Taking CO2 out of the air would be an expensive way to fight climate change
theverge.com
theverge.com
Saying so, if the problem is money, the groups that made themselves astronomically rich putting directly or indirectly that CO2 there should be the main component of that economic equation. Essentially they created a problem, got rich doing that, but all the rest of the world is the one that should get poor trying to fix it is a bad pattern.
these companies emitted carbon to satisfy the demands for goods/services from various populations around the world. By pinning the emissions onto the companies like this as responsible, it is indirectly implying that the end consumer has no responsibility. Which is absolutely not true.
The way, i think, to fix it is to price carbon emissions properly. This requires _all_ countries in the world to participate and enforce.
I’m not saying bad actors haven’t acted badly - demand generation is pretty evil, and we should definitely curtail that - but the problem is ultimately not the man in the boardroom or the White House or the luxury yacht. It’s the man in the mirror.
it's actually around a million times. a single air trip alone (let alone a private jet) emits far more carbon than an average family, and the ultra-wealthy fly a lot. plus the rest of their emissions too, of course.
https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/billionaire-emits-mi...
as the twitter classic goes: "the guy with only an Xbox one and a mattress in his room probably has the lowest carbon footprint but no one wants to talk about that". and yeah, that's dead right, the billionaire is probably into the billions of times multiplier over that guy.
that's why it's silly to whammy on consumer electronics etc as supposedly being some horrible social sin - people are going to want to do things, and actually things that keep you in your house and not traveling via car or (especially!) air travel do drastically reduce emissions overall. Even buying a new PC every year is peanuts compared to your spring break in florida.
Here are some ideas:
- You say you're happy with "in the low 60s F in the winter", but what if you had no heat? I don't know where you live, but where I live this would be untenable. Because of abundant energy, I can live in a place that is in the 0s through 40s pretty often, without having any wood-burning heat source in my house, or spending a large amount of my time cutting and splitting wood. Not to mention how much deforestation it would require if we didn't have abundant oil (which is much better to refine from petroleum than whales, btw), gas, or electricity.
- You say you're happy without driving "frequently". But what about driving at all? The pre-gasoline solution to getting individual people to individual places was literally horses. Bicycles actually work pretty well now for this, but only because of all the roads that have now been built everywhere to support cars.
- Speaking of that, are roads and sidewalks a total luxury, or are they more important than that? Concrete is another critical component of our modern infrastructure that is downstream of sucking super old dead stuff out of the ground.
There is so much more of this sort of thing: grocery stores, modern medicine, illumination when the sun isn't up, it goes on and on. It is not hyperbole to say that human civilization at anything approaching the current scale and standard of living has been achieved on the back of abundant energy from fossil fuels.
It would not be impossible to roll this all way back, but it would be impossible to do so without devastating impacts to people currently living.
I strongly believe that rather than retreat, the far more promising path is to advance. As abundant as energy from fossil fuels has proved to be, they don't hold a candle to the energy that exists in nature: the sun sends us an astronomical amount of energy each day, the earth is mostly made out of rock that is hotter than industrial kilns, the bonds of particles within atoms themselves contain a huge amount of energy. The challenge is that these forms of energy are much harder to extract than lighting hydrocarbons on fire.
The trick is to make sure we use enough the abundant and easily accessible energy we have today as an investment in our collective project to lever up our ability to tap into the even more abundant but difficult to use energy that is laying all around us.
My power went out for and hours-long stretch recently, and it only highlighted how much richer my life is because our society figured out how to provide everyone energy at very low cost.
The question now is whether we can keep doing so, while diminishing the externalities to a sustainable level. I think we can!
The next question is how to do it. There is no one simple trick that's gonna do it. In my view, figuring this out is the work of our era. In other eras, people have figured out how to make enough food to feed everyone, how to move people around quickly, how to communicate across great distances near-instantaneously, and all sorts of other things. I think this is ours. That's scary but it's also exciting. We can be heroes!
If the price for (say) carbon had been properly baked into the cost of gasoline, there would have been significantly less fat to skim off the top and we'd have vastly fewer resources and energy billionaires.
That is: yes, it's great that cheap energy has lifted billions out of poverty and afforded them the lifestyle they have today. But now those billions are going to be the ones that have to pick up the tab while also being the most exposed to the dangers.
But seriously, we lack the understanding to do local geo-engineering, much less at global scale. Hard pass.
Reducing CO2 emissions by going green and EVs (and not just EV cars), and removing CO2, is a longer but much more controllable and stable approach. I just wish we had better battery technology already, but we spent the last 100y deluding ourselves that a finite non-renewable energy source, that messed up our only biosphere, was the only course of action.
Certainly, we should implement numerous intervention strategies to combat climate change. Government spending seems largely unaccountable to citizens outside of the lobbyist elite. Why not, at least, spend some Monopoly money on something that might actually work?
Edit: spelling
1) https://comptroller.defense.gov/Portals/45/Documents/defbudg... 2) https://www.crfb.org/blogs/2023-interest-costs-reach-659-bil...
Although we humans are known for tech breakthroughs.
Ironically, afforestation is one of the cheapest and most effective ways to install air purifiers at scale.
