Scotland could become one of the first countries to establish a specific crime for mass environmental destruction as championed by late Scots barrister Polly Higgins.
We’re well beyond the point of industrial activity being done “more safely.” Either it stops entirely, or everything collapses before the turn of the next century.
Okay then, we just build Lofstrom loops and run them on nuclear reactors. Launch materials to put a solar shade up in a Lagrange point to cool the planet down until we stop all fossl fuel use and sequester enough CO2 when it is no longer needed. Construct the shade out of millions of smaller mirrors so that we can move mirrors away slowly over time so as to sync with the lowering CO2 levels.
Those loops only cost like $10 billion. That’s like a third of NASA’s yearly budget.
It’s not pie in the sky or some dumbass excuse to give the ruling class an out on climate change. Actually, the opposite – with cheap access to space, we will have access to near unlimited solar energy so we won’t need fossil fuels anymore, we can mine NEAs for metals making surface mining unnecessary, and actually build the Jetsonian post scarcity future our abusers promised us and failed to deliver on.
We really don’t have a choice anyway – we don’t have access to enough resources down here to make any of that happen, and without the solar shade no surface-only effort to stop climate collapse will work anyhow since the temperature will go up without it no matter what we do down here.
So we are left with a choice to kickstart human expansion into space or allow the biosphere to collapse. Grow or die. I say we grow.
A lot of launches would be more safely done at sea or in the high desert than in coastal areas close to population centers.
We’re well beyond the point of industrial activity being done “more safely.” Either it stops entirely, or everything collapses before the turn of the next century.
Okay then, we just build Lofstrom loops and run them on nuclear reactors. Launch materials to put a solar shade up in a Lagrange point to cool the planet down until we stop all fossl fuel use and sequester enough CO2 when it is no longer needed. Construct the shade out of millions of smaller mirrors so that we can move mirrors away slowly over time so as to sync with the lowering CO2 levels.
Those loops only cost like $10 billion. That’s like a third of NASA’s yearly budget.
It’s not pie in the sky or some dumbass excuse to give the ruling class an out on climate change. Actually, the opposite – with cheap access to space, we will have access to near unlimited solar energy so we won’t need fossil fuels anymore, we can mine NEAs for metals making surface mining unnecessary, and actually build the Jetsonian post scarcity future our abusers promised us and failed to deliver on.
We really don’t have a choice anyway – we don’t have access to enough resources down here to make any of that happen, and without the solar shade no surface-only effort to stop climate collapse will work anyhow since the temperature will go up without it no matter what we do down here.
So we are left with a choice to kickstart human expansion into space or allow the biosphere to collapse. Grow or die. I say we grow.
Sauce: Wiki - OG paper