Take the idea you floated about planting trees and building a lot more stuff from wood. Sounds good.

Have you done the math on what this actually means as a process? What I mean by this are things like:

- How many trees do we need to actually make a difference?
- It is even possible to plant these many trees?
- How much does the forest fire risk increase if we were to plant that many trees?
- What would be the consequences of adding fuel to the existing forest population?
- How much fuel do we need to burn plant trees?
- How much fuel do we need to support and maintain these new forests as they grow?
- How much fuel do we need to burn to make sure the forests don't burn?
- How much carbon do we produce when we harvest?
- How much carbon do we produce when we process the lumber (not a trivial amount, BTW)?
- How much carbon do we produce in all of the ancillary processes (manufacturing nails, brackets, etc.)?
- How much carbon do we produce building stuff from wood?
- What are the ecosystem effects of all of the above, to include other flora and fauna?
- etc?

This is the kind of analysis that is lacking when anyone makes simple statements like "lets plant more trees" or "lets seed the oceans with magic beads" or "lets build city-scale HEPA filters". All fine and wonderful, but the math is the math and, at the end of the day, what is being proposed must pass physics. I have yet to find ONE case where the physics makes any sense at all. Laboratory scale? Sure. Planetary scale? Not one. Can't find one. I looked, believe me.

That's what I mean when I ask if it is even possible. We don't need to dump trillions of dollars into something to determine if it is possible. We know enough science to be able to estimate basic outcomes. We don't need calculations that are correct within 5% to confirm if something works.

What I would want to see is something that, for example, can capture twice as much carbon as the solutions entire process will produce. We can't make anything without producing carbon and other substances, so that's inescapable. The process, then, has to capture its own "new" carbon and, at the same time, double that in order to actually claim to make a dent on the 1 ppm / 500 year natural rate of change. If it only captures 10% more than it produces it isn't a solution at all in that this will not even dent the 1 ppm/500 year slope. A forest fire alone can take out the effect of a 10% solution.

That is a very difficult hurdle. And, as far as I know, nobody has shown this to be possible.

I don't know the answers. I do not claim to know them. All I am saying is the emperor has no clothes and we are delusional. We need to start talking about reality and hold everyone accountable.

What we are doing is almost the equivalent of saying we can take a bus full of people from Los Angeles to New York City on a single 20 gallon tank of gas without refueling. Everyone gets on the bus and nobody bothers to ask anyone to do the math and prove this to be possible. And 200 miles later everyone learns they have to walk home.

So, no it isn't "oh well, nothing to be done!". It's "WAKE THE FUCK UP! WE ARE NOT HAVING THE RIGHT DISCUSSIONS AT ALL! THIS IS DELUSIONAL. WE ARE ON THE WRONG PATH!". Yes, in that case I would be yelling.

I don't think we are too far apart. I have a feeling you might understand where I am coming from if you took the time to fire-up Excel and do the math --as I have-- on various purported solutions. Things break down very quickly once to demand solutions that actually pass the laws of physics.

For example, replacing our entire fleet of vehicles with electrics sounds wonderful...until you run the numbers for the entire process and realize we need to build somewhere between 50 to hundreds of 1 GW class nuclear power plants to be able to do this. And, if we don't go nuclear, the CO2 we would produce to power these cars might be shocking.

I appreciate the conversation. And, despite what it might sound like at times, I do want to be challenged. What I hate are personal attacks, which is what happens most of the time in these threads. Attackers don't do a single bit of reading, math and expend no effort to understand. Their world view on this subject amounts to just repeating the mantra rather than someone like me, who devoted over a year to actually trying to understand. In that sense they are purely religious believers, drones, if you will. And deniers? They are the worst. They truly have no clue and refuse to learn anything at all.

What I would LOVE is for someone to show me what I am missing and how I am wrong with math and physics. I truly want to understand what I might be missing. We already know that the renewable story is delusional. Fine. How about the other stuff? Am I wrong? How? Please! I want to know. No hand-wavy stuff. Science.
Math. Physics. This has never happened in the many years I have been having these conversations. I have had private discussions with PhD-level scientists in Physics and other disciplines, who, after reflection, end-up having the same questions I have. The most fundamental one being: Why are we doing this? Have we gone mad?