> The Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Earthshot seeks to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 a tonne by the end of the decade
At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero.
Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary 5% pay cut, but that figure (if it's correct) does make it harder to argue that "we can't afford" to do anything about CO2 levels, or that tackling climate change requires us all to stop flying or heating our homes.
> It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero.
It seems hard to believe that removing CO2 from the atmosphere could ever be less expensive than not emitting it to begin with. You're working against thermodynamics.
So the whole thing seems like a fraud. An excuse to keep emitting CO2 while claiming that you'll do something about it "tomorrow."
Bear in mind that (a) you're just pulling it from the atmosphere and burying it, not splitting the C from O2 so you can use it as fuel again, and (b) there are applications like long-haul jets and cement production where eliminating emissions isn't that easy.
To put some numbers on (a), David MacKay's book has some numbers[1]:
> The laws of physics say that the energy required must be at least 0.2 kWh per kg of CO2....
> Lackner told me in June 2008 that, in a dry climate, the
concentration cost has been reduced to about 0.18–0.37 kWh of low-grade heat per kg CO2. The compression cost is 0.11 kWh per kg. Thus Lackner’s total cost is 0.48 kWh or less per kg.
Burning a kilogram of coal generates 8 kWh[2] and 2.42 kg CO2[3]. So that's 8 kWh generated, requiring 1.16 kWh to pull 2.42 kg CO2 back out out of the atmosphere.
So about 15% of the energy obtained by putting carbon in the atmosphere is needed to remove it.
Right, which is why mostly the idea is to just bury the CO2.
However, if you do want to make fuel from it, say for airliners, then it's totally possible, you just have to add hydrogen, and more energy than you'll get from burning the fuel. E.g. the Sabatier process to make methane.
Spend much time working with hydrogen as a fuel and you'll mostly be learning just how amazingly convenient sticking your hydrogens on to carbon chains is compared to the alternative.
Carbon is the ideal hydrogen storage system. It raises the critical point by 160K and increase the density achievable at normal temperatures and pressures drastically. Don't discount the energy that needs to go in to pressurizing and cooling hydrogen, it results in significant CO2 production. I'd be very interested in seeing a comparison of the energy requirements for methane production vs. hydrogen storage, I have a feeling that it would favour methane if you accounted for all of the variables.
> there are applications like long-haul jets and cement production where eliminating emissions isn't that easy.
I disagree, there's an easy solution to eliminating those emissions: have zero long-haul jets and zero cement production. Before this gets (inevitably) downvoted, the more interesting question is why do we need either, what alternatives are there, how fundamentally we're willing to question our biases and expectations over what counts as a necessity. If saving our environment is an overriding priority, then the extent of the compromises we have to make can be made clearer.
I would say it's pretty dang tough to not have cement.
What do you use for a house foundation? Many apartments are made of cement and essentially every building uses a cement foundation.
Luckily, cement is not a big part of the total emissions.
Neither is long haul travel, particularly. Short haul flights are about half of all passenger-miles in air travel, can be made fully electric, and long-haul and medium haul flights can be split up into multiple legs for almost every route.
EDIT:I will say there are ways to reduce CO2 emissions from cement. You can make clinker with electric heat just fine. But half the CO2 is from the clinker itself. Over time, cement will absorb the CO2 it emitted as it fully cures, but that can take a century. It’s possible to accelerate that process. It’s also possible to use alternatives, like sulfur cement.
> and long-haul and medium haul flights can be split up into multiple legs for almost every route.
A better solution would be to eventually ban/tax out of existence regular jet fuel, and move to synthetically-produced jet fuel[1] which can be used in today's jet engines, but is carbon neutral. Perhaps eventually all fuels can be 100% synthetic when new jets are designed for it.
Aviation and shipping make up 5-6% of GHG emissions, not a trivial amount. Aviation is projected to expand several-fold by 2050 which, in the context of decarbonisation, means it will take up a progressively larger fraction of global emissions over time. It will be one of the last and greatest challenges - which is exactly why it will require offsets, carbon capture or otherwise. The aviation's offset market, CORSIA, is already one of the most developed in the world.
Your optimism about electrifying aviation is not shared by the industry.
It's not actually easy to ban long-haul travel. It's technologically simple, which is probably the angle you are looking from, but politically very difficult.
We can drastically reduce our usage of jets though. There is no reason why people should be flying between SF and LA, or NYC and Boston. Those are well within comfortable range of high speed rail, which is electric.
Once we’ve shifted all the excess air travel over to rail, that will leave a much smaller set of jet travel to offset.
If you look at a map of all airline flights there are many thousands of short-range flights. Replacing them all with trains would be interesting. Just the right-of-way property transactions would be daunting. Look at California as a lesson in how this can't be easily done.
The other thing is, people move around. Airlines can change flights easily to map to demographic changes; that's a major strength of air travel. Not as easy to rip up tracks and start over.
It's much easier, IMHO, to switch over these short haul flights to electric aircraft than to High Speed Rail in the US. By the time even one major new HSR route will be finished, we'll have certified and be flying electric passenger aircraft with just as much speed and just as long of a route (500 miles) BUT with ability to go anywhere in the country by hopping.
I kinda doubt it will go that quickly. See how many problems Boeing had with their lithium batteries in the 787. And those were just auxiliary power. This will take a hundred times that many batteries with the scale bringing many engineering challenges. And then the totally different engines.. I think it'll take a long time to have a battery powered airliner built, in mass production and as reliable and safe as current airliners. There's a lot of stuff to be built from scratch without half a century of trial and error to learn from.
I think biofuels might be a better option for aviation until the tech has time to catch up.
I'd love for that to be true, but I am quite dubious. Flight technology tends to be very weight sensitive, and our battery densities are just nowhere close to the density that flight needs.
Current batteries have an energy density of 90-190 Wh/kg, depending on the specific chemistry. Jet fuel on the other hand has an energy density around 12,000 Wh/kg. Obviously some amount of that will be made back up with the relative light weight and high efficiency of electric motors, but that is a very step energy difference to overcome.
A quick bit of Googling says that turbofan engines are about 40% efficient, while triple phase electric motors are roughly 85% efficient. Given the 3,000 nautical mile range of a 737NG, some back of the envelope math says that an EV equivalent would have a range of about 100 miles at best[0]. Forget LAX -> SFO, this isn't even enough to get you from LA to Bakersfield. And even 100 is optimistic, given that the FAA requires that all planes have extra fuel for diversions, weather, holding, etc.
At this point, I suspect it might be easier to refine kerosene out of capture CO2 using excess renewable energy than it would be to make an EV 737 replacement.
0 - I'm obviously not accounting for weight and aerodynamic differences, which are beyond my capability to estimate, but I doubt that would make a significant difference. I'm also assuming that we're using Li-Ion Cobalt batteries, which have the highest density. The more common Phosphate chemistry makes these numbers even more bleak.
The best lithium ion batteries have 300-400Wh/kg (some cells do up to 650Wh/kg with sulfur), electric motors can have up to 95% efficiency. Long range jets can fly 20,000 km with passengers. Easily enough to do 500 miles. But if you improve aerodynamics, can go much further.
Source on 400-650Wh/kg? That’s significantly higher than what’s even reported in Tesla EVs, and I’m curious if that’s lab or production figures. Even going up to 400Wh/kg and 95% efficiency only yields 237 miles for a 737 equivalent, which isn’t enough.
The top spec 777 would give you 677 miles on batteries, assuming 400Wh/kg. Enough to serve the LAX to SFO route, but a fairly limited vehicle all things considered, especially for the price and size.
> Long range jets can fly 20,000 km with passengers.
Sure, but economics begins to dominate here. There’s a reason I chose the 737 as a reference benchmark; it’s the gold standard of short to medium range airliner, and absolutely the vehicle that we should be aiming to minimize. If you have to pull out a 777 sized aircraft to service LAX -> SFO, then the price of tickets is going to begin rising significantly to cover the higher vehicle cost. I’m also genuinely quite doubtful that many airports can handle 100% of their jets switching over to wide body aircraft, which this would require, without significant improvements to the terminals and other facilities. If governments are forced to upgrade airports to save money on rail, I’d argue that that’s penny wise and pound foolish.
All of this can be done, of course, but it really begins to erode all of the supposed cost savings over HSR.
> If you look at a map of all airline flights there are many thousands of short-range flights. Replacing them all with trains would be interesting.
Replacing “them all” is to set the bar unnecessarily high. I suspect there’s an 80/20 rule in effect here, and we should aim to replace the most popular short haul routes, not all of them. That’s why I specifically called out SF->LA. Major population centers within a few hundred miles of each other are prime HSR targets, and in countries with HSR we see a lot of passengers preferring rail for these exact types of trips.
There’s no reasonable world where every single small town gets a high speed rail running to it, but we shouldn’t set that as our goal. Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. In particular there are nice stretches of good density along the coasts of the US that seem like prime targets for high speed rail, that would make travel more ecologically sound and comfortable for a large chunk of the population.
> Just the right-of-way property transactions would be daunting. Look at California as a lesson in how this can't be easily done.
And yet right of way transactions regularly pass for highway and highway expansions. Not without difficulty, but they get done. Letting rail projects grind to a halt while forcing road ones through is a political choice, not a law of nature.
> The other thing is, people move around. Airlines can change flights easily to map to demographic changes; that's a major strength of air travel. Not as easy to rip up tracks and start over.
This is only kind of true. Changing routes is easy only to a point. Expanding and refitting airports to handle increased traffic can be incredibly expensive and slow. LA is going to spend a huge amount of time and money trying to fix not just their airport, but also the transit to their airport which is currently overwhelmed.
My city is probably well on its way to its airport being incapable of handling the recent population growth. Expanding that airport and improving transit to it will be massively expensive, and require the eminent domain of a lot of property.
Secondly, while people do move around, it’s not like they’re throwing darts at the map and moving there. The places Americans are moving to are easily predictable; they’re moving to cities. You’re not going to wake up one day to discover that America has moved to the middle of nowhere Kansas.
Generally the cities that would make the best HSR targets are also the least likely to totally collapse in population too. NYC isn’t going anywhere, neither is Boston or Philadelphia. One would be forgiven not predicting the rise of say, Denver, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t at least be aiming for HSR to the obvious targets.
And thirdly, transit availability and where people move is a two way process. People like and care about access to transit options, and the quality of the local airport (and cost of flights) is already one thing that people consider when they move to a new location. There’s no reason to believe that access to HSR wouldn’t be the same. Especially since it’s possible to put HSR stations in far more convenient locations, given the lack of turbine noise to piss off the neighbors.
This would be a lot more insightful if we hadn't already spent decades and billions of dollars looking for greener alternatives only to find that they don't exist.
Upvoted, because I think it's a legitimate question. I don't think you're actually saying let's stop all long-haul flights and cement production. You're saying that if we actually believed something was an existential risk to civilization, we'd put almost any option on the table for mitigating it, even if only to rule it out. I assume there is a list of sacred things we wouldn't even consider doing without, no matter the cost in human lives. But is jet travel and cheap construction on that list or not? Maybe, maybe not.
Concrete and jet travel are not existential. They're a few percent of the total. 3% for cement and 2% for aviation. Less than 1% for long haul aviation.
