[codefreeordie]

"Solutionism" is a fantastic word for this particular slur, since it gets to the heart of why technological solutions to our problems are not considered: because they might solve the problem, thereby robbing the politicians of their ability to wield the problem as a weapon against the population.

[sidibe]

Particularly the idea that we should conserve our way to carbon neutrality instead of figuring out how and spending the money/effort to do a lot of carbon capture drives me crazy. We're not suddenly going to stop pulling ancient carbon out of the ground in the near future, and these same people are always talkig about how we are already at the point of no return, so if you really care about the carbon problem, you'd recognize we need to figure out how to pull some of it out of the cycle (of course it's also good if we don't use too much fossil fuels, but that's never going to be enough and politically impossible, good luck telling the third world they shouldn't consume like we have been doing).

[beckingz]

We should continue investigating methods for carbon capture.

But none of them look even close to cost competitive.

[codefreeordie]

That was true of solar power 20 years ago, too. But eventually, we got there.

We will probably get there with carbon capture too.

Though I do agree, we should focus more heavily on nuclear power now, because it is much closer to ready-for-prime-time than carbon capture.

Still, I think that carbon capture is an excellent future technology for the production of carbon-neutral liquid fuels. Liquid fuels are super great, and they can be made into a very clean portable power source through the use of nuclear power and carbon capture tech.

[pencilguin]

Each dollar diverted to nukes from solar and wind brings climate catastrophe nearer.

The money spent on coal alone while waiting for a nuke to come online would suffice to build out enough solar and wind to match the nuke's output. The money spent on the nuke itself would pay for many times that much solar and wind. The solar and wind would start displacing carbon emissions almost immediately, not many years later. Displacement would increase throughout construction, and power generated early would help fund subsequent construction.

[pencilguin]

Carbon capture cannot be any kind of solution to excess carbon emission rate.

However, after carbon emissions has been substantially curtailed, we will need to capture the carbon already exhausted, because otherwise it hangs about for many decades, doing harm the entire time.