What can be done to prevent more dangerous heatwaves in Europe?
Does Europe need to plant more trees in it’s cities?
It appears that Europe does many things right for sustainability and climate change - public transit over cars, recycling, reducing carbon footprint better compared to other parts of the world. Of course all communities can do better at reducing their carbon footprint - Is this America’s fault with their carbon footprint that Europe is suffering? America has their cars, and simply cranks up their Air conditioners when it’s hot.
What else is there to do? I thought China had success improving their renewable energy output, even though they are still polluters, is it the actions of China and the USA causing misery in Europe? How do we help Europeans suffering and prevent this from happening again?
What if (theoretically speaking, because I don’t think we’re close yet) we rolled out carbon-capture technology and implementation on a massive scale? How much useful impact would that have on mitigating CC versus how much of that is still out of our hands?
Carbon capture technology was always some kind of excuse that execs had to pollute today because we could theoretically fix it in the future.
Despite some technology that works to remove carbon from the atmosphere, it’s just not viable. We output so much CO2 to the atmosphere that we just have no capacity to even build enough carbon capture facilities to reach net zero, and that’s without taking their energy consumption into account. Even if we stopped producing CO2 tomorrow, and suddenly enough carbon capture facilities to capture carbon at the same rate we were releasing it appeared, it would still take decades to make a meaningful change.
And carbon isn’t our only problem. Methane is a way worse greenhouse gas, and we keep releasing it to the atmosphere because it’s cheaper than trying to control it.
This is not to discourage from building such carbon capture technology. If it’s powered by renewables and built without a significant carbon/other contaminants footprint, by all means, build it. But it won’t save us from what’s to come.