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.