The analogy holds up when we recognise that emission reduction alone simply cannot deliver climate stability, because it only slows the speed at which the problem gets worse. The reality is that emission reduction alone cannot save the climate, any more than constipation pills could work better than sanitation systems. All the efforts of the Paris Accord have delivered only a projected 10% slowdown in the rate of emission increase, at heavy political cost, when the climate security need is for a 200% slowdown.Harry Marks wrote:That analogy might be worth something if there was no choice about technology to be used powering space heating, transport and manufacturing.Robert Tulip wrote:Saving the climate by cutting emissions is as futile as removing sewage by cutting defecation.
Scientifically you are correct that we have choice of technology, and moving to low emission technology is generally a good thing. But at global system scale only token level changes are likely through emission reduction, nowhere near addressing the security problem of global warming, and with appalling opportunity cost. Only an industrial approach to carbon removal can save us.
Political leaders did set out on that path in 1992 at the Earth Summit, but found the pushback was too strong in the face of the perceived economic disruption and cost of moving away from fossil fuels. And in any case, solar farms like the one DWill mentioned might mainly increase the total energy use, doing little to displace actual emissions within the necessary timeframes.Harry Marks wrote:We could have eliminated fossil fuel burning completely by now if we had set out to do so in 1992. We could certainly have contained it within tolerable limits at an affordable cost.
Only a sanitarian approach, physically removing carbon from the air, can displace emissions at the scale and speed required. Sanitarian environmental health engineers on the model of Joseph Bazalgette will achieve far more than economists in saving the climate. Bazalgette was responsible for building London’s sewers after the Great Stink of 1858, as a visionary engineer who responded to the final apoocalypse when shit made London uninhabitable.
You are welcome to such acerbic flourishes Harry, but I don’t see your point about either/or rhetoric. The reality is that climate politics and investment now have a more than 10:1 bias in favour of emission reduction over carbon removal. That ratio has to be reversed if we are serious about stabilising the climate. Discussion of carbon removal can only be helped by such mockery of the constipated politics of emission reduction. Sorry to get under your skin.Harry Marks wrote: Use of this kind of either/or rhetoric just discredits your cause.
You are just wrong here Harry. Emission reduction cannot deliver climate security at all. It can only slow the rate of increase of carbon in the air, while climate security requires a physical decrease in the amount of carbon in the air. All IPCC models recognise the centrality of carbon removal, but perversely push this off for decades due to the toxic politics.Harry Marks wrote:Because only one "model" is allowed at a time? This flies in the face of everything we know about production.Robert Tulip wrote:The model of emission reduction can't deliver climate security, and should be replaced by a practical sanitarian model focused on carbon removal.
We now have the trigger in place for a ten metre sea level rise. The trigger could be pulled in centuries or decades depending on unknown tipping points, together with a series of other major disruptive triggers. Climate security requires removal of those triggers, which means removal of the excess carbon.
In a functioning market of ideas, rival technologies are assessed by their outcomes. That is why biplanes are mostly obsolete. The concept of emission reduction for climate security is likely to become more obsolete than the biplane, because it is not fit for purpose, like leech collectors for bloodletting as a health measure. The conceptual framework of emission reduction only hangs on due to the absence of logic from politics, and the lack of investment in carbon removal. Emission reduction is great for economic efficiency and pollution control, but only marginal to the physical problem of climate security.