U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
reuters.com
reuters.com
At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero.
Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary 5% pay cut, but that figure (if it's correct) does make it harder to argue that "we can't afford" to do anything about CO2 levels, or that tackling climate change requires us all to stop flying or heating our homes.
"the damage costs caused by climate change will reach $5.4 trillion a year by 2070, and $31 trillion a year by 2200"
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/energy/news/2020/oct/cdp-and-...
Which gives an estimate of 2.6% of global GDP in 2100.
The one you mention seems to be in the same ballpark: assuming 2% growth, in 2070 global GDP will probably be somewhere around 220T, so 5.4/220 = 2.4%.
Consider that -4 degrees chage had washington DC under a glacier thats two miles of ice, and now imagine the same change in the other direction.
It's hard for politicians to ask a Kansas farmer for a large extra tax for CO2 removal if the main justification of it is that it eventually will prevent much larger costs to someone else overseas.
In essence, policy decisions are made on a national level, mostly by people accountable to their own citizens and needing their approval (no matter if in democractic elections or needing to sustain their authoritarian power) - and you can't match national costs (since any decision to pay or invest will be national) versus global benefits of mitigation, you need to consider what the local consequences of doing nothing are going to be as that is what is going to drive all the actual action and decisions even while the same politicians make empty talks about global solidarity.
Maybe you shouldn't. The IPCC does good work, but their predictions are conservative and imperfect, and they mostly ignore tail risks. Up until 2012 they predicted that arctic summer sea ice would last until the 2050s, and now it's estimated to be gone by the 2030s.
Does anyone do better projection work?
My first thought was “that’s where auditing and bureaucracy come in” but maybe satellites are a better way
Furthermore, countries only are liable for the commitments to which they voluntarily agree in international treaties or get forced to agree with credible threats of excessive violence.
As all the climate talks have clearly shown, no one is going to sign a treaty which accepts the obligation to pay such a bill even if it could be accurately calculated; the world simply does not work that way.
And the data is available (thanks NASA): https://oco2.gesdisc.eosdis.nasa.gov/data/OCO3_DATA/OCO3_L1B...
As for the human aspect, I think holding carbon trading countries to account when there's been a treaty signed and a financial incentive to do so isn't too far fetched.
I also think as the world gets a bit more desperate there will be more motivation. I personally would like to see sanctions on products (like Brazilian beef) but probably that's dreaming.
However, I don't consider is plausible that major carbon-emitting countries will simply agree to sign a treaty in which they will owe a lot of money to others. Currently there have been only some proposals where there would be a financial incentive to trade increases or decreases in the emissions, or to implement financial incentives within a nation or region, where any penalties get paid back to your own budget/economy, and not to third world countries, and even those tend to have a hard time passing.
I simply don't consider it plausible that the nations will agree to any major wealth redistribution at a meaningful scale - they can agree to win-win solutions when getting some reasonable benefit or political consideration in return; they can agree to solutions where your problems get fixed and our balance is roughly neutral; they can agree to some charity/support in certain cases (which usually do come with some strings attached) in a limited amount, but not a wealth distribution so large that their own citizens would feel it in their wallets.
I also do not think that this will change as the world gets a bit more desperate - there is little overlap between the people and regions who will be the first to get desperate and motivated and the people whom you would want to convince to agree to pay.
I think it’s also interesting to trace how much all of it come from really good, simple and forward thinking principles, to slowly become the state we are in now.
For instance, following your idea, there will be the issue with countries that produce more CO2 than they can afford, but we can’t make them pay as it would literally be a matter life or death to them. So they get an exception.
They then become a beacon of CO2 relocation. We start to pass more laws to limit that trend, but the existing companies will be grandfathered. They then have a monopoly on the scheme, and also find other loopholes, progressively expanding the amount of CO2 they can get away with.
During that time, these countries will be more and more CO2 swamped, degrade beyond belief, and someone will be pesting against the demon that thought about taxing countries in the first place.
To put my naive ideas out as well, I kinda see economic tricks the same way we say “don’t try to solve social problems through technology”. We should straight get the bigger economies to shoulder infra construction in weaker economies no strings attached. No loan, no debt, no nothing. We’re all extinct anyway if we don’t do it.
Who is meant by "we" in this sentence? And in what ways do you consider that it's plausible to "get them to shoulder it" in excess of whatever they freely choose to do?
> We’re all extinct anyway if we don’t do it.
Citation needed - the IPCC published worst case scenarios are far from extinction, and especially in the countries which would shoulder the burden the expected damage the local consequences are "very bad" in the sense that a few percent decrease in GDP growth is an enormously large economic damage. It's not clear if spending 5% of GDP on that (or much more, if you expect them to "shoulder the burden" as well) would be worth it for them, since they'll have to invest in local mitigations anyway due to the already accumulated greenhouse gases.
5% of global gross product is a lot. For example, it's more than what the world affords to spend on all kinds of education together. It's far more than what would cost to truly eliminate world hunger and most major diseases. It's an order of magnitude more than what the world has devoted for charitable purposes. It's literally the equivalent of mobilizing 400 million people to work only on that thing - if the expected bad consequences of climate change are e.g. 200 million displaced people, then that's very bad, but it's not worth to have 400 million people devote their lives to prevent 200 million from needing to migrate.
That's just for carbon neutrality. We have put 2 teratons of carbon into the atmosphere since industrialization.
Yes we probably don't need to remove all of that, but at least 1 teraton is probably a very good idea, by trees, olivine, seeding oceans, pumping into the ground (which I think eventually comes back out.
This is kind of like the mainstream reporting on the budget deficit, which always concentrates on the YEARLY deficit (2.77 trillion) versus 129 trillion overall.
It seems hard to believe that removing CO2 from the atmosphere could ever be less expensive than not emitting it to begin with. You're working against thermodynamics.
So the whole thing seems like a fraud. An excuse to keep emitting CO2 while claiming that you'll do something about it "tomorrow."
Carbon removal need not involve mega facilities running co2 scrubbers.
Sure, it would clearly be cheaper to emit less if the emissions were mostly coming from a small number of controlled facilities. But when the sources are millions of tailpipes and smokestacks across the globe, it's at least plausible that a centralized, new recapture solution would be cheaper than decreasing emissions in millions of old places.
I definitely see this happening much faster than any attempts at atmospheric capture would even make a tiny dent.
With enough small modular reactors, we might get to the same point elsewhere. The German renewables mix does seem to drive prices up, especially in certain peaks, because nature is unpredictable and you can absolutely have a freak streak of several windless, dark, cold days in the winter.
Anyone with the right equipment can just do it, without asking permission, just like CO₂ emitters can.
There are simply too many humans for the way in which we as a species currently behave.
Either we need single parent families, globally, for a few generations, to get numbers down to a sustainable level, or, we have to convince/force 7 billion people to accept and adhere to major changes in how they live their lives.
CO₂ is a basically easy problem, compared to this, if it is possible to take the route of geo-engineering, because, as you say, it's not necessary to change how people behave; but I think no matter what, there is a need to change how people behave, or billions die from famine and economic failure, induced by ecological collapse.
I don't think people will change (indeed, there will be large numbers of people vocally against change), I think Governments will at best effectively do nothing "(we're building lots of renewable! but we're also building lots of gas at the same time!"), or more likely make things worse ("we'll phase out coal by 2070"), so my expectation is human suffering on a scale never seen before in all human history.