Long haul aviation makes immigration feasible without dangerous long ship trips, which are worse emissions than long haul aviation. So we should keep them around in some form, but we can improve the efficiency and even electrify them.
Thermodynamics is about entropy AND enthalpy. A stationary algae bloom using otherwise unused sunlight can be a lot cheaper than trying to fly a heavy battery along with 300 passengers. Earth is also full of natural alkaline minerals that can be used as cements or for soil enrichment while naturally absorbing acidic carbon dioxide. Direct consumption of electricity for carbon capture is not necessarily the main solution, but fine for when renewable or nuclear energy would be otherwise wasted.
> A stationary algae bloom using otherwise unused sunlight can be a lot cheaper than trying to fly a heavy battery along with 300 passengers.
The alternative isn't just trying to fit a heavy battery into a plane, it's to scoop the algae up and use it to make carbon-neutral biofuels to run the plane.
> Earth is also full of natural alkaline minerals that can be used as cements or for soil enrichment while naturally absorbing acidic carbon dioxide.
Then you're trading the thermodynamic problem for an economic one. You have to mine all of that stuff up, do chemistry on it, lose the economic value of the minerals in their existing form and end up with an incredible volume of industrial waste you have to pay to dispose of.
It doesn't violate the laws of physics for that to be cheaper, but it's still pretty unlikely. Remember that the alternative doesn't have to cover the full cost of generating electricity from non-carbon sources, only the difference in cost between that and burning coal. That's pretty close to zero, if not negative, as it is, and that's without a carbon tax.
It's easier than that, simply make carbon neutral transit cheap and carbon intensive transit expensive then the market will innovate. It's just no country wants to take a hit on their economy to force the transition to happen.
» It's easier than that, simply make carbon neutral transit cheap and carbon intensive transit expensive then the market will innovate. It's just no country wants to take a hit on their economy to force the transition to happen.
I am completely with you. We aren't even able/willing to remove all existing subsidies/tax breaks for coal. We know what we need to do. We can't wait for developing nations to freeze/starve to death before we cut subsidies on our own coal and gas industry.
Even people at Brookings (which I'd call right wing) can't support subsidies and tax breaks for coal and gas:
» To lead global subsidy reforms, the United States will have to strengthen these commitments by actively dismantling its own substantial production subsidies. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute reported that direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry totaled
$20 billion per year, with 80% going toward oil and gas. In addition, from 2019 to 2023, tax subsidies are expected to reduce federal revenue by around $11.5 billion. Considering that production subsidies
grew 28% between 2017 and 2019, the United States will be under a lot of scrutiny from other countries wanting to see evidence of reform before making their own commitments.
» This is a challenging task for the United States because production subsidies are embedded in the tax code and promote fossil fuels in a variety of ways. For example, producers can deduct a fixed percentage of gross revenue instead of their actual costs as capital expenses, deduct exploration and development costs, amortize geological and geophysical expenditures, and benefit from accelerated depreciation of natural gas infrastructure. Oil and gas companies are also permitted to use the Last In, First Out (LIFO) accounting method to sell their most recent and expensive reserves first, thereby reducing the value of their inventory. Other incentives include foreign tax credits and energy production credits.
If we can't even remove direct subsidies and tax breaks (including accounting hijinks) from our domestic coal and gas industry, what moral authority do we have to ask other (less affluent) countries to reduce their subsidies?
Here are some options:
- Provide relocation subsidies to areas with public transit
- Increase public transit
- Treat bike lanes as first class infrastructure
- Provide direct gas assistance and carbon tax rebates for low income earners
This tracks for cities and looks good, but also looks like just a start.
What about rural areas? They have higher logistical costs, so cost of goods would go up. Things being sold to rural businesses also require someone to traffic their way out there. Point of reference: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/06/world/europe/france-fuel-...
There's no silver bullet to solve this problem. If there were, we would have already done it by now. The government will need to weigh the cost of subsidizing rural residences with that of other policies. The outlook for rural doesn't look great either way, many rural areas will not be able to afford the costs of climate change.
Sounds like a policy that won't pass muster then. Making things work for marginalized groups and rural areas is pretty top priority, unless significant and warranted backlash is to be expected.
The US isn't France and a set of transfers is a real solution. But I have no doubt that politicians will ignore the gravity of the situation to pander to their voter base. The huge cost of climate capture (likely 50% of our gdp) is probably a policy that won't pass the muster either. The fact is that it is far cheaper to reduce emissions today than try to capture emissions tomorrow.
This is totally true, awesome, and under appreciated. Check out project vesta. Basically there's an infinite amount of magnesium silicate minerals, and they weather to absorb co2 and release magnesium. You get some iron for free, but no heavies or toxics.. You can put it in the soil too, which is great because fe and esp mg are being depleted in soils. You can dump it in the ocean and raise PH while also mobilizing calcium. It's a win win win win win win.
In some sense it's just using the entire atmosphere as a battery. Burn fossile fuels where it's the only reasonable option (currently), such as for planes, then spend energy to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere elsewhere.
In a very literal sense, we have been using the atmosphere as half of a battery since forever-- combustion on earth uses atmospheric oxygen as as an electron acceptor.
It's also hard to believe that insurance against theft could ever be less expensive than nobody stealing anything, but that doesn't imply insurance is a fraud to allow people to carry on stealing. We live in a world where theft and carbon emissions are going to happen with or without the blessing of the US government, so if they want to spend some money seeing how far they can mitigate the damage then good.
I'd rather pin my hopes on technological progress than political magic.
Suppose it costs $1 to avoid emitting CO2 (e.g. replace gas car with electric car) and $10 to extract the CO2 after the fact. If you get the latter down to $3, you're still upside down. So where does the $3 come from? Presumably a government, but it doesn't even matter. Anyone would still be better off spending that money to subsidize electric cars or solar panels or something.
Which number do you think is larger, the cost for the US to dictate industrialisation policy for the rest of the world or the cost for the US (and possibly other governments more interested in reducing global warming, if the tech is there) to offset some of their emissions?
The problem isn't getting wealthy Californians to swap their SUV for a Tesla, it's getting poor Cubans to give up the only car their government will allow them to afford, cryptoenthusiasts to give up on Bitcoin, Saudi Arabia to decide it doesn't want to exploit its only resource and China to retire its recently constructed coal power plants. That doesn't just require lots of money, it requires magic
> Which number do you think is larger, the cost for the US to dictate industrialisation policy for the rest of the world or the cost for the US (and possibly other governments more interested in reducing global warming, if the tech is there) to offset some of their emissions?
You only have to dictate policy to them if you're trying to get them to pay for it. If you're going to pay for it yourself, there is nothing at all stopping you from paying people in Africa or South America to buy electric cars. The main thing preventing this is that you would have to convince your taxpayers to pay to offset emissions in some other country. But that's the same problem with carbon capture, except worse, because you would need more dollars to offset the same amount of CO2.
> you would have to convince your taxpayers to pay to offset emissions in some other country
I strangely think the rich world would be more comfortable building carbon capture infrastructure at home than clean energy offshore. The jobs are domestic. And you aren’t handing a productive asset to another country.
Hell, find it with an import tax on polluting countries and we don’t even have to pay for most of it.
Don't think it's even a strange thought; the US has been always much happier with industrial policy than welfare. "NASA, but for your climate" is a much easier political sell than "let's give foreigners [almost] free luxury goods".
And if you don't want people in the developing world to simply sell the brand new Teslas you've swapped for their 30 year old bangers, you're also going to have to build out a charging infrastructure, ensure that new power stations built to handle the increased electricity demand are renewable, and shut down people's routes to simply buying new ICE cars manufactured in other countries and pocketing the difference between that and the cost of the Tesla. Even assuming that politics doesn't exist and the world will do exactly what the US wants if they spend enough money. the cost of offset doesn't seem quite so expensive after all...
Just as an aside, "NASA, but for your climate" is the coolest idea for a government agency. Big climate moonshots, stuff to inspire people. I love it! I wish it could be so.
The solution to that is to subsidize production of the alternative products in your own country for export. Then subsidized US-made solar panels and electric cars would be cheaper for people in Africa and South America than burning coal, but you get all the US jobs etc.
> subsidized US-made solar panels and electric cars would be cheaper for people in Africa and South America than burning coal, but you get all the US jobs etc.
You're still giving productive infrastructure to foreign countries. A Nazi doormat could get elected running to redirect those panels and subsidies for domestic use.
If you haven't already replaced all of your own fossil fuels, redirecting them to domestic use is fine. If you have, they would have to fight all the people who want to keep their jobs making products for export.
>there is nothing at all stopping you from paying people in Africa or South America to buy electric cars
I can think of tons of problems with this.
It requires more scarce than resources like lithium to make cars.
You can be scammed by people selling the car and using that money to buy a house and a cheap commission engine. You don't have the issue with carbon capture.
Your likely to face much more political pushback for subsidizing others carbon use. "Let's make our country carbon neutral" can resonate with people as it's cleaning up after ourselves. That's much easier to convince people to do.
Can Africa and South America even use them? Is it reasonable for them, do they have the infrastructure? I know in some countries electricity can be scarce-- and power companies turn off the supply at night.
It's cheaper to scrub carbon, than it is to fix the societal and economic issues across the globe required to make passing out electric vehicles work
> It requires more scarce than resources like lithium to make cars.
What do you think it takes to capture carbon?
> You can be scammed by people selling the car and using that money to buy a house and a cheap commission engine.
How is that a profitable scam? Anybody else could buy the same car with the same subsidy. You can't resell it for more than you paid.
> Your likely to face much more political pushback for subsidizing others carbon use. "Let's make our country carbon neutral" can resonate with people as it's cleaning up after ourselves.
The only reason to do this is if you've already done that. Otherwise it would make more sense to spend the money subsidizing replacement of fossil fuels in your own country first.
> Can Africa and South America even use them? Is it reasonable for them, do they have the infrastructure? I know in some countries electricity can be scarce-- and power companies turn off the supply at night.
Solar panels and electric cars go together like hand and glove. The car doesn't care what part of the day you charge it, so you charge it when the sun is shining. And you don't need a functioning power grid to install cheap solar on your own house/business.
I'm not familiar with how exactly carbon capture technology works to be honest, but I believe it involves taking advantage of chemistry to separate carbon from air. I don't see how lithium would factor into this as there isn't any absolute need for batteries, as there are with electric cars. Carbon capture at the point of production(ie in factories themselves) could be hooked up to the grid and still have a high rate of capture
>Solar panels and electric cars go together like hand and glove. The car doesn't care what part of the day you charge it, so you charge it when the sun is shining. And you don't need a functioning power grid to install cheap solar on your own house/business.
Enough to charge a car? That's not a simple setup, that takes a serious set up. That effectively increases the cost of running an electric car by a significant margin.
>The only reason to do this is if you've already done that. Otherwise it would make more sense to spend the money subsidizing replacement of fossil fuels in your own country first.
I don't disagree with that. It's the simplest way to start, and represents the most benefit for the taxpayers paying for it.
> How is that a profitable scam? Anybody else could buy the same car with the same subsidy.
