"saving the planet" as a phrase is something I usually seem to hear more as a strawman against doing anything at all.
The advocates for taking action are usually talking about limiting damage rather than restoring anything.
The advocates for taking action are usually talking about limiting damage rather than restoring anything.
No, they are pushing nonsense for political and/or financial gain. Why? Who would push back against "saving the planet"? How many researchers are going to destroy their careers in a politically and financially-lucrative environment by speaking out against any of this?
Remember that we now know, without a shred of doubt, that the mass media has been pushing lies to their audience for quite some time. The climate madness is just another part of this problem.
Please read this research paper from Google. It has become increasingly difficult to find it. I have a dozen links that stopped working for whatever reason.
This was published on Spectrum, IEEE in December of 2014. A serious publication. The paper is from Google's research division. The title is: "Energy's Creative Destruction".
I found it (again) here:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/273392977_Energy's_...
This study made the researchers realize the futility of what was being pushed by everyone at that time. This also happens to be the paper that launched me into a year-long effort to finally try to understand this topic. Frankly, once I found the correct scientific perspective, it really wasn't that hard to get a grip and understand that we are being sold a fantasy.
The research stopped without moving on to evaluate the viability of the various CO2 capture methods floated around that time (a 7 year effort that started in 2007). Everything since then has been debunked as, at best, ineffective and, at worst, impossible.
A year later the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany released this finding:
https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggr...
Quoting:
"Findings suggest that "even a probably unfeasible CO2 extraction rate" of 25 gigatonnes per year could not re-establish pre-industrial conditions or a low emission state with the period simulated (until 2700)."
Most recently:
https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/how-much-carbon-dioxide-woul...
Quoting:
"It's so much harder to capture carbon than it is to just not emit it to begin with,” says Harvey. “When your bathtub is overflowing, you don't reach for the gold-plated mop—you just turn off the faucet."
And there's more.
In other words, it's a fantasy. All of it.
Time to snap out of the Matrix and start to discuss reality.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
If someone else is wrong or you feel they are, two good options are (1) to respond with better arguments and/or more accurate information; or (2) chalk it up to the internet being the internet and just move on.
Reality has changed significantly since 02014, though. Konigstein and Fork's article is framed by and based on Google's 02011 failure to make "RE<C", renewable energy cheaper than coal. But renewable energy is (and I'm aware that I'm arguably stating the obvious here) now much cheaper than coal and continues to decline in cost. (It has been much cheaper than coal for several years now in some places, though only in small parts of China, Northern Europe, and North America.) This violates the assumptions the article relies on; renewable energy is already vastly exceeding what the researchers considered "the most extraordinary success possible".
In 02014 PV panels cost 0.55 euros per peak watt (data from http://www.solarserver.com/service/pvx-spot-market-price-ind... visited 2016-02-18) and now the low-cost ones cost 0.060 euros per peak watt, and the mainstream ones (with warranties) cost 0.100 euros per peak watt. This implies the availability of intermittent energy for carbon-capture schemes at about an order of magnitude lower cost than was feasible when the paper came out; that changes the economics of carbon capture in favor of systems with lower capital equipment and materials costs and higher energy intensity
(The price in the US is still much higher due to a series of punitive tariffs against Chinese solar panels, presumably as a subsidy to the US's faltering fossil-fuel industries, but it's important to use unsubsidized prices for these calculations.)
Solar panel manufacturing can probably scale up to build many times current world marketed energy production, but only a small fraction of current world marketed energy production would be needed for atmospheric carbon capture, even with lower-energy-efficiency methods.
I previously did a ballpark number on atmospheric carbon capture via lime burning, but can't find it at the moment. But, essentially, the idea is that, if energy is free, you use it to heat limestone up to 900 degrees in a low-pressure sealed retort, driving the carbon dioxide out of it and making lime cement. You capture the nearly pure carbon dioxide thus produced, passively cool it, liquefy it, and inject it down gas wells into olivine rock formations, where it is permanently sequestered by serpentinization. Then you use the lime cement for building, at which point it reabsorbs an equivalent amount of CO2 from the air.
Due to the disruptive innovation in PV, no "disruptive technologies in carbon storage" are needed, just the Paleolithic technology of lime burning and the well-proven technologies of drilling gas wells.
