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Comment by kristopolous | Hacker News Reader

Ucs, the controversial organization, has an interesting analysis of geothermal.

https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/environmental-impacts-geoth...

The takeaway

> Enhanced geothermal systems, which require energy to drill and pump water into hot rock reservoirs, have life-cycle global warming emission of approximately 0.2 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour [11].

> To put this into context, estimates of life-cycle global warming emissions for natural gas generated electricity are between 0.6 and 2 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour and estimates for coal-generated electricity are 1.4 and 3.6 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour.

Nothing is really truly zero carbon currently. Solar has manufacturing and maintenance. Nuclear has construction, mining, refinement, containment, etc. It's nice to see the full lifecycle being looked at.

We can't pretend that something essential for the process doesn't matter because we do a classification handwaving. It all counts

View on HN

Yes, but carbon costs come from burning fossil fuels. If you don't burn fossil fuels to drill wells or build PV panels, then those don't have an embodied life-cycle carbon cost.

I'm being a bit pedantic, but I think its an important point: The life-cycle carbon cost of renewables isn't a fact about renewables. It's a fact about our current energy production mix, which renewables themselves will change over time.

That's a valid point but cement and steel production emit CO2 directly, it's not just from the energy source.

As part of cement making, "The process of 'calcination' splits the material into calcium oxide and CO2."[1] About half a ton of CO2 is emitted per ton of cement.[2]

And with steel: "The prevailing process makes steel from iron ore — which is mostly iron oxide — by heating it with carbon; the process forms carbon dioxide as a byproduct. Production of a ton of steel generates almost two tons of CO2 emissions."[3]

Wind farms use a lot of concrete and steel; by some estimates, more than nuclear.[4] Of course, total emissions is still way less than fossil. Assuming normal lifespan, about 25 lbs of material per MWh[5], so (very) roughly that much CO2. By comparison, a coal plant emits over 2000 lbs CO2 per MWh. [6]

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46455844

[2] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/co2-emission-from-cement-indu...

[3] https://news.mit.edu/2013/steel-without-greenhouse-gas-emiss...

[4] https://thebreakthrough.org/issues/energy/nuclear-has-one-of...

[5] https://www.freeingenergy.com/math/wind-turbine-weight-pound...

[6] https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2020-12/documents...

Steel in particular in new plants in the US, the stuff that isn't recycled in arc furnaces, is being made with a mix of hydrogen and CO (both from natural gas), and there's no reason the mix can't be almost entirely hydrogen (only a token amount of carbon is needed, and some of that ends up in the steel). Direct reduced iron furnaces can be converted to run almost entirely on hydrogen.

Cement DOES emit CO2 during manufacture, but it also absorbs it during cure (which, granted, can take decades). That means you can potentially use it for direct air capture in a sort of indirect way. (i.e. you capture the CO2 emitted during calcination, when the CO2 is very concentrated and easy to capture, then the cement itself captures CO2 directly from the air during cure).

I've been doing some googling and it appears that the US isn't actually building new steel plants. The only capacity increase I could find was bringing old plants back online. All the old stuff (other than recycling) uses carbon. Do you have a link showing what I missed?

US Steel has started to look into hydrogen production, but hasn't built anything yet. [0]

Europe has some pilot projects for hydrogen-produced steel but nothing operational. [1]

We certainly should make that conversion, and also ensure that we use green hydrogen for it, but that's a big change and there won't be much economic incentive for it before we have a decent carbon price. "Renewable hydrogen-based iron production can become the least-cost supply option at a carbon dioxide (CO2) price of around United States dollars (USD) 67 per tonne," but "the hydrogen energy used would equal 1% of global primary energy supply." [2]

Carbon capture during cement production of course also lacks economic incentive until we have a carbon price, but I haven't found a specific price it would need.

[0] https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-steel-norways-equ...

[1] https://bellona.org/news/industrial-pollution/2021-05-hydrog...