What's the subsidy level? Because people earning a few dollars a day aren't paying much more for your subsidised Tesla than they paid for their 30 year old car with an ICE. And if you start subsidising new EVs to the extent that your giving them away for less than $1k, your scheme might actually be worse for the environment (Production costs are a significant fraction of the carbon footprint of a car, especially if it isn't used very much, and directly or indirectly the subsidy makes brand new cars cheap for a lot of people in developed countries that don't need them...)
The more you consider the logistics of such a scheme, the more carbon capture makes sense, and not because I'm averse to the idea of subsidies for EVs or solar manufacture
You don't have to subsidize against the alternative of a 10+ year old car from the US or Europe if you stop selling ICE cars in the US and Europe, because in ten years the ten year old cars will all be electric too.
So the subsidy is only the amount required to make a new electric car cheaper than a new gasoline car, for the people breaking into the middle class who can now afford that. That's the same as it is in the US, isn't very much, and is declining as batteries get cheaper. It may be soon that it won't even be necessary.
Battered old cars are worth more than a year's average per capita income in much of the world. They're not throwing away recently manufactured US/European/Japanese cars before 2050 just because their country's 0.1% now find subsidised Teslas more financially attractive than Fords or Mercedes. Actually, they probably won't find subsidised Teslas more appealing than Fords or Mercedes if they drive long distances, because it's a lot easy to find a roadside shack with gasoline than EV hookups.
There are already production EVs cheaper than any US manufactured car made in China, but it isn't going to make much of a dent in the residual demand for the billion ICE cars, trucks vans already in existence in places where people buy second hand and maintain forever.
US emissions are ludicrously high per capita but shrinking. The rest of the world's are higher overall and growing.
I'm not sure the mentality that it'd be rude to consider tackling the latter problem unless and until US per capita emissions drop below the global average is going to help the planet.
Don't. You can't predict prices like that. Consider that electric cars roll out of the factory having emitted more CO2 than the equivalent combustion vehicle. It takes a lot of miles to break even. If you put a price on the CO2, you may well figure out that combustion engines end up more efficient, because carbon-neutral fuel is close to being economical.
> But then they'd still be better off spending that money to subsidize electric cars or solar panels or something.
This is a huge mistake. Don't pick winners. You don't have better information than the market.
You can predict that not emitting CO2 will cost less than emitting CO2 and then recapturing it, because it's the second law of thermodynamics.
> Consider that electric cars roll out of the factory having emitted more CO2 than the equivalent combustion vehicle. It takes a lot of miles to break even.
It takes about the number of miles that the average person drives in a year. New cars last a lot more than a year. Also, the CO2 it takes to make an electric car has a lot to do with the fact that existing vehicles and power generation emit CO2, which goes away as we get more electric vehicles and non-carbon power generation.
> If you put a price on the CO2, you may well figure out that combustion engines end up more efficient, because carbon-neutral fuel is close to being economical.
So put a price on CO2. The point isn't that subsidizing electric cars and solar panels is the best solution to the problem, it's that subsidizing carbon capture is strictly worse.
> You can predict that not emitting CO2 will cost less than emitting CO2 and then recapturing it, because it's the second law of thermodynamics.
I'm not sure that's true, in two senses.
Even if the _energy_ cost is higher, the _monetary_ cost may be lower as emissions and capture don't need to be in the same place. It may be cheaper for example to just burn some petrol to cover long distances where there's less infrastructure and instead capture an equivalent amount of CO2 using energy from solar panels somewhere sunny.
I'm not certain the energy cost must be higher due to thermodynamics. If you were taking CO2 and water and recombining them to get back nat gas and oxygen then sure. But what if you're taking the CO2 and doing something else with it? If I'm thinking about this right the bond energy in CO2 is a little lower than the overall energy released. Of course things come down then to efficiencies but I don't think there's a thermodynamics point here.
> You can predict that not emitting CO2 will cost less than emitting CO2 and then recapturing it, because it's the second law of thermodynamics.
You're mixing up watts with dollars, a mistake that "green energy" stockpickers make all the time. Consider all the energy that is hitting the Sahara. It's worth zero dollars, because it can't economically be used - but what if you could capture and transport it somehow, you know, like in a fuel?
> It takes about the number of miles that the average person drives in a year.
That's the lowest estimate I have ever heard - do you have a source for that?
> Also, the CO2 it takes to make an electric car has a lot to do with the fact that existing vehicles and power generation emit CO2, which goes away as we get more electric vehicles and non-carbon power generation.
Sure, but economics of scale apply to all technologies and unless you let the market do its thing, you won't know the minima and maxima.
> So put a price on CO2.
Exactly.
> The point isn't that subsidizing electric cars and solar panels is the best solution to the problem, it's that subsidizing carbon capture is strictly worse.
You don't know that. Ideally, nothing should be subsidized. However, in a market where profit is sooner found with dog meme cryptocurrency and other harebrained schemes, subsidies are arguably necessary, and then you shouldn't put all the money into directions that have already been mostly explored.
It's not that simple. For instance, when there's too much electricity on the European grid because, say, wind energy is particularly strong that day in Germany, producers need to pay for someone else to take that electricity. It has negative cost. This is rare for now, but it does limit the rollout of renewables.
I thought the example of solar energy in the Sahara was rather convincing? It's a lot of untapped potential energy, it just needs a business case. CO2 prices can make that happen.
> You lose a lot of watts to heat by converting fossil fuels to CO2 and back
Again, just because it's a loss in the thermodynamic sense doesn't make it a loss in an economic sense. Fuel cells are quite efficient in the thermodynamic sense, but they're not economical when the whole pipeline is considered. That said, a technological breakthrough can turn that calculation around. You can't predict that, so you shouldn't pick winners.
> Reuters Fact Checkers made an attempt at science
Color me suspicious with that one. At least they're pointing out that other researchers arrived at far less impressive numbers.
> What market? We're talking about government subsidies for carbon capture.
I'm a strong proponent of CO2 prices. That said, if the government insists on picking winners with subsidies, they shouldn't narrow themselves down too much.
> It's not that simple. For instance, when there's too much electricity on the European grid because, say, wind energy is particularly strong that day in Germany, producers need to pay for someone else to take that electricity. It has negative cost. This is rare for now, but it does limit the rollout of renewables.
If you don't have any external pressure or subsidies on you, you can turn off solar/wind in seconds. Renewables never have to pay those fees, only slow to ramp plants do.
Those "slow to ramp" plants are necessary to provide the base load. The cause of the overload is the volatility of renewables. Whether it would be cheaper to curtail renewables and who exactly gets to foot the bill - I don't know. Doesn't seem reasonable to me that, say, France should pay Germany because their very stable nuclear plants can't accommodate for the volatility of renewables elsewhere. Either way, the cost is negative, or at least zero if you turn it off. It's worthless energy, going to waste.
> Those "slow to ramp" plants are necessary to provide the base load. The cause of the overload is the volatility of renewables.
Sure, that's true. But what I'm saying is that negative prices don't impact the rollout of renewables because renewables never have to pay them. And in a market with lots of renewables and no distortions, prices won't go below zero anyway.
> But what I'm saying is that negative prices don't impact the rollout of renewables because renewables never have to pay them.
How do you know? Do you have source on that? It doesn't stand to reason that the cost of excess electricity produced by renewables should be carried by anyone else but the producers of such electricity. It's true that these overshoots wouldn't exist if coal or nuclear plants could be regulated quickly, but it's also true that if these plants didn't exist, nothing would make up for the underproduction.
> And in a market with lots of renewables and no distortions, prices won't go below zero anyway.
Alright, let's assume there's zero cost to curtailment (not true, but close enough) and that excess energy is only produced because the compensation structure works that way: You still have wasted potential energy from curtailment. Increasing the rollout strictly increases that waste. Therefore, it is reasonable to put that energy into fuel production, especially considering that the best combination of volatile renewables today is natural gas, which can be regulated quickly.
> How do you know? Do you have source on that? It doesn't stand to reason that the cost of excess electricity produced by renewables should be carried by anyone else but the producers of such electricity.
If they're acting on normal motives, they won't produce any excess specifically because they would have to share in paying the cost.
At least with any kind of bid for production system.
I could imagine a system where negative or too-low prices trigger targeted punishment, as far as I know that would be very different from what we have. For a normal market, if prices go too low then renewables can just say "okay we're offering zero power to sell right now".
> You still have wasted potential energy from curtailment. Increasing the rollout strictly increases that waste. Therefore, it is reasonable to put that energy into fuel production, especially considering that the best combination of volatile renewables today is natural gas, which can be regulated quickly.
> It takes about the number of miles that the average person drives in a year.
I wish that was true. Volvo recently put out a statement that it takes about 70k miles to recover the initially higher energy input using the world average energy mix. Some 9 years of the average UK milage.
Of course, if manufacturing is made significantly less CO2 intensive then the maths change.
For what it's worth, even if there was no CO2 benefit I'd still be rooting for electric cars to succeed for various other reasons including noise, particulates etc.
It seems like you’re assuming our current culture stays constant. I’m pretty sure it’s going to change quite drastically after we have our first million+ death heat wave. It’s going to suddenly seem a hell of a lot more tacky to be driving a huge Chevy Tahoe.
Which is to say that things that seem impossible politically might suddenly become very politically possible.
Either way the actions people will take for adaptation/mitigation are often at odds with the "prevention" path. Similarly, building flood defences would be expected to require a lot of steel and concrete, which are energy and carbon intensive. I suppose people in more marginal circumstances will need to make some tough decisions.
If we're going to talk insanely expensive moonshots, maybe the US should install and maintain free point-of-emission carbon capture for anyone anywhere in the world who wants it, and put the technology behind it in the public domain for anyone who doesn't want it from us.
Point of emission capture is at least technologically feasible.
Kind of like how some cities / states already subsidize solar panels / heat pumps / electric appliances etc.
But even more like how some organizations (like PurpleAir, maybe thats the only one though?) will get you connected with the hardware necessary to be a part of their air quality monitoring network.
Except this is a way more interesting idea for a lot of reasons.
I think the economies of scale are such that it needs to be large installations that regular people can only donate money to. Or do volonteer work, I guess.
The carbon goes down a hole in the ground, somewhere with the right geology. You can think of it as a gas well run in reverse.
As soon as you add that requirement to coal power plants, they become immediately uneconomic to build or operate. They are already borderline due to the fall in cost of renewables.
With a meagre Carbon Tax of $15/tonne, coal costs double in the US.
There's nothing that can be done to fix coal power apart from just shutting it all down.
Isn't that the whole appeal of our economic system? To root out these inefficiencies?
If it is not economically feasible to run a coal plant if they do not externalize the pollution cost, how is that my problem? And if the demand justifies it, the cost for coal-generated electricity will go up.
It's a matter of priorities and resource allocation.
Why do we allow coal operators to enrich themselves at the cost of everyone else?
The negative externalities are too many degrees of separation and to many years away from any immediately obvious perception of harm.
"Officer, these men are stealing my lawn, a few blades of grass a day as they walk by!" This doesn't engender a threat response until there's visible damage, and even then the solution is likely to involve signs and warnings, since the responsibility for total damage is so widely distributed. We need a fence around the climate lawn, and we can't leave the gate open for some people and not others, if you catch my drift.
