It’s cheaper to stop emitting now than to pull carbon from the air later

Yes it’ll be more expensive to remove carbon dioxide from the air in the future but i will be dead by then, so why do I care? Also this moral hazard is made worst by decision makers whose financial outcomes are tied to not adopting extreme climate measures.

Especially those without children, taking the long view of society seems to be very difficult.

And before any wise ass says the solution is "just" to tax dirty energy I would like to remind everyone to stop projecting stupidity and apathy onto the general public. A couple percent here and there to incentive things at the margin may fly but if their energy bills double they're not gonna just roll over and take it. At the next opportunity they'll vote you out of office because that is the more direct and more effective way of solving their immediate problem of financial hardship.

I have an EV, which makes sense economically especially because I can charge somewhere that power isn't produced or delivered by PG&E. But I burn gas to keep warm because my own home electricity is too expensive.

Municipalities are removing residents' ability to choose by banning gas. I expect this will accelerate the failure of companies like PG&E (and the grid) by driving new construction to be off-grid. I've been inching my way there on my own home. Cars as storage batteries is inevitable and will be game changing.

In about two years I will have an egregious excess of solar capacity. And hopefully no grid connection. I'd love to have a way to use that excess to suck carbon out of the air and ideally make a product I can use out of it. Pyrolitic graphite sheets would be fantastic, or liquid hydrocarbons I can burn in my legacy vehicles or a backup generator. But I would settle for something I can throw away and have buried in a landfill.

I'm not even sure what you're asking for here.

I get a letter regularly telling me to switch my energy to green by signing up for this service where I'll pay more. But if you read the fine print you're not actually switching to green energy. You're paying more for the same energy and they're taking the money and doing something with it that is maybe green? Giving it to green companies? I don't know but it's not what I immediately thought when I saw the main claim.

Same is true with solar panels where they finance it through a senior lien on your property while all the calculations of savings are based on current subsidy levels. And they're budening people with senior debt that can prevent them from selling their home in the future without paying off the senior claim or passing it on.

You even see it with EV cars where the listed price includes cost savings from gas. It's just dishonest. You don't see that math on fuel efficient cars.

I'm pretty sure that people of the future will consider the time between 1950-2050 century to be the golden age of our current Civilization.

There are so many basically unsolvable issues on the horizon that I see absolutely no chance that our society will survive in it's current form.

My bet would be that we'll devolve into another form of aristocracy as soon as AI/automation make a human workforce mostly redundant.

Technological progress is likely going to stagnate entirely at that point, we all know how rich people generally behave without outside forces...

That 1ºC over normal is the yearly average global temperature. It doesn't increase evenly over the globe (in the arctic has been over 4ºC, a region where permafrost thawing and ice melting will worsen the problem) and is causing extreme weather events all around the world. Temperature don't uniformly rise by 1ºC evenly all days, for all regions, nice and slowly, but you have weeks with over 40ºC or extreme sub zero temperatures, droughts and floods caused by big storms, hurricanes and so on.

And with more global average temperature you will have even more extreme weather. With wet bulb temperatures you can have a lot of deaths of people that won't see how "the average" will eventually bring colder days.

And it is not a sustained speed change. Positive feedback loops are triggered, adding emissions, reducing Earth's albedo, causing forest fires and so on that will speed up things even if we stop doing emissions.

And remember that are not emissions the ones that are directly rising temperature, but decades of excess of greenhouse gases that keep more heat than what we emit. And that we only stop worsening things by the time we manage to reduce what is in the atmosphere (not just what we keep adding). If somewhat things get rough and we want to drop temperature urgently, dropping by then emissions won't do the trick, we need to capture a century of emitted carbon plus what is being emitted by feedback loops.

Are stratospheric aerosols perfect? No, of course not. There's still peripheral issues associated with ocean acidification. It's also not a permanent solution, since the aerosols have to be refreshed every year. But the tech solves 90%+ of the issues with climate change instantly. It also requires no global coordination that's been the perennial issue with emissions reductions. It's cheap enough that even a mid-sized military could unilaterally undertake it.

