Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere

Yes! Pricing is a key step to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. An invitation for entrepreneurs hop on board. How much does a ton of carbon dioxide sell for? Can I pull it out cheaper?

Reducing emissions is necessary but not sufficient. Even if fossil fuel emissions stopped 100% tomorrow, we would still have an issue: 403 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

We must develop tech to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. The ideal outputs are economically-priced carbon-products without subsidy.

The cost of undoing the emissions only sets the price on CO2 emissions if that cost is lower than the cost of enduring the damage associated with not undoing them.

The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large. But unless we're starting from some kind of reasonable estimate of the cost of the damage, however approximate, it can't be right to say that these guys are setting the price on atmospheric CO2.

> There's one significant thing they're achieving here: putting a price on CO2 in the atmosphere.

Just for fun: Humans have added ~1 trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere over 200 years, taking atmospheric CO2 from 275 to 407 ppm by volume. Ongoing emissions are around 36 billion tonnes (2015).

Climeworks apparently costs $600/tonne of CO2[1], with 10 year goal of $100/tonne (although skeptics estimate it really costs closer to $1,000, but I see no reason to believe them either). So the total cost would be $100 trillion to $1 quadrillion dollars to reverse climate change (this would be about a 50% overestimate since ~30% of emissions are anti-greenhouse aerosols), and the ongoing cost would be $3.6 trillion to $36 trillion. Over 80 years that would come to $4.85-$48.5 trillion annually, while the nominal GDP is currently just under $80 trillion. So 6% to 62% of annual GDP.

The total cost to transition the entire world to solar power including all heat, industrial and burning oil would be <$40 trillion, for reference. NB that's a very high level estimate with error ~= 50%

[1]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/swiss-company-hoping-capture-1-g...

to add to your optimism:

* geoengineering avoids fixing the root problem by patching some (but not all) of the symptoms, and probably creating new symptoms

* the effects of climate change are not uniform over the globe, so for any application of geoengineering there will be winners and losers

* much research hasn't been done to figure out if the various geoengineering proposals are safe, and there is no test environment, there is only production

* geoengineering needs to be done at the same time as a serious effort to reduce both CO2 emissions and CO2 levels in the atmosphere

* but: some geoengineering options are cheap enough that single nations could unilaterally carry them out anyway, ignoring all of the above!

edit: all that said, the kind of stuff as described in the article needs to be scaled up. and a serious real world test needs to be done of doing something with the captured CO2. 50 tonnes / year is nothing. the scale of infrastructure needed to reverse current CO2 pollution is roughly the entire world fossil fuel economy, but running in reverse

assuming this proposal can be scaled up and there's something to do with the captured CO2, maybe this kind of thing is part of the solution

another open question is what to do with carbon in the ocean, to reverse ocean acidification

In the last few months I have read a few articles on hackernews about converting carbon dioxide into usable fuel. My hope for the future is that we come up with a way to capture and convert carbon dioxide even if doing so requires electricity as this would make renewables cheaper and stop more carbon output.

Somewhy climate engineering as a whole gets very negative responses from people who care about environment.

But the climate we had in 1800s was not particularly great either. 1/3 of the land surface was still desert, hurricanes and droughts were common too, so the strategy of reducing human population, using only clean energy, etc. won't get us to a much better place.

Of course some ideas are not great, but it doesn't mean that any attempt of improving climate via engineering is automatically bad.

It's been said multiple times that reduction is no longer enough - even a cut to zero won't prevent warming at this point. Geo-engineering to actively reduce carbon is the inevitable conclusion.

what about a GeoCoin where you create the coin by paying someone to suck up carbon dioxide?

And what's exactly wrong with that? Assuming that technology works, and it is possible to reverse the environmental damage — why not do just that and keep our life satisfaction? Looks like win-win-win for me.

I think a lot of global warming activists/campaigners hate the idea of a technological solution as it won't allow them to tackle things like "global inequality" which they see as important as fixing global warming itself.

The Industrial Revolution -- and all of the CO2 put in the atmosphere since then - was basically "climate engineering". It was unintended, unplanned climate engineering, but that is what it was. We took a stick and poked at the climate system enough to cause measurable shifts in it (climate change).