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jiec.12997

Then your Googles left you astray. The US has been building Direct Reduced Iron furnaces which are used to feed arc furnace “mini-mills” (which the US also has been building). The US has NOT been building new coal-fired blast furnaces, instead doing DRI furnaces (including hot briquetted iron) and mini-mills. Mini mills are flexible and can use DRI, HBI, and recycled steel as input (usually in the US they use recycled steel scrap primarily as input as it’s cheaper).

DRI/HBI furnaces use a mixture of hydrogen and CO. So they already use hydrogen, but it comes from natural gas. However, this input mix of hydrogen and CO can be changed to be almost all hydrogen (almost CO can also be made electrolytically from CO2, as NASA just did with the Perseverance rover on Mars).

Thanks, I looked up DRI on wiki, that's pretty interesting.

The word "global" in the term "global climate change" means CO2 is fungible.

Trying to make every arbitrarily delimited activity carbon neutral on its own sounds like a cult hijacking AGW to me.

You say fungible, I say aggregate.

Here's essentially the problem you're laying out.

If I have a house run by solar power and walk to the store to buy fruit from 10,000 miles away to feed to my 5 children, my carbon costs are so astronomically high from the last two that the first two don't matter.

I agree! Absolutely!

But also, if transporting fruit 10,000 miles could be done with renewables that will zero that out.

If by the time the children are adults, significant delimited activity has transformed through say, better agricultural practices, more efficient appliances, better building design to that can regulate temperature better, all these small things, then the aggregate decreases

Stop having 5 kids and buying 10,000 mile away fruit, I'm with you. Sure.

But the point of this exercise is to make such things not so high cost so that the freedom to do these things, however much I personally disapprove of it, can be preserved.

That's one of the things the anti-climate change people don't get. They see the current transformations as a restriction of their liberties. No, it's a massive effort to preserve them. If we fail to transform society and cities start sinking into the sea, I assure you, forced sterilization, meat consumption bans, bans on private car ownership, local only food by law, a ban on air travel, it'll all be on the table. We all saw how quickly the shoe dropped on covid last march; from busy streets to boarded up ghost towns in about 2 weeks. We didn't heed the warnings to prepare and here we are still living with the consequences.

Let's stay on top of this one.

>If I have a house run by solar power and walk to the store to buy fruit from 10,000 miles away to feed to my 5 children, my carbon costs are so astronomically high from the last two that the first two don't matter.

>I agree! Absolutely!

No, you're not agreeing with me. You're talking about a family unit as if the net balance matters. That's exactly what I was saying makes no sense.

Nothing has to balance except the whole world. Not people, or families, or industries, or companies, or countries.

I don't know if there is a name for the fallacy, but there's this mental short circuit I think I observe, where people want to compose the parts of something to get a quality of the whole, and it doesn't work.

If you want a blue city, then the way you get it is by making all the parts of the city blue. And recursively, every part of the parts can be painted blue.

But if you want a profitable company you do not get it by making every part profitable. That's stupid and destructive and often people seem to consider it obviously idiotic when it is tried.

Carbon emissions are like the latter, not the former.

In equations:

blue + blue = blue

but

5 + 5 ≠ 5

If you expect coordinated global action from some kind of global conductor I really invite you to look at the literature from about 1915-1950 or so that culminated in the United Nations. It was typically called "world government" in the literature.

Essentially their highest aspirations were to avoid global war and assist in ongoing nation scale catastrophes, which they have done ok at.

They were pretty cynical about systems that essentially COP is structured under as being ineffective. Which it has been, closing in on year 30 of ineffectiveness.

This problem of global governance for issues like this is still fundamentally unsolved.

It has to work more like slavery, colonialism and chemical weapons; humanity eventually collectively found the idea reprehensible and we are mostly in agreement on the right direction. This is the only method that has worked so far.

You can have inspectors and enforcements but unless the people of the country also find the thing to be dishonerable, their loyalty to their leaders (political, bosses, wealthy, whatever) is the more important loyalty.

