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Comment by spywaregorilla | Hacker News Reader

That sounds insane to me. You'd need a large carbon sequestration program running, which means you'd need to be producing enough clean energy to supply all human needs and sequester the carbon.

And no, trees will not cut it.

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Sounds pessimistic to me. I think we can make it there earlier. Don’t underestimate technology, the solutions to carbon sequestration and clean energy are getting exponentially better each year.

> exponentially better each year

I'd love to see sources supporting that; it sounds a lot more optimistic than I would expect.

Ramenz Naam has been showing this for years:

https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-c...

There are identical stories to write about onshore wind, offshore wind, and lithium ion batteries. This summer has seen a huge number of new storage chemistries announced from startups with skin in the game and experienced management that will close the gap for longer term storage.

The most optimistic prediction for renewables were too pessimistic. It's likely that we are still in the same situation today, and not nearly enough people are predicting the future accurately by short-changing new tech.

There probably aren't too many people on HN these days that remember computer tech in the 80s and 90s, but it had far fewer doubters, and didn't have an industry dedicated to creating a propaganda cloud about how awful computers are. And still, the internet and computers are far more advanced and penetrant into everyday life in ways almost nobody anticipated.

The renewables revolution will likely be as big. We will have more cheaper energy accessible to us than ever before. This may be enough to jump to a new stage of technological development.

Why do you need carbon sequestration to reach net zero new emissions?

The goal isn’t net zero new emissions, it’s net zero emissions, so sequestering every bit of CO2 you emit

There's a lot of stuff that you simply can't prevent from emitting CO2, for example various chemical processes, and other applications like air travel where fossil fuels are simply too much better than alternatives. True zero emissions is not a realistic goal. But net zero emissions is much more reasonable - you can still use carbon where you need it, you just need to make up for it.

Growth in wind and solar production is really really high, we are roughly on course to produce enough electricity for current needs by 2035 entirely from clean resources.

We could expand production even more, but private producers would probably need some guaranteed buyers for that expanded future production.

Fossil energy is on its last legs. The question is not if it will be phased out by 2050, but how many more years of new fossil fuel infrastructure we let FF companies invest in before banks stop backing it entirely. Already, large institutional investors and banks are demanding changes. It's only crony capitalism that allows for new extraction, and this will end up hurting share holders in the long run. FF companies are already taking our loans to pay dividends, so as not to spook investors. The future is clear.

Africa and other places will skip over thermal fossil fuel electricity generation, just as they skipped over sites telephones to cellular networks. Micro grids and batteries will be far cheaper to deploy than large transmission lines and large central generation.

As for carbon dioxide removal, we will probably have to start that in the 2040s, but the best tech is not yet clear. You are right that trees are insufficient, and recent fires are showing that forests can by carbon sources in addition to climate sinks. (I believe that Canada's "managed forests" have become net carbon sources this year, for example.)

I don't think this passes the usual concerns around base load, local energy needs vs. overall network totals, and storage capacity for nighttime use. Maybe that's ok. Maybe we just get a ton of solar and what we can't do in batteries we just funnel into carbon sequestration. And at night we just turn off the lights unless it's an emergency or high priority task.

But I have my doubts that this is likely to play out...

It's likely that we will have a ton of excess capacity because solar is so cheap.

These are all solvable problems. Christopher Clack has been doing global optimizations for renewable grids for a long time, and finds that lots of upgrades to the distribution grid today, along with additions of storage and distributed solar, is a surprising cost optimal route.

People always doubt the new, but it's really hard to prove that it's not possible. And once it's done, it will seem obvious in retrospect.

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