Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

The dog has been dirtying the kitchen floor for long enough already that we're also going to need that toothpick.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 fact sheet on carbon dioxide removal:

"Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) refers to technologies, practices, and approaches that remove and durably store carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. CDR is required to achieve global and national targets of net zero CO2 and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. CDR cannot substitute for immediate and deep emissions reductions, but it is part of all modelled scenarios that limit global warming to 2° or lower by 2100."

https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/outreach/IPCC_A...

And who exactly are going to be paying for these ruinously expensive nuclear power stations for the poorer countries? Is it you and rayiner? Or perhaps you want your government to fund it through increased taxes on you?

I'm sure you wouldn't want the poor countries to pay for it themselves.

I don’t know if all you wrote about is going to be a problem in the way you see it. The developing world has jumped/skipped some of the development the west/rich nations experienced and just adapted the latest technology.

A good example of this is communication technology. In wealthy nations, there was all of this wired infrastructure put in place since the advent of the telegraph. In developing nations, they just skipped all of that and most people have cellphones. Maybe not iphones or even smartphones, but the banks they used developed robust texting protocols, from what I’ve read and heard about, where people could do banking transactions from something like those old nokia dumbphones.

A lot of these developing countries rely on China, maybe to the wests collective chagrin, and China has invested heavily in rail infrastructure in a lot of these countries, and, Chinese auto manufacturers are already producing tons of electric vehicles. Guess whose car companies are building auto factories in a lot of the developing world? And though they may not meet the safety and quality standards of wealthy countries, people in developing countries are just happy to get places quicker than by foot. I may not have listed everything that emits greenhouse gases and a suitable replacement but normalizing mass transit (I forgot to mention the electric buses I’ve read these developing countries are either ordering from china or building at home in Chinese factories), but these two… industries make up a significant chunk of problematic emissions.

What I think we may see in the west is active resistance to adapting new energy and normalizing greener behavior because of things like American exceptionalism. Also, these technologies are expensive to buy for many people even in the west (right, not most people here on hackernews), and its going to be prohibitively expensive for people in old housing stock to upgrade their property and municipalities to upgrade infrastructure. Tax rebates on $35,000 electric cars and heat pumps aren’t going to mean much to people relying on older family members for a roof over their head and can’t find jobs, especially if this whole ai thing takes off. There’s also significant and continual pushback from an people who seem determined to trash electric cars and such, and thats exacerbated by corporations acting bad faith to maximize profit (high efficiency appliances that barely make it through their standard warranty terms and subscription based car features come to mind.

So yeah, I think the developing world might be fine but its the wealthy nations who are going to screw themselves (and because of the US’ voracious consumption if everything), and maybe the rest of the world regardless of what steps the developing world takes.

> We have to find ways to sequester. And we have to find ways to live in a warmer climate. It's the most probable outcome.

This is not the only conclusion from your excellent observation. Another conclusion could be that rich nations fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries without asking anything in return. I believe this is what the climate relief fund is about—as approved (albeit in a much too small scale) in last COP.

So far however rich nations are not only reluctant to fund infrastructure projects in other countries without anything in return—let alone green infrastructure projects—they are also reluctant to fund green infrastructure projects domestically (see e.g. Green New Deal in the US). The technology for mass carbon sequestration does not exist yet, and if it existed I bet it would follow the same prospects as current prospects of tackling the climate crisis. In short, they will not be built at the scale needed for any meaningful results.

This is often the case when you offer a technical solution to a societal or a political problem.

That case you made about meat consumption is actually very relatable as found in a few reports went viral in China, including this one by . Twenty years ago most rural living Chinese can't afford beef at all. Twenty years later they are able, and there are like 1 billion rural people become urban in 40 years I guess (plz check source), and developed countries are already mad about stuff they predicted to happen. Trust fund solution is one helpful tool for this, yet uprising tension in India/US allies and China/Russia/Middle East/Pakistan make the plan definitely dead. It will soon to be another case of WWII U.N. that is controlled by U.S. and vetoed by U.S.S.R. for a billion times a year and not producing anything remotely close to a deal, or a compromise. Also, solar array is tremendously expensive due to regional difference, just like battery, either rare metal or lithium.

