I don’t think human psychology will allow a united approach to global warming. Too man people are too stupid, to egoistic or just in such a tight spot they can not afford being “climate-friendly”.

So I wonder if there are Mega-Projects available to stop global warming?

Some coming to mind:

Reflector mirror at Lagrange1 between Sun and Earth - even a 1.000.000km² mirror from ultrathin film would weigh 1000 tonnes at most.

Giant Air Scrubers and I mean giant. They would dwarf the pyramids and remove pullutants and CO² from the athmosphere.

In addition I think a originator principle should become common: Any nation not really trying to act clean should simply be burdened with massive tariff measures. Using modern technology it shouldn’t be too hard to find nations who polute the ocean unnececerrally.

Edit, it became reality:

USA CO² Scrubber german

Project Cypress english

  • fiat_lux
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    1 year ago

    I wonder how much CO2 would be pumped into the atmosphere from creating a 1 million km^2 mirror? The electricity required just from manufacturing and researching and engineering alone would be immense, before considering CO2 from the labour, material production, putting it in the right place etc.

    How much CO2 would be worth paying for how much gain this project would provide? I guess it would be less CO2 than giant air scrubbers would require for power at least.

    How do you even maintain an ultra thin film mirror when space has high-speed space debris constantly flying around?

    Surely it’s clear enough by now that adding fuel to fires doesn’t extinguish them. The amount of CO2 needed to build, let alone maintain, a mega-project is just going to be high envirinmental cost, low-certainty reward.

    A quick short term implementable solution is to tax companies for carbon footprint. Proper tax, not “oh sorry we have no cash we spent it all on global domination… I mean… operating expenses.” sort of tax. The kind of tax which makes businesses pause production like they paused production during peak Covid and made an appreciable difference.