We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech
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Remove co2 out of the sky is also a good thing. The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth because then the oceans will act as a Co2 buffer sink. Think like carbon beverage, when you cool cans during production for putting carbon in them you cool them. If you heat a can they release stored co2. The same process with the oceans but at a much bigger scale.
People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make.
We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.
That's what happened pre 50s. My mother still uses the sewing machine my grandma was using and it was made in my country, not in buttfuck nowhere SE asia.
As it turns out making long lasting products isn't the most profitable thing so we shifted to producing to the least reliable standards people would still accept
I myself don't see any value to furniture of better quality than IKEA, since my kids won't want it, and I don't gain any utility of getting something of higher quality.
There's also probably some confluence with people's buying power stagnating forcing them to buy cheaper goods.
Correct taxation of negative externalities would work towards this.
I (like everyone else in my neighborhood) have super cheap, barely servicable tools in my shed that I have used once or twice. There's no way that's a reasonable allocation of resources in comparison to neighbor sharing, renting high quality tools or hiring a pro who owns such, but price and convenience heavily push me towards owning disposable crap, and I have to consciously fight it.
I'd prefer laws that producers are on the hook for enabling safe disposal.
This would cover the plastic junk issue, because most of those things cannot be recycled. Some can be "downcycled" (recycled into something less valuable), but that's still not great.
The problem with your proposal is that lots of products (like batteries) can be safely disposed, but a consumer could do something malicious, like throwing them into a river. A manufacturer should be responsible for producing products that are easy to use safely, not for the actual safe use.
We see the same thing in other industries: auto makers have to include seatbelts, but they can't be sued if someone chooses not to use one.
It's really telling that the only market the wealthy class needs to care about has incredibly tight regulation on how you describe the 'product' (Accounting standards, auditing, what the CEO tweets...).
Meanwhile the markets every day consumers & workers lives are ruled by are wall to wall lies and deception.
Our current low-regulation markets are basically designed to innovate in manipulating voters, consumers and workers. Where our most profitable industries main focus is buying off their regulators, competitors and focusing on creating moats and monopolies.
In my view a good first step would be to bring in tight regulation on political spending & lobbying. Followed by regulating advertising with a view to nationalized product discovery. Basically if even Amazon can't stop fake reviews we should make it a publicly funded good. Let every company freely list their products and (as with listed companies accounting regulation) any product produced by a big company should have stats which are directly comparable to their competitors products & legally binding. We could also require companies to list the CAD files for replacement parts they no longer make.
Could you elaborate on this bit please? Do we regulate away all but one way to differentiate a product? How do we decide which one?
Then people are wrong. Almost no economy is purely one of the other - even the most "free market" economies have lots of government regulation, government spending makes up huge parts of their economy, etc.
> We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.
Totally doable in a completely free market way. You tax externalities.
This is basic stuff - economists generally agree that if you set up a carbon tax, people will use less carbon.
If you think America has "free markets" you haven't been watching the steady march of monopolies and cartels in virtually all sectors.
Corporations own the political process in America to avoid these well past the point of usefulness to reducing emissions/concentrations.
The toothless and ineffective Paris accords show this is roughly the same for even "progressive" economies like Europe.
The privileged will risk complete destruction over the surrender of advantage. That cute quote is frightening accurate when applied to modern partisan republican politics, think tanks, and especially the billionaire donor class, and has been for 40-50 years now with respect to environmental policy.
The only hope right now is the near-miraculous development of solar/wind/EV tech that can challenge and hopefully fundamentally undercut the viability of fossil fuels.
The article's suggestion for mass investment in sequestration technologies is warranted.
But if externality taxing was actually something politically doable as opposed to some policy dream by an economist, then we would have had a carbon tax on gasoline two decades ago, which any look at the cost of sequestration of carbon generally leads to a 3-10$/gallon tax.
And we are probably a decade from it now.
I do agree that it is basic stuff from an economic theory, which is tragically hilarious given the fundamental arrogance of Republican policy towards progressive reforms such as carbon taxation always invokes laissez faire principles.
The fact that basically applicable economic theory is politically untenable means that the people in economics as discipline have utterly failed humanity, sitting on their hands as this happened for some, or actively contributing to its exacerbation from the free market/laissez faire/libertarian wing of the University of Chicago.
