Hacker News Reader

Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

Pardon my crudity, but is there a reason to not build a bunch of nuclear power plants + carbon suckers powered by electricity?

View on HN

Ok, you spend your time and resources doing that, and I'll spend mine increasing my military and economic might.

Now replace 'you' and 'me' with competing nation states and super powers.

It's a kind of geopolitical prisoner's dilemma. We're all screwed to different degrees if we do nothing, but everyone has an incentive to be a parasite, letting 90% of the world use their energy working on this problem that distributes the rewards of success (averting global climate disaster) equally to all people, while you use your energy on something that gives you direct and exclusive benefit, not globally diffused benefit.

And even if you could somehow force everyone to participate, you run into the same problem that makes communism (in the "from each according to their ability, to each according to their need" definition) not work well. When conscious beings don't get rewarded personally for working harder or smarter, and the fruits of their labor are always diffused equally across the population, everyone falls into a vicious downward spiral of trying to do the minimum work possible, therefore making everyone worse off in the long run.

I actually think if we had the technology to do that we probably would be, we spend billions on climate research and even on carbon sequestration tech but we just don't have a good scalable way to do it yet.

It's going to cost significantly more energy than the aggregate energy output of all fossil fuel burning over the past 200 years to remove the carbon from the atmosphere that was added. Probably several multiples more because it's harder to undo chemical combustion than to do it.

We're probably talking trillions of dollars, not billions.

Much more likely is that we'd invest a few billion in pumping global coolants into the atmosphere, which could be simpler.

My guess is, we'll do both...

If the benefits to an individual country are high enough compared against the costs, then that country could decide to do it even if everyone else is freeloading.

Also the problem should be solved depending on wealth: the richest countries cause/caused the majority of the problem, and they have the most incentive to fix the problem (e.g. NY, California, London), and they have the best resources to try and solve the problem.

The EU shows that countries can work together, rather than your simplistic dystopian view. Let’s presume the EU and the US pull finger, then they alone could make a difference. Rope in other rich countries, and use trade restrictions to penalise or equivalently tax non-participants.

Disclaimer: I live in a coastal city in a wealthy country: I very definitely have some skin in this game. However I expect to die ~2050, so perhaps I don’t care as much as someone who expects to die closer to 2100.

“carbon suckers”: perhaps the fact that we don’t even have a popular phrase for the technology, let alone having built anything practical, will answer your question sufficiently. That, and there are a lot of other inputs to that equation such that when I read what you typed, I kind of paraphrase it as, “why don’t we just wave a magic technology wand and make it go away?” :-)

I meant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_sequestration

Yeah, I knew what you meant, I’m being somewhat of a smartass. Somewhat, because I maintain that my point stands. :-) I mean, do we have any meaningful carbon sequestration that’s even threatening to come online?

The reason is that it's too expansive - it would mean we stop whatever we're doing and focus almost all resources on this for decades.

If the price wasn't an issue then there are simpler ways to deal with global warming without building anything - just consume less. But we're not doing that cause it's politically unpopular. So any solution that relies on majority of people making huge sacrifices probably won't fly either.

The answers here are mostly wrong. The real answer is that energy is expensive, carbon extraction is difficult, and you would remove less carbon than you could avoid adding to the atmosphere by just using the nuclear plant to offset a coal or gas plant.

The only thing carbon capture is good at is at capturing public millions in grants and storing them deep, deep into the accounts fossil fuel companies' bank accounts, where no tax officer can reach them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8

That sounds like it would hurt the oil industry and the reactionaries that prop it up have somewhat of a monopoly on force.

Possible, but expensive.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/02/23/1044972/carbon-r...

Because our economy lacks the incentives to do so. This is a solvable problem and it doesn't require new technological breakthroughs but governments do need to put the proper incentives in place.

Do we even have an efficient way to extract carbon using electricity?

Define efficient. We have ways that take about as much electricity to remove the CO2 from the air as we get from burning the fossil fuels today. If we got to a point where we have an extreme energy surplus, we could do it. But as long as we're burning fossil fuels to generate electricity, we can't really pull the CO2 out of the atmosphere more efficiently than we can put it here. It does allow a type of location arbitrage, where places that are good at producing clean energy could pull gas out of the air for places that don't have any options besides fossil fuels. You'd have to convince the places burning fossil fuels that it's worth paying the clean energy rich places for that service though. Then after you have it out of the air, storage becomes another hard issue.

At the moment there's the low hanging fruit of carbon capture at plants that burn the fuels, which can be done many times more efficiently.

Apart from the time it would take, and the total carbon released during the building process, and the fact that it would still not get close to net zero?

Currently the only method we have that is effective is chemical scrubbing using monoethanolamine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com