CO2 removal 'gap' shows countries 'lack progress' for 1.5C warming limit
carbonbrief.org
carbonbrief.org
The humongous amount of entropy we will have to generate to offset any significant part of current emissions via carbon capture (let alone already emitted CO2) basically tells us that carbon capture can only be used in exceptional circumstances where there are no feasible methods of reducing emissions. If there are, then the winning method is to not emit in the first place.
> CDR currently removes about 3bn tonnes of CO2 from the air every year, of which almost 100% comes from land-based methods, *such as afforestation and reforestation*, the study says.
Trees have pretty well matured. They will not get the same improvements through material science that solar got. "Letting carbon capture tech mature" is hoping for a moonshot to bear fruit.
just like recycling plastics matured, right? :)
1. Cut back on emissions
2. Nobody anywhere is allowed to lose money
How can this possibly work? How do you cut emissions which are a proxy for consumption/production without anybody losing out?
How you draw the bounds of society, that's hard; Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia may well hate the idea of the world turning away from oil and towards renewables, but have no power to stop it.
Big Oil was, past-tense, considered identical with national interest. Now, even though they're still useful, that value is not at anything close to the same level, and it's adapt-or-disappear time for all of them.
That's about the stage we're at.
For instance, efficiency is what has made solar panels both effective enough to use, and cheap enough to install.
Today, it's basically impossible to convince people that plastics are not recyclable - at least not in the same way that glass or metals are - because of that little recyclable symbol ever piece of plastic has on it.
In the same way, carbon capture is not impossible (plant some trees and bury charcoal), it's just that nobody wants to pay for it.
If we convert some of that pumped oil into a plastic that won't be burned but landfilled then we prevented some release of CO2.
If we use the plastic for packaging (instead of glass or metal) we saved energy (which translates today to CO2) and we saved fuel by transporting lighter packaging.
Plastic is pretty much the best thing that happened to humanity in relation to CO2 emissions.
Too bad we want to get rid of it because we find it unsightly, because we fail to properly sequester it at its end of life.
It’s sad to see someone having been on HN for so long having such a myopic view of things.
As for (a) plastic uses up about 6% of oil we dig up so political influence of plastic manufacturers is probably roughly proportional. That explains why we have paper straws while oil extraction and burning continues and increases completely unrestricted. Plastics are just the easiest political target.
And as for (b) making plastic takes less energy than making glass or metal for the same purpose, plastics also are lighter so produce less emissions in transport so if we magically waved away all the plastics our emissions would rise by many percent, not fall. And we can't just not use packaging because the we would waste even more food which would also cause emissions.
It's like with ethanol for cars. In theory it was supposed to save emissions. In practise it caused greater emissions due to land use change for the purpose of growing corn to make methanol.
Probably half of the things we do (my wild guess) to help the environment or emissions specifically actually increases emissions in the end.
It's sad to see that even on HN there is huge representation of mainstream simplistic views that don't recognize complexities of the world and the need for carefulness to not make things worse.
(a) The massive plastic producers are multinational oil companies, and they see it as a growing industry to capitalize on, so they are extremely influential lobbyists for maintaining plastic production.
(b) Anything that makes shipping lighter, cheaper, and generally more viable will result in much more shipping and thus much greater emissions, not less. This is always the problem with efficiency-driven arguments. (But it takes understanding the complexity of systems to understand this.)
(c) Of course the ecosystemic outcomes are devastating, and we still barely have the knowledge to understand the full impact.
Here’s a quick article if you want to educate yourself a bit more, I’m not going to keep replying: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/may/18/twenty-f...
(b) People won't reduce shipping when you make it more fuel intensive. They will just use more fuel. As long as the demand is there capitalism will mold everything to fullfill it. And the demand is already there.
(c) what could realistically be done is forcing plastic manufacturers foot the bill for cleanup. For example to be allowed to sell 1kg of plastics they should collect and recycle or landfill 1kg of plastic from the environment. To sell one kg of new plastic you need to buy 1kg of plastic waste. With full scruitany of the government paid for by special tax on plastic producers.