Any country attempting to combat climate change using economic means would absolutely have to use "green tariffs" I think, otherwise businesses would simply export their emissions to the developing world on an even greater scale than they do today.
I think it’s at least partly driven by people’s desire to status signal, if not their desire to consume anyway to occupy their time.
Sadly there are no reasonable alternatives. We're funnelled into this mindset/system.
The limitless consumerism isn't as bad if all the products were created with power from green alternatives.
If we had some other levers to cool down the earth, the CO2 in the atmosphere would not be such a big problem.
This won't change much. Nobody will work on Pentium II, drive a gas guzzler or get a low resolution MRI. It's hard to regulate such stuff. You can only improve it a bit e.g. mandatory 3-year warranty with an option to extend it to 6 years. While buying the consumer would see the price for each warranty length.
My 2013 MacBook Pro retina started having weird, annoying keyboard issues. I could spend 600$ to get it repaired or 1000$ to get a newer, refurbished macbook. However I'm finding a hand me down 2009 MacBook is working just fine after putting an ssd in it.
For office and graphical work, it's obviously beyond merely capable. 200+ tabs in Firefox, no problem.
People's scarcity mindset makes them think burning less fossil fuels and consuming less stuff will lower their quality of life. On the contrary, most Americans could reduce their consumption by 80% off pure life improvements.
People convolve reducing consumption with returning to the stone age, which is a false dichotomy. It's more like exiting a mindset that stuff means happy to where it means people trying to create craving.
I speak from experience of reducing my consumption by about 90%, leading many others to start reducing through my leadership executive training and podcast. Before they act, they're full of facts and figures arguing why not to act. After they act, they wish they had earlier. The key is to activate their intrinsic motivation, not to tell them what to do. Then what they do feels meaningful.
People don't want to do small things, they want to do meaningful things.
Here's a link to the site:
This sounds great, how do I do it?
My podcast shares me walking through many people to start their challenge http://joshuaspodek.com/podcast.
Do they give you enough to start with?
You mean to say you used to "consume" 10x what you do now? I'm skeptical that's even possible for someone living in the first world. Just food, clothing, and housing is too much consumption to make that figure reasonable.
My TEDx talks cover some of the major changes http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your-del.... The important part was shedding the myths erroneously justifying flying or packaged food. Then practicing and finding the joy, community, and connection that life is about when you avoid polluting behavior.
Stopping buying stuff is hard for most people, and I think the key is to stop _wanting_ stuff. Sadly I think consumption-driven society is incredibly deeply ingrained. I mean, most people seem to devote large proportions of their life pursuing unnecessary luxury goods. This is the mindset that needs to change - and particularly be reversed as we bring up the next generation. A fundamental shift is needed in what people are 'pursuing'.
[0] https://robinlinacre.com/energy-usage [1] https://observablehq.com/@robinl/energy-usage-and-goods-impo...
I do try to argue that we should reduce our consumption and buy much fewer, but much higher quality items, which we repair and maintain for a long time, instead of throwing them out and buying a completely new thing.
But I am constantly met with arguments that "no consumption means no growth, and no growth means no life and no progress" and similar arguments. These people have really entrenched themselves in consuming more and more all the time.
A couple podcast guests are prominent in zero waste and minimalism, so you might enjoy their episodes and books: Bea Johnson http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/bea-johnson and Joshua Becker http://joshuaspodek.com/guests/joshua-becker.
The biggest resource in my experience is to start however you can. People get hung up on toothbrushes while still ordering take-out while their fridges are full, which uses far more plastic than a toothbrush.
The more you do it, the easier it gets and the more horrible the old ways become.
The atmospheric CO₂ rates come from burning too much fossil fuel. Not from people wanting things. If you consume and produce things in a way that doesn't release net CO₂, that is perfectly fine from a climate perspective, even if the products are meaningless artefacts of a materialistic life that will never make you happy.
I understand the impulse toward a simpler, less materialistic life. If you like that, argue for it on its own merits.
> The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth
That... is not an action you can take. We don't have that lever. It's a goal of the whole climate change issue. So this is saying that to lower temperatures, we need to lower temperatures.