The feedstocks and capital investment required for this approach are relatively small, a few times larger than the existing global cement industry, which is only 400 billion dollars a year, 0.4% of the global economy. What has made it uneconomical historically is the cost of energy, which is now in free fall thanks to solar panel manufacturers in the People's Republic of China achieving what Google failed at.
(This is not the only possible way to use superabundant solar energy to capture carbon cheaply; for example, the chloralkali process produces NaOH from salt water, and by reacting a slight excess of NaOH with magnesium chloride brine derived from seawater desalination, you get a magnesium analogue of the soda-lime used in scuba rebreathers, which rapidly absorbs carbon dioxide from air and sequesters it permanently as hydromagnesite.)
Consequently the majority of new power generation capacity in China is now solar and wind, even after correcting for their lower capacity factors, and China's carbon emissions seem to have peaked in February and are now in decline. China is especially important here not just because they consume the majority of the world's coal and a quarter of its marketed energy (5.5 terawatts out of 20) but because they produce 80% of the world's solar panels and because, unlike any other energy-intensive country, they are rapidly expanding their energy infrastructure.
The Google paper from 02014 says, "With exponential growth in deployment, businesses could be replacing 30 gigawatts of installed capacity annually by 2040." China's PV generation capacity stands at about 800 gigawatts (ac, peak) and is growing about 3% per month, which is to say, 25 gigawatts per month. What the paper's authors dared to hope might be happening yearly 26 years from now is happening monthly, already. (Except that it's mostly not replacing fossil-fuel generation yet, but augmenting it, because China's energy consumption is growing rapidly.)
The other articles you cite are similarly premised on the now-obsolete assumption that energy will remain expensive and therefore require energy-efficient carbon capture processes. Harvey is quoted as saying, "You'd have to build way more renewables than we need to stop burning fossil fuels altogether," apparently unaware that this is in fact already happening.
The Potsdam paper (https://www.nature.com/articles/nclimate2729) isn't about global warming at all except incidentally; it's about what happens with ocean acidification under the assumption that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue rising for 200 years to five times their current level. It doesn't investigate the feasibility of carbon capture, but rather what happens if atmospheric carbon dioxide rises to deadly levels far in excess of current levels and stays there for centuries before carbon capture is attempted.
There's still the question of what system of incentives would motivate spending on the order of a trillion dollars a year on carbon capture and sequestration, since nobody is buying the serpentine at the bottom of the gas injection wells, and the market price of synthetic hydromagnesite is likely to be minimal. Since it's only about 1% of world GDP, it's plausible that international diplomacy could find a solution, as with nuclear weapons reduction and the ozone hole.
But it might turn out not to be necessary; it's plausible that abundant energy will make carbon-neutral extraction of lime from seawater a cheaper way of making cement, including portland cement, than the conventional approach hard-rock mining. Then the cement will absorb carbon dioxide from the air as it cures, though less than lime cement. And it's plausible that it will make carbon dioxide extracted from air a cheaper source of plastic feedstocks than increasingly scarce coal or oil. Perhaps 30 or 100 years from now the pressing environmental problem will be how to halt the depletion of the atmospheric carbon reserves necessary for plant life.
I take your point about these papers being dated. The sad reality is that no researcher wants to touch this with a ten foot pole. Going against the political grain can be career ending, and they know it. If we do fund research to debunk some of these lofty projections, it is very, very rare.
Let's steel-man your argument: Energy becomes so cheap that it makes some of the old ideas possible.
OK.
I don't know of a single proposal that has been shown to scale outside of a laboratory environment. In other words, if we were to say: We cannot deploy this today, yet, in 50 years, with cheaper energy, will will be able to. We ignore energy issues and show it working at a reasonable scale. The world then devotes the next N years to prepare for the deployment of such a solution.
That would be sensible.
And yet, that has not happened.
We cannot construct an argument based on an imagined solution.
And then there's the other "minor" problem: Solar is a horrible source of energy when you consider the entire life cycle. The procurement of materials, mining, transportation, manufacturing, shipping, installation and operation are not without massive ecological consequences, including CO2 production. Do anything at a massive scale --at a planetary scale-- and the consequences will track with the scale.
And yet, it does not end there. I am not even going to explore the issues with energy storage technology at a planetary scale. From an ecological perspective, that is definitely unimaginable. Let's just agree that this is something significant enough not to ignore.
