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Not a surprise, since co2 is an oxide, and therefore very stable in the athmosphere. It would take a huge amount of energy to remove it, and we don't even stop putting it in there.

Janvici had a nice way to put it: the 1.5C are already signed for, which means we won't ever see the climate of today again in the next 5000 years.

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> Not a surprise, since co2 is an oxide, and therefore very stable in the athmosphere. It would take a huge amount of energy to remove it,

There is an exothermic reaction that removes CO2 from the atmosphere, the formation of carbonates from weathering of silicate rocks. As this is naturally very slow, there is currently ongoing research into multiple different ways to speed it up.

That doesn't change anything. You need a huge amount of energy to remove CO2 from the atmosphere because CO2 is a tiny constituent part of Air (~400ppm) - that means one has to move a million molecules of air across a collector (whatever that is) to remove 400 molecules of CO2. You can't do that without huge amounts of energy and a huge surface area for your collector ... on any human timescale.

Plants do. And they only need the sunlight they have where they grow.

I think that’s the “huge surface” op is talking about.

And we’re busy decreasing the surface of woodlands on the planet.

Huh I thought the world has more trees now then ever before.

I don’t know, but they could both be true. How many 5yo pine trees does it take to equal the surface area of one giant redwood?

It's really about growth rate rather than size.

The mass of air that moves past the existing fleet of wind turbines in a year is roughly a fifth of the mass of the atmosphere.

It is a civilisation sized project that will take a lifetime, but it is achievable.

Or we could just stop burning coal.

That would be very easy if we didn't benefit greatly from burning coal

Are you familiar with the term "negative externalities?"

Sure. But the benefit is way bigger than the drawback. At least that is the decision society has made.

No. People like David Koch benefit.

The rest have very little say.

Why do we talk about removing CO2 from the atmosphere but not trying to pull it out of the ocean?

What makes you think it would be significantly easier to filter out the carbolic acid from the ocean? The same difficulties apply, and water is much more viscous than air.

Didn’t carbon we’ve carelessly dumped in the atmosphere start as ocean life that sunk to the bottom, can’t we turbo charge that cycle?

Not practically. We are talking about huge scales, such that the industrial production, transport, etc., would be as much of an environmental disaster as what it's trying to solve.

Because there is an homeostasic relationship between the co2 in the ocean and the air, and it always end up balancing out automatically.

Oh man. Somebody always gets a way to make problems out of the entropy of diffusion. It increases with the log of the concentration, so whatever problem you estimate to happen, it can be worked around.

On the case of silicates, a trivial work around is to just spread them around and let the same diffusion bring the CO2 into them.

And of course its not like we have giant windmill farms all over the world that we could integrate CO2 collectors into the blades

The best way forward is to reject parts of the consensus Green approach. In particular, investment in nuclear, and a plan to augment wind+solar expansion with a large nuclear (and later fusion) buildout is the way to go.

The rationale for this is that only by raising the living standard of the third world can the world’s population be stabilized without a major die-off (not to mention a reduced quality of life for just about everyone going forward). Further, only with massive amounts of clean energy can we clean up the ecosphere and effectively fight atmospheric CO2 buildup as needed.

There are plenty of resources on Earth if they’re managed well. Only with plentiful energy can we afford to have treat the Earth as the precious resource it is - as we begin to inhabit the rest of the Solar System!

other than the giant one staring at us 93 million miles away beaming massive amounts of energy directly at us all day, fusion reactors otherwise don't exist. Maybe not throw away all the other approaches until they do?

From my read, the previous poster does mention investing in nuclear, wind and solar. With potentially moving to fusion if it becomes available.

Solar and wind have many issues. Intermittency, the need for rare earths, and low energy density leading to ecological impact are some. It’s also under-recognized that as those technologies are built out beyond a few percent of global power, supply issues will likely lead to large cost increases and potential scarcity. Then there’s the waste/recycling problem, which is worse than nuclear.