As far as I understand we have a red button that will induce a nuclear winter
There needs to be a discussion about economic incentives. It's not people wanting things that is the problem. It's that it's easier and more profitable to produce short-lived crappy things that can be sold for cheap, because the environmental impact of the waste it generates (both CO2 and the actual crappy product itself) is not sufficiently factored into the price.
I would not be surprised if, in our current economic system, simply having more green energy available (or products produced without emitting CO2) is not going to solve anything. With almost 8 billion people on earth, we'll find ways to increase consumption and burn it.
So far global output of wealth and well-being is directly tied to emissions and consumption of fossil fuels. We have a 110-year long precedent for that. You could even argue it started with the Industrial Revolution, so the period is longer.
France is probably the only example of a country that came close enough to decoupling economic prosperity from CO2 production through Nuclear energy, but even they produce 5GT of CO2 per person.
It also isn't particularly evident that Nuclear is reproducible worldwide - it is very expensive, and Uranium is also a finite resource if you were to multiply its use by a factor of 10x/20x, etc. Remember, France is less than 1% of the world's population.
So decoupling prosperity from emissions is pretty much the panacea everyone wants. But it's unrealistic to hope for it and expect it to come in on our timeline. Kind of like fusion.
5 GT (5 000 000 T) is unfathomably large. They produce about 5T = 5000 kg CO₂ / person / year, which is 5 · 12 / (12+2·16) = 1.4 ton of carbon / coal or 1.7 m³ = 1700 l of diesel.
Going by Wikipedia 2017 list[1], they are about 5% above average per-capita CO₂ emissions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
I'd say that's a pretty good track record for creating prosperity.
And yes, thank you for the correction, GT was the wrong unit.
Please don't forget to qualify you mean economic prosperity. It's a wholly different matter than happiness, health etc. The correlation is positive (I guess) but far from 100%.
French track record is not bad, but I would still hesitate to call it good. Going by [1], they haven't notably decreased their emissions since 2011, they are worse than Sweden and Switzerland, and if poorer countries follow, it's still the kind of emissions that take us into wild climate territory with mass migrations, unrest and I would hope not war.
Good for some inspiration, better than my country, but far from enough.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...
The idea is “conscientious” people will buy second hand items so that fewer resources are used, net.
But it’s wholly beside the point. They could make durable stylish (maybe not fashionable) clothing that cradle to grave would be less impactful to the enviro than this recycling PR nonsense.
way too much car use
oh and absurd heating too, I saw black water buckets in the caribeans. Every high sun rate place should use that and never have an electric heated tank ever again
It still needs work, and I'm hoping to find a way to approximate the CO2 impact of their purchases.
Chrome: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/curb-your-consumer...
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/curb-your-con...
More info: https://www.curbyourconsumerism.app/#faq
Eventually everyone will have huge bank accounts, but live simple lives?
(Although more likely the economic contraction from wasting less stuff will cause incomes to go down!)
(I'm not your target audience because I struggle to buy stuff even when its cheap and I'm flush with money hah)
Going from Incandescents to LEDs and similiar caused the energy usage to go down in spite of increased always on electronic device usage. Replacing a hummer with a Prius or Yaris wins out quickly.
For more, see how Hans Rosling covered the idea in his 2011 "Magic Washing Machine" presentation.
a) adding even a little bit more greatly affects the CO2 levels b) with a global ppm of ~400, it basically means that you need to filter 2500 molecules of air to get a single molecule of CO2, and that's assuming perfect binding and effectiveness. There is no magic powder we can mix that'll cause CO2 to precipitate out of the atmosphere and fall to the ground like snow; it's a grueling energy intensive process to filter that out of the air around us.
Sweden's tax covers 40% of emissions from that country. Finland covers 36%. Switzerland covers 33%.
British Columbia's tax is lower, but it covers 70% of carbon emissions - a very broad-based tax. It will be USD $38 in 2021.
Personally, I think it's better for governments to focus on total coverage rather than the price. The more broad-based the tax is, the more efficient it is in shaping the economic development of the region. You don't want carbon "leaking" into sectors where it's cheap to pollute - that's inefficient. Far better to have all sectors equally incentivized to decarbonize.