There's absolutely zero reason that we shouldn't start a pilot program today. Start testing at small doses equivalent to 0.1 C temperature reduction, then scale up quickly over the next 10 years.

There is no scenario where billions of people leave the tropics and integrate conflict free into northern society. It's not even just down to cultural or racial issues, an agrarian population doesn't have many places to fit in an industrial economy and has no places to fit in a service economy.

"At present there are no proven technologies capable of large-scale air capture of CO2. It has been suggested that, with strong research and development support and industrial scale pilot projects sustained over decades, costs as low as ∼$500/tC may be achievable [226]. Thermodynamic constraints [227] suggest that this cost estimate may be low. An assessment by the American Physical Society [228] argues that the lowest currently achievable cost, using existing approaches, is much greater ($600/tCO2 or $2200/tC)."

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

I'm skeptical any tech would go below the price of simply planting trees or growing algae.

I’m not sure this is an appropriate metaphor.

Partly because a doily in your example is construed as an asset, whereas adaptation to climate (our bequest to our grandchildren) is a cost.

Secondly because apportionment of the costs and benefits will not be equitable. In the west, we benefit disproportionately from burning fossil fuels, but it will be future people in developing states who disproportionately bear the costs.

Thirdly, because the costs of climate change might run very high indeed. Look for reviews of Nordstrom’s climate economics to understand some of his appalling modeling assumptions.

Where's your evidence that future generations are going to be richer than ours, though? We're leaving them with a massive problem to deal with that's going to suck up an increasing amount of wealth over time if we don't do anything about it (which nobody's committed to doing).

If there is a change in energy production like a breakthrough in fusion or an over production of renewables, it is at least theoretically possible that would be cheaper to remove then to not emit

You're gaining energy in combustion by going from CH4/etc + O2 and producing CO2 + H2O.

The added energy comes from breaking those carbon-hydrogen bonds.

You're then sequestering CO2. Not C2. You're not doing anything other than concentration.

Yes it takes energy to re-concentrate it for sequestration. No, that's not necessary as much energy as you gain from combustion. It's energy positive overal from a thermodynamic perspective.

Yes, practicalities make that more energy intensive and more difficult (e.g. capture after emission into the air instead of from a high concentration source), but it's not quite what folks keep articulating when claiming "thermodynamics demands that this takes at least as much energy".

The original article is about those practalities and whether or not they amount to more energy than what's released during combustion. It's far from obvious whether or not they do overall, though.

Unless what you call emitting energy to be what you gain by dispersing it into the air (that we never capture, by the way), the energy cost of removing CO2 can be orders of magnitude lower than what we get by burning it. And if you are talking about the dispersion only, then it's exactly the same.

You’d potentially have a thermodynamics problem if you were trying to remake synthetic fuel from the air and hydrogen. And even if you’re doing that - there’s still an argument that it’s better to recycle the carbon than to continue to dig it out of the ground.

You then talk about trees (which aren’t free from the laws of thermodynamics). The process of a tree for fixing carbon is not efficient, typically less than 1%. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency

And that’s before you get to the step of sequestering the carbon locked up in the plants.

That seems like it’s compatible with a framework for atmospheric carbon reduction. I think the challenges are mostly economic and technical, not societal.

But…what we saw emerge at COP26 - spearheaded by John Kerry - is an _attempt_ to get around this problem.

By (1) a demand-side response, ie not dependent on regulating against fossil fuel extraction, and (2) creating groups of first movers who will invest to reduce demand and dependence on fossil fuels and force a market adjustment.

Will it work? Who knows. But there’s a lot depending on it!

Took major international cooperation to tackle that problem so people can obviously get together and coordinate an action plan.

There seems to be a lot frightening going around with regards to tipping points into positive feedback loops however if those exist and are so bad how comes that climate models don't show those and rather show that it is possible to reach equilibrium over 2°C?

The problem here is that we will, once again, ask developing nations to also pull the weight and pay the cost that allowed developed countries to reach their current position.