I also was clear that fusion is a future solution.

so your argument is "go nuclear, problem solved" ? I'm all for adding nuclear at this point but I dont know that the research supports the notion that an "all in for nuclear, done" approach would be effective.

Go all in on everything. The investments required are a joke from what I can tell.

Make the state more efficient (probably by allowing more things to be handled by private entities), and voila, there's much more than what you need.

Germany's investments into e.g. wind energy topped out at €10bn/yr. The federal budget is €500bn/yr, add to that the state, county and community budgets and it's €830bn. Even if you paid for it by tax money only, it's not a budget issue. Neither would nuclear be.

Please stop. The raw materials for any type of nuclear reactor are vastly scarcer than renewables.

Iron flow batteries exist at grid scale for $200/kWh (enough to beat nuclear total system cost where 90% of people live with higher uptime) and dropping.

Copper metallized PV uses a manageable amount of copper and nickel (100s of kgs per MW net) and less silver than the control rods in a fission reactor. The dopants are measured in mg per MW and the rest is fancy sand. Inverters tend to be GaAs, but the amount is minimal and they don't need high performance power electronics to outperform nuclear.

Multi megawatt wind turbines with no copper windings and no permanent magnets exist at commercial scale, and all Aluminum cabling is ready as a dropin replacement as soon as the few dollars per MWh maintenance burden can he justified. Concrete and steel per MW is still significantly higher for wind, but a mix is approaching parity.

> also was clear that fusion is a future solution.

It really isn't. Helion is a moonshot that might work (but requires large amounts of rare metals for exotic superconductors). Anything thermal will be 10s of times more expensive and more materials than fission.

To add to this, for people suggesting that renewables are sufficient and that we should abandon nuclear for some reason or another, this report does a good job of motivating nuclear as a critical part of the solution: https://energy.mit.edu/research/future-nuclear-energy-carbon...

Even when nuclear power was enthusiastically embraced as the future it suffered from cost overruns, hidden and underestimated lifecycle costs, security problems such the possibility of a worse Chernobyl event as a result of an ongoing war, nuclear proliferation enablement, etc.

Blaming the resulting skepticism about nuclear on the "Green approach" is backwards: Fix the things that made nuclear expensive first. Demonstrate that the lifecycle works, from mining to waste handling. Show it costs less than putting the same capital into renewables and can come online in time to be relevant.

>Even when nuclear power was enthusiastically embraced as the future it suffered from cost overruns, hidden and underestimated lifecycle costs, security problems such the possibility of a worse Chernobyl event as a result of an ongoing war, nuclear proliferation enablement, etc.

And here we are on an oil-based energy economy suffering from cost overruns, hidden and underestimated lifecycle costs, security problems such the possibility of a worse Chernobyl event as a result of an ongoing war, nuclear proliferation enablement, etc.

I would gladly change the source of the energy as the effects seem to be the same besides atmospheric emissions.

Capital investment is fungible. If investing in renewables delivers more power to the grid sooner, then that is the optimal path to freedom from dependency on fossil fuels.

> The rationale for this is that only by raising the living standard of the third world can the world’s population be stabilized without a major die-off

I don't see how pumping billions of tonnes of heavy metal tainted sulfuric acid into the ground water of Namibia and Niger for Uranium royalties that are lower than the cost of cleanup and then putting them into debt they can't service for power stations that can only be fueled by their colonizers' nuclear weapons programs is related to increasing their standard of living.

Especially when the fuel source can only service the US primary energy for under a decade.

You don’t see how electrification increases living standards [1]?

[1] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdf/10.1257/jep.34.1.122

Yes, it increases living standards immensely. Fission reactors do not help towards this goal.

> Fission reactors do not help towards this goal

Of course they do. Reactors produce electricity. You don’t like how they do it. But that they electrify borders on tautology.