We're beginning to see global acknowledgment of the problems and gradual progress towards reducing emissions. Once technology can accurately measure the cost of the negative externalities, they can be priced in. If the cost is on an exponential trend, where each ton of co2 is now seen to cost the operator an additional .0000001 cents, but 100 years later might cost millions, with regards to preventable damage, markets currently are accurately pricing in the costs. They're just not equipped to assess global climate and long term planning as relevant. That has to come from legislating sane and scientific and fair rules.
There's nothing inherently wrong with burning coal if there's a globally recognized system of accountability. Since there's not likely to ever be such a hegemony, you get what we have now - slow, frustratingly bureaucratic incremental progress, and therefore the need for mitigation as well as sustainable energy tech.
The EU has much higher pricing of CO2 (currently at 60 eur / tonne [0]) and yet Germany was using more coal power than expected, forced by the fact that there was a scarcity of wind. [1]
Of course, that caused the prices of electricity for households to jump up. [2]
Carbon Tracker calculates that the majority of coal plants in Europe are already cost negative.[1] They live off uncompetitive tariffs and subsidies. Germany's reverse auction for coal plants over the last year ended up accepting a lot of very low bids, as coal owners were desperate to get out from under stranded assets. Even they were widely criticized as over-priced given the state of the industry.
If you're considering whether coal plants would exist at all, you need to compare to the price of things like batteries. (Unless we make a ton of nuclear.)
It would be great to do sane carbon policy, but politics is the limiting factor at the moment. Carbon capture is one of the few universally popular solutions.
Maybe not. Imagine what a rhinoceros is worth to someone in an Africa. It's (hypothetically making up numbers here) a car or a house or food for a year.
For the right person in the US the cost of keeping that rhino alive in their backyard (or safe from poachers in a reserve in Africa) is much much more but both not an inconceivable amount to pay and not an undesirable one.
The best part CO2 capture is that motivated resourced people could in theory act without the worlds cooperation. People who aren't motivated and/or resourced could choose to not act and the problem could still get solved.
Currently the only way to achieve that kind of effect is to help under-resourced people to act by giving them resources. I would suggest that for a lot of reasons this is a very tricky solution.
For every resourced person motivated to capture co2 there will be another resourced person motivated to release it. Do we really want to find out who is gonna win the race. No matter how you spin it, we won't solve the emissions problem without politics.
You don't need permission to pay people to install wind turbines either. What you need is money. And if you have money, and a dollar spent installing wind turbines goes further than a dollar spent extracting CO2, why are you going to spend it on the inefficient thing?
A wind turbine is only profitable if you can physically connect it to someone who needs energy while the wind is blowing. That will get harder as more are built.
CO₂ is not the only factor driving ecological damage and indeed, the mass extinction event currently in progress.
There are simply too many humans for the way in which we as a species currently behave.
Either we need single parent families, globally, for a few generations, to get numbers down to a sustainable level, or, we have to convince/force 7 billion people to accept and adhere to major changes in how they live their lives.
CO₂ is a basically easy problem, compared to this, if it is possible to take the route of geo-engineering, because, as you say, it's not necessary to change how people behave; but I think no matter what, there is a need to change how people behave, or billions die from famine and economic failure, induced by ecological collapse.
I don't think people will change (indeed, there will be large numbers of people vocally against change), I think Governments will at best effectively do nothing "(we're building lots of renewable! but we're also building lots of gas at the same time!"), or more likely make things worse ("we'll phase out coal by 2070"), so my expectation is human suffering on a scale never seen before in all human history.
Humans are kākāpō; we're over-reproducing, having as they did no meaningful natural predators to keep us in check, and sooner or later, that leads to ecological collapse.
(The kākāpō went through several cycles of this and evolved to reproduce very, very slowly, and so came into balance with their environment, and then were very nearly almost completely wiped out when humans arrived.)
Dude, its not the 50s, most of the world is under replacement rate of reproduction. The problem now is largely the opposite, shortage of young minds to invent carbon free energy grids and young hands to build them. You can cut human population by half and still have a problem of excessive carbon emissions or transition to carbon free economy and have net zero per capita emission.
Also I don't want humanity to be almost completely wiped out.
I may be wrong, but I think the world population is growing more quickly than you portray, and will be for some decades yet, and we currently have far too many people for how we conduct ourselves as a species.
I may also be wrong to think it, but I would expect if you halved the world population, assuming it was done equally across the world, you would indeed halve human carbon emissions; half as many people, half as many homes, cars, power stations, etc.
Based on current trajectories, the world's population is not going to double again (or even increase by 50%), it will level off at about 10 billion and at that point perhaps start to shrink. It's possible this level is not sustainable with an acceptable standard of living, but it's not obvious and it certainly isn't inevitable that humanity will reproduce out of control.
The planet can't cope now - the environment is falling apart right now, already - and the mid-range estimate there's another two or three billion people to come over the next few decades.
There are estimates in excess of this, there are estimates lower. Estimates which have population declines see slow declines only.
I've not seen any real understanding of why the fertility rate is dropping, particularly in first world countries. That's a concern; what happens if the factors causing this to happen are transient?
That's part of why the estimates are only estimates, of course.
Can you provide a source for the mid-range estimate you mention? Global population is on the brink of decline rather than further growth. [1]
> I've not seen any real understanding of why the fertility rate is dropping, particularly in first world countries. That's a concern; what happens if the factors causing this to happen are transient?
The cited article discusses several potential causes and none are going away in the near future. On a global basis, humanity's current demographic profile locks in decades of either very low growth or a decline in most regions. Worth noting that these changes have all come about at a much faster pace than even the most aggressive estimates.
Despite this as our overall numbers will start shrinking, resource consumption will grow and its growth can't be prevented by force without conflict. The only class of realistic solutions to environmental degradation are technological ones. Tapping into new stockpiles (likely out in space) and increasing efficiency slash decreasing resource intensity of economic activity are more viable if one aims to avoid armed confrontation.
You are so right but nobody wants to hear it. We are incredibly short-sighted and incapable of accepting inconvenient truths. Every child conceived (and their children) is an enormous burden to the earth and all of us (in the grand scale of things) but because more population is in the best interest of every individual family, city, region and country, no reduction will ever happen, at least not voluntarily.
Third world children consume less, but their parents engage in deforestation and bushmeat hunts to sustain their families. This is an environmental burden as well.
The point is that upfront investment cost of developing industry specific carbon neutral solution doesn't have uniform ROI and can be (either economically or politically) quite expensive or sometime infeasible. This is an extremely long tail problem and we do need a more general solution applicable even after we exhausted all the low hanging fruits. This is what "upper bound" means in the parent post. So in the ideal scenario, it's more like we eliminate 80% of low hanging emission sources, significant reduce 15% of them and negate the rest with carbon removal to achieve carbon neutrality.
In addition to this, removing historical accumulated carbon is also pretty important. The expected cumulative damage at the point of 2050 will be catastrophic even in the most optimistic projection.
Depends on what the dollar cost of not burning fossil fuels turns out to be. I think being able to close the carbon loop is extremely important, there will inevitably be use cases where burning fossil fuels is the superior or only option. Rocket launches immediately jump to mind and are looking to be an area that will continue to experience explosive growth throughout the next century. We had better have a viable option for capturing those emissions along with the long tail of emissions generated during an orderly transition away from burning fossil fuels.
Rocket fuel isn't gasoline, it's hydrazine. It's not pumped out of the ground, it's synthetic.
This is a good lesson for the carbon capture economics.
We know how to make synthetic fuels and biofuels. As a general rule, making them costs around the same as carbon capture. "Grow some plants or something" is actually one of the most efficient known methods of carbon capture.
Biofuels cost more than pumping crude out of the ground. They also cost more, in most cases, than electric cars. So if you don't care about CO2 then fossil fuels win over biofuels because they're cheaper and if you do care about CO2 then electric cars win over biofuels because they're cheaper. Basically nobody uses biofuels unless they're subsidized. But we know how to do it; we just also know of something better to use in 98% of cases.
Then you have the other 2% of cases. Like aircraft. Existing batteries are too heavy for aircraft and we don't know if or how long it'll be before we have sufficient ones. But we could use biofuels for that. Put a carbon tax on fossil fuels and that's what might happen, because for a plane that might be the most cost effective alternative.
So you say hey, maybe it'd be better to keep using fossil fuels in planes and then use carbon capture. If carbon capture has a cost similar to biofuels, that could be competitive. But it's not. Because biofuels produce fuel. With carbon capture you still have to pay to buy petroleum.
Hydrazine is not used very much as a rocket fuel. It's expensive, toxic, mutagenic, carcinogenic, flammable (not escaping that though), and explosive. It also has a freezing point too high to be used in space (MMH, monomethyl hydrazine, is used in spacecraft with NTO as the oxidizer.)
The best fuels for the first stage of launchers are hydrocarbons, due to their low cost and good density. And the first stage is where most of the propellant in a launcher is consumed. The cost of propellant becomes increasingly important as the cost of the launcher is reduced; for SpaceX it is very important. The use of cheap propellants also allows more testing of their engines.
Some launch systems fly on hypergols (hydrazine is one of them; it is not used in the West anymore as a main fuel, being too toxic), some burn hydrogen with oxygen, some burn kerosene (RP-1), a new system is coming online that actually uses methane (Starship).
And these were just the liquid propellants. There are also solid fuel rockets.
Hydrolox could certainly use all electric production but all of the others require hydrocarbons as their feedstock. Take hydrazine, it's synthesized by oxidizing ammonia and the main feedstock for ammonia production is natural gas and it's synthesis produces CO2 as a byproduct. So we're right back where we started. Why don't we just use hydrogen and oxygen? It's true that storage is a problem since hydrogen must be kept at cryogenic temperatures to remain liquid but a bigger problem is hydrogen's low density. Low density means more volume and that leads to inefficiencies in the size of the rocket. Methane is generally the better option and coincidentally could use captured CO2 as a feedstock.
I tend to agree, at least from the point of view that even if we continue to burn fossil fuels that it would be much cheaper to require CO2 removal where it is produced, and thus in extremely high concentrations, than trying to waft it out of the atmosphere where it's only 400 ppm.
Electrification of transportation would also make this much easier, because instead of having billions of little fossil fuel burners all over the planet, you could concentrate that burning to just power plants. At that point there would be a lot fewer places where it would be difficult to sequester carbon (e.g. planes, large ocean vessels).
> It seems hard to believe that removing CO2 from the atmosphere could ever be less expensive than not emitting it to begin with.
This is the "get rich by saving money" fallacy. Imagine all the CO2 of a century of industrial development had not been emitted. We'd be enjoying a life without man-made climate change, but also without any of the amenities of modern life.
Consider that air-to-fuel companies are pretty close to profitability with just a modest increase in carbon taxes. Consider also that countries like Germany spent a lot of money on transitioning to renewables, with very little to show for it. Once you picked the low-hanging fruit, there are no more "savings" to be had without drastically cutting down on production. At that point, you might as well turn some of that production into sequestration.
> So the whole thing seems like a fraud.
I get the same feeling with electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines. Why? Because these have all rolled out on account of lavish subsidies, not because the market decided they are the most efficient solution. Just put a price on CO2 and watch the market figure that one out. Results may be not what you expect.
> Imagine all the CO2 of a century of industrial development but also without any of the amenities of modern life.
