software is a useful skill during a war. The same way you probably wouldn't send a doctor to a fight as the doctor is more useful to help with the wounded, a software engineer with an infosec background(as I assume the lead dev of graphene would) could be extremely useful to the war.
Software is a common skill, especially among military-age men. Probably around 5% of those employed in that group have software-related jobs. Doctors are rarer, and they also need more training to become productive, which makes them harder to replace than software developers.
You can argue that a specific individual has specific skills and experience that make them more valuable to the country in a non-fighting role. But software developer is just another common job.
>whether the growth of renewables outpaces the depletion of our carbon budget
I'm not sure I understand. There's no carbon budget, any carbon that we emit is carbon we'll have to re-capture somehow and the longer it stays in the atmosphere the longer it will have a heating effect.
We've also passed the peak of CO2 per capita, but since the population is still growing we are still increasing carbon emitions worldwide. It's going to be a while before we stop emitting anything, and then longer before we start re-absorbing it...
Whenever I hear "carbon budget", I usually understand it as "how much CO2 we can still emit (net of sinks) before the warming passes a certain threshold (for example, some level of the Paris agreement.)
I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades-- maybe by the end of the century.
Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al.
If we were on track for lots of CO2 capture by 2050, we would see the beginnings already (massive investments, quickly scaling numbers of capture sites, rapid tech iteration).
Fully agree with the rest of your point though. I consider CO2 emissions as basically "raising the difficulty level" for current and future humans (in a very unethical way, disproportionately affecting poor/arid/coastal nations).
I'm also highly confident that human extinction from climate change is completely off the table (and I think a lot of people delude themselves into believing that scenario for no reason).
The problem with carbon capture is volume. There is about 0.04% CO2 in air. So in order to remove a ton of CO2, you would need to process thousands of tons of air, depending on the efficiency of the extraction process.
It's just kind of infeasible to pull the entire atmosphere through these plants. The largest one we have is called mammoth, claimed to remove 36000 tons of CO2 per year, meanwhile our emissions are measured in billions of tons per year. Like over 30 billion.
We would need about 30 mammoths to get to a million tons per year, and 30,000 mammoths to get to a billion. Then multiply by another 30 and in total we would need almost a million mommoth plants just to undo what we are doing right now at the same rate. Carbon capture is like trying to empty the ocean with a bucket.
How are you so confident that extinction is off the table? I've stopped following this stuff because it's depressing but last time I checked we were in dire straits and I haven't heard any good news on this front. I'm just seeing ice caps disappearing, ocean currents changing, weather changing, pretty much everything that's been predicted is now happening and it's not going to slow down any time soon.
> How are you so confident that extinction is off the table?
Because even the worst-case scenarios (=> think RCP8.5) are just not enough to get rid of us.
I can totally see populous breadbasket states turning into unliveable deserts, billions of deaths from famines and heatwaves, iconic coastal cities being lost to the sea and a giant loss of biodiversity-- but I simply don't see this eradicating our species.
Humans are too adaptable, and warming is invariably gonna leave too many survivable holdout regions.
I think that an all-out global nuclear war would be much more threatening to humanity, and even that I'm very confident we would survive as species.
Yeah so this is mostly just a difference of definition. When I say extinction I mean what you describe, essentially a total collapse of modern society. I don't care whether/how long a few people survive somewhere, your scenario is apocalyptic enough for me to label it an apocalypse.
I also think this process is likely to trigger a new world war. When nations start collapsing there will be two possible outcomes - other nations take them in or they go to war. They won't just sit down and die. And everyone else won't be able to handle the number of refugees even if they want to.
But what's the probability of those direct climate effects happening without an all out nuclear war on the side, as a second order effect of the climate change? Humans are prone to fall for whatever radical ideology crosses their path when the future looks bleak.
I don't believe in world-war as byproduct of climate change yet.
I think capability to wage war internationally will probably decrease thanks to climate change; it is much easier for a state to prevent the peasants from starving than to feed/equip/fuel an army.
I also don't really see the incentives working: Countries like Bangladesh that are gonna suffer disproportionally are mostly not in a position to wage war offensively, and famines/heatwaves are not gonna make it any easier.
My admittedly cynical outlook is that it will just be business as usual: More affected/poor nations struggling, while wealthier western states moan about refugees, use their wealth as buffer and proceed to not care about people dying elsewhere.
