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Comment by Tade0 | Hacker News Reader

There's one significant thing they're achieving here: putting a price on CO2 in the atmosphere.

Some of the resistance to action on climate change comes from the notion that the cost is unknown, which in turn stems from the fact, that to date there was no scalable way to undo the emissions.

Now that a way has been demonstrated emitters can choose whether they want to reduce their emissions or undo them(assuming the right legislation forcing them to do so is in place). I believe most will go with the former option until it stops being economical.

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> There's one significant thing they're achieving here: putting a price on CO2 in the atmosphere.

Just for fun: Humans have added ~1 trillion tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere over 200 years, taking atmospheric CO2 from 275 to 407 ppm by volume. Ongoing emissions are around 36 billion tonnes (2015).

Climeworks apparently costs $600/tonne of CO2[1], with 10 year goal of $100/tonne (although skeptics estimate it really costs closer to $1,000, but I see no reason to believe them either). So the total cost would be $100 trillion to $1 quadrillion dollars to reverse climate change (this would be about a 50% overestimate since ~30% of emissions are anti-greenhouse aerosols), and the ongoing cost would be $3.6 trillion to $36 trillion. Over 80 years that would come to $4.85-$48.5 trillion annually, while the nominal GDP is currently just under $80 trillion. So 6% to 62% of annual GDP.

The total cost to transition the entire world to solar power including all heat, industrial and burning oil would be <$40 trillion, for reference. NB that's a very high level estimate with error ~= 50%

[1]: https://www.carbonbrief.org/swiss-company-hoping-capture-1-g...

That's a great back-of-the-envelope calculation. Main takeaway is that it is probably solveable, but only by government-scale efforts (philanthropy can't cover it).

The real problem is that it costs a lot and captialism shows no quarterly gains for preserving humanity. The best bet would be to have an international contribution agreement that ties something like defense spending to CO2 reduction. Fat chance of that happening, but it could really improve two situations at once.

> Main takeaway is that it is probably solveable, but only by government-scale efforts (philanthropy can't cover it).

Well... Technically possible, yeah. One of the more expensive projects the US has ever done is the Apollo project, which was a bit over $20 billion annually in todays money, or .1% of GDP. Even building the nuclear arsenal was only $100 billion annually. So as a country the best we've managed is .5% of GDP, against the much more politically actionable threat of the USSR. A 1-2 order of magnitude increase over that is pretty unlikely.

Hell, global defense spending in 2016 was only 1.6 trillion.

The cost of undoing the emissions only sets the price on CO2 emissions if that cost is lower than the cost of enduring the damage associated with not undoing them.

The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large. But unless we're starting from some kind of reasonable estimate of the cost of the damage, however approximate, it can't be right to say that these guys are setting the price on atmospheric CO2.

> The cost of enduring those damages may be (and probably is) immeasurably large.

This is what I'm getting at. There's resistance because we're not giving any specific numbers, only saying that they're "probably very high". This is far from a convincing argument.

With this technology we can instead say: "Ok, so clearing a tonne of CO2 emissions from the atmosphere is going to cost $X. These are going to be your additional expenses in the foreseeable future."

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The idea is to price CO2 emissions by the cost of CO2 scrubbing. Then a law would be set in place requiring measurement of CO2 emissions - CO2 scrubbed, which is then multiplied by industry median cost of scrubbing, which would be then taxed.

> The cost of undoing the emissions only sets the price on CO2 emissions if that cost is lower than the cost of enduring the damage associated with not undoing them.

That's correct. that's why parent poster said "assuming the right legislation forcing them to do so is in place". The cost of enduring the damage would be fines and/or jail time.

Yes! Pricing is a key step to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. An invitation for entrepreneurs hop on board. How much does a ton of carbon dioxide sell for? Can I pull it out cheaper?

Reducing emissions is necessary but not sufficient. Even if fossil fuel emissions stopped 100% tomorrow, we would still have an issue: 403 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

We must develop tech to remove carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. The ideal outputs are economically-priced carbon-products without subsidy.

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