Prevention is better than a cure
Prevention is better than a cure – but if you can’t prevent something from happening then you sure want to have a cure.
Heating up vast quantities of limestone to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and mitigate ocean acidification would not be necessary if we drastically reduced our emissions of CO2. People have suggested in comments posted to this site that what we need to do is have serious reforestation efforts and increase our energy efficiency to prevent runaway climate change - I couldn’t agree more. But we need to recognise that even if it were possible to change the way that people behave, that reforestation and energy efficiency may simply not be sufficient to solve the problem.
There are concerns that this process involves the processing of colossal quantities of limestone, but then the size of the problem is colossal too. There’s an interesting blog at Wired about what the author, Alexis Madrigal, calls “Gesturengineering” – we need to recognise that changing lightbulbs and not putting our TV on standby, whilst useful and necessary steps to reduce our emissions, are not sufficient – gestures alone are not enough. We need to recognise that the steps we need to take to tackle climate change will need to be much more than cosmetic – that they will affect our economic well-being and may have some side-effects – there probably is no perfect pain-free solution.