Climate Remediation Engineering - Size of Problem

It's easier to give a peasant a bunch of solar panels and a battery to let them generate energy on site than it is provide a diesel-powered generator and a steady supply of diesel fuel. It's a lot easier than setting up a nation-wide electrical grid.

They won't eat much more than they used to, and an e-bike doesn't generate any CO2.

Those that survive the tropical cyclones, the sea-levels rises and the more dramatic wild-fires.

The six billion odd deaths may not all be peaceful and in bed.

The world we evolved in fluctuated between CO2 levels of 180ppm (where we didn't do all that well) and 270ppm (when our population went up a lot). 600ppm may be rather more than our genome can cope with.

It's easier to give a peasant a bunch of solar panels and a battery to let them generate energy on site than it is provide a diesel-powered generator and a steady supply of diesel fuel. It's a lot easier than setting up a nation-wide electrical grid.

They won't eat much more than they used to, and an e-bike doesn't generate any CO2.

Those that survive the tropical cyclones, the sea-levels rises and the more dramatic wild-fires.

The six billion odd deaths may not all be peaceful and in bed.

The world we evolved in fluctuated between CO2 levels of 180ppm (where we didn't do all that well) and 270ppm (when our population went up a lot). 600ppm may be rather more than our genome can cope with.

But having too many of them around isn't good for anybody's health, even theirs.

Not in the US. Your life expectancies have fallen in recent years.

It wasn't a compliment.

Some places are making less than others. How come the Dutch firm ASML makes a better lithography machine than anybody in the US? You and Phil Hobbs helped them do that, but it is still a bit odd.

We will probably be able to selectively abort narcissists before they grow up to mess up society. No more Trump's.

It wasn't intended as one. The guy is deluded, crazy and dangerous.

Yes, I believe so too.

Jeroen Belleman

I am surprised that someone with your intelligence and knowledge should repeat such a fallacy.

Manufacture of vehicle Manufacture of batteries Consumables (tyres, battery etc.) Electricity generations (and the cost of making and maintaining the plant) Road making and maintenance (tarmac refining, transport & installation; road 'wetal'; concrete; street furniture; lighting ) Disposal

I knew that. Insults are normal here.

He's smart, has common sense, and is winning.

Bicycles need paved roads to be efficient. And farmers won't take tons of fertilizer or kilotons of water to the farm on bicycles, or tons of rice to market on bicycles.

People who live way up the food chain imagine all sorts of crazy things. They should spend a year working on a farm.

He may be smart, but he's ignorant, and while he may have intended to frighten the life out of markets around the world, that doesn't look much like winning to me.

Birth defects, like narcissism, may be eliminated. That would definitely be progress. Tough on people like Trump, but good news for the rest of us.

It doesn't have to generate any CO2.

That doesn't have to generate any CO2

That doesn't have to generate any CO2. Use natural rubber in the tyres, and you are extracting CO2 from the atmosphere.

Renewable energy generation is all about generating electricity without generating any CO2.

It doesn't have to generate any CO2. Making concrete without emitting any CO2 isn't a problem that we have solved yet, but we haven't done much work on the problem so far.

Any solution it likely to involve capturing the CO2 emitted from carbonate rocks as they get processed, and burying it deep underground where silicate rock can soak it up by turning into carbonates. You can see that as kind of emission, but it keeps it out of the atmopshere

Making steel without emitting any CO2 is possible - you could electrolyse iron oxide in the same way that you electrolyse aluminium oxide - but the development of any kind of industrial scale process is still a long way off.

That doesn't have to generate any CO2.

And the aim is not to eliminate CO2 generation - it's just to reduce emissions to a level that natural processes - mainly the weathering of silicate rock - can deal with.

The last big CO2 emission event (actually methane, but it got turned into CO2 within a few years of emission) - the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum from 55 million years ago - got cleaned up by natural weathering over about 200,000 years. As Joe Gwinn has pointed out, we could speed that up a bit, but that would cost serious effort.

Perhaps not, but electric trucks would work fine.

The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia had to hire a couple of sociologists to work out how to get farmers to take advantage of new scientific and technological advances.

The trick turned out to be finding a few farmers who were less ignorant and conservative than their neighbours, and concentrating on them. When the more accessible farmers started making more money than their neighbours, the neighbours started copying them.

I went to board school in Tasmania with a bunch of farmer's kids. A couple of them were smart enough to get helped that way. I didn't stay in touch with any of them, but my younger brother did.

My wife went to boarding school in Tasmania too, and at least one of her friends from that period ended up marrying a guy who was equally smart, who grew up in the same town that I did. I never met him there, but worked with his younger brother at the local titanium oxide refinery, as my summer job when I was an undergraduate.

His elder brother has died, and has a Tasmanian cosmic ray observatory named after him.

A year working on a farm might help, if you picked the right farm.

I must confess my ignorance of the flora of Australia, electric bikes don't grow on trees in the UK.

If his sense passes for common sense in the US, ... never mind. I suppose you're just rationalizing your poor choice. It's a well known psychological defense mechanism. Trump is proudly leading the US into a catastrophe.

Jeroen Belleman

Not my choice; I don't vote.

We'll see about the catastrophe. If he can shut down the fentanyl and export the cartel thugs and cancel Daylight Savings Time, he will save a lot of lives.

Last time he was President, the catastrophe was Covid, and he didn't invent Covid.

Reducing funding for The Arts will be a catastrophe for some people. They will have to find real jobs.

There are manufacturing techniques that - while being less green than growing the e-bike on a tree - don't involve burning a lot of fossil carbon. The fact that current manufacturing does involve converting a lot of fossil carbon to CO2 isn't any kind of evidence that burning fossil carbon is a necessary part of the process.

People make money out of selling fentanyl to Americans who seem to need it. Nobody has every stopped criminals from smuggling goods into the US that the population wants to buy. Prohibition didn't work and the war on drugs was a waste of time and money.

Trump wants to export anybody who looks vaguely like a cartel thug, and doesn't want to waste time on letting due process work out who actually is a member of any cartel. It delivers the photo-opportunities he craves, but also quite a lot of miscarriages of justice.

Daylight Saving Time hasn't killed anybody.

But he didn't take it seriously - to the point of getting infected himself, and it killed 3,642 Americans per million. It only killed 2,556 per million in France and 2182 per million in Germany. Boris Johnson was a similarly incompetent blowhard and it killed 3,389 per million in the UK.

He's defunding the kind of people who compete with him for public attention by making equally empty gestures (if rather better thought out).

OK about the drugs and cartels, but I fail to see how cancelling daylaight savings time contributes to saving lives.

He suggested drinking bleach might help. Smart and common sense, indeed.

There are certainly areas where funding is wasted, but going at it with a blunt axe is not going to do any good.

Lets hope he'll run out of steam soon. The signs are good: He doesn't even remember he swore to uphold the constitution. He seems utterly confused.

Jeroen Belleman

Bill Sloman's original claim was: "... an e-bike doesn't generate any CO2.", which is patently untrue. Had he said : " ...an e-bike doesn't generate any more CO2 than other comparable modes of transport, that would have been nearer the truth.

He's not confused - he's just not paying attention to what other people think that he ought to be doing. The US constitution is a large document and he hasn't got the attention span to comprehend what it says about what he ought to be doing. Eventually even his most rusted-on supporters are going to realise this, and he may be impeached and tossed out, but it may take longer than his four year term for the penny to drop. The moderately sensible ones became never-Trumpers some years ago, and the residue is depressingly dim, or perhaps merely ambitious and amoral.