Reality is geographically, poor global south likely to bear higher brunt of climate change, while many in northern regions will be net benefitiaries. But poverty immediately sucks more than climate change, hope is that development via whatever means will uplift more than a few degrees dooms. How many people in developed north would trade their inhospitable winters in heated homes for being impoverished in more fair weathered country. None, because they learned to live with the cold.

Now do the same calculation for passenger aviation.

That's not how disasters work. They aren't independent variables, when they happen, you learn and change the way things work to prevent them from happening again.

The odds definitely aren't that straightforward.

Experiments and development in the 1950s. First commercial plant in 58.

Further growth in 60s and 70s. Including deadly accidents like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 in 1961 - protests grew in 60s and 70s too.

Three Mile Island 1979.

Chernobyl 1986.

Fukushima 2011.

That 25-year gap between Chernobyl and Fukushima - and the extraordinary circumstances causing Fukushima vs the previous incidents - suggests that safety improved A LOT over the 60-odd years between 1958 and now.

3 Mile Island: No one died, nothing of any significance happened. Clickbait from an era before clickbait was a thing.

Chernobyl: Irresponsible operation of obsolete, inherently-hazardous Soviet-era design. Not something that can ever happen again if some relatively-simple lessons are followed.

Fukushima: Irresponsible maintenance of plant operating well beyond its intended lifespan, which was irresponsibly constructed in a tsunami-prone seismic zone. This type of accident can and probably will happen again, precisely because of moratoriums on new plant construction.

One risk you didn't list but probably should have is reckless military attacks waged against installations such as Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. It's hard to safeguard a nuclear plant against a barbarian invasion. It may make sense to operate such plants under UN auspices, or otherwise guarantee their safety through multinational treaties with real enforcement behind them.

I think nuclear, today, is a hardcore bad idea. Nuclear is showing no tangible signs of getting cheaper, and renewable and battery prices continue to fall.

I think you misread them

What's the equivalent of "/s" for bitter cynicism?

the bigger issue you overlooked is the constant growth of bureaucratic overhead sucking up the watershed of resources and leaving only a trickle for the people actually putting together the curriculum, teaching and researching.

The administrators are useful to a point but they vastly overstate their importance and erode everything they touch overtime like a malignant cancer in a lot of organizations.

I think you might be misunderstanding the amount of distrust placed in the root comment. He's claiming the more prestigious a University is, the more likely they are to take unethical funding because increased funding leads to more prestige. It's an attack on the integrity of modern science as practiced by academia, not on a subset of studies.

I find the notion donating to your alma mater kind of odd. You don't donate money to the local McDonald's that made a burger for you do you? I mean, you could but that's not something that's regularly done.

The service was provided and paid for and now there's some expectation to give more money after the fact?

Trusting the results is basically impossible now though. Even if they’re solution focused, you don’t know if they were adjusted in scale.

If we don’t reduce carbon emissions—heck if we don’t stop carbon emissions—there will be no future for our children and grandchildren to either prosper or impoverish in. Not reducing carbon means we are all going to die. The earth will heat 4-5 degrees. Human societies will not function as we know them today, governments will break down, wars will be fought, famines will linger. However much money fossil fuel gives us today will have no effect on that future, as we will all be dead.

> reducing carbon seems like it should be a much lower priority compared to how hard its pushed

I'm not sure what you mean. The last 50 years (and even 5) have been far more bark than bite.

> incoming nuclear fusion would alleviate a ton of our carbon issues

A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I worked on nuclear in a previous career and still have friends there, including fusion (including the big labs). Being bullish, fusion net gain is still 10 years away. It'll take decades to add to the energy portfolio after that. The case for fusion is worse than the case for fission. We should work on both, but we can't hold out for future technologies (we can say the same about storage). We needed to act decades ago, pushing it off by a few more decades is not going to solve the issue, it is repeating the same mistakes.