Most people on earth still live in conditions that are nowhere near the kind of development you are likely enjoying. They are also those who will feel the effects of man-made climate change most.
That is why this argument falls flat. We didn't buy this kind of living standard with some future self-inflicted suffering: your amenities of modern life are bought with the suffering of others.
But the deal is done and over. Now a debt is owed.
I get that, but what are the implications? Consider that the vast majority of CO2 emissions today are coming from the countries that are still developing to that standard we enjoy. We have no right to ask them to cut down. Therefore, we have no choice but to invest into sequestration, because that's the only way to pay down that "debt".
As an alternative, would it be worth it to help developing countries build green solutions now, maybe the economies of scale will help offset some of the short-term cost?
You're right that it's not right to force still developing countries to halt their progress. I just wonder if there's a way to help them develop in a way that is better long-term.
Absolutely, technology that scales out to the rest of the world is the only hope to actually make a substantial difference. That includes sequestration, renewables, but also nuclear fission and (hopefully) fusion.
Unfortunately, most of the activism seems to revolve around "us sinners" needing to abstain from our indulgences.
"Most people on earth still live in conditions that are nowhere near the kind of development you are likely enjoying. They are also those who will feel the effects of man-made climate change most."
They still benefit from industrial development, even though with a certain time lag compared to us (because that is it: time lag. Living standards in poorer countries lag behind those of Europe or Japan, but they rise nonetheless.)
For example, about 90 per cent of humanity has electricity and uses some electrical appliances. Few people live in truly pre-industrial conditions.
Capturing it at the point of emission seems like it should be the priority. Way, way easier to get it at that point. But that would make fossil fuels more expensive, and we can't have that right?
Maybe we should just massively subsidize point of emission carbon capture for fossil fuels. We need it for some use cases that renewables don't work for anyway (yet).
I suspect the public would be on board with these type of policies if the cost to the poor and middle class were subsidized.
Any legislation that increases cost of energy will impact poorest the most, but for some reason cost of energy to the poor is not brought up much in climate discussions.
And of course China is the biggest emitter by far, so something special needs to be done there. Likely first world countries would have to subsidize third world country energy costs.
It may be easier to develop one efficient process to extract CO2 from the atmosphere than to develop numerous efficient alternatives to every CO2 producing activity.
If you had process that only needs electricity then you run it only when power is cheap (usually when renewables are producing it).
Depending on efficiency this could be better solution than energy storage (instead storing energy you pull CO2 and then burn it later if energy is needed).
Carbon capture techniques do not necessarily allow you to easily burn the captured carbon again. For example, consider a process where calcium oxide is used to capture CO2, converting it to calcium carbonate (that’s how masonry mortars work). You can’t convert calcium carbonate to energy.
It could never be less expensive in the same way a a sled will continue to slide forever on a frictionless surface: theoretically.
Material limitations, and technical limitations may make it cheaper practically.
As an example, let's look at rockets. Which is cheaper, removing the CO2 after release, or developing switching technologies, for instance, to using O2 and H. Well, for certain applications, where the energy density and logistics of the fuel matter, pulling the CO2 out afterwards makes more sense.
Now, yes, that is a small example, but my point is just to show thermodynamic efficiency doesn't translate directly to cost effectiveness for all applications.
There is a moral hazard here, but the reality is that we’ve passed the point where emissions reductions alone can get us where we want to be. We will need both reductions and removal.
It's more plausible to me when you think about centralization vs decentralization.
Sure, it would clearly be cheaper to emit less if the emissions were mostly coming from a small number of controlled facilities.
But when the sources are millions of tailpipes and smokestacks across the globe, it's at least plausible that a centralized, new recapture solution would be cheaper than decreasing emissions in millions of old places.
It also depends a lot on price of electricity. Norway has a lot of electric cars because it is a rainy country with terrain very suitable for dams and cheap hydro production.
With enough small modular reactors, we might get to the same point elsewhere. The German renewables mix does seem to drive prices up, especially in certain peaks, because nature is unpredictable and you can absolutely have a freak streak of several windless, dark, cold days in the winter.
Sure, for now. But pretty much all of Europe, large parts of the US, much of China have plans to ban gas vehicles in the near future (< 15 years). Once that happens most of the rest of the world will follow quickly because there will be just less supply chain support for gas vehicles, and what remains will quickly become a diminishing fraction of the total.
I definitely see this happening much faster than any attempts at atmospheric capture would even make a tiny dent.
If taken from a purely economic standpoint, yes. But once politics get involved, a more expensive often can feel "cheaper" if it gets everyone moving in the same direction or produces some level of agreement.
Sure, in an ideal world, we would just all do the right thing. But that is not the world we live in.
At a superficial level of analysis, yes, but you can't turn off all the coal plants, stop oil extraction, convert ice to electric, and distribute sufficient power storage to keep modern life going at a snap of the fingers. If you can offset the emissions while at the same time moving toward renewable and sustainable energy, you're mitigating necessary inefficiencies.
Mitigation is better than fantasizing about rapid fossil fuel elimination. There are way too many lives that depend on maintaining the status quo, in terms of power and economics and chemical resources. Progress will be gradual, like cleanup of the pacific garbage patch.
Sadly the amount of CO2 in our atmosphere even if we stopped polluting today. Will still bring about huge negative effects down the road. We need to decarbonize our society(listed first because it’s the first priority) AND remove CO2. Source & a great read: https://www.orbuch.com/carbon-removal/
If you want to learn about carbon dioxide removal check out AirMiners: https://bootup.airminers.org/ they have a useful self paced curriculum
We do, but right now we have to start somewhere. It'll take less energy and effort and production resources to reduce emissions than capture the same amount.
Once we get closer to zero emissions it makes more sense to think about capture IMO.
Edit: oh wait I think you are saying the same as you mention reduction is first priority, sorry.
If efficiency was ever a concern we wouldn't be burning fossil fuels in the first place. A gasoline engine only extracts a small portion of the energy in the gasoline, most of the energy gets wasted as heat.
> An excuse to keep emitting CO2 while claiming that you'll do something about it "tomorrow."
While paying the higher price today to have it removed? That's not much of an excuse, that's buying your way out of it. If people want to go that route and they pay for their own emissions (there, of course, is going to be the problem) then be my guest. If you'd rather go the typically cheaper route of changing the technology or lifestyle (e.g. drive electric or ditch the car altogether), that's also fine.
Renewables don't all have steady load, so it could be an alternative to batteries/hydro batteries. Use natural gas peakers when renewables don't produce enough, use excess renewable power to remove CO2 from the air when they are producing more than you need. Basically it's using the atmosphere as a reverse-battery
The alternative there is to do pre-combustion CO2 capture on the methane, storing hydrogen (or hydrogen + nitrogen) for use in the peaking turbines.
Another possibility is to store CO2 underground, and when "charging" use a solid oxide electrolyzer to turn it to carbon. When discharging, it would be run as a SOFC and produce CO2, which would be cooled and stored again. I believe Noon Energy is looking into schemes like this.
It all comes down to the cost of energy. If the current improvements in renewable energy are sustained, or if the promise of fusion comes to pass, or even a considerable improvement in the economics of fission, then yes it could make sense to emit carbon dioxide now and recapture it later.
With the way capitalism works there'll be a lot more takers to solve a harder but more measurable problem that someone will pay them for (remove the CO2 we'll pay by the ton) than there will be to solve a less measurable problem (prevent CO2 being released generally). Perverse incentives for sure but within the existing parameters likely more effective.
While it may impact GDP, it may not impact productive output. Less stuff will be consumed for the same output. There will be impacts on how money is shuffled around; fossil fuel profits flow from fossil fuel share holders to CCS companies, fossil fuel workers will be displaced by CCS industry workers.
As renewables come online at cost parity, they will displace fossil fuel usage. That will cause a dramatic decline in fossil fuel price as oversupply becomes a constant problem. So people buying fossil fuel will be spending less for the same result.
Now, one might make the following observation; we've taken fossil fuel profits away and consumed them immediately rather then re-investing them (what capital owners typically do). This means less investment and thus growth. Frankly, I find the hypothesis not so compelling. There is little evidence that capital is the bottleneck in Capex spending. My view is the world suffers from too few good ideas chased by even fewer people/organizations and under the constraints of bumbling governments.
GDP issue aside, at 100$/ton this only adds 1$/gallon to the price of gas and 0.50$/therm to the price of natural gas. That's definitely absorbable by the declines that will happen from oversupply.
More importantly, having an actual price tag on removing carbon from the atmosphere would allow carbon markets to finally work. Assuming there is enough political will to properly monitor and tax CO2 emissions worldwide, which is a huge ask. A lot of companies and countries will be tempted to lie because it will make their products more competitive.
I think it’s also interesting to trace how much all of it come from really good, simple and forward thinking principles, to slowly become the state we are in now.
For instance, following your idea, there will be the issue with countries that produce more CO2 than they can afford, but we can’t make them pay as it would literally be a matter life or death to them. So they get an exception.
They then become a beacon of CO2 relocation. We start to pass more laws to limit that trend, but the existing companies will be grandfathered. They then have a monopoly on the scheme, and also find other loopholes, progressively expanding the amount of CO2 they can get away with.
During that time, these countries will be more and more CO2 swamped, degrade beyond belief, and someone will be pesting against the demon that thought about taxing countries in the first place.
To put my naive ideas out as well, I kinda see economic tricks the same way we say “don’t try to solve social problems through technology”. We should straight get the bigger economies to shoulder infra construction in weaker economies no strings attached. No loan, no debt, no nothing. We’re all extinct anyway if we don’t do it.
> "We should straight get the bigger economies to shoulder infra construction in weaker economies no strings attached"
Who is meant by "we" in this sentence? And in what ways do you consider that it's plausible to "get them to shoulder it" in excess of whatever they freely choose to do?
> We’re all extinct anyway if we don’t do it.
Citation needed - the IPCC published worst case scenarios are far from extinction, and especially in the countries which would shoulder the burden the expected damage the local consequences are "very bad" in the sense that a few percent decrease in GDP growth is an enormously large economic damage. It's not clear if spending 5% of GDP on that (or much more, if you expect them to "shoulder the burden" as well) would be worth it for them, since they'll have to invest in local mitigations anyway due to the already accumulated greenhouse gases.
5% of global gross product is a lot. For example, it's more than what the world affords to spend on all kinds of education together. It's far more than what would cost to truly eliminate world hunger and most major diseases. It's an order of magnitude more than what the world has devoted for charitable purposes. It's literally the equivalent of mobilizing 400 million people to work only on that thing - if the expected bad consequences of climate change are e.g. 200 million displaced people, then that's very bad, but it's not worth to have 400 million people devote their lives to prevent 200 million from needing to migrate.
Why do you need any actual price tag? Put it into market. If company releases carbon, it must buy capture carbon futures. If company captures carbon, it can sell capture carbon futures. Add government subsidies, like 98% in 2021, 0% in 2071, so companies have enough time to adapt and restructure their business.
We can measure the total amount, but it's rapidly mixing and moving so we can't reliably allocate the CO2 production to states from space measurements, no.
Furthermore, countries only are liable for the commitments to which they voluntarily agree in international treaties or get forced to agree with credible threats of excessive violence.