No, they hinder the goal because they will never provide more than a tiny fraction of the needed energy and building one would tie up immense amounts of resources that could electrify many more households and cause permanent outflows for interest on debt that can never be paid off and fuel that they are not allowed to make.

I have an idea for a program where I pour lead onto your food and loan you $100k but you can only spend it on preordering a sports car I sell that doesn't work on unpaved roads for $150k which can only be charged at chargers I own and if you do anything I don't like ever I'll just ban you from using my cars altogether. It won't explode iff you keep up with perfect maintenance and I'll be removing all of the chargers in 2060 (or 2050 if I get lots of orders). It may arrive any time between 2028 and 2040 or maybe I'll just cancel the order (but you still have to pay back the loan).

The alternative is you buy a LEV that charges itself if you use it less than 30 miles a day, can accept any charger and costs $30k but you have to find a loan yourself. It might fail to charge up to 20% of the time with a few days' notice if you don't buy the $50k deluxe package.

They're both transport, right? Transport is good.

Now do the pollution associated with lithium mining.

Then ban polluting lithium mining methods along with ISL uranium mining anywhere near an aquifer, open tailings ponds, anything to do with coal, and anything else with uncaptured externalities. Please and thankyou.

Storage and renewables can be achieved in a much more scalable, cheap, and less resource intensive way than nuclear without anything more scarce than chlorine (although rarer elements in manageable quantities make them more robust and even cheaper for now).

https://cleantechnica.com/2021/10/07/first-ess-iron-flow-bat...

https://talkmarkets.com/content/global-markets/catl-to-promo...

https://formenergy.com/form-energy-announces-450m-series-e-f...

https://news.mit.edu/2022/aluminum-sulfur-battery-0824

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Potential-150-GWh-Greenf...

I believe you meant Jancovici? https://jancovici.com/en/

Yep, typo.

I like the way he models the problem from first principles. Economic views have a tendency to hand wave the laws of thermodynamic.

Yeah, that the key problem - all current "green" or "zero" tech is simply a trick, with shuffling emissions to other countries, selling-buying quotas, maybe reducing emissions a little in the best case. Until we have a working industrial scale CO2 sequestration factories we are essentially doing nothing, or close to nothing.

How are solar panels or windmills a trick?

I don't think solar panels or windmills are a trick, but I think OP was referring to "net zero" initiatives, which are not much more than accounting scams. Most carbon credits, if even verifiable, don't involve reductions but rather promises to not cut down existing forests for X years. Western countries are trying to do what they do best: buy their way out of a problem that takes actual effort.

They're not removing co2 from the atmosphere. So they help reduce new emissions, but they don't help with the existing ones.

because we use them additionally to existing sources, not as a replacement:

https://www.cleanenergywire.org/sites/default/files/styles/g...

Less energy = less growth = recession = bad, we're stuck in that

How is it a 'trick'?

Building a wind turbine isn't shuffling emissions anywhere.

Neither is solar. Or a more efficient boiler, or....

It's not replacing fossil fuels, merely freeing them for other uses. In fact it's even common now to build wind turbines around coal mines to produce power to extract coal...

We must reduce our fossil fuel consumption in absolute numbers. So far we're merely adding more energy resources; that way political and corporate PR representative can make triumphal announces about how we're reducing the part of fossil in our energy mix... But we need to reduce our fossil use overall, and REALLY REALLY FAST.

"It's common" is not a statistic. At least in the US, coal use for power generation has dropped precipitously over the past 40 years. If whatever coal we do still extract is extracted using wind or solar, that seems like a net win (even if not a net positive, for the reason you mentioned).

But we need a net positive. We must stop pumping CO2 in the atmosphere, and we're merely pumping it a slightly slower rate, and the quantity still goes up.

The US has replaced lots of coal with gas, and that's most of the reduction. But we're not gonna make it this way. Remember: we're heading towards +2.5°C in 2100, but northern continents heat much faster than the average (oceans are cooler and represent 70% of Earth's surface): it could be from +4 and up to +6°C in Canada, Europe, etc. The situation is going to be absolutely catastrophic much sooner than 2100. Arguably we may have catastrophic, repeated crop failures this decade for instance.

