I just now realized how bad a statement "save the environment" is. The environment is just the current state, which is always changing. There will always be an environment, whether a living thing is alive to see it or not.
But the biosphere in the long-term can support a few things which generate carbon dioxide. The severity of the anthropocene event is mainly that it's happening much faster than natural selection. If we were really in the realm of natural variability there wouldn't be much to worry about. But there are things we call ecosystem services, like plant growth and carbonate compensation that can handle a decent amount of carbon emissions, on the >200 year scale. In fact, that was kind of the story of the pleistocene into the holocene, where most carbon dioxide events like volcanoes were absorbed quickly enough.
On the short term, though, the biosphere can really only afford carbon-negative solutions, as we're already in a mass extinction event. Obviously we don't have those, so yeah, we need to get to carbon neutral as fast as possible. We kind of used up our cushion in the 1990s and 2000s, and chose the route where more people die. Oh wells, water under the bridge now.
But the biosphere in the long-term can support a few things which generate carbon dioxide. The severity of the anthropocene event is mainly that it's happening much faster than natural selection. If we were really in the realm of natural variability there wouldn't be much to worry about. But there are things we call ecosystem services, like plant growth and carbonate compensation that can handle a decent amount of carbon emissions, on the >200 year scale. In fact, that was kind of the story of the pleistocene into the holocene, where most carbon dioxide events like volcanoes were absorbed quickly enough.
On the short term, though, the biosphere can really only afford carbon-negative solutions, as we're already in a mass extinction event. Obviously we don't have those, so yeah, we need to get to carbon neutral as fast as possible. We kind of used up our cushion in the 1990s and 2000s, and chose the route where more people die. Oh wells, water under the bridge now.
"Kitto daijoubu da yo." - Sakura Kinomoto