Why not to cool down air so that CO2 would fall off? Cooled air can be used for pre-cooling incoming "dirty" air stream?
You would use cooled separated products to pre-cool incoming stream of "dirty" air. CO2, having low concentration, won't fall off at -79C (or we'd have that effect in Antarctica today), but if you go to ~-140C, you'll have some results.
Why cooling process will produce greenhouse gas? You'd use energy from "green" sources to compensate for required expenses.
This isn’t something you can just assert as if by magic.
By using this kind of technology, you increase the total power requirements of our civilization. That power has to come from somewhere. If you earmark green energy sources for it, something else will need to use a dirty energy source.
This remains true as long as green energy production falls short of planetary demand (modulo carbon taxes/credits/caps which change the math here a bit depending on specifics). The leftover slack will be met by burning fossil fuels.
You have to build these cleaning devices, and you'll need to build energy sources for them. We do have both power and increase in power supply with time; the question is specific numbers, which I'm trying to estimate.
Every kWh of clean energy produced is far more effective at addressing climate change when it replaces a kWh generated by fossil fuel than it is trying to remove the carbon from that fossil fuel after the fact.
True. However, here are two significant, in my opinion, notes.
1) We already have a lot of CO2 in the air. We'd better get it out, and sooner.
2) We're proving every day our limited abilities in organizing focused efforts in fighting climate crisis, particularly by a single specific way. So, if we could reduce organizational problems by choosing a solution which has less of them, we could win in practice.
It's rather obvious that it's better not to get CO2 into the air in the first place. Looks like we can't avoid doing that now. So other options become interesting.
For a fun take on some of this see https://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/06/13/results-lab-experimen...
The chart in the article by the link suggests -140C would work for pressure of 0,0004 atm.
How did you get that number - >10% ?
I made some slightly more detailed posts elsewhere but this article addresses your point directly. Essentially, this is not a viable method for removing CO2 from the sky, because there's so little CO2 in the sky that it changes all the basic physics assumptions.
This is actually relatively basic undergraduate level napkin math from a chemical engineering perspective, but outside of that discipline most people understandably don't have experience with estimating physical states of mixed gases.
Why are people surprised that if something is free (pumping CO2 into air) demand for it is high?
You are telling me that doing a charge of let's say $10 - $100/ton of CO2 wouldn't have a DRAMATIC impact on emissions? Is $10 - $100/ton too little for a supposed climate emergency?
There is so much funding and lawmaking and finger pointing and shaming - but still - dumping CO2 into the atmosphere if free and dumping remains high and people pretend to be surprised.
On energy: CA curtails (turns off) solar (and wind) power because there is not enough demand. In 2019 CA had 921,000 MWhs of curtailment.
Let's start by charging something for CO2 emissions.
The tax that applies to every single business, every single product, every single process, everything. The one that causes every single vested interest to come out of the woodwork and join together to make it politically toxic.
We tried this in Australia. It has killed every government that even dared to discuss it. And politically it is utterly impossible to defend e.g. "Carbon tax that raises power prices for pensioners".
IMHO, the first step is to migrate coal power plants to capture and storage. It is much easier to drop emissions than to pull from the air. I would like to see more tax pressure globally incentivizing carbon release reductions. Instead you get weird stuff like Japan's carbon tax where coal pays the lowest carbon tax of gasoline and diesel.
Our carbon tax worked at reducing emissions, and at being low economic impact. It was removed because we are a corrupt banana republic, not because it's unworkable.
"The Largest Public Statement of Economists in History": https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/
For a while. But if the carbon tax works and society switches to clean energy, then there is no more emissions and no more dividends pay to the citizens.
Moreover, I think the same model can apply to other negative externalities (aka, Pigovian Tax [0]). But to the extent that the public will someday complain that their carbon dividend is going down: (a) I call that a good problem to have, and (b) because the collective action problem now points the other direction, there's no individual incentive to over-consume such that the dividend goes up again.
Two birds, one stone.
Opponents of carbon tax and similar measures need to decide which they like less... some lost profits, an escalating carbon tax, and reshuffling their investment portfolios -- or food riots, mass migration, the massive resurgence of left wing populism, and even civil war, once the effects of climate change become intense and obvious to the populace.