Yet, onece again, that isn't the entire story.
Solar technology is seriously problematic in one key metric: Operating life.
A solar panel is only good for 15 to 25 years. The electronics, if lucky, could be on a similar time scale. RoHS introduced a degree of planned obsolescence in every single electronic device on the planet. Lovely. Talk about unintended consequences.
The couple-decade lifespan of solar systems means that, if we were to install solar at the required planetary scale, the entire planet would have to rebuild the earths entire solar power generation infrastructure every twenty years or so.
That cannot be ignored. The word "cataclysmic" comes to mind.
Imagine China constantly producing replacement panels and systems for a planetary scale solar array rebuilding from here to eternity. We can't even begin to calculate just how much ecological damage this might cause. It won't be zero. It will not be trivial. It will be at a scale never before imagined.
And that's the problem.
It is easy to say "solar and wind" and point to a solution in isolation of the realities of the idea.
It's like cleaning your floors with muddy water. The exercise does not result in cleaner floors.
It's always pleasant to discuss issues with you, too! It's unfortunate that there's so much ideological battle on here that it's rare, in part because the structural incentives are for rapid replies rather than thoughtful ones. (The tone of some of your comments in this thread has perhaps been somewhat inflammatory, as well.) I forget, are you on the think.com hackers-l?
> I don't know of a single proposal that has been shown to scale outside of a laboratory environment.
Well, elsethread, I pointed at https://cobblab.eas.gatech.edu/energy/Readings/rochelle2009...., which mentions dozens of power plants that are using amine scrubbing at sub-gigawatt scales for flue gas decarbonization. While this is still three orders of magnitude lower than required, I hope you'll agree that it's outside of a laboratory environment!
It's reasonable to wonder whether current sources of the required amines can scale to those levels. I suspect that with insanely cheap energy it will be more profitable to use cheaper, less energy-efficient materials such as lime. Hopefully it is clear that lime burning faces no obstacles in scaling to the necessary level to terraform Earth, but if you have any doubts, I'd be happy to answer them.
I suspect we'll probably come up with something better than lime kilns; the reason that's what I outlined upthread is mostly because it's so simple and well understood, without any unknowns that might come back to bite us.
> We cannot construct an argument based on an imagined solution.
Well, as I understand it, the alternatives would be to construct an argument based on an already deployed solution, which unfortunately doesn't exist, or to construct an argument not based on any solutions, which won't get us anywhere. So constructing an argument based on an imagined solution is probably our best choice. While that approach didn't work so well at bringing about world peace, urban renewal, or Xanadu, its track record is pretty decent at building things like the Apollo program, the railroads, and the internet, so I don't think we should dismiss constructing an argument based on an imagined solution. We just have to be careful and rigorous in our calculations!
> Solar is a horrible source of energy when you consider the entire life cycle. The procurement of materials, mining, transportation, manufacturing, shipping, installation and operation are not without massive ecological consequences.
This turns out to be false, which should be clear from a simple calculation, almost a Fermi estimate. A square meter of 21%-efficient solar panel (the most common kind today) is 210 watts peak, 40 watts average at a 20% capacity factor. It's mostly (>90%) made of 3.2-mm-thick soda-lime glass, which is 2.44g/cc, so it's 7.8kg/m². If we take its rated life of 20 years, it produces 25GJ, which works out to 3200MJ/kg. We know that the procurement of materials, mining, transportation, and shipping to send coal to coal power plants is economically feasible—significant compared to the economic value of the coal as energy, but far from overwhelming, so many coal power plants are located far from coal mines. Coal's energy density tops out at 33MJ/kg, conveniently 1% of the "energy density" of the solar panel, and we know that the majority of the massive ecological consequences of coal mining come from burning the coal, with a small but significant addition from strip mining.
So, even for coal, procurement, and transportation/shipping are insignificant, and for solar panels they're roughly a hundred times smaller even than that. Mining the requisite materials similarly makes an impact that's only roughly a hundredth of the already small environmental impact of coal mining.
(The only rare material used in solar panels is silver, which contributes about 10% of their cost. Everything else is very abundant, far more abundant than coal, and therefore doesn't have to be refined from low-grade deposits.)
The ratio is actually close to 300:1 than the 100:1 I've been using, because the solar panels directly produce electricity, while about two thirds of the coal's energy is lost in the thermal power plant.
