The implicit model in "just emit less" is that human coordination problems are easier than engineering problems. That's historically backwards. We're extremely good at building things. We're terrible at getting everyone to sacrifice simultaneously for diffuse future benefits. Please generalize this!

I strongly beg to differ. Building is the easy part. It is the political will that isn't. Try to build a train in California and it takes decades and you have a hundred different entities sabotaging you. Put five more lanes on a freeway and no drama, it just happens. We got to the moon when the political will was there but the engineering was still basically science fiction but once the political will dried up, even though the engineering was solved and 'easy', we couldn't get back. History is full of these examples.

I think you're actually agreeing with ctoth i.e. people think the engineering is difficult and politics is easy, BUT that's backwards if you look at history (which you then do). Political will IS the difficult part, and at least the three of us agree on that.

I guess my internal LLM hallucinated what I was expecting to read!

Covid proved this generalisation is not a truism.

USofA was probably the only place that actively resisted the global effort.

I think people do want a better world. Greed is not universal. Most countries that grow a middle class find most people prefer to stop work. I.e. there are not that many infinitely greedy humans. And they can be taxed.

Despite neocon economic theory, most people aren't selfish. And those that are, are often happily rewarded with a plaque in their honor or a medal.

Just look at the length Trump goes to for an award.

COVID didn’t cost anyone anything in terms of improved standard of living. Curbing emissions growth would do that.

People aren’t “greedy,” but my family in Bangladesh absolutely wants to live like my family in America, or at the very least like my family in Canada. They don’t consider that “greedy” and if you tell them it is they’ll laugh at you.

The country’s CO2 emissions per person have increased by a factor of 5x since we left in 1989, consistent with per capita GDP going up by 10x. Even on an efficient development path it’s going to go up another 5x in order to increase the country’s GDP per capita another 10x, which will put it at the level of a poor eastern european country like Hungary or Croatia. That’s the earliest anyone is even going to listen to you about CO2 reduction.

> COVID didn’t cost anyone anything in terms of improved standard of living. Curbing emissions growth would do that.

We live in a horrendously inefficient way. We ship everything from half way around the world in diesel ships, trucks, and trains, we buy shitty single-use plastic items packaged and shipped in single-use plastic packaging, we replace our phones instead of our batteries, our clothing and shoes degrade within a couple years, our restaurants and grocery stores throw away half the food they purchase, our agricultural system spends nitrogen and pesticides like they're free to grow corn as an industrial chemical component. I don't know exactly how much meat there is on that bone, but there's a whole lot of emissions we could remove that wouldn't negatively impact our lives and would probably improve them.

Forget how we live. Take the per capita CO2 output of Norway—which already generates 99% of its electricity using renewables—and somehow halve it. If the Indian subcontinent increases to that level, the added CO2 output alone will be double that of the entire EU currently.

And that’s the steady-state number. It’s impossible to believe that these countries can become twice as efficient as Norway, which already has a fully renewable grid, while building a ton of housing and infrastructure that Norway doesn’t have to build because it’s already built.

Maybe with nuclear power? Are you already factoring that in under "an efficient development path"?

> USofA was probably the only place that actively resisted the global effort.

Really? China, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Italy, UK, Brazil, Tanzania, North Korea, etc.?

Making the COVID response sound like one global cooperative endeavor is some serious retcon'ing.

The is one trick that doesn't require political will. If you can make the microeconomics work it can be made to scale it self.

E.G. Make CO2 extraction so cheap it's worth everyone doing it and say, make a market to sell the CO2 to farmers. Then make burying inedible bits of plants so cheap it's done on a large scale.

Then you just wait. Microeconomics takes over.

They did this with plastic clean up. By building a machine that makes plastic into fuel & construction pellets. Then stuck such a machine on a plastic poluted island and waited.

For this trick. All you require from your políticans is that they don't lie or bomb the place.

Buried plants make methane…

This is true, but can be mitigated if the plant parts are first converted to to charcoal. It’s doable, but not trivial enough for farmers to do it without some other incentive.

Methane is valuable byproduct, which is easy to capture, store, and use at winter.