Not to mention the water supply of Calgary and many other western Canadian cities is glacier fed, and the Bow Glacier that provides to Calgary may not be able to meet demand within the next 30 years... a problem that will only get worse with climate change.
Yes, the great lakes region looks better than most. And it will look desirable to a lot of displaced people...
We need to think past that point: how will the world look like once civilization has collapsed? What will still exist? What will not?
Then pull it out of political discussion! We don't have political discussion about "how to hang people of color Q better" anywhere in the world (mostly) anymore because we've wrote it in the text of our f laws that violence and racial discrimination are forbidden! Not on the political menu anymore.
Same needs to happen with lots of stuff concerning climate, ecology, sustainability etc. - we need to restrict the political menu to only the right choices.
And use the states' monopoly on violence to enforce these choices.
Yeah, sure, you can philosophise in the most general terms but that's not how you get people and companies stop doing wrong things. You get them when the people/entities who want to re-bring the despicable things back into discussion can be fined / closed / put-in-prison etc.
I don't argue for eco-fascism. But with some things we need to be ruthless, especially in order to be able to carry on our peaceful, understanding and democratic discussions concerning all the other things!
https://www.world-nuclear.org/information-library/current-an...
The most direct approach would be to levy the tax at the time buried carbon is taken out of its geological grave, but good luck enforcing that globally. The most realistic approach (still a total sci-fi fantasy, with plenty of room for a dystopian touch) would be a fundamental removal of resource extraction sovereignty, implemented through a combination of military force and buying out whoever is currently in charge of representing that sovereignty.
> Briefly: there are plant-based, mineral-based, and chemical options.
Where are cryocooling-based options?
Aren't there plenty of places where energy is so plentiful that you don't need to care that much?
You carefully compress incoming air. Separate water vapors (and liquids, and hopefully not solids) from it. Cool this air in thermal exchanger - at this point CO2 falls off. Then you pass that air through turbo detander, which returns you some energy, and get a pre-liquified air, which pass to the thermal exchanger. Clean air of normal temperature is released to atmosphere.
You have to compress the air - but you also cool air, so compression is easier, and you also get some energy from the turbine where you decrease the pressure. Subject to optimizations. How much energy will you need?
A lot.
Air compression is not cheap, energetically. Chilling is also energetically expensive. You'll need to do both. This would be pretty much the "brute force" method, like O(n!) in software engineering. The concept would be to bring half the planet's atmosphere down to near its liquid temperature. Currently in most US homes, Air Conditioning (air cooling) contributes the majority of each home's energy use. This would be much greater than that, it requires chilling air to -140 °C to get CO2 to "drop out".
In contrast, seeding the ocean with iron would be fairly close to O(1). However, potential side effects of this process concern some scientists greatly. Googling 'Russ George' may provide more insight.
Side note: The press material for sesinnovation also says the outlet stream is nearly 100% nitrogen...that means they're using a stream which already has oxygen removed from it (likely because the air was just used for combusting fuels). Air is roughly 21% oxygen so you can't take air, only remove CO2, and get 100% nitrogen out. Generally these "Carbon Capture" technologies only work on feed streams with high CO2. So hey're placed at industrial outlets, where fuel/coal is being burned. These streams can be > 10% CO2. Often they don't work as well, or at all, on diffuse streams like 0.04% atmospheric CO2. The technical reasons why this is the case deal with "partial pressures" as well as general entropy.
Not exactly.
The idea is that you don't just compress air - and let the heated compressed air cool to the atmosphere in order to then expand it so it would cool some more, and then just release whatever's left back to the atmosphere. No, you use those leftovers to cool the incoming air - so you need to compress air spending less energy - and you also get the expanding air to help you to compress incoming air.
The principal point where you have non-reversibility is that extra cooling - making compressed cold air to do the work - which you need to reach necessary temperature. And you only need that temperature to separate gases; after that you can use the cold products to help with compression.
So - without colorful metaphors - I'd like to figure out how much energy will you need.
I see the approach of SES with flue gases. I'm not sure how it will look like with regular air.
GREAT work.