As all the climate talks have clearly shown, no one is going to sign a treaty which accepts the obligation to pay such a bill even if it could be accurately calculated; the world simply does not work that way.
>4 km2 (1.5 sq mi) or smaller, 3 times per second.
Looks like there's accuracy enough to be able to model this. OCO-3 is apparently observing city level CO2 levels.
As for the human aspect, I think holding carbon trading countries to account when there's been a treaty signed and a financial incentive to do so isn't too far fetched.
I also think as the world gets a bit more desperate there will be more motivation. I personally would like to see sanctions on products (like Brazilian beef) but probably that's dreaming.
Okay, I'm surprised by this capacity and it looks really nice - it does not measure emissions, though, but at that resolution perhaps can be used to get a reasonable estimate of them.
However, I don't consider is plausible that major carbon-emitting countries will simply agree to sign a treaty in which they will owe a lot of money to others. Currently there have been only some proposals where there would be a financial incentive to trade increases or decreases in the emissions, or to implement financial incentives within a nation or region, where any penalties get paid back to your own budget/economy, and not to third world countries, and even those tend to have a hard time passing.
I simply don't consider it plausible that the nations will agree to any major wealth redistribution at a meaningful scale - they can agree to win-win solutions when getting some reasonable benefit or political consideration in return; they can agree to solutions where your problems get fixed and our balance is roughly neutral; they can agree to some charity/support in certain cases (which usually do come with some strings attached) in a limited amount, but not a wealth distribution so large that their own citizens would feel it in their wallets.
I also do not think that this will change as the world gets a bit more desperate - there is little overlap between the people and regions who will be the first to get desperate and motivated and the people whom you would want to convince to agree to pay.
CO2 is colorless, odorless, and is produced in many ways, not just from factories or out of tailpipes. For instance, would we want to bill countries with receding glaciers which release methane, a more powerful greenhouse gas that decays into CO2?
1) this sets a quantifiable measure on what a carbon tax should be. Which is essentially higher than it would be to remove said carbon. The tax including a convenience fee.
2) We're still on the bottom of the S curve for carbon removal. I'm not sure why anyone that visits HN would be surprised that a new technology costs more. But if we're to survive climate change it is essential that we innovate this technology and make it as cheap as possible. So see $100/tonne as a stepping stone rather than a final product. That will not be the final price, but rather comparable to your first home computers.
Edit: I know I said 2, but a third thing to consider is that we already have too much carbon in the atmosphere. We really need to be net negative, not zero. In addition to this we can't expect developing countries to choose between power and existential crisis. As rich countries we have burden from past emissions. So if we are the ones removing it, that's more equitable. But also probably the only way it's going to happen. If we don't step up, no one will. Though we're also the ones that will fare the best because of our already elevated status. But is that the kind of people we want to be?
That's based on two very cautious geoengineering approaches that have virtually no negative side effects. If governments were willing to consider other geoengineering approaches, I think that number could be driven down significantly. My favorite candidate is ocean-wave-based olivine weathering, as proposed by Project Vesta. They think that, at scale, that approach could get costs down to $21/ton, plus reduce ocean acidification more effectively too. But it's more complicated and could have some negative effects, such as putting a lot of poisonous heavy metals like nickel in the ocean. But because politicians hate ever having to say that they're knowingly causing any problem, those avenues get starved of research funding, as we see here. But I think that, within 50 years, we're probably going to find a scalable CO2 removal approach for less than half the target cost of this program, and that basically could solve global warming, but because of political cowardice it's discovered 30 years later than it could have been.
Everyone wants to do emission reduction first and delay geoengineering as long as possible, when we should be doing the opposite. Even if the financial cost appears much smaller, it's clear now that large scale emission reduction is politically very expensive. Emission reduction is the clean, ideal solution that we don't have the ability to scalably implement yet. Geoengineering should be temporary quick and dirty approach we use to buy time, creating some problems that last decades in exchange for time to implement a solution for a problem that lasts for millennia. Assuming that cheap geoengineering techniques whose negative side effects are bounded in space and time can be found, but I think that they can.
That's just for carbon neutrality. We have put 2 teratons of carbon into the atmosphere since industrialization.
Yes we probably don't need to remove all of that, but at least 1 teraton is probably a very good idea, by trees, olivine, seeding oceans, pumping into the ground (which I think eventually comes back out.
This is kind of like the mainstream reporting on the budget deficit, which always concentrates on the YEARLY deficit (2.77 trillion) versus 129 trillion overall.
They are different problems. You can stop filling the tub, but the water in the tub isn't going to evaporate in time. You still have to drain it. It's not either/or.
In Ministry for the Future, governments started paying fossil fuel companies more money to keep the fuel in the ground than they could make by extracting and selling it.
Only then the extraction slowed down.
Maybe we can start by including the cost for sequestering the CO2 in the cost of the fuel?
Of course it's never going to be more economical to remove it than just avoiding producing it in the first place.
Problem is, even if all human sourced CO2e emissions ceased tomorrow, the world would still continue to warm significantly because the blanket is already up there. The natural processes that sequester carbon take many millennia (or more) to make any significant changes.
This is not completely true. The oceans are still absorbing some of the emitted CO2, so if human CO2 emissions were to cease the atmospheric CO2 level would begin to decline. This will eventually cause the surface waters to become saturated with CO2 though, so this decline will slow before all the anthropogenic CO2 were absorbed. Eventually excess carbon will be transported to the deep ocean, allowing more CO2 to be absorbed.
Carbon capture and emissions reduction are like diet and exercise: you gotta do both. Yeah, if we keep emmitting at present rates, carbon capture is still going to be a very expensive way to stand still, but if you reduce emissions and you're only capturing the carbon from those sources which are hard to decarbonize, then it becomes a much more practical solution.
Maybe you shouldn't. The IPCC does good work, but their predictions are conservative and imperfect, and they mostly ignore tail risks. Up until 2012 they predicted that arctic summer sea ice would last until the 2050s, and now it's estimated to be gone by the 2030s.
Which gives an estimate of 2.6% of global GDP in 2100.
The one you mention seems to be in the same ballpark: assuming 2% growth, in 2070 global GDP will probably be somewhere around 220T, so 5.4/220 = 2.4%.
Thats for 1.5 degrees, a target we've already missed. We are now on track for over 3 degrees right now, and every extra degree of heating is exponentially more damaging than the last.
Consider that -4 degrees chage had washington DC under a glacier thats two miles of ice, and now imagine the same change in the other direction.
The same report you linked (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/energy/sites/bartlett/files/c... page 10) includes interesting parts regarding e.g. climate change damage to agriculture like "temperate regions in Canada, US and Europe have positive GDP impacts whilst negative impacts are expected in India, other developing Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America." It does not go into that detail for the other types of damage because there it's just different rates of negatives, however, it's reasonable to assume that the regional differences there are also just as large.
It's hard for politicians to ask a Kansas farmer for a large extra tax for CO2 removal if the main justification of it is that it eventually will prevent much larger costs to someone else overseas.
In essence, policy decisions are made on a national level, mostly by people accountable to their own citizens and needing their approval (no matter if in democractic elections or needing to sustain their authoritarian power) - and you can't match national costs (since any decision to pay or invest will be national) versus global benefits of mitigation, you need to consider what the local consequences of doing nothing are going to be as that is what is going to drive all the actual action and decisions even while the same politicians make empty talks about global solidarity.
Lol "5% pay cut". Classic ivory tower, wealthy first-world thinking. 4 trillion dollars is $500 per person on earth, which is more than the annual wages for a significant percentage. Energy cost increases put vastly more of the burden on low-income individuals due to the demand inelasticity of heat, fuel, light.
Of course it won't be distributed evenly, that is the point. Just like always, energy cost increases harm poor people the most.
If you are in USA, has the government absorbed the increase in energy prices? Of course not. It costs everyone more to pay their heating bill or buy gasoline than just a year ago. Wealthy people can afford it. Poor people cannot. And the energy spikes also contribute to the huge inflation in food and everyday goods, once again hurting poor people the most.
That's the most basic of examples. Reality hits in many ways. Poor people generally have to travel much further to work every day. No matter whether they take public or private transportation, when fuel costs go up, maintenance drops... routes get cancelled, cars break down, tolls go up, whatever.
Or employment goes away entirely. Are mines, factories, construction projects still profitable when energy costs spike? Some yes, some no.
Carbon recapture is essential for humanitarian purposes. Countries like China, India, and Bangladesh, won’t forgo industrialization to go to net zero CO2 emissions. I’m from Bangladesh and there’s just zero political will to do that. Maintaining the 6-7% annual GDP growth is literally what the legitimacy of the government is built upon. So it’s imperative for the developed world to build the technology to recapture that carbon.
Which is why it’s in their interest to develop economically as fast as possible so they can be best prepared for the future. The Netherlands handled a similar degree of their land being underwater using 19th century technology.
But there is zero appetite for curbing growth. Bangladesh is a miracle of capitalism. When my dad was a kid 1 out of 3 children died by age 5. Now it’s 1 out of 40 and the life expectancy is 72 years. (Closing in on white Americans.) Nobody wants to change course on that.
Oh I certainly did not mean Bangladesh should not develop. Even outside of the things like child mortality, transitioning to less carbon-intensive economy will require certain level of economic development. In the longer term, ignoring climate change in politics will not work though, because (a) rising seas do not care (b) even if developed world introduces enough innovation to fight climate change, they will find a way for everyone else either to adopt it or pay for it.
At a first read, this is great, because it's apolitical. It's about innovation, and is positive, I.e. doing something instead of telling people not to do something. For once this seems like something a government should be doing. I'm almost suspicious I missed something.
Oh this is very political. You just need to follow the money. Basically carbon offsetting is the notion of adding carbon to our atmosphere by continuing to e.g. burn coal or gas and by offsetting that with carbon capture.
The problem with that is that it is kind of expensive. To the point where it would be cheaper to simply stop burning stuff and maybe do something cleaner instead. By instead committing to lowering cost to 100$ per tonne, the US is basically announcing subsidizing the continued dumping of CO2 in our atmosphere by making it cheaper to green-wash that business with carbon offsetting. That is going to inevitably involve some creative bookkeeping. The net effect of that will be lots more carbon ending up in the atmosphere than actually captured. Courtesy of the US tax payer.
The best way to capture carbon is to leave it in the ground.
It obviously doesn't and they never claimed that it did. The point is that it's cheaper on the margin to stop polluting than it is to keep polluting and then clean it up afterwards.
Imagine the first hole has been leaking for 200 years, and also getting a new hole each year. Also each hole grows every year. The boat is on track to be totally sunk in a couple decades.
You probably want to start bailing immediately, also start plugging holes immediately. Except our technologies for bailing aren't practical yet (and may never be). If we don't plug the holes, we'll sink. If we don't start bailing, we'll sink. If we do both immediately, we might still sink but we've got a better chance.
It's not clear to me 280ppm is actually ideal, because below 150ppm, most plant life on Earth begins to die from the lack of CO2 in the atmosphere. It takes a couple generations for plants to adapt (which they can), but I don't imagine most crops and forests will survive the transition well.
I actually think where we're at is relatively decent. We know what's happening, can reliably predict certain storms.
Definitely don't want to go any higher, but going in the opposite direction for too long is entering ice age status.
