Transportation decarbonization is the second most impactful thing. And anything else comes far behind those two.
That said, just because some action isn't on the top 2, it isn't reason to stop doing it. And besides, yes, we will need to reduce the atmospheric CO2 at the second half of the century, and this is probably what will yield results fastest. It's all the better if we just start right now.
I can see a world where globally the typical transit is a BEV for heavy equipment, transit, and some shipping all charged by renewables sometime in 2070-2080. However the lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and power plants being built today range from 20-50 years. We are unlikely to force early retirement of that infrastructure at a global scale within the next 20 years.
I wonder about that. Will they be subsidized? At the same time are also closing down functional coal plants because their operational cost can't be recouped now that they compete with renewables.
(Yeah, in all likelihood, everybody involved is actively refusing to think and talk about that on the hopes that they will have left this job by then. And the people putting money there are probably trying to sell their shares away to another loser before it.)
Any way you cut it, those new coal plants will only get operational at all if people decide to constantly burn some money in them.
> However the lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and power plants being built today range from 20-50 years.
Yes, and that means we can replace up to 5% of our transportation emissions by year without increasing our capital depreciation. That is in stark contrast to the norm in that you are supposed to do some net investment to adapt to any random change.
If you decide (by regulation, morality, or whatever) to actually sink money on the change, you can get there much faster.
When they are producing energy, renewables are about an order of magnitude cheaper than coal (and falling).
However having been the world's worst offender in terms of rising CO2 output, it seems to be peaking and going into decline. See "China’s emissions set to fall in 2024 after record growth in clean energy" for example https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-chinas-emissions-set-to...
Decarbonization is the best thing to do by a large margin, both in a cost-benefit sense and in a net impact sense. It's stupid to burn coal to produce $X worth of electricity and then spend many multiples of $X just to remove a tiny fraction of the carbon.
But you're also right that decarbonization won't occur in the amount required by 2060.
Which, quite frankly and plainly, just means we're fucked. Not even going into positive feedback loops of natural methane emissions due to warming arctic and tropics.
Of course there are still options to avoid the worst but they'd require such an immediate turnaround and international collaboration at a time when geopolitical polarization and tensions are ultra high. I just don't see it happening.
Yet the carbon capture people think a cost line item no advantage except regulatory requirement will scale out faster? Yeah, ok.
Carbon capture and hydrogen cats, science and engineering aside,Val ways trace back to oil and gas media and lobbying. Its just fud at the policy level.
I don't think this is true unless you assume some imminent improvement on grid scale power storage.
News reports about how cheap wind and solar are with supporting data based on levelized cost of energy (LCOE) completely miss the fact that intermittent power sources are not substitutes for base load generation. To approach true substitution you have to include overbuilding the intermittent sources or spending money on very expensive storage systems (that may not even exist yet). In either case the cost goes up considerably.
IMHO:
* don't turn off nuclear plants
* invest in more cost effective nuclear power
* invest in more effective energy storage
* invest in more effective solar/wind
* don't pretend that energy infrastructure can be legislated into existence--- I agree
* invest in more cost effective nuclear power
--- I could diatribe about this a long time, but basically I think solid fuel is a dead end in nuclear plant economics, but the entire industry is focused on solid fuel rod huge pressurized dome. I think truly effective nuclear will take a lot of government investment and novel thinking. Or materials breakthroughs that make LFTR/MSRs cheap.
* invest in more effective energy storage
-- EVs will take care of this, probably sulfur batteries
* don't pretend that energy infrastructure can be legislated into existence
-- it can be subsidized effectively though. See: china.
The existence of coal plants doesn't mean you have to run them most of the time.
Since you don't quantify a cost-benefit of any action, how have you arrived to this effort ordinality?
Given a ranking, would any efforts in combination have higher impact than a higher ranked effort alone?
The marginal costs for those top 2 are quite public. For electricity it's negative, electric cars cost some 30% more than normal ones.
They are reasonably easy to estimate for things like spreading carbon-capturing rocks around (or you can use the price of phosphate-rich rocks, it should be similar). It's not a very expensive thing to do, but way more expensive than those 2.
Marginally, there isn't a lot of synergy between those different options. But if you push them to levels much higher than the ones we have now it becomes clear that decarbonizing electricity will become a bottleneck to almost everything.
