
From an energy standpoint, what it costs to bottle up the CO2 is equal to the following:
Take all the energy (heat + work) that was chemically embodied in all the historical fossil fuels. We need to run all those chemical reactions that released energy again, but this time backwards.
We need to also add the energy it would take to run the thermodynamic change backwards, because the original energy was in concentrated high density form, and now the carbon has dispersed to a low coherence state where it's stuck in air, ice, water and vegetation all over the place. It all has to come back out which involves major material movements and filtering / transformation
In conclusion, this is more expensive than all the money and energy and materials in the entire human history put together.
Unless....
Do you know of any magic?
That may well be the case, but it's always a mistake to assume we know everything. That's how we got into this mess in the first place. It wasn't long ago that we didn't know what germs were, didn't have electricity, didn't understand things like relativity or quantum mechanics. We don't know what we're going to learn tomorrow, or next year, or 50 years from now.
If there's an option A in which we both fail to do anything to reduce carbon in the atmosphere and also fail to do anything to cool down the planet and an option B where we for now fail to do anything to reduce the carbon in the atmosphere but manage to cool it down enough to provide a stop gap, option B might get us to a point where we can actually do something. At the very least it could give us a little more time before we fully run out of options for survival. Option A doesn't give us that breathing room and doesn't make things better in the mean time.
Saying that neither option can fully solve our problem doesn't mean it's not worth doing the thing that makes the immediate issue less severe. It's a bandaid, to be sure, but sometimes a bandaid is what you need to slow down an infection until you can get somewhere where you can actually heal.
I don't know the long term answer. I don't think anybody does. But I also don't think we can say with honesty, given the history of human knowledge and technology, that we actually know whether or not an answer will exist in the future. In the mean time, we should probably be acting to create the possibility that we can make use of an answer if we find one.
To be clear on what's required, we would need something like a free infinite energy source that doesn't pollute at all. It also would have to be rapidly scalable within a decade or so. At that point we could have a giant vacuum cleaner sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere. We need to discover this new technology yesterday and it needs to clean the whole planet in about 20 years.
At this point in the story, we are adding about 1% to the CO2 pollution per year. Given the vast scale of the solution we will be coming up with, do you think this extra 1% or 25% will be somehow pivotal?
To me, this is like having pancreatic cancer that's untreatable by medicine and deciding if you are going to quit smoking or not. Yeah, smoking doesn't make it better, but in the face of the only cure being basically a miracle, is it actually meaningful to ask this question?
Like, a miracle that can cure an unfixable problem is so huge that do a few extra cigarettes hang in the balance?
I mean...of course you're right. Slowing down CO2 pollution is very very important. In 1950.
(We do not have 50 years. Lol.)