• @[email protected]
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    463 months ago

    I still don’t get the reasoning behind these sort of geo engineering projects. Let’s say, best case scenario, it works wonders and cools the planet significantly.

    The fact that we found a “solution” to the warming temperatures will justify the actions if the corporations pumping tons of CO2 and methane into the atmosphere. If anything, it will encourage them to pollute more, as there is now a way to solve the problem.

    De-growth is the only way to actually solve the problem. But since it’s not profitable, it won’t happen under the current economic system.

    • @[email protected]
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      133 months ago

      I definitely don’t disagree with you, but if it helps it helps. At this point I think we need to reverse our damage in order to avoid disaster.

      But yes, it will also give encourage more pollution unless companies are actually held responsible for their pollution.

      • FaceDeer
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        13 months ago

        Millions of people starving in third-world countries will in no way make wealthy business executives feel “responsible” for what they’re doing. They don’t care about that. So if you want these companies held responsible, letting mass deaths happen isn’t going to do it.

        Frankly even if it would make them feel “responsible” it’s a monstrous thing to allow to happen if you have any way of stopping it. IMO the people who oppose geoengineering research because they want greenhouse gas emissions to cause megadeaths are as out of touch with humanity as the executives they claim to hate.

    • Sonori
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      123 months ago

      The general reasoning is that while it doesn’t help with ocean acidification or a thousand knock on effects, and most certainly doesn’t ‘solve the problem’ as you put it, such measures would blunt most of the most deadly ones, especially for poorer nations that don’t have the resources to abandon coastlines, flood, and drought prone areas.

      Especially since even if all artificial co2, methane, and nitrous oxide emissions snapped out of existence tomorrow we’d still see feedback warming for years to come, and centuries to return to where we are today, killing hundreds of millions of people in the meantime.

      If they work effectively, which I am admittedly personally highly skeptical of, any of these geoengineering projects could save tens of millions of people for negligible cost long after we’ve hit net zero.

      I am however also skeptical that it would significantly encourage companies to pollute more, as that necessitates you to expect them to pollute less if they think millions of people will die at some point in the distant future because of it, and I think basically any graph of fossil fuel useage after we all agreed that it was killing a shit ton of people and had to be eliminated in the 90s pretty well proves that not to be the case.

      I also don’t think that needless death and destruction will modivate significant political action, see Covid, it just makes people suffer.

    • @[email protected]
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      -23 months ago

      Population decline isn’t going to happen. The planets doomed. Its just damage mitigation at this point.