If we went carbon neutral today, things would continue to worsen for an estimated 50-70 years before correcting. Only going significantly carbon negative solutions will have the rapid, desired effect, and that's nigh impossible.
this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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One of the Civilization 6 expansions introduces climate changes. You can unlock a technology for carbon recapture, however, generally by the time you are able to unlock it, climate change is already occurring. You're also not able to reverse damage that has already been done.
While it can be frustrating in game, I appreciate the fact that the developers realistically incorporated it not being feasible.
Then we should massively increase our CO2 output as the 1% that would be removed grow with the output.
It'll be something like the tragedy of the Commons. People in jurisdictions that don't enforce carbon neutral activities would just ramp their activities up with more abandoned, relying on the scrubbers to save them. And they're definitely going to be able to outpace the scrubbers.
In our current economic modeling, a carbon generating activity is a profit center, a carbon sinking activity would be a cost center. So every business would be incentivized to generate carbon and not sinking any of it. And it'd be difficult for governments to pay for sinking it. Especially when carbon can be produced outside their own jurisdiction.
The bigger question is this: How much energy would be required to collect and sequester 101% of daily carbon emissions?
I think it absolutely should be done, but getting there will be a huge undertaking and we will need creative solutions to get there without contributing to the problem.
If this does happen, and there are strong carbon controls globally, we could potentially reverse global warming very very slowly. But it would trend to the better. I'm hopeful