Thanks for the link. I'll read it even though I doubt I find anything new in there. It's basically mainstream narration at this point. Which means people with money paid for promoting it because it serves their profits. It's basically a smokescreen for the most profitable and harmful activity to peacefully continue.
[1] https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/90-of-plastic-polluti...
It's not the plastic that's a problem. It's poverty and lack of organization of those regions. If humanity never invented the plastic those rivers would still be the most polluted (with population waste) rivers on the globe.
Manufacturers simply replace BPA with similar alternatives which aren't as widely known by consumers (BPS or BPF for example).
Some accountability would go a long way here. Most of the stuff around carbon capture are plainly fraudulent.
People when carbon tax: You made inflation high. Get out!
The ideal voter gets to ask for things he'll never get but complain about them if he does get them. That way he can act free of sin and simultaneously vote out people who give him that. There's always some other pretext. "I'm not voting him out for his carbon tax. I'm voting him out because X". Because the space of actions a political leader must do is large enough that nothing is perfect, the voter can always claim he is optimizing to some good.
In the West, people get what they vote for and my experience is that they're quite representative of peoples' views.
> People when carbon tax: You made inflation high. Get out!
This is quite a funny observation. And true. The general psychological bias is when immediate known losses are standing against unknown future gains. Also Americans in particular are allergic to the term tax.
A carbon tax would be the most hands-off way to solve the problem. Ideally phased in slowly and with a clear price structure from the get-go. All you need is:
- industry needs to know how much they will be taxed in X years, so the bean counters can put it in their projections so execs listen
- the tax needs to be tight enough so you can’t escape through tax “planning” aka move operations to unregulated countries
The rest takes care of itself. Once there’s a tangible measurable cost things will change quickly from green leaf-decorated “we care”-pamphlets to fire in the ass of the decision makers.
It's almost like the voting population consists of people with various different opinions. Personally if I could be assured that a carbon tax would be spent mostly on low-overhead tree/algae farming, and to a lesser extent useful research, I would be ok with it. Otherwise, it's just a cash grab that impoverishes people more for no benefit.
But no algae farms, sorry. Sort of illustrates the point perfectly hahaha.
Tax credits are a scam too. I'd rather have everyone pay a reasonable low tax for this purpose than favor some people and uses over others. The market will probably sort that out if you let it.
>But no algae farms, sorry. Sort of illustrates the point perfectly hahaha.
Most of our oxygen comes from algae, so it's not crazy. But I'd prioritize other things first, probably.
You will note in the table [2], that at the top are the oil producing countries in the Middle East, followed by Canada, USA, and Australia. Most of the large European countries are far below. The bottom half of the table obviously contains no West countries.
China has half the per capita emissions of USA/Canada/Australia, and the same as current Europe, and it's already decreasing both its population and soon its per capita emissions.
It's precisely the people in the Middle East and USA/Canada/Australia have to make the largest changes in their systems. China+Europe have to follow the same downward trajectories.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/co2?tab=table&time=2011...
[2] Please ignore small countries, which have negligible total emissions.
It's not like we're going to give developing countries nuclear power so their choice is coal, natural gas, wind, and solar. And inevitably they follow that specific chain of energy build-out as their growing economy starts cleaning up. No one has demonstrated a high-scale success that is not that.
It’s easier to justify improved efficiency when the cost of spilling carbon is a big number of dollars rather than a tiny slither of a global problem.
That said, I do agree investment should be limited, it’s obviously only going to be the “best” solution in the rare circumstance that there is no good solution.
Nobody is making any bit of extra work towards cleaning the planet. And that's a really big shame for the developed countries.
Or a political one. Developed countries provide them a small financial incentive to build out renewables instead. Some kind of UN fund. It doesn't have to be a large incentive, it just needs to tip the financial decision over at the margin. The economic logic: it's a retroactive carbon tax, of sorts, given the extreme inequality in emissions per-capita since the industrial revolution. It's also a pragmatic solution, because it's cheaper to prevent the emissions than extract it after they've been released.