They'll stop shoveling coal into the furnace when the global police come by but then do it again after they leave. They have to want to stop intrinsically, not through a punitive threat. They have to be able to thrive and live well by not doing it too.

It's gotta be less work, easier, and pay better.

I mean look, I'm open to trying other things but they haven't been working. This method takes centuries, we still have prison and indentured labor which are effectively slavery, over 200 years later

We don't have that kind of time but also we don't have any other kind of solution

>If you expect coordinated global action from some kind of global conductor I really invite you to look at the literature

"I lost my keys in the dark, but I'm looking under the streetlight because that's where the light is".

I don't understand the frame of mind where you keep arguing about how you don't have a flashlight, I don't have a flashlight, we can't possibly wait until morning, etc. If you can't solve a problem, swapping it for some arbitrary thing you can solve is pointless.

Saying "it has to work" is the sort of thing people say in the movies. Something "has" to work because the script writer decided on it.

Coordinated global action may in fact be impossible. Some people think an effective world government would be a fate worse than unrestricted emissions.

I'm just saying it's the solution by definition. Again, because that's what "global" means.

>It has to work more like slavery, colonialism and chemical weapons

I don't know what I can say for a third time that I didn't say the first two and I feel like you are ignoring.

These are all things that compose like my analogy of painting things blue. If the people in a family did bad stuff, then their family did; if the families in a country did, then the country did, etc.

They are not things that compose via the summation of numbers corresponding to their parts. You don't add up a measure of colonialism produced with a measure of colonialism consumed elsewhere. There is no target threshold for colonialism or slavery or chemical weapons.

Not to mention, from what I read, all three things are very widespread to this day, so if they were like carbon dioxide emissions, it would be a pretty pessimistic sign anyway.

So I am trying to work out the basics of climate change action needed

1. More efficient agriculture Cutting and clearing land for agriculture is generally destructive - so a) everyone becomes vegetarian, b) stop growing food in 2 dimensions c) grow more efficient food (broth and hydroponics)

2. more efficient transport of food Don't transport food thousands of miles, don't refrigerate it, don't fly it,

3. transport to move off carbon Stop flying, more EV.

4. reduce travel apart from flights and holidays (carbon tax) commuting is huge contributor- remote working will impact this

4. Building efficiency Insulation and ground source heat pumps and so on See also strongtowns - denser living is halley kore efficient t living

Anyone have any links to the numbers?

If your kids have a negative carbon footprint (this is possible... after all, trees do it... because carbon is a good building material for cell walls), then having more kids is potentially superior to having fewer...

I don't think kids can do photosynthesis. And I can't imagine any way to make kids carbon negative that wouldn't be considered a crime against humanity.

If the kid would invent or improve a green energy source. Or convinces other people to stop eating meat.

Kids can plant trees

Planting trees isn't the problem. Trees can plant themselves pretty well already, just leave them space that you won't cut and plow every year.

My late grandpa had a small plot of land where he grew tomatoes and other vegetables. Since he died 12 years ago nobody does anything to that land cause he lived far from the rest of the family. It's a small forest now.

Not cutting trees for new farming land and leaving the space is the problematic part. And more kids is kinda at odds with this.

BTW what you're actually doing by planting a tree is burning carbon to move an already existing plant from one place to another.

> BTW what you're actually doing by planting a tree is burning carbon to move an already existing plant from one place to another.

That is true (unless you're actually planting seeds), but generally the idea is that another tree will grow where you took it from, so the end result is more trees.

Yeah but if there are any trees in the region where you plant - a tree would grow in that spot anyway if you just leave it be :)

BTW one of the weirdest examples of "patriarchy" is the preference of city planners to plant only male trees (because they generate less "junk"). Which reduces the amount of new trees growing in and near cities significantly.

Very interesting! I never knew that a fair number of city trees are dioecious. What happens to all the female saplings?

I would imagine that we can actually do a lot to accelerate the process of trees spreading over an area. And even a small speed-up compounds over time.