Two (small) comments: - Perhaps the review of the re-forestation option could mention that this has a number of positive side effects (outside of carbon capture), for example on rainfall and wildlife.
- as there is a time constraint on co2 capture (e.g. 2050), and as the various co2 capture solutions are not all at the same stage of maturity, it could be useful to have a table/chart that summarizes which co2 capture options are deployable now vs. at some stage in the future
Forests are not the only option. Imagine large installations with tanks of algae under a white canopy. I imagine the economies of scale are huge once this is ramped up to industrial levels.
The question is who will pay for it. Nobody wants to indirectly subsidize coal plants on another contintent.
Large scale solutions that help mitigate the existing CO2 are going to require some significant capital and operational expenditure.
The cheapest large scale solution actually requires less money, and more legal / willpower. But I’d argue it’s also harder to measure concrete impact and “monetise” oceanic surface iron enrichment. It’s harder to convince people to pay for estimated results even ones based on measurement and science, than results containing physical outputs, like actual solid/liquid/gaseous CO2.
Nope. Tree sequestration is extremely effective on a global scale. That's why it's so important that we prevent deforestation.
"Intact forests and those re-growing after disturbance (like harvesting or windthrow) sequestered around 4 billion tonnes of carbon per year over the measurement period — equivalent to almost 60% of emissions from fossil fuel burning and cement production combined."
http://theconversation.com/explainer-how-much-carbon-can-the...
In summary: its not as bad as I thought when I wrote the previous reply, sure. But it is still far from feasible.
I looked this up and seems it's the opposite. I'd politely suggest you check your assumptions are correct.
https://www.quora.com/Is-there-less-carbon-dioxide-at-higher...
https://667-per-cm.net/2015/08/04/atmospheric-concentration-...
There's a reason energy based on organic matter has gotten a bad reputation. It's just not a very efficient way of getting energy from the sun compared to e.g. solar.
The calculation for carbon storage will be a bit different, but not by that much.
Now look at the gigatons of coal we already dug out of the soil and burnt. That's a lot of forests you need to plant, cut down, and turn into charcoal. It might be doable, but it certainly won't be cheap or easy.
History will not look kindly on this epoch.
For a prospectus of what could happen, I point to the large-scale devastation of (ancient) civilization attributed to the Sea Peoples (https://www.history.com/news/who-were-the-sea-peoples). They're believed to have toppled the Hittite Empire and severely weakened the Egyptian one. "some historians believe they had been displaced from their homeland by famine or natural disasters." -- the parallels to the anticipated effects of climate change should be clear.
Large-scale political unrest, very possibly including a WW3, is something I feel justified in considering "an existential crisis." Your mileage may vary.
Do you have a reference to that prediction of it probably killing 100's of millions of people? On it's own, it doesn't really mean much because what time scale and what's the no-climate-change number to compare to?
Here's the thing about CCS: direct air capture is like a junior engineer's naive, brute-force solution because it's way too expensive and not scalable for the several teratons that need to be sequestered.
Bio CCS remediation approaches are superior because they use biology to do more of the work for less resources. Kelp, phytoplankton (including ferrous seeding) and other ocean-based CC are the natural solutions to lock-up carbon. There's a massive kelp forest right now off the Yucatan in Mexico stretching nearly to Africa. Harvesting, expanding and fertilizing such an ecosystem with an army of specialized ships seems like a better plan for tackling it. Such a plan would still require assuring the Sequestration in CCS such that biomass sinks to deep ocean trenches OR harvesting, compacting and pumping underground. If we can manage and offset GHGs down to a sane level at some point in the future, then it should be an immutable prime-directive that GHGs cannot be emitted without first purchasing or accomplishing an equivalent assured CCS.
PS: As luck would have it, I happen to subscribe to several climatology and related academics on various video platforms, including Paul Beckwith, who does a good job of summarizing the latest research and underscoring events and trends. EDIT: https://paulbeckwith.net
In terms of geoengineering, it seems like these two are our best bets:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio... to prevent runaway warming. As a side effect, the dispersed sunlight helps plant growth. Solar power generation is negatively impacted though.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization to sequester CO2. As a side effect, marine life and fish stocks would be boosted by the greater plankton food supply.
