You're not wrong. That said I want to take issue with one thing: Between the lines there is a suggestion that doing a small positive action is useless. But that implies that there is either a silver bullet-type solution where doing only one major thing will resolve the problem of climate change, or that there is no possible way we can resolve it.

I want to counter the implication by saying that the problem of solving climate change is easy in concept but complex in implementation.

The concept is that we must reduce GHG in the atmosphere and oceans, and reduce the amount of new GHG added there.

The solution can contain hundreds of minor actions working on concert, some certainly have more impact than others, but they all contribute, such as for example:

- Taxes on emissions.

- Incentives on sustainable actions.

- Local changes such as improved public transportation and cycling.

- Electric transportation.

- Large scale battery storage.

- Renewable energy sources.

- Better insulated houses can avoid peaker plants needed in winter cold snaps for heating, and summer heat wave air conditioning.

- large scale (industrial) carbon capture.

- Re-forestation (where the tree is not immediately burned but instead used long-term in e.g. housing and furniture).

- High speed rail to offset flights.

- Incentivise local tourism rather than long-haul flights for vacations.

- Social changes such as adjusted diet to be better (e.g. less beef, more lamb, poultry, and especially vegetables).

- Right-to-repair and related social changes that lead to a thriving second-hand-market.

For example, the EU Common Charger Directive (aka the USB-C Law) is expected to reduce e-waste by 12 000 tonnes yearly in the medium-long term and reduce GHG emissions ~to~ by 900k tonnes yearly. That may not look like nearly enough in the grand scheme of things, but once you do a handful of those it starts moving the needle.

I agree that implementing 10 ideas that tackle 5% of the problem is valuable. Maybe 100 ideas that tackle 0.5% of the problem each.

But ideas that tackle 0.00001% of the problem are more useful as a counterexample of what doesn't work.

I haven't looked into large scale technical solutions to climate change, but they seem quite unlikely to scale in relation to the consumption of fossil fuels.

Sure, coal-burning plants could add carbon capture at the source. But as we decarbonize, we will be left with the use cases like aviation and off-grid mobility where carbon capture at source isn't feasible technically or economically.

The only thing that will really work (has the right magnitude of effect) is to stop digging carbon out of the ground and burning it without capturing the carbon at the source, or block the sun's rays so that more energy is reflected to space.

What I like about the author's idea is it is a technical solution to a technical problem. Taxes, incentives, or for that matter anything that requires large-scale public behavior change is:

a) not likely to work

b) equally unlikely to cause a change on the scale needed.

c) will likely come with unpredictable and unwanted side effects caused by trying to force society to change (which is most often requires threats of violence and the loss of civil rights)

> The concept is that we must reduce GHG in the atmosphere and oceans, and reduce the amount of new GHG added there.

That's an assumption.

I'm usually in favour of fixing the original problem, as so much of what is wrong with society would be simpler to fix by focusing on the source, but we prefer technological solutions rather than be confronted with changing our behaviour.

The problem with global warming is the source of the issue is extremely large, complex to reverse, and extremely difficult behaviour to change because it underpins economy. It is also one that is guided by economy on a global scale of supply and demand, making a single country green tends to just displace emmission to a poorer country (see what happened with coal).

For GHG I think the human forces at play are way too strong. This one needs a solution that will unfortunately allow for GHG, because the weaning off on a global scale is way longer than you think, and reversing it is going to takel even longer.

It's too late, we need climate engineering, i.e controlling the temperate with other mechanisms.

We saw this in action during the transition to cleaner shipping fuels a couple of years ago. I'm not suggesting we polute more, but controlling temperate with particulates clearly works.

The only thing we need to implement from your list is the carbon tax. But it has to be sufficiently high.

The rest will happen without extra nudging just because doing it "the wrong way" will be too expensive.

By feeding carbon tax money into carbon extraction we can eventually start reducing amount of carbon in atmosphere.

It’s probably too late for a tax-only solution. Either the tax is too low to have the necessary effect, or people will overthrow the government who instated it. The change we need has become quite drastic.

Of course sudden imposing of sufficiently high tax will cause massive shockwaves going through markets and people's lifes.

Therefore tax should be increased gradually, year by year, spread out for ~10 years.

That would have been a great strategy about thirty years ago. Now we can’t really afford a measure that only really starts working a couple of years in the future. We already know pretty well what needs to be done, we don’t need the market to figure it out for us.

The best moment to starting it was 30 years ago. The next best moment is now.

Don't cry over spilled milk. It is spilled. But don't throw the rest just because the glass is now half empty.

As otherwise, in 30 years, we'll be in the same exact spot.

Best is the enemy of good.

That's a false dichotomy as there are a ton of measures other than a tax that we can take (even in parallel to a tax).

Imagine the money collected being awarded on a per tonne basis for each tonne of carbon you can extract and reliably sequester.

Yes, this is a one of the steps of the way how it should work from my point of view.

What is your point?

But only a very miniscule fraction of carbon ends up as oil.

This paper made an attempt at a comparison of fossil fuel use versus agricultural biomass production: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-annual-production...

I think plants convert 120 GtC from the atmosphere into biomass every year (ref https://www.worldbioenergy.org/uploads/Factsheet_Biomass%20p...) - obviously this is very roughly balanced by how much CO2 is naturally returned to the atmosphere. The additional anthropogenic CO2 emissions are 37 GtC.

So there is theoretically enough biomass for us to sequester - if we could do all that work without dramatically increasing our CO2 emissions...

Note this is an issue with averages. The conditions that produce oil deposits are rare, and last for geologically short periods. If you average out all oil ever produced by all time over which oil has been forming, the number is quite low, but during those periods of time the rate is orders of magnitude higher.

Further, the commonly touted claim that it takes millions of years for oil to form is only relevant if your goal is to naturally produce extractable oil. The carbon sequestration is practically instantaneous, it just takes millions of years of deposition for the sequestered carbon to get deep enough to turn into oil. Renewable oil is never going to be a thing, but sequestering carbon through biomass is at least possible.

And note that any realistic solution to climate change demands a reduction in fossil fuel consumption, but with sequestration less reduction is necessary, and the very large amount of carbon already emitted can be removed.

I think it's more like 3-4 orders of magnitude (i.e. 1000 or 10000 of these sites), but yes, it would take quite a few to completely offset CO2 emissions.