Apparently they even cultivate species that aren't dioecious naturally to become so :) https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/may/16/how-urba...

And of course some species are cloned because it faster and cheaper, so then female saplings aren't a problem. You clone what has higher demand.

> I would imagine that we can actually do a lot to accelerate the process of trees spreading over an area.

Yes I was a little facetious. I don't actually plan to persuade people not to have kids or not to do gardening. But when I see people gathering millions of dollars to use drones to plant trees I can't help but think it's focusing on the wrong (but cool) part of the problem.

That’s not necessarily true. Some places have been ravaged by desertification and so actively planting trees can facilitate a forest where otherwise there wouldn’t be any.

Second, you can choose trees which are particularly good at sequestering carbon for long periods.

Humans are already animals that act as “ecosystem engineers” (like beavers or trees). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecosystem_engineer

We just haven’t historically been very good at it (ie we’ve often historically reduced ecological diversity instead of facilitating it). I think we can do much better, and there are many examples of humans who HAVE done a great job at it (for instance, the man who planted a forest on an island in India). https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HkZDSqyE1do

Do you think the planet would be better off if everything else was the same but his parents had decided not to have him? So this is why I think we can’t apply a broad average of human footprint to whether someone should decide to have kids or not. Instilling values, such as being a net-positive to the environment and the value of choosing to live a net-carbon-negative life (and support continued climate action), can be more important than just the marginal impact of not having kids at all.

Also, negative-sum thinking ends up in a pretty dark place pretty fast if brought to its logical conclusion.

And it seems pretty obvious what the long term result would be if all climate-conscious people had no kids but folks who don’t give a crap about climate action raise lots of children.

Hello Ajuc and Firad, I don’t literally mean plant trees, what I mean is that unlike fruit-jet-miles, the carbon cost of people isn’t n * constant, people can make choices and take actions including actions that are carbon negative.

Only the leaves (and maybe other green and exposed parts) of a tree do photosynthesis. The rest of the tree provides structure and protection and nutrients and most of the carbon is sequestered in the structure and roots, not in the photosynthetic part.

Human civilization, as it becomes more reliant on solar power, essentially becomes photosynthetic. Already, sustainable harvesting of trees to make long-lived structures can sequester more carbon than a tree does as it decomposes on the forest floor at the end of its life (emitted CO2 and a bunch of methane, which is worse). But we can also do “photosynthesis” more directly by using photovoltaics to produce hydrocarbons from direct captured CO2 and water. In fact, going back to the space meme, this is already done on the International Space Station as a side effect of the life support system. Water is split into oxygen (for the crew) and hydrogen. The hydrogen was originally just vented to space along with CO2 (expelled by the crew) captured from the cabin air, but they realized they could combine the hydrogen with the CO2 and recover the oxygen in the form of water, with the hydrocarbon methane as the byproduct. The methane is vented to space normally, but then they realized they could use the methane and reform it into polyethylene and hydrogen (which can be recycled to capture more oxygen form CO2). The polyethylene could be used in the 3D printers on the space station to produce structures. (NASA hasn’t accomplished this methane to polyethylene goal, yet, although methane-to-polyethylene/polypropylene is done on Earth via methane to methanol, then methanol to olefins). This is, essentially, a synthetic kind of photosynthesis. NASA funded SBIR grants to try to demonstrate this process. And there’s no reason you can’t make any kind of hydrocarbon this way from water and CO2 (hydrogen and CO—which can be made from CO2, as Perseverance demonstrated—are synthesis gases which can be used via the Fischer-Tropsch process to produce any hydrocarbon).

In this way, as the mass of a photovoltaic-centric human civilization (buildings and infrastructure and machines) in the form of carbon fiber and wood and resins grows, it is sequestering carbon in its own structure, just like a tree does. So humans (with their houses and buildings, etc) can, in fact, become carbon negative as we transition to clean energy including for utilizing synthesized (or natural) hydrocarbons (or sustainably harvested wood) for structural materials.

