| I've always been heavily involved in permaculture and aquaponics. One of the things I've learned is that there is no such thing as waste in nature. Nature will always seek balance. Combine that with the fact that technologies grow at an exponential rate and CO2 is much more linear in comparison, and it becomes a technology problem and less of a government / political issue. We will have technology that takes CO2 as an input and produces something of value for us. We're seeing it already but it just isn't implemented on large scales. Things like algae farms converting CO2 to energy, or even bioengineering organisms for artificial photosynthesis. CO2 will be a non-issue once technology grows more. Especially if you believe a "singularity is near". Hell, even switching from beef to fish would be a huge savings. Fish require a lot less water per pound of edible flesh and require around 1/10th the feed. Combine that with duckweed which depollutes water, consumes CO2, and produces feed for the fish all at the same time. There are so many technologies and solutions available even now. It's hard to not be optimistic in my opinion. I think water shortages are a much bigger threat and we need to consider a way to desalinate water from the ocean and pump it inland. Variants of ram pumps that use the kinetic force of waves can pump water uphill without any external energy input. And then you just point a bunch of mirrors at a water tower for desalination. Not sure why it isn't being done more. |