This this isn't wrong, be careful. Many of those proposing action outside of the top two are really trying to distract you from fixing the real problem. Many things outside of the top two need a ton of research before we can fix them - by getting you to spend your time and effort on that research you don't do anything about the top 2 which we can solve today. Thus the entrenched interests (mostly big oil) are pushing you to look at things outside of the top two knowing you can't solve them today, and while you are looking there they can sell more [oil or whatever].
Spreading CO2 capturing material is a very viable way to help. And we must research capture anyway, because we surely will need it.
This kind of action is the carbon credit system working like it was supposed to work, and a really good example to use to turn it into a tax that gets negative to whoever is capturing.
But I do agree, one has to always be careful not to fall for polluter's propaganda.
We also need to get to a place, culturally, where we can have calm rational conversations about how many people we can reasonably ask this planet to support. At middling timescales, fewer people is better than greener tech. Some will see that as opting out of progress but there's really a lot of opportunity to offset it by doing a better job of investing in the people we already have.
I think there are less heavy handed ways to get us from a place where it's assumed that you'll have kids to a place where it's respected but not encouraged, but when people hear you talking about population growth as a problem to be solved, they immediately assume that you're about to propose something awful.
I disagree, that's a dangerous trap. Oh, sure, it seems reasonable and sagacious at first glance, but that's what makes the eventual misdirection/procrastination so insidious! Long-term planning is not automatically wise planning.
________
To illustrate, imagine that:
1. There's a local park with houses around it.
2. Some people periodically dump their trash in it.
3. The trash-piles are getting kind of big and stinky now.
4. A well-meaning neighbor says: "What we really need is to get a place, as a community, where we can have calm rational conversations bout how many people can live near this park."
5. (Bonus) Many of the biggest trash dumpers agree: "Exactly, literally everybody here is to blame, and especially people moving in and/or having too many kids! The only way forward is a very thorough and lengthy symposium with multiple committees to develop recommendations to stop that kind of thing."
________
In that analogy, it's easier to see that your neighbor's proposal is--er--less than practical, because (A) the immediate problem isn't actually total visitor count,(B) we'll never reach full consensus, and (C) any consensus number would still meaninglessly unenforceable.
So it can't really help, but it can harm by creating unnecessary discord and will prevent/delay practical changes like "Anything you bring must be taken back out", or "Littering: $X fine."
When it comes to our impact on the carrying capacity of this planet, we don't have a small handful of bad actors. We have a small handful of good actors. The vast majority of us (here in the US) are not willing to make the compromises necessary to be carbon neutral. We just don't know how to live that way, and it may take several generations of trying to figure it out.
In the meantime, were going to have to find a balance between quality and quantity of life. To leave quantity unconstrained is to expect the have-nots to quietly tolerate the excesses of the haves to a much greater degree than they already do. It seems like a recipe for needless conflict (which will further set back, if not completely prevent, our sustainability goals).
Looking at [1], COVID when probably the most number of people stopped driving and individual energy needs plummeted, our CO2 emissions and fossil fuel energy use dipped marginally. I think the reason is that shipping, airline, and commercial transportation (ie trucks) consume the most and those aren’t getting off fossil fuels any time soon. [2] indicates that cars and buses together contribute ~7% to global emissions. Aviation and shipping individually are bigger CO2 emitters than the total amount used by personal vehicles.
Also these reports are hilarious (is that the right word?) to read. They use phase out to mean “no co2 emissions from this sector” while politicians say phase out to mean “no new sales/construction of co2 emitters in this sector”. Completely phasing it out will take much much longer.
It’s good for us to do the work and cars are a meaningful contributor, but the biggest impact would actually be shipping + aviation + trucking. Unfortunately those are also the hardest problems and the ones EVs won’t touch any time soon (maybe trucking but even then I think we’re stuck with diesel for quite a while). Shipping probably needs nuclear power and aviation needs some kind of zero emission fuel (hydrogen probably won’t cut it). Heck we haven’t even removed lead from aviation fuel and that doesn’t even require an engine change.
Seriously?
The average person in the westernised world probably uses something between 100 to 400 litres of water for washing and flushing per day, personal use actually in their house. And drinks around 2 litres in the same amount of time. External water use on behalf of that person for example for growing food and manufacturing things is even more. Having a glass of water wasted at a restaurant is a complete negligible non-issue. How ridiculous.