In any case it seems absolutely bonkers that we are still selling fossil-fueled-vehicles and building coal power plants when we clearly have the technology and capability to replace both of them.
I'd personally recommend buying a CO2 monitor: https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32887534678.html?spm=a2g0o.p...
In contrast going fully carbon neutral would cost the economy at least 100 times that amount. And even then it would still result in some amount of warming between 1.5-3 C. Plus require multilateral commitment from nearly every country.
To me the calculus seems to strongly favor forgetting about carbon mitigation completely. Instead just focusing on immediately starting aerosol injections. The tech already exists and is ready to be deployed. Starting sooner will give us time to get better at using it, and discover any potential pitfalls.
Then in 100 or 200 years, we can switch over to more advanced geoengineering that fully and permanently scrubs carbon out of the atmosphere. Aerosol injection would act as a stopgap measure until the carbon-scrubbing is cost-effective.
[1] https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aae98d
I don't think it's a good idea to wait for such undeveloped technology to mature, because the clock is already ticking. It is still much more important to reduce emissions now.
What would be much better, for example, is developing smaller cars. I would rather see society organize for a voluntary reduction of co2, because capturing co2 seems like scientifically too fastidious.
Also, I'm european and I tend to be very pessimistic when looking at US co2 emissions per capita.
"there are two general approaches to keep warming to below a certain level:
- Reducing emissions
- Removing previous emissions from the sky
If you remember one thing from this piece, it should be that we need to do both.
Gone are the days where optimistic emissions reductions kept us below a 2-degree warming target."I don't like those sorts of techs because people will brandish them as a solution, while it's highly unlikely they will help at all.
The article seems to ignore scientific research from the field that actually started decades ago, so it's difficult to take that very seriously. To me most of these methods look more like emergency measures when sh* literally hits the fan...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reflective_surfaces_(climate_e...
https://www.fastcompany.com/90368127/is-it-possible-to-raise...
I do have one other question: is there any chance you'll partner with a Canadian charity, or other ex-US charities for that matter, to accept tax-free donations from other countries?
I'm sure Halliburton-like companies have a 3 step plan to be right at the front of the money firehose when governments are forced to reduce CO2 or face even bigger costs (both financially and politically) in the coming decades.
"The state will handle this" is not only a legitimate structure in totalitarian dictatorships, it's used across the developed western world for most public services.
"Carbon Removal 101": http://bit.ly/carbonremoval-101 (I helped write this one)
Covers a reading list, accelerators, conveners, platforms, newsletters, and funders.
Index of startups working on negative emissions: http://www.airminers.org
1. Plant trees
2. Cut down trees
3. Sink trees to the bottom of a great lakeHowever the problem is that at least for the near future burning oil, making plastic, and similar other carbon intensive processes make it near impossible to plant enough trees.
Carbon taxes, solar, wind, energy storage, and nuclear offer at least the possibility of offsetting carbon generation.... then plant and sink trees.
I do wonder how hard it would be to make a widget that with sunlight could make pure carbon bricks that would be useful as a building material. I think Cory Doctorow described it in one of his sci-fi books. Ideally self replicating of course.
[1] http://urbanforestrynetwork.org/benefits/air%20quality.htm [2] https://cosmosmagazine.com/climate/trees-and-plants-reached-...
For an intuitive understanding, consider: Our surplus of CO2 comes (mostly) from burning fossil fuel that took millions of years for the original plant life to accumulate.
So slowly, very slowly leaves fall/get eaten by bugs, break down, and get absorbed by new trees. But there is a net gain, just a very slow one. Then things like continents collide, mountain ranges come and go, and significant biomass gets buried and under pressure and time turns into oil/gas.
So for scale we could cut down all trees and bury it and take 638 gigatonnes out of our ecosystem. Not sure of the average tree age, but assuming it was replanted we could likely repeat that every 20-30 years.
The annual oil consumption looks to be around 36 billion barrels. Each weighs around 300 pounds. If my conversion is right that's about 4.9 Gigatonne.
So burying all trees every 30 years would be about 21.2 gigatonne a year or enough to offset all oil consumption AND decrease our current levels to pre-industrial levels.
Or we could just use less oil.