This is the best argument on why we should follow the "green transformation" path I have yet seen. Thank you

Steel can also be made in a process using hydrogen instead of coke. I don't know any replacements for cement.

There are a number of replacements for (ordinary Portland) cement, such as slaked lime, Sorel cement, alkali-activated cement, geopolymer cement (sometimes classed as an alkali-activated cement, though the Geopolymer Institute disagrees), and so on. Most of these have lower, zero, or even negative net CO₂ emissions. https://res.mdpi.com/d_attachment/sustainability/sustainabil... "Recent Progress in Green Cement Technology Utilizing Low-Carbon Emission Fuels and Raw Materials: A Review" is a CC-BY overview of seven of them from 02019.

There are folks talking about using solar concentrators (like solar thermal plants) but without the steam turbine and electrical generation equipment to make cement.

https://helioscsp.com/concentrated-solar-power-csp-and-indus...

Same logic works there as well though, it's possible to fix that, both for steel and cement(see Sweden)

For those interested:

https://www.hybritdevelopment.se/en/

https://www.h2greensteel.com/

https://www.cementa.se/sv/slite-ccs

> The life-cycle carbon cost of renewables isn't a fact about renewables. It's a fact about our current energy production mix, which renewables themselves will change over time.

Sure but we are talking about right now. Things will eventually be swapped out. That's a different conversation though, it's an advocacy and not a descriptive one.

People tend to use things that are marginally adequate way longer than anyone intended. For instance, the ancient Roman gravity dam of Proserpina is still doing its job.

Even if we had say a sleek $1,000 self driving solar car that never needs charging and goes for a million miles without maintenance, there's no guaranteed adoption curve, production capacity, distribution and logistic timeline, consumer acceptance, these are all hard unknown realities regardless of how silvery the bullets are.

It IS relevant right now. If the "lifecycle emissions" of near-term renewables is used to argue against deploying them and instead using existing carbon-emitting sources, then you've delayed progress and made things impossible to resolve except by basically shutting down everything (which would kill people and is politically infeasible).

Decarbonization compounds. That means that "lifecycle emissions" analysis can end up being too pessimistic if you consider changes made in a vacuum. Electric cars require steel and electricity to make, so considered by themselves (while still definitely worth it) don't look as good as they do when you consider we will need to be decarbonizing steel and electricity as well.

Power plants need vehicles and steel as well, so decarbonizing transport and steel also reduces the lifecycle emissions of power plants!

I think people resist this type of thinking because of a different kind of magical thinking: a sort of anti-silver-bullet magic. They have the idea of fossil fuels as fundamental to civilization, like we can't actually get rid of them. But this isn't true. We can eliminate fossil fuel usage just fine.

We should consider fossil fuel as the seed corn. Instead of feeling bad that it takes fossil fuels to do the initial manufacture of geothermal (or whatever), consider it as simply priming the pump, as seed corn. There is no better use for fossil fuels than assisting in manufacturing their total replacements.

You can probably do "time" arbitrage here. The CO2 price is low today so CO2 intensive construction is still viable today but it won't be in the future. Thus your geothermal plant will end up becoming more profitable over time.

Well put.

Parent is correct that it "all counts," but that doesn't mean it all resolves to the same thing over the long term.

For example, one of solar's key strength is the improvement curve that its on. Carbon, energy and dollar costs are improving. So in a sense, every Kw produced now reduces the costs of Kw produced in the future. Its valid an important to think of lifecycle costs currently, it's also not a full picture.

I believe most decent life cycle analyses these days will include a prediction of carbon intensity of electricity used in the future as one more thing to help compare costs/benefits now vs the future.

As an example burning trash for power gets relatively worse as other energy sources become carbon free, while recycling gets relatively better as the energy required becomes lower carbon and/or cost.

Possibly, though there isn't really a standard way of doing so.

I doubt that any such analysis accounts (nor should it) for technological curves yielded by investing in one technology or another. There are limits to any one calculation.