They also tell you to cut back on personal usage. But that amounts to 10% compared with agriculture’s 40% (used to grow economic crops like alfalfa which we send to China, not food crops) and 50% is lost to the environment.
> Initial water savings came mainly from more efficient indoor plumbing and fixtures; more recent efforts have also focused on reducing outdoor use, which accounts for nearly half of all urban use.
Except that it isn't:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1185535/transport-carbon...
> when probably the most number of people stopped driving and individual energy needs plummeted, our CO2 emissions and fossil fuel energy use dipped marginally.
Because the reduction was a percent of half of less than a third of CO2 emissions. People stopped commuting to work but they still went to the store, or had more things delivered from the internet in a giant UPS truck.
> I think the reason is that shipping, airline, and commercial transportation (ie trucks) consume the most and those aren’t getting off fossil fuels any time soon.
Why not? Trucks can do in the same way as cars. Rail is the easiest to electrify -- a "diesel locomotive" is actually an electric locomotive with a diesel generator on it. Add a third rail or electric gantry and you don't need the generator, and put some batteries in the locomotive and you can get by partial coverage. Container ships are predominantly cargo by weight and have some significant leeway in terms of generation methods with a poor energy density -- or you can go the opposite way and use a nuclear reactor as you say.
The hard one is aviation, but it's only ~2% of total CO2 emissions and the worst case scenario is biofuels, which would be more expensive but is a known working technology in the absence of any lower cost alternative.
The really hard one is heating in the winter, because it's a large proportion of CO2 emissions but is inversely aligned with solar generation and can't be significantly scaled back on a cold day to account for intermittent generation from wind. That's the thing where nuclear seems like the best option.
But you don't have to solve the hard problems before adopting the known solutions to the easy problems.
I intentionally omitted rail as it’s already extremely efficient in terms of co2 per kg shipped compared with other forms of transportation.
As for trucks, no, electrifying them is harder for all sorts of reasons. A big one is range and how big a battery would need to sit for them. If you’re thinking commuter trucks and local delivery vans sure. But diesel trucks are really hard to electrify. Evidence: people have been trying to do this for a while and there’s no electric semis on the road.
> People stopped commuting to work but they still went to the store, or had more things delivered from the internet in a giant UPS truck.
That argument feels flat - work commuting makes up the vast majority of miles that people use their cars for.
As for aviation, its global warming effect is actually larger because of complicated effects. Unclear what biofuels will do.
> The really hard one is heating in the winter, because it's a large proportion of CO2 emissions but is inversely aligned with solar generation and can't be significantly scaled back on a cold day to account for intermittent generation from wind. That's the thing where nuclear seems like the best option.
If you spend the money to build nuclear for winter, it makes a lot more sense to run it in the summer too. If anything, solar and wind make more sense as technologies to power recapture with nuclear satisfying our day to day energy demands.
> But you don't have to solve the hard problems before adopting the known solutions to the easy problems.
Never said you do but it is worth discussing when talking about resource expenditure - we should be allocating resources to solving the most impactful changes, not the easiest ones. I’ll note that solar advocates conveniently overlook how much our grid demands will scale up with electrification of transportation - it will rapidly out grow our renewable efforts since we’re not regularly building nuclear power plants meaning fossil fuels will take up the slack.
This only really matters for long-haul trucking, which predominantly exists for political reasons because it would otherwise be much more sensible to use rail for that. A large proportion of usage for big trucks, and the part that can't easily be replaced with rail, is short haul trucking, e.g. getting bulk goods from the port to the local warehouse an hour away. This doesn't require a huge amount of range and the truck can be charged while it's being loaded and unloaded.
But even long-haul trucking isn't unsolvable. The Tesla Semi has a 500 mile range, which is more than 8 hours of driving at 60MPH, and at some point the driver will want to stop for a meal which allows the truck to be topped off.
> diesel trucks are really hard to electrify. Evidence: people have been trying to do this for a while and there’s no electric semis on the road.
There are Telsa Semis on the road, though not a lot of them yet. But this is a production issue, not a feasibility issue. They just have to make more of them.
> That argument feels flat - work commuting makes up the vast majority of miles that people use their cars for.
I tried to look this up and the numbers are all over the place (probably depends heavily on region) but it doesn't seem to be true. Typical numbers are in the range of a third or less.