> fleshed out cost-benefit analysis

I wouldn't trust any of these. Zero of them. You need to have a pretty good understanding of these systems (highly complex) to even understand if the analyses are good. Every single one has a bias and is highly politicized. The more politicized a topic is, the higher level of expertise you need to understand who is telling the truth (politicization adds large amounts of noise).

> Bjorn Lomborg

Who is a political scientist. He isn't a climate scientist, nor even a scientist. Here's a rather well known scientist, Stefan Rahmstorf (studies physics of oceans) discussing Bjorn[0]. You can check Bjorn's scholar page[1] to even verify that he's not doing actual science bust just writing opinions with no supporting evidence. Please stop supporting hacks.

[0] https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/08/bjorn...

[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=HUMF5c0AAAAJ

nuclear fusion will be achieved but nobody question if it will be economically convenient, even with global carbon tax and esg frameworks. As today we are in the realm of hundreds of billions for "sperimental" fusion facility, just comparing to fission plant cost, they have balloned exponentially from sperimental phase decades ago

Regarding the trees, I hope they research that claim!

Regarding the concept that it's a distraction, I think that's folk behavioral psychology with an unhealthy dash of moralism. It needs to be substantiated with evidence before I take it seriously. We are talking about a real carbon mitigation research avenue that could have real benefits.

Planting trees is not really viable to deal with CO2 emissions on any significant scale.

Assuming a tree absorbs around 20kg of CO2/year, you'd need to plant 250 trees per year (!!) for every single passenger vehicle (~5tons of CO2/year).

And the problem does not stop there-- these numbers only work for the first 20 or so years of tree growth, and afterwards you have to seal you trees (under high pressure to turn them into hydrocarbons? :P) or plant even more trees to compensate for older trees decomposing (releasing CO2).

The fact you were downvoted is pretty good evidence that we'll commit a mass extinction on par with the great oxygenation, denying it the whole way.

Trees don't pump the air through their leaves, they let CO2 diffuse and blow in the wind.

Look, I think direct air capture (DAC) is as much “not the solution” as the next guy, but this kind of black-and-white thinking has no place in climate change mitigation.

Right now, DAC costs about $250-500/ton. The average passenger vehicle in the US emits 4.6 tons of CO2/year. You say it’s not cost-effective but you could literally charge every passenger vehicle user in the US $1-2000/year and use it for capture and eliminate the single largest source. That is the same order of magnitude as vehicle registration fees (though of course you’d want to make such a tax progressive, etc.), at least in California.

More importantly, DAC provides a major price signal for the cost of carbon emissions: if it costs $250/ton to get CO2 out of the atmosphere, it starts to make more sense to charge emitters $250/ton in advance to remove it — and if we implemented such a system, the market would likely respond very quickly with rapid reductions in carbon emissions. Oil and gas companies think it’s the solution? Great, they can pay $250/ton for it.

Instead we’re selling everyone individual shame about what are really societal decisions, telling them not to drive as much, be too cold/hot at home, and eat less beef — while letting producers largely off the hook. That’s the real lunacy here.

> So any climate plan that relies on large-scale CO2 removal from atmospheric air is probably a complete SCAM.

The "scam" language is interesting to me.

I often run into people who seem to think that advocates of carbon capture technology are somehow being intellectually dishonest and are not serious about climate change.

In fact I think there are a lot of people who are interested in carbon capture tech who just keep an open mind about it. Not all scientific advances are obvious early on.

I think we should avoid assuming that people who are promoting carbon capture research are speaking in bad faith. There are lots of people who genuinely believe the tech may mature to a point it is useful to the fight against climate change.

Just because the fossil fuel industry promotes it doesnt mean that everyone who promotes it is a shill for the fossil fuel industry.

We don’t need to strong arm the world to access oil, we are a net exporter of oil. There’s lots of bad things to say about our foreign policy, but the idea that it’s about oil should have died with the Iraq War (where we spent trillions of dollars but didn’t get any oil).