Quote:
Originally Posted by suzzer99
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_sunshade
The Fresnel Lens proposed is said to cost 10 billion up front, then 10 billion in supportive costs. I'd say that's off by quite a bit but who knows? Politically it would be about on par with nuclear energy: a potential solution that environmentalists really don't like because it involves some nasty byproducts. The space mirror would remove incentives to stop polluting, so I don't think it'd fare well until people in western countries start dying en masse.
As an aside, if people really took global warming seriously there are a lot of opportunities to burn less fossil fuels. I'm in the aviation industry so I see the opportunities there, such as:
-reducing fuel reserve requirements from 45 minutes to 40 minutes. Saving weight by carrying less fuel means that less fuel is burned on every trip (every extra 100kg carried on the aircraft means an extra 2.5kg of fuel burned per hour) A reduction of 5 minutes of fuel (about 300kg on average) means that the world jet fleet produce 2.5 billion kg less CO2.
-eliminating oxygen masks systems for passengers. Same thing, removes hundreds of kg of weight from the aircraft, saving billions of kg of CO2.
-weighing all airline passengers and charging a token amount per kg (even 10 cents per kg would be an incentive for people to lose weight and not carry so much crap). If people lost weight in general it would save fuel burned in cars as well.
The increased risk of the above might mean somewhere on the order of .1-10 extra deaths per year from airline accidents. But saving a few billion kg of CO2 per year may do a small part to save billions of lives. If we really took global warming seriously, we could dramatically reduce the weight of aircraft in all sorts of ways.
In 50 years it is quite possible that our grandkids will be looking at the way we lived with utter scorn, the same way depression-era people look at us. Unwilling to expose ourselves to even a tiny bit of danger or discomfort so that our kids might avoid a mad-max hellscape.