There's not going to be anything cheap about fighting climate change. We need to start removing 35-40 gigatons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere immediately if we want to retard, and begin to reverse, what we've been adding the past several decades. To do that, we're going to have to cease using fossil fuels entirely. China gets 70%~ of their power from just coal and is building hundreds of new coal plants, the United States gets about 60% from fossil fuels (about half of which is coal). China is adding millions of new drivers to the road annually, they have so many new drivers that there is a lottery system to 'win' a spot to test for your license.
Then we have the problem of 1.3-1.5 billion cows. An average cow produces 70 and 120 kg of methane a year. That's 91,000,000 metric tons of methane. Methane is roughly 30x more potent at trapping heat. So conservatively that is 2.73 gigatonnes CO2 equivalent which doesn't include the fuels used to transport them and their feed, the fertilizer manufacturing to fertilize the fields that grow the grain they eat, the cost of refrigerating/freezing their meat...
Over-fishing and acidification is killing off large seaweed and kelp 'forests' in coastal waters, those 'forests' handle a good deal of carbon sequestration.
---
Let's just look at a hypothetical. Say we outright banned ALL air travel:
Something like 95 billion gallons of aviation fuel was used last year, that has gone up every year without fail for a decade - it was only 66 billion in 2009. Depending on the type of fuel you're looking at 0.55+ gigatonnes there last year.
A tree, highly dependent upon species, can absorb as much as 48 pounds of CO2 per year. That means you need at least 36.3 million trees.
Healthy forest has 40 to 60 trees per acre. That means at least 946,031 square miles of forest, just to offset last year's commercial air travel.
There's nothing easy about fighting climate change. :(
According to that pdf we can offset all human emissions for $250 billion per year by mining/crushing/spreading olivine rocks.
I know planting trees has been in the news lately but if we want to tackle climate change and especially ocean acidification we should accelerate the same natural process that brought the earth back into equilibrium after mass extinction events occurred. In the past it wasn't trees that did it, it was weathering of exposed limestone/olivine rocks that sucked up excess carbon.
"Get out of your SUV and turn off your air conditioning" is an easy solution to people who don't drive SUVs and live in SV.
Tell them to stop satisfying their taste buds? Tell them that much of the developing world will have to suffer? Does not compute. Can't we just make the rich pay for it somehow?
Environment is now an emotional, political, and identity issue, not a rational one.
Worse still - the problem is worse then you think and the solutions are more complicated then you suppose. If you stopped all air travel it might make emissions go up. It might reduce economic growth that makes implementing other fixes harder not easier.
There's a reason all of these emissions are produced - it's pleasant to imagine that it's all about things that don't really matter - does some rich guy get a sports car or an econobox - but I genuinely don't believe it's that simple. Instead it's a series of complicated decisions about productivity, value and risk.
Honestly, there is a very hard evidence requirement for anybody claiming the world has already ended. I just looked out of the window, it seems to be still there.
Then we have the problem of 1.3-1.5 billion cows. An average cow produces 70 and 120 kg of methane a year. That's 91,000,000 metric tons of methane. Methane is roughly 30x more potent at trapping heat. So conservatively that is 2.73 gigatonnes CO2 equivalent which doesn't include the fuels used to transport them and their feed, the fertilizer manufacturing to fertilize the fields that grow the grain they eat, the cost of refrigerating/freezing their meat...
Over-fishing and acidification is killing off large seaweed and kelp 'forests' in coastal waters, those 'forests' handle a good deal of carbon sequestration.
---
Let's just look at a hypothetical. Say we outright banned ALL air travel:
Something like 95 billion gallons of aviation fuel was used last year, that has gone up every year without fail for a decade - it was only 66 billion in 2009. Depending on the type of fuel you're looking at 0.55+ gigatonnes there last year.
A tree, highly dependent upon species, can absorb as much as 48 pounds of CO2 per year. That means you need at least 36.3 million trees.
Healthy forest has 40 to 60 trees per acre. That means at least 946,031 square miles of forest, just to offset last year's commercial air travel.
There's nothing easy about fighting climate change. :(