The goal shouldn't be to adhere to a specific number, but identify an acceptable range/boundary.
There is a substantial time lag between the concentration of carbon changing and the climate reaching its new equilibrium. Even if we stopped emitting carbon today the warming would continue for some time. So if you're OK with what it's like today then you still need to take some carbon out of the atmosphere to keep it like this.
> I actually think where we're at is relatively decent. We know what's happening, can reliably predict certain storms.
You mean aside from the massive wildfires, depleting groundwater with droughts in so many parts of the world, etc.? The status quo hits the 'sweet spot' for you?
The observation I'm making is that we know what the bounded risks are. We don't know what the lower bounds (or upper bounds) might do. We've planted lots of vegetation that depends on the growth of CO2 levels year after year (to some degree). It's not clear to me that if it gets too low that would be a good thing.
By the way, I'm not arguing that we shouldn't decrease the CO2 levels. We should. I'm trying to have a nuanced and interesting discussion about a very complex phenomena.
Each of those problems you brought up can also be mitigated with proper engineering as well.
Take for example how Israel effectively solved the drought problem. Now that's an exceptional case and it wouldn't be logistically feasible to expect every nation to dedicate so much of their GDP to such problems. I'm just trying to suggest there are other variables at play, besides moving CO2 levels up and down like a thermometer.
Those wildfires are not new, and are more a factor of humans over meddling (putting out every tiny fire instead of letting nature do it's thing). Global warming plays a part but it's not as if nature was without forest fires pre-man.
Likewise droughts are just as much caused by misuse of water resources than they are changes in rainfall. California in particular has no business having cities as large as it does given their groundwater situation - and that has been before global warming accelerated.
> At a first read, this is great, because it's apolitical.
This is a strange statement to make about DAC. Once you think about what that means there's a lot of thorny political issues.
Removing carbon from the air to store it permanently does not give you anything economically. Someone's going to have to have to pay for it. Is that people who made their wealth based on fossil fuels? People who emit most or who did so in the past? Or everyone?
Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favor of supporting development of this tech. But there are complicated political questions to be answered. Framing this as "apolitical" is probably not going to help.
Side stepping the “is it political” part (which I have no interest in discussing- it’s a tarpit)…
There is an economical advantage to reducing CO2 from the environment. It gives you an environment that humans can thrive in (by way of being an environment that the current food chain can thrive in). It’s hard to consider investing in the future when you think it might be apocalyptical. Easier if you think there is a future for humanity.
There is an advantage for society as a whole, but for the person running a single DAC machine the advantage is neglegible. (Which is kinda the inverse why climate mitigation is so hard to begin with - avoiding emissions doesn't give the person doing so a lot of advantage.)
Managing access and impact on shared resources like the environment is political to the maximum level.
> It's about innovation, and is positive
Innovation is not automatically positive. The idea that technology can magically solve all problems is techno-optimism and it's a very ideological position.
> is positive, I.e. doing something instead of telling people not to do something
Telling people not to do something is not negative.
If it costs $100 to remove, then that should set the price. If you can set a reasoned price on a externality then charging anything less is subsidizing the pollution.
I agree that creating an upper bound price is powerful, because it economically incentivizes those companies to figure out cheaper ways to save on that tax, like not emitting in the first place :p
Why not look at it as costing $10 of externalities plus $90 worth of steel bars that you’re preventing? That combination would make a $100 removal cost a good goal. Or at least something that includes both the positive (stuff is good, jobs are good) and negative externalities (carbon is bad).
The cost of emission certificates in the EU is currently at 63 EUR (72 USD) per ton. The carbon tax in Switzerland is 96 CHF (104 USD) per ton, soon to be increased to 120 CHF (131 USD).
Ok, you just killed the US steel industry and several others. Massive amounts of manufacturing have moved to other industries to avoid the tax. US economy is now significantly less competitive. What's the next move?
Great idea. Now US companies down the supply chain have a higher cost of goods sold too. US Steel is technically more competitive domestically, but is worse off internationally. You have successfully incentivized even more businesses to leave the United States and have lost millions of jobs. You have possibly violated several trade agreements too but let's ignore that.
So what now? We haven't accomplished much other than moving manufacturing to other countries. Are we just going to tax the finished goods coming into the country too because they were made with dirty fuels too? Because people are already pretty unhappy, including auto manufacturers, pretty much anyone who actually makes stuff, and also people who need to eat food. Especially people who just lost their jobs due to your earlier choices.
that's what things like COP26 should have been for - breaking the borders between our made up nations and agreeing to solve this problem together as global citizens
Ideally yes. That's the basic problem with international trade. If you try to do something that's better for the world, someone will eat your lunch, your people will suffer, and little will change.
Impose a tax on O&G industry, remove all of their subsidies, and earmark the collected tax towards CO2 removal and other climate change reversal methods. Could get to the $100 per tonne in a fraction of a time.
A tax on the O&G industry is a tax on consumers. Demand for energy is largely inelastic, so costs are easy to pass on. Gas prices at only $3.50 are already sending Joe Biden's approval ratings through the floor. Sending gas prices past $5 or more means a reactionary panel of candidates get elected next cycle, which is counter-productive.
I always forget US gas prices are dollars per gallon. According to Google prices are currently less than a dollar a litre, in Europe the median seems to be about 1.8 dollars per litre (4.5 litres in a gallon). In the UK it is about 7.5 dollars per gallon.
The USA seems addicted to cheap fuel. That addiction needs to end sometime, and if you collectively cry about prices raising to less than the levels the rest of the world deals with just fine it doesn’t give much hope for the future.
Cheap fuel means cheap transportation, which means cheaper goods and greater purchase power across the entire economy. This is especially the case in countries like the USA where population density is so low. In the EU we can accomplish corresponding purchase power with more expensive fuel prices because of population density (more than 3x more people per km than the US).
I don't think it is at all reasonable for the USA to just give up on cheap fuel because our situation can allow for more expensive fuel.
Consider the american built environment since WW2, gas at 7.50/gal would simply make many people’s daily lives unaffordable, and the most impacted people have the largest clout politically due to the rural bias at every level of our government. We would happily commit climate suicide first.
It would make people buy electric cars, or just trade 20 mpg SUVs for 40 mpg small cars.
If there is a rural bias, the solution would be to subsidize the rural areas to buy their votes. The solution to a problem of the commons, and the distribution of benefits, are separable (Coase Theorem).
> Demand for energy is largely inelastic, so costs are easy to pass on
Demand for energy is inelastic, but demand for O&G in the long term is less so because over time a higher price for O&G will push investment into alternatives.
When these come up, I like to note that we likely also have to think about how to unwind the organizations that will build up around these practices.
Unless every removal op is a vertically integrated loss center in govt or large emitters, there will inevitably be people in the chain whose livelihoods or profits or stockholders benefit from keeping the spigot on (both of money for removal, and of emissions that necessitate it).
This is all assuming invention and improvement don't bootstrap easily scalable straightforwardly profitable removal practices.
Thinking ahead about this means a chance at putting up guardrails before there is an established lobby to push back.
Profitable removal organizations would actually allow certain industries to transition more slowly.
Also, if you can close the money loop you can set up good incentives. If the money spigot is funded by the emitters, the capture orgs are directly incentivized to make capture cheaper to make it more attractive to emit, etc. Key to avoid direct public subsidy of said spigot though.
The US could halve their emissions and still emit at the same level of an industrialized country like France. A good starting point is to invest more in nuclear energy.
Half is still a lot more than zero, which in turn is still not the negative you need to actually reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Carbon capture is the only option to undo the damage that's already been done, and to sustainably continue the activities where CO2 emissions are fundamentally unavoidable.
Logically extrapolated, mass genocide is usually the alternative to technological innovation. Most of us agree one is better than the other — The rest look the other way. (Ex. The Chinese on Uighurs)
Since you've been using HN primarily (exclusively?) for political/ideological battle, we've banned the account. Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
Uh, no? Business as usual scenarios are the default option (tautologically) and will lead to lots of dead bodies in the future. Anything else requires large-scale coordination to change course.
Seems to me that everything becomes much easier if we just get fusion right. Carbon removal would be cheap at that point, correct?
I’d like to see governments band together and offer up a $1 trillion prize for whomever comes up with a scalable fusion power plant, which would then be released to the public domain.
Or just put a ton of solar plants into the US deserts. it's super cheap now, I doubt fusion will ever be cheaper than just collecting whatever sun sends to us. And for carbon removal you don't need a stable electricity source
I don't think fusion is coming soon enough to be part of the plans for Climate Change. People working on fusion reactors have been misleading the public about progress. They have been using a "Q" value (energy in versus energy out) to describe some internal process rather than the entire process. So when they say something like "67% efficiency" they really meant "1% efficiency."
Even building boring old nuclear fission plants is far too slow! We need big changes now, not in 5-10 years, and definitely not in (really optimistically for fusion) 25+ years.
Carbon capture certainly has some appeal, though it seems far from clearly being a net positive yet.
Notably questionable IMO is the sequestration when used to simply pump more oil, so taxes end up subsidizing fuel extraction. Oil giants are some of the biggest DAC investors, along with airlines [1][2].
Wouldn't it be more efficient to remove CO2 from the sea where it has been accumulating as the oceans act as sinks for atmospheric pollutants and ocean acidification is actually more of a problem in the short term?
Been a while since I read up on this, but I think the problem is the energy cost of extracting CO2 from sea water makes it a wash at least in terms of CO2 reduction.
I do worry about the oversight and auditing of such metrics. The article does refer to the problem of "I planted X trees therefore I removed Y carbon", when that is true only under particular conditions.
It's strange from an environmental "culture" standpoint (the treehugger epithet, "save the trees"), but to truly get a good carbon sink out of planted forests you then need to cut them down, bury them, and plant more ones.
Which is basically what happens if we use wood for all our housing and as many consumer products as possible and chuck them in a landfill.
But yes, lies, damn lies, and accounting is definitely a danger to any environmental regulation. It has been for decades, all the industry players know how to game the system:
- no real penalties
- insiders in the regulatory offices
- hide large amounts of pollution from inspectors
- accumulate penalties and lawsuits? Start new corp, transfer assets, declare bankruptcy for the old corporation
- industry-wide penalties? Offload that back to the government (that is, society) with lobbying and rescue funds and other business subsidies
I guess you need to plant X trees, wait Y years for them to accumulate Z carbon and then bury all the trees M meters underground to stay there forever.
A forest will only grow as a carbon sink on the century timescale, which is the window in which we irreversibly enter headlong into the anthropocene or mitigate our global anthopogenic effects. We don't have to plan for burying them.
That's incorrect, if you look into regenerative agriculture you'll see that soil carbon content can be increased from 1 to 8 percent in less than a decade. Carbon sequestration isn't just from biomass above the soil, it also occurs through carbohydrate transfer to microbes and as a result of the increase in microbial biomass in soils.
I've said this repeatedly here: the world won't address climate change even if it's mildly inconvenient to do so, let alone the massive endeavours that have been proposed thus far.
The solution will be economic.
Want to replace fossil fuels with cleaner energy sources? It won't happen until those alternatives are cheaper.
When energy is sufficiently cheap or the byproducts are sufficiently valuable, that's when carbon extraction from the atmosphere will make sense.