Problems need to feel urgent enough to gain sustainable support from society, but climate change doesn't feel urgent, despite it being a five alarm fire relative to the last few millennia.
I suspect we won't get serious about breakthroughs until 2100 or so. Fingers crossed for fusion.
If this were right, we wouldn't have solar power scaling up by hundreds of gigawatts per year, or the EV and charging network deployment we're currently seeing, or a bunch of recent progress on geothermal power, electrolysis, and heat pumps (including for industrial heat).
I'm not sure which part of your thesis is wrong though. Maybe people do feel sufficient urgency to work on all this? Or maybe people are actually capable of working on things without needing a "five alarm fire" to motivate them. I tend think it's the latter, personally.
Another example of a breakthrough emerging from non-urgency: AI. It wasn't a new field, and was highly academic, and then boom. Transformers.
I guess the urgency with climate tech is a personal one, not inherent to the industry.
Like, there isn't really an "invention of the transformer" singular breakthrough moment for lithium ion batteries. But there absolutely is a breakthrough-level difference in battery technology between, say, the 90s and today.
Maybe battery nerds would say there were breakthrough moments like that, but when I read The Powerhouse (Steve Levine), which is about some of these developments, I came away surprised and impressed by how incremental but consistent the progress was.
Same thing with solar panels. We figured out how to do PV in the middle of the 20th century, but it didn't really work until recently, after tons of "boring" incremental progress on it.
That's not expensive. That's less than $300 per person per year.
The US spends $800B on military. If $100B were to make a dent in climate change, that's a bargain.
I'd consider the US spending anything short of $1T / year here reasonable, sustainable, and likely economically-beneficial. That's about 3% of GDP, for reference.
The reason for having a military is to be disaster-ready. Even medical spending is something like 1/3 of our GDP, and reducing pollution would help there. Any way you run the numbers, $100B is not much here, and critically, those costs would go down as we invest and technology improves.
I'm very far from the far-left fringe in terms of believing in some of the horror stories around climate change -- the discourse is polarized -- but even taking relatively right-wing estimates of impact, it's hard to see how a spend on that order is not justified.
The problem here is people don't see the difference between large numbers. $5M, $5B, and $5T all simply look "big."
You can't capture CO2 unless we have vast amounts of carbon free energy. If we have vast amounts of carbon free energy, we'll stop adding CO2. At which point the problem stops getting worse and (very gradually) improves on its own.
If the problem has gotten to the point where the amount of CO2 is itself a danger, it means we're still adding CO2 to the atmosphere, and sequestering CO2 just isn't an option.
So this is considering a scenario that isn't just expensive, but effectively impossible. And worrying about "things we might do some day" misses the fact that we need to stop using fossil fuels right now. Plotting to remove the existing carbon just isn't helpful and makes things worse.
So carbon capture should still be funded, but it would be on the backburner. I don't know what is the appropriate funding. A billion dollars per year, maybe?
Plants seem to do OK. I mean, fine, there are technical arguments to be had, but have them with details and not hyperbole. Starting from that kind of position is ridiculous when there's an existence proof all around you.
Is this not obvious to others?
A simple, yet very effective old proverb is that when you find yourself in a hole, first stop digging.
Unfortunately it isn't. Most people still need to get from A to B and can't afford a Tesla.
But this threaten very powerful established interests, and those interests have been remarkably adept at mobilizing themselves and spreading disinformation, fear, and doubt in the population.
Even the most weak and financially friendly efforts are attacked and undermined. Like a carbon tax with a generous rebate -- like here in Canada, and a policy formerly advocated by conservative economists, but now a target of populist demagoguery and will likely be gone after the next election.
Conservative and neo-liberal ideological strains have spent 40+ years steadfastly eliminating the ability of central governments to plan and have coordinated industrial/macro-economic strategies in the west -- something they mostly had after WWII.
Now we desperately need it.
To wean ourselves off will be painful, but not impossible. Building strong local community is a good start; I've got to know a few neighbors now in this rural area and we're starting to offer to pick up groceries for each other, thus reducing the car trips to town. Building trust goes a long way to not needing to do everything yourself.
And how many financial interests (with the resources to actively lobby against change) would be affected too.
If you have an obvious answer that takes those two things into account I'd love to hear it!
Does a corporation's existence justify its continued existence? Like people, it'll try to keep on going, but it not being a person, it's okay to let these things go. People will lose jobs, but the answer to that is to revitalize the land so we can transition to getting our food nearby, and spending the time to do it- time well spent.
Computers, for example, are a fun diversion we enjoy thanks to our curiosity, ingenuity, and cheap (money-wise, not life-wise) energy. I don't consider them essential.
Letting go of a lot of our costly and polluting playthings is the way to go. Children cry when someone takes their candy away, and we'll be no different unless we realize that candy is killing us and we exercise our adult brains to change our habits.
Looking to the future, virtually the whole of humanity will drastically need to change the way they do things to cope with the changes in climate. It's likely too late now, but there would be far less changes needed if we stop pumping out so much CO2 into the air and thus reduce the likelihood of climate catastrophes.