But also, what it is about the other numbers that would make this confusing? "Cars and vans" are a little under 15% of total CO2 emissions. That's how much you could get by electrifying them and charging with renewable generation, which is not at all insignificant. But if you reduce the <15% by a third temporarily and then say the reduction was only <5%, well, yeah. But what do you want to do? It isn't the case that one source is emitting 95% of CO2 and we're trying to focus on the other 5%. It's 15% here, 15% there, >50% nowhere in particular.
> As for aviation, its global warming effect is actually larger because of complicated effects. Unclear what biofuels will do.
What they would do is replace petroleum-based jet fuel in existing planes.
> If you spend the money to build nuclear for winter, it makes a lot more sense to run it in the summer too.
Of course it does.
> If anything, solar and wind make more sense as technologies to power recapture with nuclear satisfying our day to day energy demands.
Nuclear is base load. Electricity demand is higher during the day because that's when most people are awake, but also when solar generates. Building enough nuclear to satisfy peak daily demand would be unnecessarily expensive, and result in overcapacity most of the day. Moreover, there is a lot of demand which is adaptable to intermittent generation -- that ~15% of CO2 that comes from "cars and vans" and becomes charging batteries, that can be ~100% solar and wind. Energy storage to shave down the demand peak in the early evening can be charged from renewable generation.
> I’ll note that solar advocates conveniently overlook how much our grid demands will scale up with electrification of transportation - it will rapidly out grow our renewable efforts since we’re not regularly building nuclear power plants meaning fossil fuels will take up the slack.
Pretty much all of the One True Solution folks are missing the plot.
Existing US power generation is ~60% fossil fuels, ~18% nuclear, ~14% solar and wind, ~6% hydro and a trivial amount of "other". It's hard to increase the amount of hydro because most of the good sites are already used, so if we want to get rid of that 60% fossil fuels, what's left is nuclear, solar, and wind.
But it's not 60%. It's more like 260% because we're also talking about dumping the fossil fuel energy use for transportation and heating onto the power grid, which are themselves each almost as much energy use as the entire existing power grid.
You don't ask whether we should address this by building more solar and wind or more nuclear, you build as much of both as you possibly can and still might end up short. We need something like 6 times more nuclear and 12 times more solar and wind than we have right now.
But it would be cool if I could travel to a quarry and crush rocks for a while, and it would actually meaningfully help with the climate.
As a species we emit 35 billion tons of CO2 per year. So I would think we're talking capture in at least the hundreds of millions tons a year range.
I don't see this being viable at a scale that matters until we've solved a lot of other problems first.
This volcanic rock thing doesn't sound like it is capturing enough to matter anyway as some people have already calculated.
Naively, you would expect that producing and distributing crushed rocks sufficient to capture carbon would be equivalent to at most 10x the concrete industry. In practice, it’s likely closer to 1x.
Slighty off-topic, but I'm curious: what do you think requires more energy to move, 35 billion tons of steel or 35 billion tons of feathers?[*]
but in all seriousness, the correspondence to rocks is beneficial as it's not obvious just how much mass industry moves in 2023. If you add in waste rock at quarries the numbers rise precipitously. A single shovel bucket can move 20 tons.
There was a discussion just a couple of weeks ago here on HN about a project which gave more efficient cooking stoves and sold the estimated savings in terms of carbon as credits. Only problem was that it massively underestimated the actual carbon saved.
A couple of years ago the Guardian did some investigating where forests which was under no threat of deforestation being sold as carbon credits as if they had saved the entire forest from deforestation.
Probably in part confirmation bias, but also I don't think that a fix to a market that has externalities is to ductape it with a new market that has new externalities. That just provides more loopholes for evasion.
Estimating carbon emissions avoided by a project is a messy and subjective process in the best of cases. Even more so when large amounts of capital is at risk.
Currently it looks like companies get the PR benefits of being "net emissions neutral" while the carbon credits they purchased to become so will be shown to be little more than fraud a couple of years later.
The actual way to fix this is to price carbon. You don't get money for not burning down a forest, you pay money if you burn down a forest, or burn coal. Then you refund all of that money to the public so it isn't a net tax, it's just an incentive to not emit carbon, because only the people who emit carbon pay the tax but everybody gets the refund.
There’s a reason none of the carbon recapture companies talk about how much energy they use per ton of co2 captured.