Manufacturing, installation, and operation of solar panels can of course be carried out in arbitrarily harmful ways, but they don't carry any inherent environmental costs the way mining and shipping do, and overall they seem to be doing little or no environmental damage at the moment. Operating solar farms may actually be environmentally beneficial in desert and desertifying areas, although we should expect that to eventually be misaligned with some kind of economic objective.
> I am not even going to explore the issues with energy storage technology at a planetary scale.
That's okay! I've been exploring them for several years, and it turns out that, while the energy transition to renewables does create a planetary-scale energy storage problem, there are numerous viable planetary-scale solutions. So there's not really anything to worry about.
> A solar panel is only good for 15 to 25 years.
It turns out that this is only the rated life, and crystalline silicon solar panels (the kind that has virtually all of the current utility-scale market) have actually degraded by only about 15% at 25 years, unless they're broken (for example due to manufacturing defects or vandalism). They do continue to degrade thereafter, but only by a fraction of a percent per year. Crystalline silicon is the silicon analogue of diamond (but without diamond's metastability problem), and its surface oxide layer has a very low diffusivity for oxygen, so the relevant timescale for the solar cells themselves is probably millennia, not years. (The EVA adhesive would probably have to be replaced every century, though.) Most panels manufactured in the 01970s are still operational today and still produce most of their original power.
> RoHS introduced a degree of planned obsolescence in every single electronic device on the planet. Lovely. Talk about unintended consequences.
It turns out that there are exemptions from RoHS, and in particular solar cells are soldered with solder containing lead, avoiding the problem you're describing. Plausibly the power electronics that are connnected to the cells will eventually short out with tin whiskers, but even in RoHS-soldered devices, tin whiskers are not inevitable, and even when they occur in the power electronics, they generally don't damage the solar cells themselves, though they can.
> The couple-decade lifespan of solar systems means that, if we were to install solar at the required planetary scale, the entire planet would have to rebuild the earth's entire solar power generation infrastructure every twenty years or so.
Remember that the amount of material in solar panels is about 1/300 of the amount of coal that they replace over their lifetime. So if we did replace the whole solar power generation infrastructure every twenty years, the amount we'd have to replace is roughly equivalent to the amount of coal we'd have to dig up every month to supply the same amount of power through coal plants. Which is pretty much what we've been doing.
However, this is a place where I think you're underestimating the impact. Right now installed solar power is increasing by about 25% per year, which is to say, every three years, we've been rebuilding the earth's entire solar power generation infrastructure! We just haven't been ripping the old stuff out.
You could imagine (as many politicians and researchers do!) that once we have enough solar capacity installed to supply all of world marketed energy consumption (100 TW peak, costing about 11 trillion dollars at today's prices, to supply 20 TW) we will suddenly stop manufacturing solar panels except for those needed to replace out-of-warranty panels. At the current exponential rate, that should happen sometime around 02042, shortly after the 32-bit time_t rollover. But it seems implausible that a solar panel manufacturing industry manufacturing 25TW per year of solar panels (an amount worth US$3 trillion per year at today's prices, but will more likely only be worth on the order of US$200B/year at that time) will be willing to just roll over and die instead of looking for new markets. We should expect world marketed energy consumption to dramatically increase in the years leading up to that time, spurred by energy costs of a tenth or a hundredth of the lowest prices fossil fuels could ever deliver.
That's when it gets, to use your word, cataclysmic. We're talking about deploying 100'000 km² of solar panels per year at that point, roughly the size of the UK, Italy, Ecuador, or (the land area of) the Philippines. That's still only 1/5000 of the planet per year, and much of it will surely be offshore like the new Shandong solar power plant, but it's sure to start to cause environmental damage as people start clear-cutting natural trees to make space for their artificial "trees".
And that's why I think we should start deploying solar-orbit power satellites well before that point, to start transitioning the most energy-intensive industrial processes off of Earth. O'Neill cylinder habitats made from asteroids can provide abundant living space for extraterrestrial humans. That way, we can preserve its biosphere as a park and a workshop for those who want to continue practicing traditional human crafts such as farming, blacksmithing, CNC machining, and cooking. We probably can't keep the humans from practicing their less laudable traditional crafts, such as warfare and genocide, but we can at least prevent them from annihilating the biosphere.