Got a dollah?
Everyone stop what youāre doing and listen to this.
https://www.greatbigstory.com/amp/sound-of-extinction?__twitter_impression=true
Trees. We need trees.
Literally solar powered. No human interference required. Can be scaled up globally in virtually no time.
I agree we need more trees, but just the number of trees, and land for those trees, to get us carbon neutral is immense, to say the least.
Iāve done some back of the envelope calculations and itās, itās not encouraging. Weād basically need to use up all of the arable land in the world. That might get us carbon neutral.
So hereās the part where I stan nuclear energy.
We could reduce the amount of trees needed to be carbon neutral if we stopped tossing so god damn much carbon into the air all the time. One of the big ones is burning coal and petrol to put the energy on the grid. Thatās like 30% of all emissions right there IIRC, and thatās competing with shit like Cars and Planes and burning oil to heat houses.
The no-good, do-nothing government (ok so thatās the line I use with family, maybe wonāt hit here) has this office thatās not helpful at all called the Energy Information Administration that maps out all the energy generation, transportation, exchanges etc of all energy in the states.
You can even put your address in and find out exactly what garbage is being burned to keep your lights on check it out:
https://www.eia.gov/state/maps.php
For me personally, Iāve got 2 roughly equidistant power plants to my abode one being a natural gas plant and the other being petroleum (oneās supplied by port exchange, the other Iām having a hard time determining how they supply. Itās right by the intersection of 2 major highways so Iād guess truck.)
Anyway, where I live just to type this message to you is putting carbon in the air. However if we go to a few miles west of Philly. Holy shit theyāre already pretty close to carbon neutral already. Howās that? Well itās the nuclear plants they have supplying the area.
Iād like to work in how good standardization would be for this rather than competing companies each solving the same issue in proprietary ways and unable to source parts from one another. And how great itād be if we could make nuclear energy boring. But Iām already running out of energy for this post.
Toss your address into the EIA map and find out exactly what fuel youāre currently burning to read this post. Unless youāre a bit west of Philly, in which case Iād implore you to smugly feel superior.
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Another easy way to get more trees planted is to use the search engine Ecosia. The more you use it to search, the more trees they plant.
The point itās not just the amount of trees. Trees is like the number 1 starting point, but itās kind of irrelevant if it also isnāt working in tandem with zero-emission policies. Not carbon neutral, carbon zero.
You canāt expect biomass to both remove the excess of carbon in the atmosphere and also neutralise continual production of carbon emissions.
Zero means fundamentally rethinking global transportation for example. Grounding most if not all flights. etc. etc.
You get the idea.
No country/ corporation finds the necessary solutions palatable. This is the problem.
I really want to get behind a lot of these green initiatives, but I feel that most people to contribute to them donāt understand the immensity of the challenge ahead of them, they see huge numbers like āweāre going to plant 20 million treesā and think to themselves āoh yeah, I gave them $20 for 20 trees, that should be enough to offset me, right?ā Except that number needs to be more like 200 million trees, or a billion, and then weād quickly get into the problem of where are we going to put all of them.
Bah, Iām not arguing against you, Iām just being overly cynical about the whole thing. Honestly initiatives like this would have been really awesome in like 2000, or even 2010. I believe that weāre 10 years too late with all of this. And apparently that feeling is growing in others as well. Reading that David Attenborough said that weāre too late now just really cements this for me.
Hell, seeing all these initiatives to get carbon neutral by 2050 is like a joke to me. In 2000 everyone was like, yeah carbon neutral by 2020! Well itās 2020 now and that future isnāt 20 years away, apparently itās 30. Itās worse than nuclear fusion, at least thatās always 20 years away!
Itās not looking good, at all.
HAH BUT AUGUST WASNāT THE HOTTEST AUGUST EVER SO OBVIOUSLY GLOBAL COOLING HAS STARTED
CHECKMATE SCIENCE
sob
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āSince such a steep mitigation is impossible, the only way to achieve this budget is with very large ānegativeā emissions: pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere.ā
And temperatures keep climbing. Weāre not even in the worst of it yet.
Deniers citing āThe Little Ice Ageā are not making the argument they think they are making, considering the French Revolution was preceded by several bad grain harvests due to the cold weather.