To be clear on what’s required, we would need something like a free infinite energy source that doesn’t pollute at all. It also would have to be rapidly scalable within a decade or so. At that point we could have a giant vacuum cleaner sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere. We need to discover this new technology yesterday and it needs to clean the whole planet in about 20 years.

At this point in the story, we are adding about 1% to the CO2 pollution per year. Given the vast scale of the solution we will be coming up with, do you think this extra 1% or 25% will be somehow pivotal?

To me, this is like having pancreatic cancer that’s untreatable by medicine and deciding if you are going to quit smoking or not. Yeah, smoking doesn’t make it better, but in the face of the only cure being basically a miracle, is it actually meaningful to ask this question?

Like, a miracle that can cure an unfixable problem is so huge that do a few extra cigarettes hang in the balance?

I mean…of course you’re right. Slowing down CO2 pollution is very very important. In 1950.

(We do not have 50 years. Lol.)