Humans are kākāpō; we're over-reproducing, having as they did no meaningful natural predators to keep us in check, and sooner or later, that leads to ecological collapse.
(The kākāpō went through several cycles of this and evolved to reproduce very, very slowly, and so came into balance with their environment, and then were very nearly almost completely wiped out when humans arrived.)
Also I don't want humanity to be almost completely wiped out.
I may also be wrong to think it, but I would expect if you halved the world population, assuming it was done equally across the world, you would indeed halve human carbon emissions; half as many people, half as many homes, cars, power stations, etc.
The planet can't cope now - the environment is falling apart right now, already - and the mid-range estimate there's another two or three billion people to come over the next few decades.
There are estimates in excess of this, there are estimates lower. Estimates which have population declines see slow declines only.
I've not seen any real understanding of why the fertility rate is dropping, particularly in first world countries. That's a concern; what happens if the factors causing this to happen are transient?
That's part of why the estimates are only estimates, of course.
> I've not seen any real understanding of why the fertility rate is dropping, particularly in first world countries. That's a concern; what happens if the factors causing this to happen are transient?
The cited article discusses several potential causes and none are going away in the near future. On a global basis, humanity's current demographic profile locks in decades of either very low growth or a decline in most regions. Worth noting that these changes have all come about at a much faster pace than even the most aggressive estimates.
Despite this as our overall numbers will start shrinking, resource consumption will grow and its growth can't be prevented by force without conflict. The only class of realistic solutions to environmental degradation are technological ones. Tapping into new stockpiles (likely out in space) and increasing efficiency slash decreasing resource intensity of economic activity are more viable if one aims to avoid armed confrontation.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/22/world/global-population-s...
Point of emission capture is at least technologically feasible.
But even more like how some organizations (like PurpleAir, maybe thats the only one though?) will get you connected with the hardware necessary to be a part of their air quality monitoring network.
Except this is a way more interesting idea for a lot of reasons.
With a meagre Carbon Tax of $15/tonne, coal costs double in the US.
There's nothing that can be done to fix coal power apart from just shutting it all down.
If it is not economically feasible to run a coal plant if they do not externalize the pollution cost, how is that my problem? And if the demand justifies it, the cost for coal-generated electricity will go up.
It's a matter of priorities and resource allocation.
Why do we allow coal operators to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else?
Well it's your problem because they currently do externalize the pollution cost, and the status quo is difficult to overcome.
> Why do we allow coal operators to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else?
Great question, but the rough answer is that a lot of people don't believe (or don't want to believe) that the cost to everyone else is meaningful.
"Officer, these men are stealing my lawn, a few blades of grass a day as they walk by!" This doesn't engender a threat response until there's visible damage, and even then the solution is likely to involve signs and warnings, since the responsibility for total damage is so widely distributed. We need a fence around the climate lawn, and we can't leave the gate open for some people and not others, if you catch my drift.
We're beginning to see global acknowledgment of the problems and gradual progress towards reducing emissions. Once technology can accurately measure the cost of the negative externalities, they can be priced in. If the cost is on an exponential trend, where each ton of co2 is now seen to cost the operator an additional .0000001 cents, but 100 years later might cost millions, with regards to preventable damage, markets currently are accurately pricing in the costs. They're just not equipped to assess global climate and long term planning as relevant. That has to come from legislating sane and scientific and fair rules.
There's nothing inherently wrong with burning coal if there's a globally recognized system of accountability. Since there's not likely to ever be such a hegemony, you get what we have now - slow, frustratingly bureaucratic incremental progress, and therefore the need for mitigation as well as sustainable energy tech.
Of course, that caused the prices of electricity for households to jump up. [2]
[0] https://www.euractiv.com/section/emissions-trading-scheme/ne...
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/germany-coal-tops-wind-as-primary-elec...
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/europeans-brace-for-hard-winter-as-ene...
[1] https://carbontracker.org/cop26-a-chance-to-reset-and-elimin...
The carbon goes down a hole in the ground, somewhere with the right geology. You can think of it as a gas well run in reverse.
Well, at least you'll have to convince them to pay $100 per tonne captured.
For the right person in the US the cost of keeping that rhino alive in their backyard (or safe from poachers in a reserve in Africa) is much much more but both not an inconceivable amount to pay and not an undesirable one.
The best part CO2 capture is that motivated resourced people could in theory act without the worlds cooperation. People who aren't motivated and/or resourced could choose to not act and the problem could still get solved.
Currently the only way to achieve that kind of effect is to help under-resourced people to act by giving them resources. I would suggest that for a lot of reasons this is a very tricky solution.
Electrification of transportation would also make this much easier, because instead of having billions of little fossil fuel burners all over the planet, you could concentrate that burning to just power plants. At that point there would be a lot fewer places where it would be difficult to sequester carbon (e.g. planes, large ocean vessels).
Maybe we should just massively subsidize point of emission carbon capture for fossil fuels. We need it for some use cases that renewables don't work for anyway (yet).
Any legislation that increases cost of energy will impact poorest the most, but for some reason cost of energy to the poor is not brought up much in climate discussions.
And of course China is the biggest emitter by far, so something special needs to be done there. Likely first world countries would have to subsidize third world country energy costs.
Depending on efficiency this could be better solution than energy storage (instead storing energy you pull CO2 and then burn it later if energy is needed).
I find it would be great if we could convert CO2 to something that cannot be profitably burned.
Sure, in an ideal world, we would just all do the right thing. But that is not the world we live in.
I'd rather pin my hopes on technological progress than political magic.
Suppose it costs $1 to avoid emitting CO2 (e.g. replace gas car with electric car) and $10 to extract the CO2 after the fact. If you get the latter down to $3, you're still upside down. So where does the $3 come from? Presumably a government, but it doesn't even matter. Anyone would still be better off spending that money to subsidize electric cars or solar panels or something.
Don't. You can't predict prices like that. Consider that electric cars roll out of the factory having emitted more CO2 than the equivalent combustion vehicle. It takes a lot of miles to break even. If you put a price on the CO2, you may well figure out that combustion engines end up more efficient, because carbon-neutral fuel is close to being economical.
> But then they'd still be better off spending that money to subsidize electric cars or solar panels or something.
This is a huge mistake. Don't pick winners. You don't have better information than the market.
You can predict that not emitting CO2 will cost less than emitting CO2 and then recapturing it, because it's the second law of thermodynamics.
> Consider that electric cars roll out of the factory having emitted more CO2 than the equivalent combustion vehicle. It takes a lot of miles to break even.
It takes about the number of miles that the average person drives in a year. New cars last a lot more than a year. Also, the CO2 it takes to make an electric car has a lot to do with the fact that existing vehicles and power generation emit CO2, which goes away as we get more electric vehicles and non-carbon power generation.
> If you put a price on the CO2, you may well figure out that combustion engines end up more efficient, because carbon-neutral fuel is close to being economical.
So put a price on CO2. The point isn't that subsidizing electric cars and solar panels is the best solution to the problem, it's that subsidizing carbon capture is strictly worse.
I'm not sure that's true, in two senses.
Even if the _energy_ cost is higher, the _monetary_ cost may be lower as emissions and capture don't need to be in the same place. It may be cheaper for example to just burn some petrol to cover long distances where there's less infrastructure and instead capture an equivalent amount of CO2 using energy from solar panels somewhere sunny.
