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.
Anyone with the right equipment can just do it, without asking permission, just like CO₂ emitters can.