Many of the solutions being proposed are simply more thoughtful forms of climate engineering, designed with a better understanding of the system's inputs and outputs.

The law of unintended consequences will play a big part here, because the climate is a terrifyingly complex system. But, at this point, it is reasonable to make assertions about big picture inputs and outputs (eg., more/less CO2 = warmer/cooler global temperatures).

So, climate engineering is something that has been going on for a very long time, even if it was not called that. It will continue being a thing, albeit hopefully in a much more directed and thoughtful way.

What is climate denial? Please define. I hope this is a reference to the debate regarding the magnitude of the climate sensitivity parameter. If not, then what is it? No one of any consequence (least of all, someone like Richard Lindzen) denies that there is such a parameter and that it is central to the climate question. So what value would you go for and why? I guess a climate denialist would say it has a value of zero (denies science as we understand climate at present) but we can conclude that Arrhenius (at '5') went too high. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_sensitivity So it lies somewhere in between.

I see a lot of people saying "technology will solve it for us, we should do nothing. sure I'll fight climate change - when it's zero cost to do so" as an argument to wait for better batteries, better windpower, better coal power etc. This will be another "wait for the scientists to fix it" item.

> "In the end people are going to always choose themselves over the environment."

If you want a reason for optimism, eventually those two will more clearly interlinked. The question is whether we can avoid damaging the planet before the survival of humanity depends on doing so.

Agree 100% that the introduction of climate/geo engineering as a means to offset CO2 emissions will be an enormous reason industry and individuals lose interest in trying to reduce emissions. Unfortunately, it is far too late for even the most amazing reduction in emissions to solve the problem now, so these techniques will be needed.

Just as most folks prefer to medicate their health issues away rather than making lifestyle changes, by the same token we're going to be living in a more and more over-engineered environment, with each "solution" leading to more "unintended consequences".

50 tonnes a year per machine doesn't sound much, compared to just growing bamboo or something similar.

Wouldn't that depend on the source of energy running the CO2 extractor?

I like where your question is headed. Carbon dioxide removal tech must be powered by solar/wind with low emissions for this to work.

Serious question. Why not just plant a shit load more trees?

Or, given that the world annual CO2 emissions are around ~400*10^9 tonnes, there should exist one for literally every human being.

There is no debate and no climate scientist sees this as a threat. Reduction is needed but it won't cut it its too late for natural carbon sequestering at its normal pace. People who work on reduction also often work on sequestering and if not do not see these efforts as a threat to any of their work.

> To many who are actively seeking better performance in our carbon reduction efforts, ideas like this could be seen as a threat to those efforts.

This is sad. People thinking like this are actively sabotaging their own efforts and dreams.

It's like a boat with a hole in it. You desperately need to stop the inflow of water (limiting emissions), but you could also use some way to pump out the water that's already in the boat (geoengineering). Because, 1) it's not the inflow that ultimately kills you, it's what has accumulated, and 2) pumping out gives you more time to fix the inflow.

We need the plan B now. We also need plans C, D and E.

What worries me though, is the "human playing god" magical thinking crowd will latch onto geoengineering efforts and gain popular support, the way anti-GMO and anti-vaccine groups did.

Humanity is amazing at preventing itself from solving problems.

Reduction efforts have lost. Deniers have successfully turned global warming into an issue of identity politics, not of science. Once something is within the realm of identity politics, there's no going back.

We should continue to shout loudly that reduction is needed, but we need a Plan B asap. Counting on politics to turn in our favor is a losing cause.

Agreed - check out Opus12 for an example of point-source capture: https://www.opus-12.com

Would be relevant to get Climeworks' perspective on the question of point source vs atmospheric carbon dioxide.

My hope is that this study is correct: https://m.phys.org/news/2017-08-hydrate-gun-hypothesis.html

How long does it take for air to mix worldwide?

I visited NOAA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii last month. It's one of the key global sites where carbon dioxide is monitored. The scientist giving the tour answered this, and I believe it was on the order of a few weeks for mixing to occur.

Here's a visualization that starts to answer your question: https://amp.livescience.com/48798-carbon-dioxide-global-comp...

I would love a more detailed answer to this question as well.