I'm not certain the energy cost must be higher due to thermodynamics. If you were taking CO2 and water and recombining them to get back nat gas and oxygen then sure. But what if you're taking the CO2 and doing something else with it? If I'm thinking about this right the bond energy in CO2 is a little lower than the overall energy released. Of course things come down then to efficiencies but I don't think there's a thermodynamics point here.
You're mixing up watts with dollars, a mistake that "green energy" stockpickers make all the time. Consider all the energy that is hitting the Sahara. It's worth zero dollars, because it can't economically be used - but what if you could capture and transport it somehow, you know, like in a fuel?
> It takes about the number of miles that the average person drives in a year.
That's the lowest estimate I have ever heard - do you have a source for that?
> Also, the CO2 it takes to make an electric car has a lot to do with the fact that existing vehicles and power generation emit CO2, which goes away as we get more electric vehicles and non-carbon power generation.
Sure, but economics of scale apply to all technologies and unless you let the market do its thing, you won't know the minima and maxima.
> So put a price on CO2.
Exactly.
> The point isn't that subsidizing electric cars and solar panels is the best solution to the problem, it's that subsidizing carbon capture is strictly worse.
You don't know that. Ideally, nothing should be subsidized. However, in a market where profit is sooner found with dog meme cryptocurrency and other harebrained schemes, subsidies are arguably necessary, and then you shouldn't put all the money into directions that have already been mostly explored.
Watts cost dollars. You lose a lot of watts to heat by converting fossil fuels to CO2 and back. Overcoming those losses is quite optimistic.
> That's the lowest estimate I have ever heard - do you have a source for that?
13,500 miles, the same as the average annual miles driven in the US:
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...
> Sure, but economics of scale apply to all technologies and unless you let the market do its thing, you won't know the minima and maxima.
What market? We're talking about government subsidies for carbon capture.
It's not that simple. For instance, when there's too much electricity on the European grid because, say, wind energy is particularly strong that day in Germany, producers need to pay for someone else to take that electricity. It has negative cost. This is rare for now, but it does limit the rollout of renewables.
I thought the example of solar energy in the Sahara was rather convincing? It's a lot of untapped potential energy, it just needs a business case. CO2 prices can make that happen.
> You lose a lot of watts to heat by converting fossil fuels to CO2 and back
Again, just because it's a loss in the thermodynamic sense doesn't make it a loss in an economic sense. Fuel cells are quite efficient in the thermodynamic sense, but they're not economical when the whole pipeline is considered. That said, a technological breakthrough can turn that calculation around. You can't predict that, so you shouldn't pick winners.
> Reuters Fact Checkers made an attempt at science
Color me suspicious with that one. At least they're pointing out that other researchers arrived at far less impressive numbers.
> What market? We're talking about government subsidies for carbon capture.
I'm a strong proponent of CO2 prices. That said, if the government insists on picking winners with subsidies, they shouldn't narrow themselves down too much.
If you don't have any external pressure or subsidies on you, you can turn off solar/wind in seconds. Renewables never have to pay those fees, only slow to ramp plants do.
Sure, that's true. But what I'm saying is that negative prices don't impact the rollout of renewables because renewables never have to pay them. And in a market with lots of renewables and no distortions, prices won't go below zero anyway.
How do you know? Do you have source on that? It doesn't stand to reason that the cost of excess electricity produced by renewables should be carried by anyone else but the producers of such electricity. It's true that these overshoots wouldn't exist if coal or nuclear plants could be regulated quickly, but it's also true that if these plants didn't exist, nothing would make up for the underproduction.
> And in a market with lots of renewables and no distortions, prices won't go below zero anyway.
Alright, let's assume there's zero cost to curtailment (not true, but close enough) and that excess energy is only produced because the compensation structure works that way: You still have wasted potential energy from curtailment. Increasing the rollout strictly increases that waste. Therefore, it is reasonable to put that energy into fuel production, especially considering that the best combination of volatile renewables today is natural gas, which can be regulated quickly.
If they're acting on normal motives, they won't produce any excess specifically because they would have to share in paying the cost.
At least with any kind of bid for production system.
I could imagine a system where negative or too-low prices trigger targeted punishment, as far as I know that would be very different from what we have. For a normal market, if prices go too low then renewables can just say "okay we're offering zero power to sell right now".
> You still have wasted potential energy from curtailment. Increasing the rollout strictly increases that waste. Therefore, it is reasonable to put that energy into fuel production, especially considering that the best combination of volatile renewables today is natural gas, which can be regulated quickly.
Yep, all true.
I wish that was true. Volvo recently put out a statement that it takes about 70k miles to recover the initially higher energy input using the world average energy mix. Some 9 years of the average UK milage.
Of course, if manufacturing is made significantly less CO2 intensive then the maths change.
For what it's worth, even if there was no CO2 benefit I'd still be rooting for electric cars to succeed for various other reasons including noise, particulates etc.
The problem isn't getting wealthy Californians to swap their SUV for a Tesla, it's getting poor Cubans to give up the only car their government will allow them to afford, cryptoenthusiasts to give up on Bitcoin, Saudi Arabia to decide it doesn't want to exploit its only resource and China to retire its recently constructed coal power plants. That doesn't just require lots of money, it requires magic
You only have to dictate policy to them if you're trying to get them to pay for it. If you're going to pay for it yourself, there is nothing at all stopping you from paying people in Africa or South America to buy electric cars. The main thing preventing this is that you would have to convince your taxpayers to pay to offset emissions in some other country. But that's the same problem with carbon capture, except worse, because you would need more dollars to offset the same amount of CO2.
I strangely think the rich world would be more comfortable building carbon capture infrastructure at home than clean energy offshore. The jobs are domestic. And you aren’t handing a productive asset to another country.
Hell, find it with an import tax on polluting countries and we don’t even have to pay for most of it.
You're still giving productive infrastructure to foreign countries. A Nazi doormat could get elected running to redirect those panels and subsidies for domestic use.
And if you don't want people in the developing world to simply sell the brand new Teslas you've swapped for their 30 year old bangers, you're also going to have to build out a charging infrastructure, ensure that new power stations built to handle the increased electricity demand are renewable, and shut down people's routes to simply buying new ICE cars manufactured in other countries and pocketing the difference between that and the cost of the Tesla. Even assuming that politics doesn't exist and the world will do exactly what the US wants if they spend enough money. the cost of offset doesn't seem quite so expensive after all...
I can think of tons of problems with this.
It requires more scarce than resources like lithium to make cars.
You can be scammed by people selling the car and using that money to buy a house and a cheap commission engine. You don't have the issue with carbon capture.
Your likely to face much more political pushback for subsidizing others carbon use. "Let's make our country carbon neutral" can resonate with people as it's cleaning up after ourselves. That's much easier to convince people to do.
Can Africa and South America even use them? Is it reasonable for them, do they have the infrastructure? I know in some countries electricity can be scarce-- and power companies turn off the supply at night.
It's cheaper to scrub carbon, than it is to fix the societal and economic issues across the globe required to make passing out electric vehicles work
What do you think it takes to capture carbon?
> You can be scammed by people selling the car and using that money to buy a house and a cheap commission engine.
