Feels like modern form of absolving sins.
All you need is charismatic preacher to bop you on theforhead and say you are saved.
All you need is charismatic preacher to bop you on theforhead and say you are saved.
A hug part of the power of religions, such as christianity or ESG, is that it provides a mechanism to allow normal people to engage in evil but feel forgiven or justified.
"If someone can make you believe absurdities, they can make you commit atrocities."
There are lots of evils that can easily be undone (in multiples!) with cash. Like littering.
Perhaps the best you can do is mitigate warming factors, like investing in burning previously vented methane, but that might be risking triggering a Cobra Effect, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perverse_incentive#The_origina...
There's no realistic tech on the horizon that can actually reverse novel carbon emissions. Even if we had that kind of carbon capture tech, we would likely need to devote at least as much energy as we got in aggregate from all our fossil fuel burning human civilization captured over the past century to the project. We're several orders of magnitude in renewable and nuclear generation fleets away from that possibility.
The adults in the room aren't talking about reversing carbon pollution on human timescales anymore. They're talking about planetary heat engineering to adapt to a more densely insulated Earth. That means adapting to a changing environment on the ground, as well as possibly limiting the amount of solar energy entering the system in the first place.
Humanity is entering childhood's end. We can't depend on our mother to do all the work of providing a safe cradle for us anymore. We either grow up and take ownership by proactively managing our environment, or we die. The teenage years are usually painful.
Several orders of magnitude? That's not right at all.
If we more or less stopped emitting carbon, and devoted just 2x our current renewable and nuclear production to capture, paying "as much energy as we got", we'd be removing it 1/3 as fast as we emitted it, which is a pretty good pace.
Even if you include the growth to replace all current energy use, you don't even need a single order of magnitude.
Also it's entirely possible today to do things like make carbon-bearing liquids and stick them in a dead oil well, using local solar power to run the equipment. Something doesn't have to scale to the entire planet to be a real thing that some entities could pay for and legitimately be net negative on carbon. Geoengineering is almost certainly more cost-effective, but that's a different issue. Paying for $5 of cleanup every time you toss a piece of litter isn't cost-effective either, but it does legitimately improve things.
Agreed with you that 7x isn't "several orders of magnitude" but it's certainly not happening anytime soon either.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s... * "electricity production", probably excludes direct-use such as vehicle transportation
> Agreed with you that 7x isn't "several orders of magnitude" but it's certainly not happening anytime soon either.
The hard part of that 7x is switching our current energy uses. It's not the extra power. And a reliable grid with that many renewables should make lots of extra power as a side effect.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/electricity-prod-source-s...
The rollout of PV and wind is a modern miracle success story that many are intentionally ignoring.
Some quick and dirty back of the envelope math.
According to this source, https://ourworldindata.org/energy-production-consumption, oil, coal, and nat gas, the big culprits, currently account for 137,000 TWh of energy use per year, or 76.5%. Bump that up to 82.5% if you include traditional biomass burning.
So, only 31,000 TWh per year come from renewables and nuclear. One third of that is hydropower, which is largely tapped out and certainly doesn't have exponential growth potential. So, we currently have about 20,000 TWh of renewable and nuclear generation capacity as a civilization, compared to 179,000 total consumption.
So, just to maintain current civilization standards without fossil fuels, we need to grow our renewable nuclear fleet by a little less than a single order of magnitude. Does it make sense to devote any of our renewable fleet to renewing atmospheric carbon if we are still emitting any of it? Seems like the more prudent action would be to use 100% of renewables to decrease emissions in the first place, because emission/extraction is always going to be an inefficient process.
Now, this doesn't account for the fact that most humans in the world are still incredibly energy poor. Your refrigerator uses more energy than the total use of the average person in Nigeria, which is expected to become more populous than China by the end of the century. Let's say that we agree that US levels of energy consumption is too high to target, and we would like a world where everyone has a European standard of living. The average European consumes about 38 MWh per year, US is double at 79 MWh, https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/per-capita-energy-use.
This means by the year 2100, human civilization would need control of about 400,000 TWh of energy to accommodate an expected population of 10.4 billion humans. Therefore, we need a 20x increase in the renewable and nuclear fleet just to serve all humans with a good standard of living without any fossil fuel consumption.
Now that we have people taken care of and we're not adding more carbon, we can start talking about removing carbon.