I've seen some ideas for this. One is to use renewable energy to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into gasoline. That's actually not that hard. It's just chemistry after all. Alternatives are things like graphene.
There are places in the world where this could make sense. A given area might be remote such that building pipes of delivering such fuel is cost-prohibitive. Likewise, the cost of extending an electric grid might be too high. Or it simply may not be feasible because of politics.
This can negate the disadvantage solar and wind have in being variable power output and/or simply using a hydrocarbon fuel as a means of storing excess energy.
This would technically be carbon neutral not carbon negative but it'd be a start.
I understand your point and I agree (within limits) but that makes it no less true. Side note: total extinction of the human race is incredibly unlikely at this point and certainly not from climate change. That's not to say that huge numbers of us won't die in the process.
> the laws on nature do not owe us a cheaper method of producing energy
Of course not but increasing fossil fuel costs ultimately make other forms of energy production economic.
> The Moneyed classes have never given up anything willingly: the end of monarchy, the end of slavery and even labour laws were won in blood.
I agree but that's really a whole separate topic. The unwillingness of the ultra-wealthy to pay for the society that makes their wealth possible and the legions of people who adamantly oppose the ultra-wealthy just being slightly less ultra-wealthy is a recipe for disaster.
The ultimate form of wealth redistribution is war and revolution.
> The Moneyed classes have never given up anything willingly: the end of monarchy, the end of slavery and even labour laws were won in blood. Its likely to be the same with climate change
This seems to be a very valid observation. However, it's worth noting that with respect to climate change, it's nto about some mystical "0.1%" but rather in this case the "moneyed classes" include the vast majority of the first world citizens, which (as you state) are very unlikely to give up their privilege willingly unless the "global south", who will suffer the worst parts of the climate change first, would win that concession through blood.
However, as a counterpoint, nuclear weapons do act as a reasonably effective veto in conflict escalation.
Ah, but how would certain entities make tons of money with trees? They wouldn't. And that's why we've been hearing about this nonsense for well over a decade now. It's about making money while pretending they're doing something.
As other commenters pointed out, the other trickiest problem (beyond feasibility and energy requirement) of CO2 removal is that it's not clear who would be paying for them, since you want to sequester the CO2 and not use it. So in the end, it will be either a voluntary deal, or paid by the taxpayers as part of the maintenance of the infrastructure that is earth. Do people make money out of road and bridge maintenance ?
At some point, you might argue that planting trees can make you more money if something edible grows on them (or under them)
Trickiest problem? Not clear who's going to pay for all this? The people are going to pay for all of it and then some. That's the entire point of this operation.
As for the second part of your post: are you playing devil's advocate here? Planting trees, sustainable agriculture - that's not great way to generate fantastic profit at everyone's expense. It's not going to happen any time soon. Sorry for being a nihilistic prick but surely you're not that naive.
We need some kind of agrarian Elon Musk to shake things up while making profit.
Who is `The people` here ? The taxpayers ? That's entirely possible, and it would probably be the only scalable way to fund it (treat "the atmosphere" as an infrastructure that we have to maintain without directly benefiting from it.)
What I mean in my second post is that a private investor can put money into a forest, plant the trees, and recoup some of the costs by sell the fruits.
This is a silly image to tell that if you're a private investor (no insult here), and want to sequester CO2, you either "need to have CO2 sequestered as a byproduct of a project that makes money ; or need to have money generated as a byproduct of a project that sequesters CO2."
If you're a public investor (aka "the handler of taxpayer's money"), or a charity (aka "the handler of rich people's spare money"), the deal is not the same.
When we are going to start taxing coal manufactured products (like e.g. Bitcoin) correctly? There should already be a huge tax on, for example, Chinese made steel that imported both iron ore and coal from Australia by ship to be smelted in the mainland...
Until we make capitalism work for climate it will work against it.
It's easier to convince the public that the climate problem is being worked on with this Carbon Removal and Storage. If it turns out not to work that great, it's most likely somebody else's problem 5-10 years from now.
What's the difference between smelting the steel in Australia and shipping it to China, vs shipping the coal to China and smelting the steel on location? I don't think there is any material difference there.
Then both should be equally carbon-taxed when sold in EU/US, that would actually incentivize figuring out how to do these processes in low-carbon way (or, how to lie about the emissions)
The marine fuel used to transport 60%+ more stuff, it increases the carbon cost in a way that’s hugely inefficient. I worked on a project for an unnamed Australian mining company trying to optimise the shipping routes and I just see this sort of thing as profoundly wasteful.
But my point is that you aren't necessarily reducing the amount of fuel used. Either you ship coal, and make steel there, or you keep the coal here and ship the finished steel off. Either way, the metal has to get to China.
Iron ore is about 60% iron and the stats I’m seeing suggest 1 tonne of steel takes about 0.77 tonnes of coal. So you need fewer than half the amount of heavily polluting ships if the steel was made in Australia.
This is a very bad idea. Photosynthesis and sea life suck CO2 out of the atmosphere very fast, which is why CO2 isn't as high as people used to forecast it would be.
Moreover, each glacial period ends with CO2 levels lower than at the end of the preceding one. The last one ended with CO2 levels not too far from starvation for photosynthesis. At the current rate of CO2 depletion we were headed for mass extinctions in just a few more glacial periods. Bringing CO2 up above 400ppm at the end of the current interglacial will extend life on Earth by a lot, possibly millions of years.
In the antArctic the temperatures can get very close to the freezing point of C02. A little bit of extra energy (nuclear or wind?) would be enough to freeze atmospheric C02 into solid blocks. Would there be any easy and inexpensive way to store those blocks long term? Under the ice sheets? Bottom of the ocean? Send it into space on Musk's rockets?
Stitch in time saves nine. It's always better to move to a less polluting lifestyle instead of coming up with a round-about expensive way to capture what was released into the atmosphere.
Trying to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is like capturing fart. Except that it is way more complicated.
Just convert everything to solar, wind, hydro and nuclear, the earth will heal itself. No new taxes, departments, bureaucracies, crooks and additional burdens on the tax payer who will foot the cleanup bill while corporations keep on keeping on.
Are there any public companies actually working on this? The last time I looked it seemed like the answer was “Chevron, kinda”, but that doesn’t seem like the right spirit.
Imagine that tomorrow someone came and said that they have found a technique to remove any arbitrary amount of carbon dioxide for a trivial cost. What do you think that would do to the world? Whoever controls that is the most powerful person in the world because they can literally suffocate all life on the surface.
Carbon capture technology is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Just convert the carbon to biomass. Just plant trees.
I'm not sure if you mean this seriously but even with a miracle technology it's going to be hard to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at dangerous levels without risking serious repercussions to yourself.
But where I live, it would be difficult. Yes, there is a "CO2 tax" here. Twenty years ago I converted my wood-burning fireplace to natural gas. That was being, in my opinion, environmentally friendly (I prefer burning wood -- more pleasant). If the cost of NG goes too high I can revert to wood. Electricity is out, because the local power company prices it at around 7 times higher than natural gas. $800 per month to heat my house. $125 for natural gas. Wood? 3 to 6 cords should do... At 1 cord per acre, I would need 3 to 6 acres. I could buy 40 acres, put up a house, and produce my own biofuel as well. No "price on carbon emissions". If you can convince me that CO2 is an existential threat, that is one thing. I can move to Memphis where I don't need to heat my home. You cannot deny me the right to do that, if you think that CO2 is that threat. Otherwise, you can tax me until I refuse to participate.
Your only argument is that CO2 is good for the plants. It's a bit light and does not really account for the cycle of carbon on the planet. It's like saying, since sun is good for the health, fuck the ozone layer of the atmosphere haha.
So now I am quite weary of visiting "Ice age farmer"'s personal website.
Please get out of your information bubble, it's not too late.
Btw I rather prefer my own conspiracy theory that the most wealthy on the planet are already old, do not care about what happens after they die and don't want to change anything that might affect profits on which rest their privileges. I don't any secret documents to prove it though. Just a feeling.
No, of course it's not my sole argument. I have more than two dozens well researched books full with arguments for and mostly against this bunk science which is underpinning "climate change" and the CO2 lie.
I just don't have the time to argue with internet people over such things, there are enough scientists out there disproving the silly notion CO2 or humans are is to blame for "climate change", a term that has been used since their "global warming" phrase has become a burden. All of their predictions were wrong over the last 100 years and their fear mongering is completely based on falsified data and corporate science.
You don't need any "secret documents" to prove that there is an agenda behind it all, since they are publicly available and pretty easy to access from their sites and all of their wonderful front companies. Just start reading the UN's Agenda 2030 document.
If you actually looked into history then you'll see that much of what has happened from WW1 onwards was an effort by wealthy people, dynasties in finance etc., to build a world of their liking, which gives them top down control via a lot of fronts.
Check out who owns the world economy.
It's BlackRock and Vanguard, the latter owning the former.
Then there are a lot of foundations and NGO/NPOs which have their function of control and wealth funnelling as well, connecting finance, business, politics and the media.
The "climate change" bullshit is for natural resource and social control. The carbon credits are nothing more than a new financial product and their green governance guidelines are for leverage.
Nothing about it is about saving the earth or the environment.
If the aim is to reach "net zero", then the ecosystem will have the same amount of CO2 in year N as in year N-1. That doesn't seem like a drastic situation (except that the level we stop at will already be well outside the recent historic average).
After reaching a steady state, we can then consider how much we want to continue scaling up the CO2 removal process, and for how long we want to run it at "net negative" levels. Whatever rate we choose should cause fewer violent disasters than the process of extracting and emitting the carbon did in the first place.
Qualitative proposals to control atmospheric CO2 concentrations by spreading crushed olivine rock along the Earth's coastlines, thereby accelerating weathering reactions, are presently attracting considerable attention. This paper provides a critical evaluation of the concept, demonstrating quantitatively whether or not it can contribute significantly to CO2 sequestration. The feasibility of the concept depends on the rate of olivine dissolution, the sequestration capacity of the dominant reaction, and its CO2 footprint. Kinetics calculations show that offsetting 30% of worldwide 1990 CO2 emissions by beach weathering means distributing of 5.0 Gt of olivine per year. For mean seawater temperatures of 15–25 °C, olivine sand (300 μm grain size) takes 700–2100 years to reach the necessary steady state sequestration rate and is therefore of little practical value. To obtain useful, steady state CO2 uptake rates within 15–20 years requires grain sizes <10 μm. However, the preparation and movement of the required material poses major economic, infrastructural and public health questions. We conclude that coastal spreading of olivine is not a viable method of CO2 sequestration on the scale needed. The method certainly cannot replace CCS technologies as a means of controlling atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
So I'm thinking this is probably a good foundation to start from. How long before someone can convince the US, much less China to olivine their fields?
This is not a fake problem. It's a series of problems, but I concede that olivine is a good way to go.
So I'm thinking this is probably a good foundation to start from.
How long before someone can convince the US, much less China to olivine their fields?
This is not a fake problem. It's a series of problems. I have edited a previous post in the thread to concede the technical effectiveness of this solution.
At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero.
Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary 5% pay cut, but that figure (if it's correct) does make it harder to argue that "we can't afford" to do anything about CO2 levels, or that tackling climate change requires us all to stop flying or heating our homes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product