1) However much C is stored by protecting forests / planting trees, is peanuts compared to humanity's GHG emissions.
Read: phasing out fossil fuels is the #1 task that we should focus on, as it has the biggest effect - by far. Planting trees etc helps, but it's not what will get us where we need to be.
2) Re-forestation is hard. Saplings die, growing trees takes time, and they may fall victim to drought/forest fires later on. Correspondence between [trees saved/planted] and [carbon credits] is... well, not 1:1. To put it mild.
3) Carbon capture is mostly a fantasy. Existing plants capture a minute fraction of human-emitted C at high cost, and this won't change for the foreseeable future.
Maybe CC will work at scale, some day. And for that reason, exploring the tech is worthwhile. But as it is, it's not a 'solution' in any way, shape or form. A different but similar story goes for geo-engineering.
4) We're racing past 1.5°C warming, no matter what. We'll probably run past 2°C warming, too. 2.5°? 3°? Even more? Don't rule it out! Prepare.
But there's no way to fit CO2 removal into the economy in the same way. Nobody wants to pay for CO2 removal, and we'll be relying on government agencies to coordinate, fund, and verify the process. It's always going to be prone to corruption, fraud, and mismanagement.
So I'm not surprised that everyone is behind on CO2 removal.
A lot of things get done despite corruption, fraud and mismanagement. As soon as people decide to actually do something about it, it will be done. The amount of investment required is significantly less than what a world war cost, for example. A lot of people thought such a war was impossible because nobody could (or at least would) afford it but here we are.
The main question is how much pain it's going to take to push people into action, and how much additional pain will be no longer avoidable by then. Looks like it's going to be a lot but humanity will survive.
If not, how do we mitigate those increases without CDR?
Maybe we don't, and the magical CDR unicorn isn't going to come and save us. I don't mean to speak for parent, but CDR is the "least effective way", yet many are speaking as if it's the most viable solution. And maybe it is, because $DEITY forbid that a dollar of CO2-producing profit be left on the table, but if that's the case then we are most certainly doomed.
If we ceased all economic activity today, then probably, but I assume you'd have to nuke most of the population or something equally catastrophic.
> If not, how do we mitigate those increases without CDR?
The half-assed approach (which I assume we'll take), is solar radiation management.
Also, there doesn't seem to be an appreciation of the speed at which we need to stop emissions to meet 1.5C or even 2C of warming. It's at the point where if we don't replace almost every car, furnace, stove, etc with its electric counterpart and power them with clean electricity (due to the continuous emissions of those machines for their lifetime, assuming no early retirement), we can guarantee breaching the 1.5C limit. We need a World War 2 level buy-in from government, industry, and consumers. I wish this was more widely known.
It's not all doom and gloom. China's 'dumping' of cheap solar and evs are actually a hugely good thing for the world. We're not on as dire a path as we once thought but 3+C of warming is still bad enough that I ultimately think we'll resort to geoengineering to stop it. No matter how dangerous geoengineering is, it's cheaper than completely revamping our economic system, and for whatever reason we seem to care far, far more about the 'cost' of a solution over it's risk.
That is to say - can I burn 1 litre of oil in order to capture more than the emissions of 1 litre of oil (without cheating and boxing it at the point of emission), can I use the lifetime energy produced by a 1sqm solar panel to capture the emissions required in the process of creating a 1sqm solar panel?
Including creation and maintenance of whatever apparatus is required to capture the carbon.
It seems to me as if the arguments all focus on money when what really matters is something more akin to an energy return on energy invested calculation.
I'm all for carbon capture as a technology, but if a company was to take $100 from me as a service for capturing my carbon, I literally have no way of knowing what I am even getting for my money. And it sounds like the same is true even at a utility/national level.
Go back to economics 101. Rational consumers purchase at the margin. Carbon capture is still only an irrational action.
If we want to have any progress on global warming, CRD or not, we really need to start price setting the value of carbon.
E.g. we build everything in concrete and glass nowadays (a huge source of CO2) while we could build with wood (an actual proven form of CO2 capture), but there are zero incentives for timber production and construction.