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Comment by makerofspoons | Hacker News Reader

This is to be expected- we will continue to break these records until such a time we deploy carbon sequestration at scale.

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Carbon sequestration is a red herring. It won't keep up with emissions and will waste valuable time reducing emissions, which can be done now. I don't know if you've done the simple energy delta math on most sequestration plans, but a lot of them involve emitting a lot of new carbon.

Carbon sequestration is a necessity at this point for many emissions scenarios. BECCS (Bio-Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage) seems to be the IPCC's favored technology at the moment. It doesn't have to keep up with emissions, we need to cut emissions to the point that sequestration can bring us carbon negative.

That approach has really serious technical challenges (poor fuel quality and proximity of suitable land to population centers vis a vis the energy necessary to transport it). It's not clear how it's going to scale up to the necessary level.

What is the plan to pay for carbon sequestration? My assumption was always that it would be via carbon taxation or some kind of offset/credits scheme— if you run a business with a conventional emissions footprint, you need to pay for that footprint, and the cost of paying (for someone elsewhere to capture and sequester your emissions) will simultaneously provide the incentive to improve efficiency and reduce your emissions at the source (which is always preferable to having to scrub them afterwards, of course).

But... carbon taxes seem to be a huge non starter. The current (centrist) Liberal government in Canada introduced an extremely modest and utterly inadequate one that is revenue neutral (the money for the year came back on our tax returns this spring), and the opposition Conservative party is having a field day attacking it as a "cash grab" that's just ideologues taking money out of the pockets of "everyday Canadians". Check out the parade of last carbon-tax-free fill ups posted on social media the night before it kicked in:

https://www.macleans.ca/news/conservative-mpps-fill-up-their...

And the keyboard warriors on social media are even worse— they read the word "tax" and their brains just click over into rage mode, despite that carbon taxation is a long time conservative policy, and that similar market-based solutions were openly favoured by previous generations of right wing politicians in Canada:

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-if-youre-a-c...

How do we make progress on this? If a relatively progressive country like Canada can't even collect a tiny payment for incentive purposes (because all the revenue is being returned), how in the heck are we supposed to get to a place where polluters are charged the actual cost of scrubbing their emissions?

If we can't get polluters to pay directly, where are the trillions going to come from to pay for this? We can't even seem to find the money to build high speed rail, or get proper running water to our indigenous communities.

A carbon tax and dividend scheme might be more politically palatable, as it wouldn't be as regressive.

This is exactly what the Canadian system is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_fee_and_dividend

It's almost certain to be repealed when the current government loses power in this fall's election. :(

But the larger point is that when you pay back all the revenues as dividends, then you only get the reduction incentives. Where does the extra cash come from to actually pay for sequestration?

That is unfortunate.

Perhaps government contracts to sequestration companies in order to hit emissions targets could be carved out of existing budgets. I'm from the U.S. and there is certainly money to be diverted. Maybe we just need sequestration contractors in the right districts for certain politicians?

Possibly. But the reality is that if we (either Canada or the US) were looking to "spend money on jobs", there are a million things we could have been hiring people for over the past couple decades, even stuff as simple as infrastructure maintenance and tree planting.

Looks like there are projections for a bunch of jobs in the carbon capture industry (eg https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/17/carbon-c...), but I'm still hazy on how we're going to find trillions in the general revenue pot to make it happen.

Attacking a 'carbon tax' worked for the conservatives in Australia to take down a centre-left government. I'm sure conservatives in Canada took note.

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