Life-cycle emissions accounting is useful if we're considering technology options or feasibility assessment for a specific project. But the linked article isn't talking about any specific project. It's talking about whether geothermal is a good tech in general.

In that context the lifecycle emissions stats are less useful because the calculation assumes a rate of indirect emissions (due to construction, mining, refinement, containment, etc.) based on the incumbent power generation tech.

In other words, if geothermal power was more ubiquitous, then the indirect emissions for a new geothermal project would be lower.

So we should be doing calculations of "what percentage of its lifetime power production is required to sequester the carbon it took to create and use it?"

That's almost a peak oil approach, which was both insufficient and the most accurate possible.

We can only state things in terms of stuff which currently exists. The future will yield different results because new techniques and technologies will come along. But we can't rely on or predict them.

There's a lot of "pons and fleischmanning" when talking about future energy use - mass scale geo-engineering or sucking carbon out of the atmosphere technology, it has to be avoided. The technologies don't exist yet. We have to use real-world stuff.

Using current reality for future projections is inherently defective because of the innovation factor and routinely leads to bad predictions (such as peak oil[1]), but it's the only reality we have and is sadly as good as we're going to get. Anything else (such as say next-gen nuclear) has to be regarded as a fiction in the calculations until it actually exists.

It's messy, sloppy, and requires a large trashcan but the alternative is to get to results that rely on things that literally do not actually exist. Kinda like how the people planning Operation Downfall (the land invasion of japan during ww2) weren't told about all the other things in the works (backroom deal to get Russia to declare war on Japan and the Manhattan project), they had to assume those things would continue to not happen.

[1] - The Hubbert peak was essentially that the amount of energy to extract and refine oil would surpass the energy from the oil and thus make it unsustainable so the operations for oil extraction would cease. New techniques have been developed (such as fracking) which have changed this math, but in 1956, using 1956 knowledge, this was the best prediction possible. It's somewhat Malthusian - who was also as "correct as possible" with the best science that 1798 had to offer. He couldn't factor in, say, the Haber–Bosch process from 112 years in the future in his food growth computations.

> Using current reality for future projections is inherently defective because of the innovation factor and routinely leads to bad predictions (such as peak oil[1]), but it's the only reality we have and is sadly as good as we're going to get. Anything else (such as say next-gen nuclear) has to be regarded as a fiction in the calculations until it actually exists.

but are certain that at least one of these fictitious scenarios will come into being. We just have no certainty as to which.

The first step in this is inventing a scalable way of sequestering the carbon from atmospheric CO2. We have been talking about carbon markets for over three decades now and still have not solved the supply side of the equation. It's frankly embarrassing.

> We have been talking about carbon markets for over three decades now and still have not solved the supply side of the equation.

Talking, but never actually doing.

Carbon Credits are a thing, but the fundamental problem is that one 1 of carbon credit isn't used to pull 1 ton of carbon out of the atmosphere. Instead they're like brownie points that politicians arbitrarily set the price on.

If there were some large scale way to scrub carbon out of the atmosphere then the market could work, but in their current state they are a joke.

> If there were some large scale way to scrub carbon out of the atmosphere then the market could work

We don't need to wait for that to set up an impactful system. At the simplest, have a serious tax and dump a bunch of the resulting money into research grants and a big reverse auction for capture.

Http://www.carbonengineering.com

Is it embarrassing? Maybe it’s a shortage of market incentives or maybe it’s just a really difficult problem? We shouldn’t assume we’ll have innovative solutions for everything.

I think a healthier futuristic perspective would be one that considers only some percentage of problems will be solved through innovation, at least in the near term. That way we accept we still could be screwed and need to work harder!

It's embarrassing that we are still using fossil fuels without any plan to deal with the pollution it causes. It isn't like people weren't aware of the problem either, I remember talks in the 80s about the Greenhouse Effect and how we needed to act quickly before the problem got out of hand.

