I think where some of these ideas run afoul of reality is that they ignore the scale of energy and resources necessary to make them happen. And the probability distribution of each idea being realizable at scale.

It's a planetary scale problem, which means the numbers are very large no matter what anyone suggests.

I have no clue how much CO2 t-shirt manufacturing produces when you consider the entire supply chain and human footprint. If you add-up t-shirt manufacturing world wide, the number likely isn't trivial. And yet, even if we stop making t-shirts the need for clothing does not evaporate. I would be willing to bet that t-shirt manufacturing is now optimized almost as far as one could go and the providing an alternative form of clothing to billions of people around the world would be dirtier and consume more resources than just making t-shirts.

This is frustrating to me because I can't find a path. The minute one includes the pesky little reality of conservation of energy things become real.

I can't think of a single problem --regardless of the domain-- that can be fixed with less energy than that which created it in the first place.

And so, if that's true --and I think it is true without dispute-- this idea of being able to control atmospheric CO2 concentration at a planetary scale is in a range between hubris and lunacy.

Another way to put it is: We cannot fix it by subtraction.

This means we cannot fix it by simply going down to zero CO2 generation, no matter what the approach might entail. That, at best, gets us to 100K years for a 100ppm reduction in CO2.

I admit, this is a defeatist view. Yet, I believe this is reality and what is being pushed out there is fantasy. My fear is that, yes, we need to start doing a number of things to make human life better (the planet will do fine without us) but none of this work will begin until we frame it from a truthful baseline.

As I have said before, there are tons of reasons to cleanup our act globally --and we should-- but let's not lie to ourselves and pretend that this is to save the planet or reverse climate change. We can't. We won't.

And we won't because, even if we go to zero CO2 the planet itself will not cooperate. If you look at the charts for the 800,000 year ice core sample CO2 data one of the questions should be: How did CO2 increase, we were not around to make it happen?

The answer is, for the most part, massive continental scale fires.

So, we go CO2 neutral and cover the planet with trees.

And then fires, massive fires, fires we cannot control, contribute more CO2 to the atmosphere than we ever contributed before with our non-carbon-neutral technologies. Just look at what happened this year in California alone:

https://news.mongabay.com/2020/09/off-the-chart-co2-from-cal...

It is hubris to think we can control this at a planetary scale. We can't control it in a US state that recently surpassed the entire United Kingdom to become something like the fifth largest economy in the world...and we can't stop massive forest fires. From the article:

"The fires have already generated more than 91 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, which is about 25% more than the state’s annual emissions from fossil fuels."

I wish I had answers. All I am able to do is point out that we are lying to ourselves in hopes that, if enough people stop to think and understand this reality we will switch tracks and empower our scientific community to look at this from a different perspective. Maybe then someone with a unique perspective might discover a way to deal with it. We don't need to fix it, I don't believe we can, we need to understand how humanity can survive the cycle we are on.

Thanks for engaging.