Somehow, somehow, everyone’s heads are still in the sand. Desperately trying to bury them deeper. It’s like CICO denialism.

I expect this to be a deeply unpopular take here, but solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us. All of our industrial tekhne has been in the service of rolling down the stored-energy hill faster and faster. To put the genie back in the bottle, to take apart the CO2 and turn it back into hydrocarbons, we’d have to do more work than everything that was done in the last two centuries. And that’s an extremely conservative lower bound.

It’s so dire. I don’t think most people understand that everything around them is made out of petroleum. Not just your ability to travel, or your clothes. Your food is made of petroleum. Your institutions are made of petroleum. Your gender equality is made of petroleum. Your freedom is made of petroleum.

There is no putting this thing in reverse. If the AI doesn’t get us first, thermodynamics will topple all of this.

While it is true that reversing combustion would require more energy than was released burning it, I don't think anyone reasonable is proposing it. The proposal is to redirect future energy production away from fossil extraction and into cleaner sources (solar, wind, nuclear, geothermal) which is a completely different thermodynamic problem. The constraints are things like grid storage capacity, permitting timelines, and critical mineral supply chains - not physics.

If we overcome these very real contraints, we reduce the rate of new additions to atmospheric CO2. We will still need to do the thermodynamically hard work of removing CO2 at gigaton scale, but deferring that until removal tech is more mature is the right sequencing.

Of course, this assumes that we are actually working towards the CO2 output reductions right now and really committed to CO2 removal in the near future.

Sorry if this sounds like a dumb question, but I legitimately don't know: does the thermodynamic argument hold up? (Broadly, I agree that humanity needs a healthier relationship with industrialism before fixing this is possible).

A few ways I can imagine it doesn't:

- We can reduce warming by other means, like changing the Earth's albedo.

- A lot more energy falls to Earth every day from the sun than we use via petroleum; a good amount of solar/wind would let us climb back up the hill via sequestration.

- We don't need to sequester CO2/methane into high-energy-density hydrocarbons; could an efficient sequestration process yield eventually net positive energy per unit greenhouse gas from the burn -> sequester process?

You are right, except: "solutionism will fail. Magic technology will not come to save us."

You just can't know this. It might be true. But it might not. That's the thing about the future, it is fundamentally alien.

> Your gender equality is made of petroleum.

That is the weirdest and wokest comment I read this year on the internet. Could you please explain?

All we have to do is plant trees. Millions of trees, and reduce beef farming.