I mostly agree with your assessment, except that "moaning about refugees" and resulting action is going to get a whole lot worse as the numbers increase.
We're already seeing how countries like the UK and US can be manipulated to respond to these situations, even when their effects are mostly imaginary and even net positive. Imagine what will start happening if the bogeyman of migration becomes a real problem.
"Use wealth as a buffer" works in the current scenario to some extent - although the US seems to have a lot of trouble with it. But what will scaling that look like? Trumpian concentration camps throughout the country, ICE budget approaching that of the US military, national curfews, martial law, suspension of habeas corpus...? We've already seen hints of all these things.
Things could get very bad. But I agree, not extinction-level, yet. Give us time though!
>I highly doubt that we will have global negative emissions (CO2 capturing) within the next decades
Just to clarify what I wrote, I also highly doubt we'll get it at scale in the near future. We desperately need it though, as well as any other measure that will bend the trends in the right direction.
This may not be the right place for this, but I'm honestly getting very anxious about our climate. Some of the data such as the temperature anomaly is showing an exponential trend. See the scariest graph I've ever seen here: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/26/climate/climate-heat-inte...
"Even very rich nations have a handful of prototype plants for CO2 capture right now at best, and the budget for things like this is the first thing that gets slashed by Doge et al."
Might want to take a look at China, or at least what IEA writes about CCUS and the like there.
Do you have any source for this extraordinary claim? It's practically a claim of perpetual motion.
Carbon dioxide a tiny fraction of the atmosphere, even in concentrations which are immediately harmful to human life.
At the moment it's 400 parts per million. So in order to extract 1kg of Carbon Dioxide from the atmosphere you have to pump 2500kg of air through the system. This alone makes it unlikely we can do this profitability.
You then need to extract the carbon dioxide using some technique which will probably involve cooling or pressuring that volume of air. Before finally transforming carbon dioxide, a very stable chemical compound, into a reagent which is actually useful (probably carbon monoxide).
Difficult engineering problem but working from first principles suggests that the energy requirememts are not insurmountable. The roundtrip efficiency is worse than batteries but much better than photosynthesis.
Terraform Industries (and others, like Synhelion) has a plausible if slightly optimistic target to be price competitive with fossil fuels for methane in the early 2030s.
Some places with very cheap to extract hydrocarbons like Saudi Arabia may be able to compete for a very long time, but there are many futures where most of humanity's hydrocarbon consumption (including the ones used for the chemical industry, plastics, etc) derives from atmospheric carbon.
And this can happen fast, the world (mostly China) has developed a truly massive manufacturing capacity for PV.
Terraform Industries (and others); I'd seriously consider taking a long bet that these companies turn out to be better at converting investor capital into employee salaries, for a finite period of time, than they are at converting atmospheric CO2 into natural gas.
If such a technology was possible then it would be far better to start with carbon capture from existing emitters. The concentration of CO2 being easily 3 orders of magnitude higher.
For hydrocarbon synthesis, hydrogen production from electrolysis dominates the energy usage, along with driving the Sabatier process. DAC might be like 5-10%.
Higher CO2 concentration is better but certainly not needed, it doesn't make or break the economics.
I'm not going to argue over the numbers but any business which ignores such an obvious upside / upside scenario is not really serious about achieving economic criticality. It would allow a power plant, iron ore plant, cement producer, what have you, to make claims about their environmental credentials while simultaneously improving the efficiency of the process.
It may never be “worth” it in economic sense, but it offers a way to separate the time of “energy is used” and “energy is available”. Assuming sufficient captureable volume you could capture the emissions of a fossil power plant during the ~two weeks per year where weather is sufficiently bad. And then take the other 50 weeks to capture that carbon again. It can be completely inefficient (like sub 5% round trip efficiency) if a) we pay for it via a capacity market and b) have sufficient excess (clean) energy to run it
The idea that we'll have huge excesses of clean energy seems like wishful thinking. We may have issues with excess energy at certain times of day for sure. But intermittent excesses like that are difficult to make use of economically because of capital costs and low utilisation. A general excess would be countered by falling energy prices to the point that it's difficult to make a business case for new installations.
I don't see a future where technologies which are massively inefficient reach their break even cost before other energy intensive activities or more efficient grid scale storage soak up the excess.
