Drain the swamp monsters

Meanwhile fossil fuel consumption increases and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere increases.

The only way to quit fossil fuels is to quit fossil fuels. It's like smoking. It doesn't matter how you quit, so long as you quit.

There's no magic that's going to sequester all that carbon dioxide.

It seems the "one technology" that could change this is nuclear power. Even so, a fully nuclear powered society would look nothing like the consumer society many affluent members of our world economy now enjoy.

Nothing is changing, solar and wind and other "renewable energy" schemes have not displaced fossil fuels, so its clear we are going to have to learn to cope with an increasingly hostile climate and rising seas.

Our most basic problem is the way we currently define economic "productivity." This kind of fossil fueled productivity (with supplemental renewable energy or not) is a direct measure of the damage we are doing to the earth's natural environment and our own human spirit.

GliderGuider and I both agree...

We have developed plenty of low-carbon technology since 1970. A bit more of it introduced to the same human environment won't help in the future any more than it has helped in the past.

The reason the fight has failed is because the changes required are not technological, but cultural and psychological.

We would need to reverse our growth. Not just stop it, reverse it.

Worse than that, we would need to reverse it in all domains: population, land use, energy consumption, material production, economic activity.

Even worse, the reversals need to be world-wide, with each region or country giving priority to those aspects of growth that are highest.

In short, the human presence on he planet needs to contract dramatically. Unless and until that happens, things will continue to get worse.

What do you think the chances are of that happening?

Just not voluntarily.

With the melting of the Arctic we have completely destabilized the Jet Stream and local weather patterns.
Giant loops and whorls like humanity has never seen. Everything either seems to be too cold, too hot, too wet or too dry, and whips back and forth between the extremes.

Right now we are having a major drought in much of the mid-west where many of our major food crops are grown. For the second year in a row it has been too wet here in Ohio for the farmers to get into their fields. Other food production areas of the world are seeing similar weather extreme challenges to food production.

We may very well be on the precipice of a worldwide famine driven by climate change.

Hungry people are self contracting fairly quickly.

I have hundreds of papers on the subject in my files, a broad sampling of all the major approaches from alkylamines to zeolites, to MOFs, metal hydroxides...blah...blah..blah.

Thee most paper on this subject, and it's not a sequestration paper, is by the late great Nobel Laureate George Olah: Anthropogenic Chemical Carbon Cycle for a Sustainable Future

Attempting to "sequester" fossil fuel waste is a terrible idea, because of the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Like the so called "renewable energy" scam which you correctly note has failed miserably, it is a callous attempt for this generation to scam all future generations by leaving them nothing but waste dumps.

It happens that carbon is "presequesterd." The way to sequester it permanently is to not dig it up or (in the case of dangerous natural gas) drill to outgas it in the first place.

There are thousands, if not tens of thousands of scientific papers written about how to capture carbon and to the extent that these myriad technologies are useful, they will only be so to the extent that they can be utilized to remove carbon from the atmosphere permanently, without appeal to a three card Monty game involving oil, gas, and coal. The engineering challenge of removing the carbon dioxide waste from the planetary atmosphere is enormous, just on the hard edge of feasibility but no slam dunk by any means. We are currently dumping stuff in a few decades that it took living systems hundreds of millions of years to accumulate.

EOR, enhanced oil recovery is a disgrace, a horror, and should be regarded as being beneath contempt, even if it represents the only current industrial practice in which carbon dioxide is reinjected into the ground.

The big "sequestration" scheme by companies like Statoil, the Norwegian oil company that pretends to give a shit about the environment so long as it doesn't cost them any money, are loudly advertised before being quietly dropped as "uneconomic."

Like the solar and wind industries, carbon capture and sequestration is a feel good fantasy that is unsustainable and again, is a crime against all future generations.