I'll link a page with a chart on it, the web page relies on Javascript to actually render charts, the chart we care about here is "Electricity generation mix by quarter and fuel source".

https://www.ofgem.gov.uk/energy-data-and-research/data-porta...

Now, on the left is 1998, on the right is this year. There are a few noteworthy differences

1. The UK actually produces less electricity, partly from efficiencies and partly de-industrialisation in some areas.

2. Coal went from over 30 TWh in 1998 to 2.24 TWh today. Are we instead burning that coal in homes? Nope. Steam locomotives? A handful of quaint examples. Coal mining largely stopped in the UK.

3. Gas went from almost 30 TWh in 1998 to slightly less today. We are still burning gas to heat homes and businesses but I doubt it's more than in 1998.

4. Wind and solar went from negligible to almost 25 TWh today. It's about a third of today's electricity generation.

I don't see a way to read this which doesn't have us significantly replacing fossil fuels. Those coal mines are shut. Does the UK still have petrol stations and gas boilers? Yes, but it doesn't have many more of them than in 1998. That displacement shown is a real improvement.

It just isn't enough.

UK has massively de-industrialised, as has most of Europe (but Germany). However global industrial production, energy consumption in general and fossil fuels in particular all enormously increased since 1998.

Global numbers are all that counts, climate-wise. Plus I'm pretty sure that including imported emissions would annihilate (or even worsen) the apparent reduction for countries such as UK, France, etc.

If I go on a diet and lose weight, is that also a trick because the average weight of the population goes up?

Just because someone else does something else to negate the net effect of something doesn't mean you haven't done the thing.

If we hadn't done anything emissions would be even higher. It isn't as if we have to burn a certain quota of coal and gas.

This isn't an argument for doing less, it's an argument for doing more.

> If I go on a diet and lose weight, is that also a trick because the average weight of the population goes up?

The keyword here is "imported emissions". When you reduce your consumption because you're closing a factory to import the same stuff made in worse (environmental, social) conditions elsewhere, the gain is only apparent.

So following your analogy, if what you're after is the global population health, if you lose weight but everyone else gains more than what you lost, than the result is indeed a net loss overall.

I'll repeat my metaphor.

If I go on a diet...

In the metaphor 'I' mirrors green technologies. 'global population health' mirrors total global emissions.

If I go on a diet and lost weight, that is no trick. I have lost weight.

That isn't invalidated by the rest of the world getting fatter.

If I put solar panels on my roof I will lower my co2 emissions. That isn't invalidated by you rolling coal.

I agree it's bad that co2 emissions are increasing but that doesn't mean that the proposed solution is a trick.

Neither is hydroelectric dam.

I admittedly haven't looked very hard, but the current push towards overall reduction and renewable sources (solar, wind) and long-timescale sources (nuclear) feels like much less of a trick than CO2 sequestration. Last time I checked, most sequestration efforts involve some kind of logistical sleight of hand (like ignoring the energy required to crush and spread out rocks, or the fact that most seedlings don't grow into mature trees).

A lot of replies to this comment are saying a version of "how is solar/wind/etc a trick?"

And the answer is that no, they are not a trick...they legitimately produce energy.

But the goal isn't "make more clean energy", the goal is "keep coal and oil and gas underground"!

And yet coal(!!) production is at basically all time highs, with oil not far behind.

Unless we start making oil, coal and gas artificially expensive to produce, "clean" sources just add to global energy usage, instead of displacing it.

https://yearbook.enerdata.net/coal-lignite/coal-production-d...

https://yearbook.enerdata.net/crude-oil/world-production-sta...

Yes, the Russia aggression threw a wrench into every replacement project out there.

But there are always two options to speed-up the process, you can make fossil fuels artificially expensive, or renewables artificially cheap.

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