How is that a profitable scam? Anybody else could buy the same car with the same subsidy. You can't resell it for more than you paid.
> Your likely to face much more political pushback for subsidizing others carbon use. "Let's make our country carbon neutral" can resonate with people as it's cleaning up after ourselves.
The only reason to do this is if you've already done that. Otherwise it would make more sense to spend the money subsidizing replacement of fossil fuels in your own country first.
> Can Africa and South America even use them? Is it reasonable for them, do they have the infrastructure? I know in some countries electricity can be scarce-- and power companies turn off the supply at night.
Solar panels and electric cars go together like hand and glove. The car doesn't care what part of the day you charge it, so you charge it when the sun is shining. And you don't need a functioning power grid to install cheap solar on your own house/business.
What's the subsidy level? Because people earning a few dollars a day aren't paying much more for your subsidised Tesla than they paid for their 30 year old car with an ICE. And if you start subsidising new EVs to the extent that your giving them away for less than $1k, your scheme might actually be worse for the environment (Production costs are a significant fraction of the carbon footprint of a car, especially if it isn't used very much, and directly or indirectly the subsidy makes brand new cars cheap for a lot of people in developed countries that don't need them...)
The more you consider the logistics of such a scheme, the more carbon capture makes sense, and not because I'm averse to the idea of subsidies for EVs or solar manufacture
So the subsidy is only the amount required to make a new electric car cheaper than a new gasoline car, for the people breaking into the middle class who can now afford that. That's the same as it is in the US, isn't very much, and is declining as batteries get cheaper. It may be soon that it won't even be necessary.
Battered old cars are worth more than a year's average per capita income in much of the world. They're not throwing away recently manufactured US/European/Japanese cars before 2050 just because their country's 0.1% now find subsidised Teslas more financially attractive than Fords or Mercedes. Actually, they probably won't find subsidised Teslas more appealing than Fords or Mercedes if they drive long distances, because it's a lot easy to find a roadside shack with gasoline than EV hookups.
There are already production EVs cheaper than any US manufactured car made in China, but it isn't going to make much of a dent in the residual demand for the billion ICE cars, trucks vans already in existence in places where people buy second hand and maintain forever.
I'm not familiar with how exactly carbon capture technology works to be honest, but I believe it involves taking advantage of chemistry to separate carbon from air. I don't see how lithium would factor into this as there isn't any absolute need for batteries, as there are with electric cars. Carbon capture at the point of production(ie in factories themselves) could be hooked up to the grid and still have a high rate of capture
>Solar panels and electric cars go together like hand and glove. The car doesn't care what part of the day you charge it, so you charge it when the sun is shining. And you don't need a functioning power grid to install cheap solar on your own house/business.
Enough to charge a car? That's not a simple setup, that takes a serious set up. That effectively increases the cost of running an electric car by a significant margin.
>The only reason to do this is if you've already done that. Otherwise it would make more sense to spend the money subsidizing replacement of fossil fuels in your own country first.
I don't disagree with that. It's the simplest way to start, and represents the most benefit for the taxpayers paying for it.
Ok -- Empty out the North.
http://www.mappedplanet.com/karten/klima/januar_temp-na.png
How about it? I get to move to Memphis, where I no longer need to heat my dwelling in the Winter.
https://www.chatelaine.com/home-decor/environment-eco-home-h...
I pay 11.3 cents per k/w for electricy
https://www.torontohydro.com/for-home/rates
Natural gas costs 4.71 US/MMBtu
https://www.torontohydro.com/for-home/rates
Now
1 MMBTU = 293.07107 kWh
So with ALL of this, electricity is 7 times more expensive than natural gas.
Now, it costs $125 or so per month to heat a house here - Using electricity, that would be $875. Per month.
https://www.torontohydro.com/about-us/company-overview
Only 6.3% Natural Gas.
In a nutshell, I can't afford it. That's ok, I can just to Memphis for my retirement.
I'm not sure the mentality that it'd be rude to consider tackling the latter problem unless and until US per capita emissions drop below the global average is going to help the planet.
This may come as a shock to some, but pretty much nobody outside the US cares what people from the US think about them.
Which is to say that things that seem impossible politically might suddenly become very politically possible.
This is the "get rich by saving money" fallacy. Imagine all the CO2 of a century of industrial development had not been emitted. We'd be enjoying a life without man-made climate change, but also without any of the amenities of modern life.
Consider that air-to-fuel companies are pretty close to profitability with just a modest increase in carbon taxes. Consider also that countries like Germany spent a lot of money on transitioning to renewables, with very little to show for it. Once you picked the low-hanging fruit, there are no more "savings" to be had without drastically cutting down on production. At that point, you might as well turn some of that production into sequestration.
> So the whole thing seems like a fraud.
I get the same feeling with electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines. Why? Because these have all rolled out on account of lavish subsidies, not because the market decided they are the most efficient solution. Just put a price on CO2 and watch the market figure that one out. Results may be not what you expect.
Most people on earth still live in conditions that are nowhere near the kind of development you are likely enjoying. They are also those who will feel the effects of man-made climate change most.
That is why this argument falls flat. We didn't buy this kind of living standard with some future self-inflicted suffering: your amenities of modern life are bought with the suffering of others.
But the deal is done and over. Now a debt is owed.
You're right that it's not right to force still developing countries to halt their progress. I just wonder if there's a way to help them develop in a way that is better long-term.
Unfortunately, most of the activism seems to revolve around "us sinners" needing to abstain from our indulgences.
They still benefit from industrial development, even though with a certain time lag compared to us (because that is it: time lag. Living standards in poorer countries lag behind those of Europe or Japan, but they rise nonetheless.)
For example, about 90 per cent of humanity has electricity and uses some electrical appliances. Few people live in truly pre-industrial conditions.
The type of energy and even when it’s spent is non-uniform (think about the Texas gas debacle).
The alternative isn't just trying to fit a heavy battery into a plane, it's to scoop the algae up and use it to make carbon-neutral biofuels to run the plane.
> Earth is also full of natural alkaline minerals that can be used as cements or for soil enrichment while naturally absorbing acidic carbon dioxide.
Then you're trading the thermodynamic problem for an economic one. You have to mine all of that stuff up, do chemistry on it, lose the economic value of the minerals in their existing form and end up with an incredible volume of industrial waste you have to pay to dispose of.
It doesn't violate the laws of physics for that to be cheaper, but it's still pretty unlikely. Remember that the alternative doesn't have to cover the full cost of generating electricity from non-carbon sources, only the difference in cost between that and burning coal. That's pretty close to zero, if not negative, as it is, and that's without a carbon tax.
I am completely with you. We aren't even able/willing to remove all existing subsidies/tax breaks for coal. We know what we need to do. We can't wait for developing nations to freeze/starve to death before we cut subsidies on our own coal and gas industry.
Even people at Brookings (which I'd call right wing) can't support subsidies and tax breaks for coal and gas:
» To lead global subsidy reforms, the United States will have to strengthen these commitments by actively dismantling its own substantial production subsidies. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute reported that direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry totaled $20 billion per year, with 80% going toward oil and gas. In addition, from 2019 to 2023, tax subsidies are expected to reduce federal revenue by around $11.5 billion. Considering that production subsidies grew 28% between 2017 and 2019, the United States will be under a lot of scrutiny from other countries wanting to see evidence of reform before making their own commitments.
