> There is nothing whatsoever we can do about it. Plain and simple.
[citation needed]
Humans could never fly. We could never destroy entire mountains. We could never drain an entire sea or make an island. We could never split an atom. We could never walk on the moon. We could never have an international network sending live video around the world at near light speed. We could never burn so much fuel that we heat up the earth in a measurable degree.
Yet people did all of these things.
Just because it seems impossible now doesn't mean it won't be possible someday.
> I challenge anyone to show how anything short of all of humanity leaving earth can produce a rate of change dramatically better than tens of thousands of years per 100 ppm
If a single person right here, right now, could do that in an economical fashion, they'd be a trillionaire before the decade is over. Nobody in 2001 was single handedly making pocket-sized GPSes that played games, streamed video, and had AI facial recognition in the sub-thousand dollar price range either, but that changed fast. Anybody who proposed using solar panels and windmills as a main power source for cities in 1910 would've been called a kook just as well. It's incremental change.
Go back and read my top post and go through the exercise I delineated. I provided everything you need to verify the claim. It is so simple a high school kid with a ruler could do it.
That's what's so frustrating about this. People like to say things like "well, just because cows don't fly today". Well, no, that's not a counter-argument. This is about physics. What's interesting is that it is about physics so simple the answer can be discovered with a printed chart, a ruler and a pencil.
If you bother to go through the exercise, the baseline you should discover is that, in rough terms, it takes 100K years for a 100ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2. 100KY/100ppm.
What does that mean?
That's the baseline for any subtractive approach to "saving the planet".
It's the baseline that says: We know it's 100KY/100ppm if we eliminate EVERYTHING.
It's simple logic to understand that if we engage in partial elimination the rate of change will not be better than 100KY/100ppm. It cannot.
If you erase the entire United States from the face of the planet, will the rate be better than 100KY/100ppm. No way. Impossible. And we just erased the largest economy on the planet.
Meanwhile, the governor of California is virtue-signaling by trying to eliminate IC cars in 15 years? How is that going to even make a dent?
He is far more likely to trigger an industrial shift that will result in far more CO2 being produced to retool and shift to manufacturing and support electric vehicles than IC vehicles ever produced.
Simple logic: Do anyone have any idea how many high power charging stations a fully electric-car CA would require?
Well, there are over 10,000 gas stations in CA. I am going to say we likely need at least twice that many high power charging stations. Why? Because you can fill your gas tank in 5~10 minutes and it takes 75 MINUTES to charge a Tesla at a Supercharger station. So, yeah, 2x might actually be a low number.
Any idea of the resources and industrial mobilization required to build 20K, 30K, 50K charging stations? Any idea how much CO2 this construction process would entail?
And then we have the small issue of powering them. Current Tesla Supercharger stations consume about 1.5 MWh PER DAY. This means that 20,000 stations would consume 30,000 MWh PER DAY. This assumes the same utilization level (about 50 sessions per day). Anyone visiting a gas station knows this number is laughable.
Let's put 30,000 MWh into some context: A typical nuclear power plant produces about 1,000 MW. This supercharger network would consume the output of THIRTY nuclear power plants. We would have to build one nuclear plants per year for thirty years to be ready for full scale electrification of transportation in CA. If we extend this to go nationwide we would likely end-up with, I don't know, a thousand nuclear power plants.
And don't even think about saying "solar". I don't even want to imagine the pollution China would generate if tasked with producing 30 GW in solar panels, not to mention the CO2 produced to ship and install that infrastructure...and it only covers part of the day...which means you now have to manufacture and install massive battery banks...etc.
Where is your CO2 footprint now?
This is all very simple logic and very simple math. All it requires is a bit of critical thinking applied to pencil and paper. Not that difficult. We are being sold barrels of lies right and left (I mean that politically).
[citation needed]
Humans could never fly. We could never destroy entire mountains. We could never drain an entire sea or make an island. We could never split an atom. We could never walk on the moon. We could never have an international network sending live video around the world at near light speed. We could never burn so much fuel that we heat up the earth in a measurable degree.
Yet people did all of these things.
Just because it seems impossible now doesn't mean it won't be possible someday.
> I challenge anyone to show how anything short of all of humanity leaving earth can produce a rate of change dramatically better than tens of thousands of years per 100 ppm
If a single person right here, right now, could do that in an economical fashion, they'd be a trillionaire before the decade is over. Nobody in 2001 was single handedly making pocket-sized GPSes that played games, streamed video, and had AI facial recognition in the sub-thousand dollar price range either, but that changed fast. Anybody who proposed using solar panels and windmills as a main power source for cities in 1910 would've been called a kook just as well. It's incremental change.