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Comment by crocowhile | Hacker News Reader

That's comparing apples to oranges though. Renewables are to stop emitting CO2, carbon capture to try and recover the one we've been emitting in the past decades. We need both, the latter possibly in the shape of organic capture since it's way more efficient and cheap.

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My understanding is that it's not so much about undoing past decades, but being able to even reach zero additional warming in the first place. Cows won't stop farting (that sounds like they're the butt of a joke but it's not actually, even if some feed additives reduce it), so we need to compensate for the methane. Or air travel for relevant distances (where a train won't do), we don't have the battery tech to make it zero emission but we can totally capture the carbon. (It's not super economical but it's cleaning up after oneself, it's either that or accepting further warming and much greater costs later.) Or compensating whatever emissions occur as part of making those batteries and stuff we need to capture and use that zero-emission solar/wind/water energy

You two are right. It's about been net zero additional anthropic warming, because, as you said there is some emission we can't cut.

Zero additional anthropic warming result in progressive global decarbonizing thanks to carbon sink. (If the carbon sinks still exist when we reach 0 net emission and the permafrost hasn't thawed yet)

Engineering/inventing ways to emit less CO2 is fixing the root cause of the problem.

Spending energy that likely came from fossil fuel burning to "capture" CO2 is like saying you've found a perpetual motion machine. The engineering is simpler for this in some ways, but it's still not really a "good" solution.

I agree organic capture is a good idea, and CHEAPEST thing we could do to have an impact dump iron into the open ocean to spawn a phytoplankton bloom, but there is no money to be made doing that.

Isn’t the point of most carbon capture schemes to use renewables (likely solar) as the energy source. Like Terraform Industries?

Don’t know if it will work or is economically viable, but sounds pretty win-win to me.

There is a lot of R&D predating mass cheap solar where proposals do things like have it captured at the production site or arbitrage cheap off peak energy to store it since the grid capacity is there anyway.

Modern solar definitely makes this idea more attractive but you’re still emitting more carbon to build the solar in the hopes you’ll store more than you produced in X years. It is not a great value proposition versus making the grid more efficient or just emitting less by using that solar for the grid instead of sequestration.

Carbon capture isn’t about pulling carbon out of the air - it’s about pulling carbon out of smokestacks just before it hits the air.

Yeah going net zero by just stopping emissions isn't just not going to help our situation that much, we've already emitted enough to fuck ourselves properly, it's also not even possible.

There's no such thing as a net zero society with our current technology, period. Anyone seen an electric tractor lately? Combine harvester EVs? Electric aircraft? Zero emission concrete? Electric container ships? Cheap plastics without oil? Electric orbital launch vehicles!? Lots of fantasy tech that ranges from being cost ineffective to borderline infeasible and we can't (or won't, anyway) run our civilization without these and dozens more that have no real replacement on the horizon. Covid has made that point really sharply clear, we just can't stop ourselves. Piston engined planes still today run on leaded gas despite knowing that it's literal poison for fucks sake, it's fuckin hopeless to convince anyone about anything when there's a chance someone might lose money.

Carbon capture might help in the long run, but the bulk of it will have to be on geoengineering to even give us a century of time to remove megatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere and oceans. And maybe a fish or two will even survive.

> There's no such thing as a net zero society with our current technology, period.

That's not quite true. All the technology is here, just not yet deployed.

> Anyone seen an electric tractor lately?

Biofuels exists. Even now, we have enough biomass to produce replacement fuel for agriculture, long-distance trucking, and rail transport. We just waste it on mostly useless ethanol.

> Electric aircraft?

Aircraft will switch to SAF (synthetic fuel). Right now, manufacturers are working on adapting and certifying engines to use 100% SAF and the work is expected to be completed around 2030.

> Zero emission concrete?

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2432222-zero-carbon-cem...

> Electric container ships?

https://www.yara.com/corporate-releases/the-worlds-first-cle...

The technologies are here already. They now need to mature and then be deployed.

> Biofuels exists

At 2-3x the price. Ask an average farmer what their profit margins are. Oftentimes, roughly zero already.

> https://www.newscientist.com/article/2432222-zero-carbon-cem...

Unless it's the same price or cheaper as regular concrete, it will be used by literally nobody. No nation has the balls to mandate something like that when there's a billion real estate lobbyists telling them otherwise either.

> the work is expected to be completed around 2030

Great, we might actually see some of these planes in active service by 2120 then!

> https://www.yara.com/corporate-releases/the-worlds-first-cle...

There's also https://electrek.co/2024/05/02/fully-electric-10000-ton-cont... and a hundred hydrogen prototypes, and flettner rotors, and wingsails that went absolutely nowhere in practice.

Shipping uses the lowest quality, cheapest possible fuels that are borderline impossible to compete with, ships are large investments that last 30 years and nobody wants to spend money retrofitting them with a new powertrain. Note how solar in general was basically a rounding error in terms of usage until it became cheap enough to actually displace existing alternatives.

All of these technologies have 50 years of dev time to practical scale and cost competitive effectiveness in them at best, so they can almost be considered a fantasy along with net energy gain fusion for any kind of notable impact beyond pilot projects.

> At 2-3x the price. Ask an average farmer what their profit margins are. Oftentimes, roughly zero already.

Fuel is about 3% of the farm expenses ( https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/2023_... ), even tripling it will not make produce significantly more expensive for consumers. But individual farmers can't switch because it will make their individual farm uncompetitive. That's where the regulation should come in to force _everyone_ to switch, negating the competitive advantages.

> Shipping uses the lowest quality, cheapest possible fuels that are borderline impossible to compete with

Shipping had largerly switched to low-sulfur fuel by 2020, resulting in an additional increase in temperature, as fewer particulates are emitted.

> All of these technologies have 50 years of dev time to practical scale and cost competitive effectiveness in them at best, so they can almost be considered a fantasy along with net energy gain fusion for any kind of notable impact beyond pilot projects.

Not really. Most of the technologies required for low-CO2 economy exist right now, and just need to be deployed. It just needs political will to force its adoption.

> resulting in an additional increase in temperature, as fewer particulates are emitted

Yeah that has been a blunder of epic proportions, certainly helped a lot to bring last year up to 1.5 C.

Well I hope you're right, but frankly I think political will is too focused on pointless infighting and corruption to get anything done even if they wanted to. Most people aren't even demanding anything from their representatives, they just want cheap food, cheap gas and no taxes. The Paris Agreement has become a complete joke by now, nobody's even trying to abide by it anymore.

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