» This is a challenging task for the United States because production subsidies are embedded in the tax code and promote fossil fuels in a variety of ways. For example, producers can deduct a fixed percentage of gross revenue instead of their actual costs as capital expenses, deduct exploration and development costs, amortize geological and geophysical expenditures, and benefit from accelerated depreciation of natural gas infrastructure. Oil and gas companies are also permitted to use the Last In, First Out (LIFO) accounting method to sell their most recent and expensive reserves first, thereby reducing the value of their inventory. Other incentives include foreign tax credits and energy production credits.
https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-global-fossil-f...
If we can't even remove direct subsidies and tax breaks (including accounting hijinks) from our domestic coal and gas industry, what moral authority do we have to ask other (less affluent) countries to reduce their subsidies?
Any ideas on what groups this would affect most?
What about rural areas? They have higher logistical costs, so cost of goods would go up. Things being sold to rural businesses also require someone to traffic their way out there. Point of reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/world/europe/france-fuel-...
This is a good lesson for the carbon capture economics.
We know how to make synthetic fuels and biofuels. As a general rule, making them costs around the same as carbon capture. "Grow some plants or something" is actually one of the most efficient known methods of carbon capture.
Biofuels cost more than pumping crude out of the ground. They also cost more, in most cases, than electric cars. So if you don't care about CO2 then fossil fuels win over biofuels because they're cheaper and if you do care about CO2 then electric cars win over biofuels because they're cheaper. Basically nobody uses biofuels unless they're subsidized. But we know how to do it; we just also know of something better to use in 98% of cases.
Then you have the other 2% of cases. Like aircraft. Existing batteries are too heavy for aircraft and we don't know if or how long it'll be before we have sufficient ones. But we could use biofuels for that. Put a carbon tax on fossil fuels and that's what might happen, because for a plane that might be the most cost effective alternative.
So you say hey, maybe it'd be better to keep using fossil fuels in planes and then use carbon capture. If carbon capture has a cost similar to biofuels, that could be competitive. But it's not. Because biofuels produce fuel. With carbon capture you still have to pay to buy petroleum.
Some launch systems fly on hypergols (hydrazine is one of them; it is not used in the West anymore as a main fuel, being too toxic), some burn hydrogen with oxygen, some burn kerosene (RP-1), a new system is coming online that actually uses methane (Starship).
And these were just the liquid propellants. There are also solid fuel rockets.
The best fuels for the first stage of launchers are hydrocarbons, due to their low cost and good density. And the first stage is where most of the propellant in a launcher is consumed. The cost of propellant becomes increasingly important as the cost of the launcher is reduced; for SpaceX it is very important. The use of cheap propellants also allows more testing of their engines.
Another possibility is to store CO2 underground, and when "charging" use a solid oxide electrolyzer to turn it to carbon. When discharging, it would be run as a SOFC and produce CO2, which would be cooled and stored again. I believe Noon Energy is looking into schemes like this.
In addition to this, removing historical accumulated carbon is also pretty important. The expected cumulative damage at the point of 2050 will be catastrophic even in the most optimistic projection.
Material limitations, and technical limitations may make it cheaper practically.
As an example, let's look at rockets. Which is cheaper, removing the CO2 after release, or developing switching technologies, for instance, to using O2 and H. Well, for certain applications, where the energy density and logistics of the fuel matter, pulling the CO2 out afterwards makes more sense.
Now, yes, that is a small example, but my point is just to show thermodynamic efficiency doesn't translate directly to cost effectiveness for all applications.
While paying the higher price today to have it removed? That's not much of an excuse, that's buying your way out of it. If people want to go that route and they pay for their own emissions (there, of course, is going to be the problem) then be my guest. If you'd rather go the typically cheaper route of changing the technology or lifestyle (e.g. drive electric or ditch the car altogether), that's also fine.
To put some numbers on (a), David MacKay's book has some numbers[1]:
> The laws of physics say that the energy required must be at least 0.2 kWh per kg of CO2....
> Lackner told me in June 2008 that, in a dry climate, the concentration cost has been reduced to about 0.18–0.37 kWh of low-grade heat per kg CO2. The compression cost is 0.11 kWh per kg. Thus Lackner’s total cost is 0.48 kWh or less per kg.
Burning a kilogram of coal generates 8 kWh[2] and 2.42 kg CO2[3]. So that's 8 kWh generated, requiring 1.16 kWh to pull 2.42 kg CO2 back out out of the atmosphere.
So about 15% of the energy obtained by putting carbon in the atmosphere is needed to remove it.
[1] https://www.withouthotair.com/c31/page_244.shtml)
[2] https://www.euronuclear.org/glossary/coal-equivalent/
[3] https://360energy.net/how-does-using-energy-create-carbon-em...
I disagree, there's an easy solution to eliminating those emissions: have zero long-haul jets and zero cement production. Before this gets (inevitably) downvoted, the more interesting question is why do we need either, what alternatives are there, how fundamentally we're willing to question our biases and expectations over what counts as a necessity. If saving our environment is an overriding priority, then the extent of the compromises we have to make can be made clearer.
Once we’ve shifted all the excess air travel over to rail, that will leave a much smaller set of jet travel to offset.
The other thing is, people move around. Airlines can change flights easily to map to demographic changes; that's a major strength of air travel. Not as easy to rip up tracks and start over.
I think biofuels might be a better option for aviation until the tech has time to catch up.
Current batteries have an energy density of 90-190 Wh/kg, depending on the specific chemistry. Jet fuel on the other hand has an energy density around 12,000 Wh/kg. Obviously some amount of that will be made back up with the relative light weight and high efficiency of electric motors, but that is a very step energy difference to overcome.
A quick bit of Googling says that turbofan engines are about 40% efficient, while triple phase electric motors are roughly 85% efficient. Given the 3,000 nautical mile range of a 737NG, some back of the envelope math says that an EV equivalent would have a range of about 100 miles at best[0]. Forget LAX -> SFO, this isn't even enough to get you from LA to Bakersfield. And even 100 is optimistic, given that the FAA requires that all planes have extra fuel for diversions, weather, holding, etc.
At this point, I suspect it might be easier to refine kerosene out of capture CO2 using excess renewable energy than it would be to make an EV 737 replacement.
0 - I'm obviously not accounting for weight and aerodynamic differences, which are beyond my capability to estimate, but I doubt that would make a significant difference. I'm also assuming that we're using Li-Ion Cobalt batteries, which have the highest density. The more common Phosphate chemistry makes these numbers even more bleak.
The top spec 777 would give you 677 miles on batteries, assuming 400Wh/kg. Enough to serve the LAX to SFO route, but a fairly limited vehicle all things considered, especially for the price and size.
> Long range jets can fly 20,000 km with passengers.
Sure, but economics begins to dominate here. There’s a reason I chose the 737 as a reference benchmark; it’s the gold standard of short to medium range airliner, and absolutely the vehicle that we should be aiming to minimize. If you have to pull out a 777 sized aircraft to service LAX -> SFO, then the price of tickets is going to begin rising significantly to cover the higher vehicle cost. I’m also genuinely quite doubtful that many airports can handle 100% of their jets switching over to wide body aircraft, which this would require, without significant improvements to the terminals and other facilities. If governments are forced to upgrade airports to save money on rail, I’d argue that that’s penny wise and pound foolish.
