Removing CO₂ is far more doable, because you don't have to convince/force 7 billion people to do something.
Anyone with the right equipment can just do it, without asking permission, just like CO₂ emitters can.
Anyone with the right equipment can just do it, without asking permission, just like CO₂ emitters can.
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.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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...
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.
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...