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Originally Posted by robot_parade
Aha - the above is all true, but, the problem is, that measuring one's environmental impact based upon CO2 is a very poor yardstick. The coal power plants that probably power that families house produces more than CO2. The waste that the nice garbage men carry off every week has to go somewhere. Etc. etc.
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But we can pay for land to make land-fills. Sure, people who consume things should pay for their disposal -- but that isn't that hard.
As can the other costs of emissions. You'll notice that the emissions from most industry have been reduced by many orders of magnitude over the last 30 years...
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This argument re-enforces my point above. CO2 is not the whole story.
So we release CO2 that warms the earth. We release sulfur to cool the earth. What are the environmental impacts of the extra sulfur? Acidification, off the top of my head. I'm sure there are others. How will we deal with those?
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Human ingenuity?
Remember: the economic cost of (say) emitting CO2 is bounded above by the cost of fixing it (removing the CO2). It can quite often be cheaper than this.
Also note that the answer "don't mess with the environment, leave it alone" is not a sustainable answer. The environment will produce ice ages, asteroid/comet impacts, super-volcanoes that shut out the sun, etc.