All of this can be done, of course, but it really begins to erode all of the supposed cost savings over HSR.
Replacing “them all” is to set the bar unnecessarily high. I suspect there’s an 80/20 rule in effect here, and we should aim to replace the most popular short haul routes, not all of them. That’s why I specifically called out SF->LA. Major population centers within a few hundred miles of each other are prime HSR targets, and in countries with HSR we see a lot of passengers preferring rail for these exact types of trips.
There’s no reasonable world where every single small town gets a high speed rail running to it, but we shouldn’t set that as our goal. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In particular there are nice stretches of good density along the coasts of the US that seem like prime targets for high speed rail, that would make travel more ecologically sound and comfortable for a large chunk of the population.
> Just the right-of-way property transactions would be daunting. Look at California as a lesson in how this can't be easily done.
And yet right of way transactions regularly pass for highway and highway expansions. Not without difficulty, but they get done. Letting rail projects grind to a halt while forcing road ones through is a political choice, not a law of nature.
> The other thing is, people move around. Airlines can change flights easily to map to demographic changes; that's a major strength of air travel. Not as easy to rip up tracks and start over.
This is only kind of true. Changing routes is easy only to a point. Expanding and refitting airports to handle increased traffic can be incredibly expensive and slow. LA is going to spend a huge amount of time and money trying to fix not just their airport, but also the transit to their airport which is currently overwhelmed.
My city is probably well on its way to its airport being incapable of handling the recent population growth. Expanding that airport and improving transit to it will be massively expensive, and require the eminent domain of a lot of property.
Secondly, while people do move around, it’s not like they’re throwing darts at the map and moving there. The places Americans are moving to are easily predictable; they’re moving to cities. You’re not going to wake up one day to discover that America has moved to the middle of nowhere Kansas.
Generally the cities that would make the best HSR targets are also the least likely to totally collapse in population too. NYC isn’t going anywhere, neither is Boston or Philadelphia. One would be forgiven not predicting the rise of say, Denver, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least be aiming for HSR to the obvious targets.
And thirdly, transit availability and where people move is a two way process. People like and care about access to transit options, and the quality of the local airport (and cost of flights) is already one thing that people consider when they move to a new location. There’s no reason to believe that access to HSR wouldn’t be the same. Especially since it’s possible to put HSR stations in far more convenient locations, given the lack of turbine noise to piss off the neighbors.
If that was it the only thing left, we'd have no problem. That's at pre-industrial emissions level. https://ourworldindata.org/uploads/2020/09/Emissions-by-sect...
Long haul aviation makes immigration feasible without dangerous long ship trips, which are worse emissions than long haul aviation. So we should keep them around in some form, but we can improve the efficiency and even electrify them.
What do you use for a house foundation? Many apartments are made of cement and essentially every building uses a cement foundation.
Luckily, cement is not a big part of the total emissions.
Neither is long haul travel, particularly. Short haul flights are about half of all passenger-miles in air travel, can be made fully electric, and long-haul and medium haul flights can be split up into multiple legs for almost every route.
EDIT:I will say there are ways to reduce CO2 emissions from cement. You can make clinker with electric heat just fine. But half the CO2 is from the clinker itself. Over time, cement will absorb the CO2 it emitted as it fully cures, but that can take a century. It’s possible to accelerate that process. It’s also possible to use alternatives, like sulfur cement.
This is patently false. A quick search shows a number of 8% of global CO2 going to cement production and use emissions.
(As far as indirect emissions like transport, the heat to make the clinker, etc, then yeah, I can believe that it gets to 8% total.)
Rocks.
> Many apartments are made of cement
Make them from wood.
Aviation and shipping make up 5-6% of GHG emissions, not a trivial amount. Aviation is projected to expand several-fold by 2050 which, in the context of decarbonisation, means it will take up a progressively larger fraction of global emissions over time. It will be one of the last and greatest challenges - which is exactly why it will require offsets, carbon capture or otherwise. The aviation's offset market, CORSIA, is already one of the most developed in the world. Your optimism about electrifying aviation is not shared by the industry.
A better solution would be to eventually ban/tax out of existence regular jet fuel, and move to synthetically-produced jet fuel[1] which can be used in today's jet engines, but is carbon neutral. Perhaps eventually all fuels can be 100% synthetic when new jets are designed for it.
[1] https://www.dw.com/en/sustainable-aviation-fuel-power-to-liq...
We can make biofuel at some price. We can capture CO2 at some price. Build that into the product and there's no reason to reduce to zero.
However, if you do want to make fuel from it, say for airliners, then it's totally possible, you just have to add hydrogen, and more energy than you'll get from burning the fuel. E.g. the Sabatier process to make methane.
I find this aspect of global warming intriguing. I wish som physicist could fill in.
Aren't we always fighting the laws of thermodynamics?
Is this what global warming is all about if you leave out the details about CO2 etc?
Is it even possible to fight?
If you want to learn about carbon dioxide removal check out AirMiners: https://bootup.airminers.org/ they have a useful self paced curriculum
Once we get closer to zero emissions it makes more sense to think about capture IMO.
Edit: oh wait I think you are saying the same as you mention reduction is first priority, sorry.
Mitigation is better than fantasizing about rapid fossil fuel elimination. There are way too many lives that depend on maintaining the status quo, in terms of power and economics and chemical resources. Progress will be gradual, like cleanup of the pacific garbage patch.
As in, if someone pays $1B to decarbonize, the entire world benefits from it. So everyone is incentivised to make someone else pay for it.
Empirically, things like these tend to be very underfunded.
¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
Everyone wants to do emission reduction first and delay geoengineering as long as possible, when we should be doing the opposite. Even if the financial cost appears much smaller, it's clear now that large scale emission reduction is politically very expensive. Emission reduction is the clean, ideal solution that we don't have the ability to scalably implement yet. Geoengineering should be temporary quick and dirty approach we use to buy time, creating some problems that last decades in exchange for time to implement a solution for a problem that lasts for millennia. Assuming that cheap geoengineering techniques whose negative side effects are bounded in space and time can be found, but I think that they can.
As renewables come online at cost parity, they will displace fossil fuel usage. That will cause a dramatic decline in fossil fuel price as oversupply becomes a constant problem. So people buying fossil fuel will be spending less for the same result.
Now, one might make the following observation; we've taken fossil fuel profits away and consumed them immediately rather then re-investing them (what capital owners typically do). This means less investment and thus growth. Frankly, I find the hypothesis not so compelling. There is little evidence that capital is the bottleneck in Capex spending. My view is the world suffers from too few good ideas chased by even fewer people/organizations and under the constraints of bumbling governments.
GDP issue aside, at 100$/ton this only adds 1$/gallon to the price of gas and 0.50$/therm to the price of natural gas. That's definitely absorbable by the declines that will happen from oversupply.
I think you got the first sentence flipped? GDP will stay the same, but actual productive output (eg. stuff being produced) will go down.
If their pie-in-the-sky $100 comes through, that is.
If you are in USA, has the government absorbed the increase in energy prices? Of course not. It costs everyone more to pay their heating bill or buy gasoline than just a year ago. Wealthy people can afford it. Poor people cannot. And the energy spikes also contribute to the huge inflation in food and everyday goods, once again hurting poor people the most.