> And how many financial interests (with the resources to actively lobby against change) would be affected too.
Putting financial interests ahead of the health of our environments is how we got into this mess.
> If you have an obvious answer that takes those two things into account I'd love to hear it!
You've framed the problem in an unhelpful way - you're asking for a solution that perpetuates unsustainable practices.
We've been trying to convince people to emit less CO2 for decades and that sadly doesn't seem to be working well enough to get us out of this mess.
Some sources of electricity could be replaced by renewables, but not all. And certainly not as cheaply as oil or gas is.
In fact, might turn out to be not so cost effective either if it's almost impossible to force billions of people to change their habits.
As long as environmental friendliness is a luxury, nothing is going to happen. This is the dynamic that needs to be disrupted, somehow.
The realization that needs to be reached (but won't, because people don't think that way) to power real change is that it's not cheap; we just don't pay the externalities at the pump, so we get used to thinking that it's cheap.
There's a book that came out recently - "Not the End of the World" by Hannah Ritchie - that starts by digging into a two-pronged definition of the concept of "sustainability", where the first prong is about meeting the needs of current generations, and the second prong (which is the one we usually focus on when thinking about sustainability) is about maintaining an environment in which future generations can meet their needs as well.
The problem with most of what we're doing today is that it fails the second prong: future generations won't be able to meet their needs if the earth is too hot to support human civilization.
But the problem with your proposed solution is that it fails the first prong.
If you were dictator of the world and waved your wand such that nobody ever dug up another fossil fuel, starting from this moment, the result would be upheaval, privation, and death on a massive scale. Human civilization is, at this moment, dependent on digging up those fossil fuels and lighting them on fire.
So what the (great many) people who are working on this problem are doing is trying to navigate a path that threads a needle between these two bad outcomes, transitioning away from the dig-stuff-up-and-burn-it model to one that still works about as well - or ideally, even better! - for people currently living, without sacrificing the lives of people who will live in the future. And yeah, pretty much everyone involved thinks that does mean we'll dig up very little of those fossils, on the other side of this transition. But that is more like an effect than a cause.
Hope that helps!
Tomorrow is far too late. We should have started reducing our dependencies on oil since the 1970s.
It is an obvious idea - and it's totally fine to put out obvious ideas! - but that's also why there are so many well known and top of mind reasons that it is not the solution to our predicament.
To me, this is like a new student of algebra who thinks, "division is defined for all values of the denominator except zero, an obvious solution to that special case is that it should be defined for zero as well". It's an interesting idea for a student to have, but the reasons it doesn't work are very well known.
Of course we want to maintain and even grow, but there are costs to that.
To address the first prong, would it work to change our culture? Continuing to justify the massive amount of energy we convert, largely because we want to and not because we need to, feels like a problem with solutions that don't necessarily involve war.
Clearly we use more energy than we need, but I think lots of people hugely overestimate how much room there is to cut that without many many people dying. A very large amount of humanity's energy usage goes toward the food and other infrastructure of civilization that keeps people alive.
Improving energy efficiency is certainly one component of decarbonization. But to my knowledge, nobody suggests it is enough on its own, or even a particularly large portion of the mix of solutions.
I think the most helpful framing is to look out ~100 years. In 2124, will humanity be using fossil fuels? No, highly unlikely. Oil is done: either through depletion, or EROI descent, or explicit measures to cap CO2 pollution, or a combination. We will see a world without oil soon, one way or the other. The question is how gracefully can we make this transition without causing massive human suffering? Part of that graceful transition involves the responsible use of our remaining fossil hydrocarbons.
"Just stop oil" gives us zero chance of pulling off a smooth transition and plunges us straight into economic collapse with no regard for human well-being. "Drill-baby-drill" raises the risk of catastrophic climate crises with no regard for human well-being. Neither is a good mental framework if you care about helping humanity deal with this predicament.
And carbon capture in the oceans promises to be much more cost effective.
But then I believe we'll almost certainly want to go net-negative for some period of time. And we'll need to do a bunch of research and experimentation into carbon removal techniques to figure out how to do that. The earlier we start doing that, the better!
How many people can Earth reasonably support?
Edit to answer your (rhetorical?) question: What we can do is build strong local connections; that's the first step towards decreasing our level of domestication, per Why We Need to be Wild, by Jessica Carew Kraft.
How you plan to strike those coal power stations?
Human numbers have dwindled since the runaway global warming that eventually triggered the water crisis.
The biggest cities are now barren ruins. Humanity survives in tribal pockets near the poles, making do with scavenged old tech from the past.
A breakthrough! Someone discovers an old harddrive that contains information on why we didn't fix this when it was still possible...
An extraterrestrial event? Nuclear war? An incurable disease? Technological limitation?
"It was too expensive."
Is that information accurate? It's hard for me to tell, but the amount of junk on that page (especially on mobile) gives me a really bad first impression.
https://www.co2meter.com/blogs/news/could-global-co2-levels-...
Even if you believe it's not man-made, the historical way that organisms "adapt" to climate change is by going extinct in favor of new organisms that can handle the new climate. "People should just go extinct" is, I suppose, a proposal that one could make, but I don't think it's useful along any axis.