We're already well past the point where if we just stopped emitting we will be ok. We now need carbon capture as part of the solution and thus far nothing has panned out. Nor is there much political will to actually push for solutions. They're just seen as pure cost that will make your country less competitive so nobody wants to be the only country who goes for "truth" in this prisoner's dilemma.

The big problems in the 80s were acid rain and recycling. We kind of nailed those.

Global warming wasn't as important as a nuclear winter.

Embarrassing to use fossil fuels? In front of who? some future self who judges you? Wait till you see next decades' problems.

Recycling plastic is a red herring popularized by the fossil fuel industry. Up until recently most of its actual success came from a combination of:

1) China's heavy exports meaning that transporting bulk goods TO China was practically free, because the ships were making the trip while empty anyway

2) China's manufacturing industry growing so fast that they simply, literally could not get enough plastic

3) Dirt-cheap labor costs in some parts of China enabling labor-intensive recycling on razor thin margins

4) Corruption and a disregard for the true costs of environmental damage making waste dumping look far more profitable than it actually was.

AIUI these have disappeared recently, due to China's economic growth, and shift from exports to selling domestically, and their environmental damage starting to seriously catch up with them, all of which resulted in them no longer accepting plastic.

China still accepts plastic for recycling. As you note they make a lot of stuff and so need it and have net exports so lots of ships are going there anyway.

What they banned was people pretending to send recyclable plastic but really just sending them any old junk.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_National_Sword

Text from their official notification:

> Objective and rationale, including the nature of urgent problems where applicable: The reasons for urgent measure: According to the Special Actions of Strengthening the Supervision and Strictly Striking of Illegal "Foreign Garbage" by the General Administration of Customs of China, Ministry of Environmental Protection of China, Ministry of Public Security of China and General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine of China, as well as the Special Actions of Striking of the Illegal Actions of Imported Solid Waste Processing and Utilizing Sectors by Ministry of Environmental Protection of China, we found that large amounts of dirty wastes or even hazardous wastes are mixed in the solid waste that can be used as raw materials. This polluted China's environment seriously. To protect China's environmental interests and people's health, we urgently adjust the imported solid wastes list, and forbid the import of solid wastes that are highly polluted. Protection of human health or safety; Protection of animal or plant life or health; Protection of the environment.

A waste management scientist in India has a royality free patent of using plastic in asphalt. This is a good way to recycle plastic, but one could pave only so many roads.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic_road

We fixed acid rain by exporting it to China. Recycling is kind of a mess at the moment due to China stopping pretending that they were recycling plastic.

We did mostly fix the Ozone hole though, albeit it is still an ongoing process.

Recycling has been nailed? I might have missed a few major breakthroughs because the plastixa problem seems anything but fixed to me

If we had an actual market for carbon emissions, people would be very incentivized to come up with solutions that scale better than burying charcoal. But since we're not even incentivizing people to bury charcoal, I'm not very surprised that we made little progress at doing more difficult things.

The "free energe" is moving the heat from the hot rock to the atmosphere. The difference is that it's not doing that by oxidizing carbon to CO2.

Yes. But CO2 is a problem because it prevents the heat from the sun from escaping (and there is 1kW/m2 of that). Without excess “greenhouse” gasses excess energy is free to radiate into space.

> We can't pretend that something essential for the process doesn't matter because we do a classification handwaving. It all counts

Funny thing: in France, stats for wind energy include the cost of wiring, and cables are required to be buried. Stats for nuclear just ignore the wiring. I'm pro nuclear, but that always bugged me.

> life-cycle global warming emission of approximately 0.2 pounds of carbon dioxide equivalent per kilowatt-hour

"pounds per kilowatt-hour" has to be a strong contender for most ridiculous choice of units. One might almost use that as a joke.

Even "pounds per mechanical horsepower hours" would have been more sane.

The standard unit is gCO2e/kWh (grams of CO2 equivalent per kilowatt hour).

Zero carbon is a nonsensical goal. The carbon cycle is necessary. The issue is whether or not it ends up in an equilibrium pleasant for human life or not.

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