Month: January 2022

NYTimes: A Sci-Fi Visionary Thinks Greed Might Be the Thing That Saves Us

A Sci-Fi Visionary Thinks Greed Might Be the Thing That Saves Us nyti.ms/334iiuz

“What might be a climate equivalent of Pearl Harbor? We’re already having little regional Pearl Harbors all over the place. We had our heat dome in Seattle over the summer, we had the mega tornado supercell that passed from Arkansas to Kentucky. These little pinprick Pearl Harbor events happen here and there, but it’s difficult to imagine one that would impact an entire country the size of the United States — if it did, it would be a really bad thing. We don’t want to put ourselves in the position of wishing that something terrible would happen. It’s also natural to assume that the CO2 problem is similar to other air-pollution problems we’ve had before. In the ’50s, there was a disaster in London because of too much coal smoke in the air, and they 

cleaned up the air by burning less coal.2

 In the ’70s, a lot of the smog problem in L.A. was cleaned up by putting catalytic converters on cars and 

cutting down on hydrocarbon emissions.3

 There’s a similar story around 

the ozone hole.4

 We’re accustomed to thinking that all we have to do is stop emitting the pollutant, and then nature will clean up the air. But it’s not true in the case of CO2 in the atmosphere. People confuse CO2 emission reduction or elimination with solving the problem. But even if we could stop emitting all CO2, we’d be stuck for hundreds of thousands of years with extremely elevated CO2 levels that nature has no quick way of removing from the air. That’s the key thing that has to be widely understood before we can actually begin envisioning ways to attack the problem”

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