Lack of research is not the bottleneck here. Having worked with a Canadian environmental non-profit on ecological impact assessment (how are natural events interconnected, how effective are our environmental efforts), the problem of natural disaster prevention is moreso a problem of political and economic will than actual science/modelling/data.
For example, there are obvious things you can do to reduce flash flooding and wildfire risk and damage, but government/taxpayers/corporations are often unwilling to take these measures since they:
- are expensive, though eventually more than make up their worth in disasters averted and scale of disaster reduced
- are not immediate fixes, since they usually involve restoring ecological health i.e. forests, rivers, ecosystems
- are not guaranteed to prevent disasters - only reduce their occurrence and severity
- generally involve reducing the "development" (sprawl) of cities and the "productivity" (unsustainable practices) of big farms
I hope this summer increases environmental disaster prevention budgets everywhere. May the Ministry of the Future wet bulb event never happen.
What's lacking is a sense of urgency. People are calling for action but not agreeing on what action. There are several camps arguing about whether there is a problem, whether we should do something, what we should do, when we should do it, or what would happen if we do/don't do it. But not a lot is getting done even while we are facing weather extremes that some still insist are perfectly normal.
Pre-emptively doing things sidesteps that whole debate. Redneck republican alternate reality types like cheap solar too even if they don't believe in global warming. So lets not bother them with facts that they can't seem to grasp and just present them with solutions that are obviously good.
Things to do:
- Shut down coal everywhere with extreme prejudice. It's expensive; we no longer need it. A couple of countries are dragging their heels here (Germany, US, China) for no good reason other than that they are protecting vested interests. It's dying anyway; we might as well get it over with. And we'll drive electricity prices down long term.
- While we debate taxing carbon, maybe at least stop subsidizing it. Financially it amounts to about the same thing and it will be a long time before taxes catch up to those subsidies otherwise. Not subsidizing oil should be a lot less controversial than subsidizing and taxing it at the same time is (which is the reality in a lot of places). Yes, that will cause a few oil businesses to die. That's a good thing. Needs to happen.
- Commit to an EV only strategy and don't let manufacturers weasel themselves out of this by e.g. counting hybrids as part of the solution or waiting forever on a hydrogen strategy that they is perpetually not happening either. Zero tolerance on any form of ICE on our roads. Get it done. It's going to happen anyway. So, lets just make it happen faster.
- Double down on infrastructure expenses for clean energy. More renewables. More battery. More green hydrogen. More cables to transport electricity. Those are all good investments that will serve us a long time. Create incentives to do this. Remove obstacles. Create some jobs in the process. All good stuff.
- Stop wasting time on stopgap measures like carbon capture that are a net loss of perfectly good clean energy repurposed towards putting more co2 in our atmosphere (but slightly less than without it). It's not a solution; it's not part of a solution; it merely prolongs bad things we need to stop doing. The people insisting this is a solution seem to be employed by subsidized oil companies.
- Stop turning good soil into desert for the production of bio-fuels (e.g. corn). Biofuels are not worth destroying our soil and forests. If we stop burning oil; we don't need bio fuels either. Biofuels without government subsidies are not a viable thing anyway. So, shutting down those would speed this up.
- By all means keep on subsidizing nuclear and fusion. But stop pretending these are anything but very long term solutions. For the foreseeable future they are a combination of too expensive, late, and not happening on a relevant scale on a timeline that matters. Freeing up some oil and gas subsidies would create that budget. At least it will go somewhere constructive instead of destructive. And maybe something genuinely cheaper and better than solr/wind will result from it in a few decades.
Why do you consider carbon capture a stop gap solution? We still have thousands of tons more CO2 in the atmosphere than is safe, and it needs to be removed. Ceasing further emissions is also important, but not enough on its own.
Because it keeps dumping carbon in the atmosphere acceptable for longer, which at this point just isn't acceptable anymore. Carbon capture is not about reducing the amount of carbon in our atmosphere but merely about reducing the rate at which it grows by prolonging the business models that are destroying our planet. Those business models need to get seriously unprofitable in a hurry. Carbon capture schemes are subsidies designed to keep them profitable. No carbon capture system exists that is economical without subsidies.
We're capturing a percentages of what we should not be putting in the atmosphere to begin with and even those percentages are questionable if you factor in the losses, the inefficiencies, the inevitable optimism about how much is actually captured, and the inevitable ease with which those inefficiencies are green-washed away. Most of these schemes are actually pretty wacky, leaky, and questionable and don't stand a lot of scrutiny.
For example we are green washing stuff like creating blue hydrogen which works by creating it from methane and than "capturing" some of the carbon in a way where it ends up in the atmosphere after some time anyway. The goal here is monetizing the methane in a way that companies can get away with it; not actually capturing the carbon. Likewise, other companies are planting some trees to compensate for their industrial scale burning of oil, gas, etc. they are capturing nowhere close to what they put out. Or people are "capturing" carbon by intensively turning soil into desert (which emits a shit tonne of carbon) while harvesting corn; which we then burn as well. There's no end to how messed up the carbon bookkeeping is for a lot of this stuff. Most of it serves just one thing: green washing stuff we need to stop doing urgently. Kill the subsidies and most of these schemes instantly stop making sense.
I think you are conflating two issues. Continued pollution is a problem, regardless of whether carbon capture or something else is used as the excuse. Carbon capture itself is not the problem there.
We need to do two things: a) stop polluting further, and b) re-sequester as much of the GHG currently in the atmosphere as we can.
Carbon capture helps with the second requirement, and doesn't particularly harm the first (since if carbon capture was not a useful excuse the polluters would simply find or make another)
Lack of research is not the bottleneck here. Having worked with a Canadian environmental non-profit on ecological impact assessment (how are natural events interconnected, how effective are our environmental efforts), the problem of natural disaster prevention is moreso a problem of political and economic will than actual science/modelling/data.
For example, there are obvious things you can do to reduce flash flooding and wildfire risk and damage, but government/taxpayers/corporations are often unwilling to take these measures since they:
- are expensive, though eventually more than make up their worth in disasters averted and scale of disaster reduced
- are not immediate fixes, since they usually involve restoring ecological health i.e. forests, rivers, ecosystems
- are not guaranteed to prevent disasters - only reduce their occurrence and severity
- generally involve reducing the "development" (sprawl) of cities and the "productivity" (unsustainable practices) of big farms
I hope this summer increases environmental disaster prevention budgets everywhere. May the Ministry of the Future wet bulb event never happen.