There's actually a ton of profit in it if you plant the right trees.
Not completely true
Not completely true
For example Europe has more forests than it had had in 100 years.´
I think it's less that people don't care, more that there is really not much new discussion to be added to most climate change topics.
I think there's merit to showing some interest and being learned of things happening. Understandably the US presidential election is what's front and center right now though. Can't get anything done if the people in power are fascists who put profit and petty hatred over the future of humanity.
Same in the US. There's 3-4 times as much forest as there was 100 years ago. A lot of it is because of the forestry industry believe it or not.Not completely true
For example Europe has more forests than it has had in 100 years. Wood can be used to make a lot of things (Europe has various big pulp and paper companies) and forests grow better when they are handled with care.
Yep. I think the main concern is that it's not off-setting the effects of increase usage of fossil fuel. Europe as a whole was a mess 100 years ago as well to be fair.
apparently you haven't seen the cost of trees lately?
It can be very profitable if we genetically engineer some kind of trees to have rapid growth and huge CO2 intake. I'm fully on board with geoengineering: Whatever it takes, we must slow down the climate change!
I'm terms of best bang for the buck option. A space mirror isn't the worst. Hell once we've mitigated climate change you can even repurpose it into a reflector to help heat up the atmosphere of Mars by bouncing additional light into the planet
Not completely true
For example Europe has more forests than it has had in 100 years. Wood can be used to make a lot of things (Europe has various big pulp and paper companies) and forests grow better when they are handled with care.
I think the issue is more that our entire way of life revolves around carbon emissions, basically. We're going to need a miracle/technological breakthrough to turn this around.
It's called nuclear power. We are just too ignorant as a society to fully grasp its potential. It is literally the only current technology that can save us from ourselves. Thankfully, there are a significant number of very smart people working on commercializing small, modular molten salt reactors (MSRs) over the next 5 to 10 years. Hopefully, fusion won't be too far behind, as advances in MSRs and material science are accelerating the development and commercialization of power producing/netting fusion reactors, as well:
It's because of economics and the reputation that nuclear power is not widely accepted. First, nuclear plants cost billions and takes years to build. This is why the private sector won't build them so it's up to the government to do it. Problem is nuclear power has a bad reputation in the publics eyes and no politician wants to risk their careers on trying to sell it. It doesn't matter how rare a nuclear meltdown would be, it's all the public will think about. A bit like why we have so many airplane regulations despite the rarity of plane crashes.
Isn't one of the major problems with wind and solar that they're not on-demand energy? Or is that not a thing.
It is a thing but that's why we're seeing innovations in battery tech. The grid can pull energy from batteries when demand gets higher and store it when demand is lower.
Old talking point, I'm not sure what to believe now. Apparently it can be overcome by layering enough generation sources on top of each other.
You are serving as a prime example of ignorance on the topic. There is no physical way for MSRs to "melt down", as they operate fundamentally differently than Light Water Reactors (i.e., They have a negative coefficient of thermal reactivity and therefore fission only happens in a controlled temperature window). Also, MSRs will be small, modular, and mass producable on an assembly line off site in a factory. They will not cost billions of dollars to deploy. Once commercialized, they should wind up costing as much as a coal plant. There is currently enough thorium and uranium fuel/waste that can be used as fuel to last for hundreds of thousands of years at the current rate of global consumption (fusion will essentially be infinite, as it uses tritium derived from sea water). Again, ignorance of the science and these technologies' potential is fueling an irrational fear of what will ultimately save us. Solar and wind currently do not produce enough power (i.e., low power density and conversion efficiency) and would literally take hundreds of years to deploy across massive expanses of land and sea to just meet or existing global power consumption (not taking into account growing population and demand).
The new type of nuclear fission reactors (i.e., Molten Salt Reactors) expend nearly all of the fuel they utilize, leaving nearly no nuclear waste (i.e., it can utilize upwards of 100% of the fuel rather than 3 to 5 % of the fuel like Light Water Reactors currently do; MSRs can even burn the nuclear waste from LWRs as fuel!). And what tiny bit does remain as waste from MSRs is only radioactive for between 200 and 300 years rather than 10,000 years plus, as is the case with LWRs.