Back to the first data source, human civilization has currently consumed an aggregate of 5,341,110 TWh of fossil fuels since 1800. Assuming carbon capture can be 100% efficient (preposterous) meaning it takes an equal amount of energy to remove the carbon as we got when we burned it, then we would have to devote an equal amount of renewable energy watt hours to the project. Dedicated our current fleet of renewables, that would take 178 years. Let's assume that by the year 2100, we have 100,000 TWh of excess energy and we somehow have the political will to devote 20% of collective energy to the reversal project. That would take 53 years to remove the carbon added as of 2023 assuming 100% efficiency, and not accounting for the growing rate of carbon emissions until 100% carbon free. Given the fact we've been way overly generous with efficiency assumptions, we're looking at a project that takes multiple centuries.
So to your initial point, I am wrong. Not really several orders of magnitude, but between 1 and 2 orders of magnitude even in the most generous case where we don't make social progress eliminating poverty and just maintain the status quo. And that's assuming the crisis isn't that urgent and we can lazily take on the order of centuries to remove all the carbon we've added.
The rest of your analysis is quite correct but this is too pessimistic. You don't have to turn carbon dioxide back into fuel to get it out of the atmosphere. You only have to turn it into a stable non-gaseous compound, like magnesium carbonate. That can be done by crushing silicate rocks rich in alkaline earth metals, like olivine, and spreading them in coastal areas to get exposure to water and wave action. The magnesium silicate exchanges with carbonic acid to form magnesium carbonate and silica. The chemical reaction is thermodynamically spontaneous. The energy input to crush the rocks is just to accelerate the kinetics of weathering by exposing more surface area.
It's an accelerated version of the geological carbon cycle that naturally removes CO2 from the atmosphere:
http://butane.chem.uiuc.edu/pshapley/Environmental/L29/2.htm...
See section 7.2.2 of this IPCC report "Mineral carbonation and industrial uses of carbon dioxide" for the chemistry and thermodynamic considerations:
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_chapte...
As for the research efforts, some privately funded work is trying to get a saleable product out of carbon capture, like turning CO2 into useful polymers or other chemicals. Accelerated silicate weathering is simpler but it also has no hope of producing any valuable outputs. It's purely a mitigation measure for CO2 that has already been emitted. I don't think that these efforts are likely to yield profitable processes, but it would be great if they did because then even countries without government decarbonization mandates could improve via private business efforts.
On the government-funded side, I think that some unproductive R&D work is being funded either due to funding bodies not being savvy enough or due to politics. Kind of like how NASA has to go forward with the Space Launch System even though it's ridiculously expensive for what it does.
Also my original comment was about specific people or companies paying for capture. At that scale, paying for the increase in renewable power production isn't very hard. Many people and companies already use carbon-free power sources.
And I will note that over the course of decades scaling an industry up by 20x isn't particularly hard.
> An indulgence does not forgive the guilt of sin, nor does it provide release from the eternal punishment associated with unforgiven mortal sins. The Catholic Church teaches that indulgences relieve only the temporal punishment resulting from the effect of sin ... an indulgence is not a permit to commit sin, a pardon of future sin, nor a guarantee of salvation for oneself or for another.
I've seen this phrasing frequently in regards to carbon sequestration and it always seems to wildly understate the real problem with removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
CO2 isn't some unnecessary byproduct of creating energy, compared to say soot in wood burning. The CO2 created is an essential part of the carbon cycle by which all living things store and release solar energy. CO2 + H2O + (Solar) Energy => Hydrocarbons + O2. This is how energy is stored on our planet from the energy in a high calorie soda to petroleum (okay technically sugar is not a hydrocarbon, but the idea still holds).
When we extract energy from foods, burning organic material, or fossil fuels we do so by reversing that equation: Hydrocarbons + 02 => CO2 + H2O + Energy
To "scrub" carbon necessarily requires more energy than we got out of the process in the first place. Photosynthesis, for example, is only 4% efficient. Which means it takes about 25x as much solar energy to build the log you burn then the heat and light you experience burning the log.
"Scrubbing" CO2 fundamentally requires tremendous amounts of energy, and more than we got from the energy source in the first place. There are natural processes, like rock weathering, than can do this without energy inputs, but those are hard to replicate and scale.
The first setup is growing a lot of plants, turning them to charcoal, and burying it. This does require lots of energy, but the plants do it for you. You don't have to input the energy.
The second setup is a process that uses CO2 but doesn't generate fuel, so it needs much less energy than creating hydrocarbons.