For a sense of scale, last year we emitted 40Gigatons of co2 in the air. If I’m reading [1] correctly this corresponds to over 120k TWh of energy that we generated from just that co2. That’s an insane amount of energy capacity we need to overbuild past net 0 (and it’s cute when people think solar will get us there by 2050).
And these numbers are still growing each year and at best we maybe have put a dent in the second order derivative but we haven’t started the downward trend.
And COVID showed how much of an impact a mass scale reduction in personal co2 caused when basically most people stopped driving - it was a blip in [1]. This shows us roughly the impact that EVs attached to renewables will have - most of the CO2 is from industry, shipping, airline transit, concrete, etc. Those things are decarbonizing very very slowly and it’s not a “slow and then all at once” kind of thing. The only way to overbuild enough capacity is to build an insane amount of fission power plants, but I suspect we’re rapidly crossing the point where even that would work since the ecological damage caused by global warming isn’t going to be reversed (eg the ice caps won’t reform, the extinct species won’t come back, etc).
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
Edit: for those downvoting me, I would appreciate if you explained where I’m factually incorrect. Unless the downvote is just an emotional response to uncomfortable data, which I understand.
Industrial scale direct air capture technology right is ~1200KWh per ton of CO2. And this energy cost is non linear - as we scale up, the lower CO2 concentration in the air will result in higher energy costs being needed to extract the remaining. I don’t think exposing the rock will be cheaper or can even scale as a process but harder to say. But that energy used is largely waste - sure we’ll maybe find a use for some of the co2 but then that’s also not sequestration and will release some of the captured co2 back into the air.
Using those numbers means we’d need to be spending 48TWh to capture the carbon we emit each year, which is almost half of our current global energy production. Those are massive numbers. Of course you could overbuild less and slowly extract the co2, but then climate change gets even more baked in.
In total, that means we could sequester all global CO2 emissions for ~1.68 Trillion dollars per year - or 1.9% of global GDP. This is a small fraction of the estimated costs of economic disruption of climate change, why wouldn't we spend money on this?
That 1.68T number (insanely optimistic btw because 4c/kwh is quite cheap and it’s probably closer to 3-5x more expensive in practice), is just electricity. People to build these factories need salaries. There are significant construction costs. And then there’s the 40GTon of captured co2 we’d need to sequester - figuring out where to store it is a huge problem. And remember we need to repeat this process each year ongoing to keep up - forget about all the co2 already in the air. Oh and these tend to be chemical reactions so you’re also going to have to be shipping large scale of consumables around to perform the sequestration process.
Sequestration is a long long long way off from being practical if it ever even gets there and you’ve wildly underestimated the cost and complexity I think.
I’m less concerned about total cost, olivine weathering proposals generally sit at $50 per ton delivered and applied where it’s needed. Which is 1/3rd the price of the electricity I estimated.
That gets us into the realm of 500 billion per year. Less than the US’s defense budget. If more economic efforts materialize - perhaps we’d get to 100-300 billion per year at which point joint funding becomes obvious.
Still great to do the other things, but let’s not ignore a technology which is promising and cheap.
Should I read: 1 CO2 ton effectively captured after discounting CO2 emitted for basalt extraction and dispersion ?
I suppose one could argue that by reducing the cost of getting that waste away, they're effectively incentivizing mining. You'd need a more sophisticated model to see if this will work.
"One tonne of basalt captures 0.153–0.165 tonne CO2, depending on infiltration rate (400–1200 mm/a), reactive surface area (3.7–15 m2/g) and CO2 partial pressure (41.1–3000 Pa). When the infiltration rate is high (1200 mm/a), the CO2 capture capacity of basalt is exhausted after 9.5–11.4 years." [1]
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12665-022-10320-0
With weathering, the carbon is permanently locked away and as long as there is more rock to weather you can keep capturing more and more carbon. We already produce billions of tons of waste rock each year as a byproduct of mining. The bottleneck is entirely the extraction of desired resources from that rock. If we didn't care about that, it's really easy to just blow up massive quantities of rock to dramatically increase the exposed surface area.
Lithos is almost certainly one of the many scam CO2 projects.
This is all voluntary right? As far as I can tell [1] the US doesn't have a carbon pricing system so this is really dependent on companies being interested in the positive PR this leads to?
Better put this absorbing rock in places we don't need for other stuff like deserts and salt lakes
And use ice water to ever expand the fractures? Basically just a solar farm that pumps air underground, ocassionally pumping and then cooling water?