(I visited the Mauna Loa Ovservatory because of our open source project to track carbon dioxide worldwide: https://gitter.im/giving-a-fuck-about-climate-change/Lobby http://carbondoomsday.com)

The technology presented here is not a paradigm shift, it is merely another way of capturing CO2. What is remarkably about it (compared to other, known techs is that it does not require an enormous amount of biomass. But by their own admission it is no really cheap technology: <100$ for 1t of CO2. [1]

But there are several fundamental problems that remain: 1. Storage: CO2 has to be stored safely for an (on human scale) indefinite amount of time. 2. Scale: The amount of CO2 recaptured is gigantic (see other comments). 3. The problem of investment without immediate benefit. On a national level, the money needed to deploy this technology at a large scale is basically "lost" for the immediate future, the (positive) effects will be felt later on. This is similar to the situation right now, where we "only" have to reduce the amount of climate-forcing gases, but cannot be bothered to really weigh in on the problem. 4. Most importantly: this kind of technology is already factored in in current mitigation scenarios. So on top of reducing emissions (close) to 0, deployment of carbon-capturing technology is a prerequisite for remaining inside anything like the 2°C climate change by the end of the century. [2]

So the problem is one of framing for this technology. It is not so much a game-changer but more of a sight of hope that maybe given an heroic effort in emission-reduction, this technology might help to achieve the internationally agreed upon goals for climate-change. Hence it is often seen as a kind of moral hazard, when portrayed as a means to happily keep on emitting.

[1] http://www.climeworks.com/co2-removal/

[2] e.g., https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...

- CO2 is plant food. Indoor growers supplement CO2 levels up to 1500 ppm (after which they say that there is not much return) to enhance growth. There is no reason to remove it from the atmosphere.

- Supposedly CO2 is also a green house gas that helps earth trap some heat from the sun. The link between how much heat CO2 captures based on the concentration is very difficult to find, suggesting that the link is not very strong and propaganda driven "climate science" deliberately doesn't want anyone to know. My guess is that it is very weak at best which is why they supplement the theory with heating will cause water vapor concentration to rise, which is also a green house gas, which will cause snowball effect. This could be tested in a controlled greenhouse but most probably it didn't turn out to be favorable for the propaganda so the research has not been published.

- Climate has been changing throughout the history of the earth and there are no known consistent patterns that we have been able to model which can help us predict anything, not that we have seen working at least. Overall though, it has been cooling and there is no reason that it will not continue to do so in the long run.

- The causal relation between CO2 levels and global temperatures has not only not been established, but it is impossible to establish because of large number of factors affecting it and affecting each other. The best we can get is some kind of correlation but even that hasn't been consistent over time. They keep adding more explanations to anomalies to pretend that they know what is going on but it's obvious that they just don't want to accept it. Max Plank said "Science advances one funeral at a time", but it seems increased life expectancy will keep "climate science" going for a while.

So, yeah some people may be upset that people are touting this solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

The magnitude of the emissions. We are putting tens of billions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere per year. Even assuming the filtering process is very efficient (net-carbon negative) where do we store that in the blimp? How many blimps would we need?

As a thought experiment - look at the average car - a Toyota Camry for example. That car emits 206 grams per kilometer. Over the course of the car's lifetime (about 200 thousand kilometers or so) that's 41 thousand kilograms of CO2. For one family car.

You don't need to remove those. You just need to make sure they get them wet, so entropy can follow its inexorable path.

Methane goes away pretty quickly on its own, so that's less pressing. CO2 is needed in the atmosphere, but not nearly as much as we have. Pre-industrial levels were 30% lower than current levels.

Presumably, most of the captured CO2 eventually ends up back in the atmosphere anyway - either through leakage, or eventual decomposition of the greenhouse plants being grown.

But it's still a net gain if the CO2 would otherwise have come from fossil-derived sources?

At the scale we'd need to turn things around, land is a significant limiting factor. I saw a study in Nature a couple years ago saying we could manage a gigatonne/year of carbon sequestration from biochar without major impacts on biodiversity and food production, which is pretty good but not sufficient on its own.

I have a better alternative: growing excess food and dumping it on the ground.