Of course it seems like wishful thinking! Because that’s the historic norm. Energy was (in some way) always the limiting factor. And every time energy access got meaningfully cheaper society massively reorganised around it.
And yes “energy” in general won’t be free. We still need to build the generation and distribution systems. But we reached a point where just dumping solar on all _new_ roofs rounds to essentially free (the costs are the labor and the access to qualified personnel). The exact same is currently happening to batteries. Any transformer project will be able to just integrate 4-12 hours of batteries without getting meaningfully more expensive. The same for every domestic or industry service upgrade
We are not there yet. But give it another 5 years and we will. And then we are only talking about financing what little distribution system we will need (basically you only need average-sized cables not peak-sized ones) and a capacity market for backup power systems (also only for average residual demand). And those we simply cannot (efficiently) finance by a per-kWh-used charge
Consider a chemical synthesis that needs carbon. Right now it uses oil. But is has to be extracted and transported. With carbon capture from the air that no longer required. And maintaining the extra facility at the chemical factory can be cheaper than maintaining the extraction and supply chain for oil or coal.
We are also limited the incentives to that make us cut tree for money, and not develop technologies if they are not profitable within a short time-window. We have the technology to plant more trees right now, but we aren't.
People plant loads of trees for lumber, but you're right, it's an economics question in the end.
This actually means I'm also worried about something currently impossible: that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm? Pre-industrial? Ice age? Same coin, other side. We want to flip a coin and have it land on the edge.
A single world government could organise to fix this either way, but as all leadership roles come with the risk of the leader being fundamentally bad, this isn't something I'd advocate for either.
> that when we do develop the tech sufficiently to be useful, if it's cheap enough to be profitable, nothing would seem to stop extraction. So CO2 goes down to, what, 300ppm?
This is an extremely improbable scenario, for several reasons:
1) If you actually use the extracted CO2, then it gets re-emitted on use, and the atmospheric concentration is virtually unaffected.
2) Concentration difference alone makes it very unlikely that we'll ever extract CO2 as cheaply as O2 from ambient air (or carbon from a mine), and CO2 is not really an appealing ressource compared to its components, either (so demand would presumable be pretty low for centuries, even if the price comes down a lot).
> 1) If you actually use the extracted CO2, then it gets re-emitted on use, and the atmospheric concentration is virtually unaffected.
Depends what you use it for, e.g. synthetic diamond windows won't re-emit unless they catch fire.
> 2) Concentration difference alone makes it very unlikely that we'll ever extract CO2 as cheaply as O2 from ambient air (or carbon from a mine), and CO2 is not really an appealing ressource compared to its components, either (so demand would presumable be pretty low for centuries, even if the price comes down a lot).
Underestimating how big an industry would get is the mistake Svante Arrhenius initially made, thinking it would take millennia to emit enough CO2 to cause noticeable global warming.
And remember, with this concern I'm inherently presuming tech (mainly energy) that makes it sufficiently cheap that business and/or governments are willing and able to remove in the order of at least one teratonne of the stuff (but hopefully not two or more teratonnes) — because less than that, it's not solving global warming.
Sure, but you said "It's practically a claim of perpetual motion." which is overstating the challenge to a much greater degree than this understates it.
If you actually use captured carbon for something productive like synthetic fuel (where CO2 gets re-emitted) you are kinda ruining the point though.
Thats what makes this even less attractive-- those plants are expensive to build and operate and you can't even really use the product in the most obvious ways.
Shrinking? China is growing their coal capacity (1). What people mistake is China is not "for renewables". They are for maximizing absolute output. That means they are "for everything"
I think 1.5°C is already basically impossible; scenarios between 2°C and 4°C by 2100 over pre-industrial levels seem achievable-- that would be a total remaining CO2 budget of ~3 Tera-tons of CO2 within 2100.
That is an average of 4 tons of CO2/person/year for 10 billion people. Americans are at 3x that right now, Europeans/Chinese 2x, and a few wealthy nations are already there (France, Switzerland, Israel). Poorer countries like India are significantly under that value (for now!).
Doubling that CO2 budget to 6000 Gt would make things significantly worse (5° expected temperature increase or more).
Oh, we're definitely going to need direct air capture, which consumes massive amounts of energy. Fortunately, it's only massive compared to things like global shipping, not compared to the sun that hits the Earth.
