>>468888In case you are an honest climate skeptic:
Paul Cockshott made a video that explains climate change on the basis of straight forward physics without any of the complicated climate models. So if you found the popular account of climate change unconvincing, and you are still open to considering a reasoned argument. I suggest you watch this:
https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=kIonH3GNKuMIn case you want to argue a different approach to the climate problem:
In principle we can emit as much CO2 as we want as long as we take out the same amount of CO2 out of the atmosphere as we put in. This means that we treat chemical fuels as an energy storage medium, instead of a primary energy source. We would have to pay an energy-cost to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and convert in to fuel, and we'd get back that energy when we burn that fuel, minus the conversion losses.
The thing is that the conversion-losses for hydrocarbon fuels are about 30% and when we do the same thing with only the hydrogen without the carbon, the conversion losses are only 20%. But wait there is more, you can use the hydrolysis machine that originally made the hydrogen in reverse (to make usable energy) and also get about 80% efficiency, while a combustion engine that burns hydrocarbon (to make usable energy) only gets 40% efficiency. And you need a hole nother machine to make the hydrocarbon fuel. A hydrogen car could make it's own fuel if you give it electricity and water. Once you scale up the hydrogen industry until it has the same economies of scale as the hydrocarbon industries you'll get more than double the usable energy.
Of course hydrogen fuel tanks either need a pressure vessel (most economical for small tanks) or a cryogenic temperature vessel (most economical for big tanks). Those are more expensive but they are more secure, they are much harder to light on fire than either petrol tanks or battery packs, and hydrogen can carry more energy/weight then both.
But if you are a unyielding petrol-head, you can get a type of solar collector that takes water vapor and CO2 out of the air and turns it straight into petrol by using intense focused sunlight on a special catalyzing substrate. I think you might still be able to buy one, these cost about 2.5 million a pop and produces on average about 17l or 4.5gal of high octane petrol. These might get cheaper if somebody makes a breakthrough in catalyzing technology, so that they don't require lots of rare elements like titanium.
And since this is the nuclear thread, there is a special sub-set of nuclear reactors that make hydrogen by thermalizing water. These can scale up to a size of hundreds of gigawatts and could build an energy infrastructure that dwarfs anything that came before, like on the scale where you might consider heating the roads in winter to melt the snow.