💾 Archived View for hackersphere.space › ~willowf › gemlog › 2023-11-13.gmi captured on 2024-05-10 at 11:01:25. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Imagine this. You're a college student living in a dorm. You've decided that you want to smoke weed in your dorm. You fill your dorm with fat clouds. It reeks. You aren't even aware how obvious it is.
No one confronts you. But the next day, the RA puts up a sign next to the elevator that says, "Marijuana is prohibited to all students except those with a valid medical exemption. Students found to be in possession of marijuana products will be placed on academic probation on the first offense and expelled on the second offense." Does this mean your RA knows you were smoking weed in your dorm? Probably not, right? The smell could have come from anyone! Everyone else is probably doing it, too. So that night you smoke in your dorm again.
Next day, the RA calls a meeting of all the floor's residents. Everyone else looks bored and annoyed, but you feel a bit nervous. The RA explains that they don't want to have to get anyone put on academic probation, so they aren't going to name names, but it's very obvious that a smell is coming from a particular part of the floor, so please get the smell under control, whoever it is?
So now you have a choice. Do you:
Probably the third option, right? From your shortsighted perspective, the really important thing is to not get caught, to not risk being held responsible for breaking the rules of the residence hall. To *appear* to be complying with the rules. From your point of view, the idea that it may not be a good idea for a twenty-year-old to saturate their developing brain with THC, due to both short-term consequences for their academic performance and long-term consequences for their neuropsychiatric health, is likely not something that even crosses your mind. And if you were confronted with this idea, you would probably dismiss it.
Depicted: A handmade carbon-capture device made from upcycled biodegradable materials.
In case you don't know, "carbon capture" is the idea that we can solve climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. The technical feasability of this is on the level of, say, self-driving cars, or Martian colonization. In other words, it's not physically impossible, but its practicality is greatly overstated by wealthy capitalists with ulterior interests.
It isn't physically impossible to remove carbon dioxide from the air. Obviously, trees do it. The fossil fuels in the ground are made from carbon that was mostly in the atmosphere hundreds of millions of years ago. But there's a very simple obstacle to carbon capture: Burning fossil fuels, once they're extracted, is very easy, and also very profitable. Removing carbon dioxide from the air and storing it somewhere indefinitely is neither easy nor profitable. For carbon capture to be an effective solution to climate change, we would need to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at least *ten times as fast* as we have been putting it into the atmosphere over the last 150 years or so. How are we going to do that? Are we supposed to pass the air through a molecular sieve that allows oxygen and nitrogen to pass through, but not carbon dioxide? Are we supposed to pass the air through a chamber that's cold enough to freeze the CO₂ into dry ice? Are we supposed to bubble the air through huge tanks of algae, then put the algae somewhere where its carbon won't return to the atmosphere via decay or combustion? Keep in mind: if carbon capture is the answer, then whatever technical approach we take, is going to have to counteract 150 years of the most lucrative application of one of our most primitive technologies: fire.
It is not physically impossible for those approaches to work. Well, the molecular sieve thing might be. But carbon capture technology is always going to be a massive loss for any company that bankrolls it. The dry ice industry currently produces exactly as much dry ice as they can actually make a profit on - and dry ice does not remove carbon from the atmosphere, it goes right back into it. Very quickly. To change this fact you would have to... I don't know, eject the dry ice into space? At the scale of billions of tons? This is a harder problem than nuclear waste disposal; gram for gram, nuclear waste is more dangerous than dry ice, obviously, but to make a dent in climate change, you literally have to take *billions of tons of CO₂* out of the air. At present, the combustion of fossil fuels adds more than thirty billion tons of CO₂ into the air *every year*. The same problem goes for algae; unless you're ejecting it into space, carbon stored in algae turns back into carbon dioxide in pretty short order via decomposition.
Ever heard of Maxwell's Demon? This is a thought experiment from physics. The idea is: entropy tends to cause a system in disequilibrium to evolve towards equilibrium. In other words, heat dissipates and gasses disperse. The thought experiment is this: What if you have a chamber filled with homogenous gas, and you divide it with a gate, operated by a little demon who only allows cold gas molecules to go to one side and warm gas molecules to go to the other? Wouldn't you end up with one half filled with hot gas and the other half filled with cold gas? Doesn't that mean you've increased its potential energy? Well, yes, but it turns out that the demon necessarily expends more energy operating the gate than it can possibly accumulate. The same goes for removing CO₂ from the air: it would take a lot more energy to do that than it takes to burn fossil fuels. Any idiot can set gasoline on fire with a cigarette butt.
We stop extracting fossil fuels from the ground. Shut down the oil wells and the coal mines. Through sabotage if necessary.
Probably not as badly as the flooding of coastal cities or the desertification of farmland. Historically, the economy tends not to do too well when there's nowhere to live and nothing to eat.
