Canadian scientists are building a system that could turn atmospheric Co2 into fuel

[hunter]

8. Carbon "neutral" isn't enough.

To fix anything, we'd have to put the carbon back into the ground.

And it's a lot of carbon.

The only way to quit smoking is to quit smoking. The only way to quit fossil fuels is to quit fossil fuels.

Simple, right? Just quit making new gasoline or diesel fuel powered vehicles, quit building fossil fuel power stations, quit building oil refineries, then push beyond that to scrapping these fossil fuel machines, quit drilling for oil, quit digging for coal.

The solution to this problem is staring us in the face, we just don't like it.

Really? Shut down the fossil fuel industry, and all the industries that depend on fossil fuels? Who thinks that's ever going to happen?

The "market" has no good mechanism for dealing with the required changes.

Anyone with money or a decent credit rating can still buy a new fossil fueled car, anyone with money can still fuel their vehicle with fossil fuels. Anyone with money (and under no suspicion as a "terrorist&quot can buy a ticket to travel by fossil fueled jets.

Thus this civilization will end prematurely, just as smokers often end prematurely, when nature says "times up!" and vital organ systems fail.

I like to think this fossil fuel civilization can fail gracefully, people adapting to change without the usual panoply of horrors, but it's not going to be any "alternative" technology that keeps people alive and fed, it's going to be the people who are most creative in establishing very adaptable largely self-sustaining communities using existing technologies.

Some of these new communities will be violent fundamentalist hells; that's a traditional human way of doing things, and we already see it happening in places now suffering the twin pressures of overpopulation and changing climates. (Torturing women is a common theme of these societies...)

In other places things may not be so bad, the people experiencing freedoms they've never enjoyed in our current very rigid economic systems where "productivity" is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to both the earth and the human spirit.

The habitable parts of this planet, deserts to jungles to arctic wilderness, were all populated by humans on foot and by sail, without fossil fuels. That's how powerful we humans are. The era of "fueled" vehicles of any sort will by nature end; a brief nightmare of wars and environmental catastrophe.