> It did always feel a bit awkward having Zigbee networking and IP networking competing over the same site
Funny, to me that's a feature. It makes the threat of a hacked device that exfiltrate data from within your network much less likely. I avoid any wifi device because of that.
This. The network fragmentation is the point, just like how some businesses would run IPX internally and use a proxy for web/IP traffic to protect corporate infrastructure from malicious devices or software.
Not everything has to be on TCP/IP. For smart home connectivity, I’d say that’s a feature, provided said networking standard is just as open as TCP/IP.
As late as the early 2000s! I was still setting up IPX for some older DOS/Win95 games to play over the LAN as recently as 2008, and my Novell class (last one offered at my college, around 2007) cited several large local companies who were still employing that technique as a “security through obscurity” thing, though the professor was mainly just citing use cases for IPX rather than promoting new implementations of it.
If the incentive is there, the technology will advance. I hear "we need to slow down the progress of technology", but that's misunderstanding _why_ it progresses. I'm assuming the slow down camp really need to look into what's the incentive to slow down.
Personally I don't think it's possible at this stage. The cat's out of the bag (this new class of tools are working) the economic incentive is way too strong.
Electrolysis is one of the most promising paths to CO2 utilization - not just collecting and burying CO2, but using it.
With a feed of CO2 plus electricity, you can make a number of chemicals. Some companies look to make fuels - but there's plenty of other chemicals that can be made this way. Fuels are attractive, but also borderline thermodynamically impossible to make profitable vs petrochemical fuels, unless energy is free. Even still, SAFs (sustainable aviation fuels) and other green-washed products can be profitable here. There's also a few use cases for being able to generate fuel in remote places (space, at sea, military applications, national security in case of pipeline blockade)
China is pushing so much power production via renewables that the idea of 'free' power is becoming more and more of a reality. I don't think using this for fuel makes a lot of sense but we use oil for a lot of things other than fuels. With enough investment in renewables to create huge amounts of excess power we can potentially use this to replace a lot of the non fuel uses of oil. Factories in the desert that produce their own raw materials from the air using the solar and wind right next to them is the dream here.
We could choose to redefine profitable -- taxing authority exists in much of the world. Make synthetic fuels that demonstrably generate themselves via solar or wind tax free. Impose taxes on fuels that come from the ground.
We're producing an unbelievable amount of solar energy right now, and that amount is skyrocketing. Especially in China, who seems at the front of a shift toward renewables.
Indirectly yes. Instead of releasing additional carbon first into chemical products and then after they are waste into the atmosphere, the carbon is pulled out of the atmosphere first.
They are talking about turning CO2 into burnable fuel, so it's hard to see how this on its own would reduce emissions if you burn that fuel outside closed containers.
If 100% of the fuel we use comes from this technique - where it is imbued with carbon that was atmosphere-bound (flue gas) then we have decreased emissions significantly, since the alternative was that we release the flue gas CO2 AND the burning fuel CO2.
so long as it is a closed cycle it is neutral. That is the key. carbon from the air that goes back into the air is fine. Carbon from the ground that goes into the air is unsustainable.
Wayland is still pretty garbage. Hyprland is the most viable window manager replacement. The community is amazing too, way better than the Sway people. Lots of help from their forums and chatroom. Still, I had trouble with some basic stuff not working. So much tool replacement! So much work, for so little reward.
With i3/X11, I can run xrandr and see all my disconnected displays. As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no way to see disconnected display outputs in any wlroots or other Wayland composer. None. There's no standard way to do screenshots or video recording. It requires some custom portal for every single composer. I've never gotten Flameshot working in Sway or Hyprland and the suggested replacements are clobbered together garbage.
I do use network transparency (ssh -Y) quite often and it's not there in Wayland.
i3/X11 is just so much better and smother and I don't see the gain of Wayland. It's 100x more difficult to write programs that need to work in different composers. I hope this project succeeded and we really do see an X11R8 out of it.
I'm old enough to remember the switch from XFree86 -> xorg. I hope we see that again and we have real competition so the Wayland devs can finally get around to fixing their broken garbage of a display regression.
> I do use network transparency (ssh -Y) quite often and it's not there in Wayland.
There's waypipe (https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/mstoeckl/waypipe), which works well in my experience. Although I must say I don't use network transparency (be it X or Wayland) much these days.
I have to say I find the architecture of X much better than Wayland's. It is mostly the same, except X is more modular which I think it is a problem that Wayland is not.
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