That's the most basic of examples. Reality hits in many ways. Poor people generally have to travel much further to work every day. No matter whether they take public or private transportation, when fuel costs go up, maintenance drops... routes get cancelled, cars break down, tolls go up, whatever.
Or employment goes away entirely. Are mines, factories, construction projects still profitable when energy costs spike? Some yes, some no.
Only then the extraction slowed down.
Maybe we can start by including the cost for sequestering the CO2 in the cost of the fuel?
We're all going to end up paying a lot more than 5%, some of us a _lot more._
Problem is, even if all human sourced CO2e emissions ceased tomorrow, the world would still continue to warm significantly because the blanket is already up there. The natural processes that sequester carbon take many millennia (or more) to make any significant changes.
1) this sets a quantifiable measure on what a carbon tax should be. Which is essentially higher than it would be to remove said carbon. The tax including a convenience fee.
2) We're still on the bottom of the S curve for carbon removal. I'm not sure why anyone that visits HN would be surprised that a new technology costs more. But if we're to survive climate change it is essential that we innovate this technology and make it as cheap as possible. So see $100/tonne as a stepping stone rather than a final product. That will not be the final price, but rather comparable to your first home computers.
Edit: I know I said 2, but a third thing to consider is that we already have too much carbon in the atmosphere. We really need to be net negative, not zero. In addition to this we can't expect developing countries to choose between power and existential crisis. As rich countries we have burden from past emissions. So if we are the ones removing it, that's more equitable. But also probably the only way it's going to happen. If we don't step up, no one will. Though we're also the ones that will fare the best because of our already elevated status. But is that the kind of people we want to be?
But there is zero appetite for curbing growth. Bangladesh is a miracle of capitalism. When my dad was a kid 1 out of 3 children died by age 5. Now it’s 1 out of 40 and the life expectancy is 72 years. (Closing in on white Americans.) Nobody wants to change course on that.
This is a strange statement to make about DAC. Once you think about what that means there's a lot of thorny political issues.
Removing carbon from the air to store it permanently does not give you anything economically. Someone's going to have to have to pay for it. Is that people who made their wealth based on fossil fuels? People who emit most or who did so in the past? Or everyone?
Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favor of supporting development of this tech. But there are complicated political questions to be answered. Framing this as "apolitical" is probably not going to help.
There is an economical advantage to reducing CO2 from the environment. It gives you an environment that humans can thrive in (by way of being an environment that the current food chain can thrive in). It’s hard to consider investing in the future when you think it might be apocalyptical. Easier if you think there is a future for humanity.
The problem with that is that it is kind of expensive. To the point where it would be cheaper to simply stop burning stuff and maybe do something cleaner instead. By instead committing to lowering cost to 100$ per tonne, the US is basically announcing subsidizing the continued dumping of CO2 in our atmosphere by making it cheaper to green-wash that business with carbon offsetting. That is going to inevitably involve some creative bookkeeping. The net effect of that will be lots more carbon ending up in the atmosphere than actually captured. Courtesy of the US tax payer.
The best way to capture carbon is to leave it in the ground.
I actually think where we're at is relatively decent. We know what's happening, can reliably predict certain storms.
Definitely don't want to go any higher, but going in the opposite direction for too long is entering ice age status.
The goal shouldn't be to adhere to a specific number, but identify an acceptable range/boundary.
You mean aside from the massive wildfires, depleting groundwater with droughts in so many parts of the world, etc.? The status quo hits the 'sweet spot' for you?
Likewise droughts are just as much caused by misuse of water resources than they are changes in rainfall. California in particular has no business having cities as large as it does given their groundwater situation - and that has been before global warming accelerated.
And it's not like putting the blame somewhere else somehow changes the reality.
By the way, I'm not arguing that we shouldn't decrease the CO2 levels. We should. I'm trying to have a nuanced and interesting discussion about a very complex phenomena.
Each of those problems you brought up can also be mitigated with proper engineering as well.
Take for example how Israel effectively solved the drought problem. Now that's an exceptional case and it wouldn't be logistically feasible to expect every nation to dedicate so much of their GDP to such problems. I'm just trying to suggest there are other variables at play, besides moving CO2 levels up and down like a thermometer.
You probably want to start bailing immediately, also start plugging holes immediately. Except our technologies for bailing aren't practical yet (and may never be). If we don't plug the holes, we'll sink. If we don't start bailing, we'll sink. If we do both immediately, we might still sink but we've got a better chance.
Managing access and impact on shared resources like the environment is political to the maximum level.
> It's about innovation, and is positive
Innovation is not automatically positive. The idea that technology can magically solve all problems is techno-optimism and it's a very ideological position.
> is positive, I.e. doing something instead of telling people not to do something
Telling people not to do something is not negative.
So what now? We haven't accomplished much other than moving manufacturing to other countries. Are we just going to tax the finished goods coming into the country too because they were made with dirty fuels too? Because people are already pretty unhappy, including auto manufacturers, pretty much anyone who actually makes stuff, and also people who need to eat food. Especially people who just lost their jobs due to your earlier choices.
The USA seems addicted to cheap fuel. That addiction needs to end sometime, and if you collectively cry about prices raising to less than the levels the rest of the world deals with just fine it doesn’t give much hope for the future.
If there is a rural bias, the solution would be to subsidize the rural areas to buy their votes. The solution to a problem of the commons, and the distribution of benefits, are separable (Coase Theorem).
Cheap fuel means cheap transportation, which means cheaper goods and greater purchase power across the entire economy. This is especially the case in countries like the USA where population density is so low. In the EU we can accomplish corresponding purchase power with more expensive fuel prices because of population density (more than 3x more people per km than the US).
I don't think it is at all reasonable for the USA to just give up on cheap fuel because our situation can allow for more expensive fuel.
Demand for energy is inelastic, but demand for O&G in the long term is less so because over time a higher price for O&G will push investment into alternatives.
Unless every removal op is a vertically integrated loss center in govt or large emitters, there will inevitably be people in the chain whose livelihoods or profits or stockholders benefit from keeping the spigot on (both of money for removal, and of emissions that necessitate it).
This is all assuming invention and improvement don't bootstrap easily scalable straightforwardly profitable removal practices.
Thinking ahead about this means a chance at putting up guardrails before there is an established lobby to push back.
Also, if you can close the money loop you can set up good incentives. If the money spigot is funded by the emitters, the capture orgs are directly incentivized to make capture cheaper to make it more attractive to emit, etc. Key to avoid direct public subsidy of said spigot though.
I’d like to see governments band together and offer up a $1 trillion prize for whomever comes up with a scalable fusion power plant, which would then be released to the public domain.
Also, Putin is mostly fine with climate change because Russia (and possibly Canada) will be arguably the disproportionate net winner in a 2.5 C world.
Notably questionable IMO is the sequestration when used to simply pump more oil, so taxes end up subsidizing fuel extraction. Oil giants are some of the biggest DAC investors, along with airlines [1][2].
[1] https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2021/03/the-direct-air-...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/is-it-time-for-an-emergency-roll...
That's massively simplified, but this video gives more information and there are plenty of engineering challenges to overcome - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL3AZGw9xZM
One proposal was to do this electrolytically or by electrodialysis. This has been called "Direct Ocean Capture".
http://carbon.ycombinator.com/electro-geo-chemistry/
This may be considerably cheaper as a CO2 removal technology than DAC.
I'd pile them up in some desert. Should last a few centuries.
We’ve seen this happen with carbon capture programs already.
Which is basically what happens if we use wood for all our housing and as many consumer products as possible and chuck them in a landfill.
But yes, lies, damn lies, and accounting is definitely a danger to any environmental regulation. It has been for decades, all the industry players know how to game the system:
- no real penalties
- insiders in the regulatory offices
- hide large amounts of pollution from inspectors
- accumulate penalties and lawsuits? Start new corp, transfer assets, declare bankruptcy for the old corporation
- industry-wide penalties? Offload that back to the government (that is, society) with lobbying and rescue funds and other business subsidies
The solution will be economic.
Want to replace fossil fuels with cleaner energy sources? It won't happen until those alternatives are cheaper.
When energy is sufficiently cheap or the byproducts are sufficiently valuable, that's when carbon extraction from the atmosphere will make sense.
I've seen some ideas for this. One is to use renewable energy to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into gasoline. That's actually not that hard. It's just chemistry after all. Alternatives are things like graphene.
There are places in the world where this could make sense. A given area might be remote such that building pipes of delivering such fuel is cost-prohibitive. Likewise, the cost of extending an electric grid might be too high. Or it simply may not be feasible because of politics.
This can negate the disadvantage solar and wind have in being variable power output and/or simply using a hydrocarbon fuel as a means of storing excess energy.
This would technically be carbon neutral not carbon negative but it'd be a start.
We are going to go extinct with that attitude - the laws on nature do not owe us a cheaper method of producing energy.
The Moneyed classes have never given up anything willingly: the end of monarchy, the end of slavery and even labour laws were won in blood.
Its likely to be the same with climate change
I understand your point and I agree (within limits) but that makes it no less true. Side note: total extinction of the human race is incredibly unlikely at this point and certainly not from climate change. That's not to say that huge numbers of us won't die in the process.
> the laws on nature do not owe us a cheaper method of producing energy
Of course not but increasing fossil fuel costs ultimately make other forms of energy production economic.
> The Moneyed classes have never given up anything willingly: the end of monarchy, the end of slavery and even labour laws were won in blood.
I agree but that's really a whole separate topic. The unwillingness of the ultra-wealthy to pay for the society that makes their wealth possible and the legions of people who adamantly oppose the ultra-wealthy just being slightly less ultra-wealthy is a recipe for disaster.
The ultimate form of wealth redistribution is war and revolution.
This seems to be a very valid observation. However, it's worth noting that with respect to climate change, it's nto about some mystical "0.1%" but rather in this case the "moneyed classes" include the vast majority of the first world citizens, which (as you state) are very unlikely to give up their privilege willingly unless the "global south", who will suffer the worst parts of the climate change first, would win that concession through blood.
However, as a counterpoint, nuclear weapons do act as a reasonably effective veto in conflict escalation.
Like, really.
At some point, you might argue that planting trees can make you more money if something edible grows on them (or under them)
As for the second part of your post: are you playing devil's advocate here? Planting trees, sustainable agriculture - that's not great way to generate fantastic profit at everyone's expense. It's not going to happen any time soon. Sorry for being a nihilistic prick but surely you're not that naive.
We need some kind of agrarian Elon Musk to shake things up while making profit.
What I mean in my second post is that a private investor can put money into a forest, plant the trees, and recoup some of the costs by sell the fruits.
This is a silly image to tell that if you're a private investor (no insult here), and want to sequester CO2, you either "need to have CO2 sequestered as a byproduct of a project that makes money ; or need to have money generated as a byproduct of a project that sequesters CO2."
If you're a public investor (aka "the handler of taxpayer's money"), or a charity (aka "the handler of rich people's spare money"), the deal is not the same.
Which ofcourse doesn't stio various governments from doing fuck all, when they have vacant land they could have reforested
Until we make capitalism work for climate it will work against it.
Moreover, each glacial period ends with CO2 levels lower than at the end of the preceding one. The last one ended with CO2 levels not too far from starvation for photosynthesis. At the current rate of CO2 depletion we were headed for mass extinctions in just a few more glacial periods. Bringing CO2 up above 400ppm at the end of the current interglacial will extend life on Earth by a lot, possibly millions of years.
Surely the best place to sequester carbon is in topsoil where we can use if to grow food.
I have not done the maths, but I do do a lot of composting myself and it makes me wonder as I watch my soil get deeper.
I think....
Carbon capture technology is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Just convert the carbon to biomass. Just plant trees.
What's the process and what happens to it ?
https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/carbon-cycle.html
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.8b02803
which is CO2 to calcium carbonate. This happens in nature and is used by coral.
So, all that CO2 in the atmosphere can become trees and coral.
After reaching a steady state, we can then consider how much we want to continue scaling up the CO2 removal process, and for how long we want to run it at "net negative" levels. Whatever rate we choose should cause fewer violent disasters than the process of extracting and emitting the carbon did in the first place.
Relevant:
Qualitative proposals to control atmospheric CO2 concentrations by spreading crushed olivine rock along the Earth's coastlines, thereby accelerating weathering reactions, are presently attracting considerable attention. This paper provides a critical evaluation of the concept, demonstrating quantitatively whether or not it can contribute significantly to CO2 sequestration. The feasibility of the concept depends on the rate of olivine dissolution, the sequestration capacity of the dominant reaction, and its CO2 footprint. Kinetics calculations show that offsetting 30% of worldwide 1990 CO2 emissions by beach weathering means distributing of 5.0 Gt of olivine per year. For mean seawater temperatures of 15–25 °C, olivine sand (300 μm grain size) takes 700–2100 years to reach the necessary steady state sequestration rate and is therefore of little practical value. To obtain useful, steady state CO2 uptake rates within 15–20 years requires grain sizes <10 μm. However, the preparation and movement of the required material poses major economic, infrastructural and public health questions. We conclude that coastal spreading of olivine is not a viable method of CO2 sequestration on the scale needed. The method certainly cannot replace CCS technologies as a means of controlling atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
P.S. Counterpoint:
This is from a preofessor in the Netherlands, 2016 He's giving lots of strategies, other than "Olivine all the things": http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2016/07/olivine-weathering-t... This is a whitepaper from that professor 2017: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
His own summarized blogpost, where he is representing the "Olivine Foundation": https://smartstones.nl/the-rate-of-olivine-weathering-an-exp...
So I'm thinking this is probably a good foundation to start from. How long before someone can convince the US, much less China to olivine their fields?
This is not a fake problem. It's a series of problems, but I concede that olivine is a good way to go.
What's that in numbers, so we can compare to the number aimed for here?
This is a whitepaper from that professor 2017: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=...
His own summarized blogpost, where he is representing the "Olivine Foundation": https://smartstones.nl/the-rate-of-olivine-weathering-an-exp...
So I'm thinking this is probably a good foundation to start from. How long before someone can convince the US, much less China to olivine their fields?
This is not a fake problem. It's a series of problems. I have edited a previous post in the thread to concede the technical effectiveness of this solution.
Doesn't that require a monstrous amount of olivine to obtain significant effects?
A liter of oil produces 3 kilos of CO2, density of rocks is 3-4 kilos per liter.
Rather nice image for the idea of "not sustainable".