We could certainly _burn_ all of them every 30 years, but that wouldn't help. The figure you need is the marginal capture after the emissions from the process.
Wikipedia says our current emissions from fossil fules and cement production is estimated at 10GtC (not absurd compared to your numbers, since you count only crude oil).
So restating, if somehow without adding any new carbon buried _all_ the vegetation on earth every 30 years, we'd remove 21 GtC per year or a net reduction of 11. To get back to pre-industrial levels it would still take 34 years even ignoring the >1000 GtC currently in the ocean surface that would come out of solution and fight the reduction. (I have no idea how to setup the diff eqs for solving for the ocean contributions...)
The fact that an emission free removal and replacement of all vegetation of earth would still take a long time is basically my point around "planting trees" not being a sufficient plan. :)
Not that planting trees is bad, but solving this is going to take some mixture of reduction and magic (presumably both the political and technological kind).
Certainly it wouldn't likely be 100% every 30 years, but 3.3% every year. As far as geo-engineering significant climate change this looks like one of the easier approaches actually.
Of course it's much more feasible with the continued migration towards solar, wind, hydro, and related.
Sadly I think Nuclear got the short end of the stick for mostly political reasons. Things like putting a nuke plant in a known tsunami zone, without protection, because of political lobbying.
So all in all, agreed.
This is a little bit how these lobbies have been pushing changing personal habits "turn of the water while brushing your teeth, don't use plastic straws". Or also CO2 compensation (or absolution as I call it).
Not to say that we shouldn't invest in sequestration, but just need to be careful with the phrasing. This article does a good job, saying BOTH need to happen (reduction of emission and sequestration).
In 10 years, you would have 12000 trees and removed 4283 tons of C02 instead of 120.
Trees are not really the best carbon removal tool that one could hope for, but at least they're a decent comparison.
PS: Very approximate carbon removal per tree per year rate of 5.9kg. Bigger trees can remove more carbon (>22kg for a 10yo tree) and the tree species also have a role to play, but you get the point, climeworks effectiveness is extremely small and you're lighting piles of cash on fire.
By comparison, climeworks would have removed 120 tons of CO2.
Stop pending the argument that "it's politically impossible / toxic / whatever / unenforceable etc.", that's a dumb argument.
Just take politics out of the equation! Or more precisely, take "democratic choice" out of this particular policy decision!
If countries amend their constitutions to disallow any party or individual not in support of this to even be part of any election, then this particular aspect would simply not appear in political campaigns. Have "dark room" deals in most countries of the world put this into place and move on.
And once the major international players are on board, for any country not playing the same game, just kindly point the missiles at them!
In the end, most national governments would approve of such taxation because they'll have the opportunity to formulate it in their own terms and slightly increase national budgets (maybe investing a bit more in the military and gaining an advantage over their neighbors that don't do it... ugly but any incentive in the right direction helps). And multinational corporations would also not mind it much if it's done across the board, without favoring anyone... and actually corporations could be "hired to enforce the tax" in more advanced schemas, offering opportunities to profit while punishing misbehaving countries.
This is such a scary sentence! The problem of climate change has been cause precisely by a lack of democracy. The military, the large oil refiners, the design of our infrastructure has been deeply affected by corporate priorities at the expense of a manipulated populace. We have climate denial in the US in large part because of corporate propaganda (and the fact that if people's oil sector jobs disappear there's no organized democratic approach to help them, they're at the mercy of the private sector).
Furthermore, real democracy would include all the people affected by climate change that didn't cause it! The people of the Marshal islands should certainly have a say in how we approach this problem. Saying we don't need democracy is an extremely America centric approach.
In the circles I'm in, we talk a lot about eco-facsism, which is the way the ecological crisis will be used to promote fascist policies with a green tinge. These include blaming immigrants, cracking down on poor people, and denying democracy in favor of the technocratic actors who caused the problem in the first place.
We need the opposite! We need complete renewal of democracy and democratic practice in order to solve these problems. This idea scares the powerful because solving this crisis necessarily requires democratic control of major parts of the economy, which is a threat to the existing beneficiaries of the economic system.
In all the civilized world we've taken certain really BAD options off-the-political-democratic-choice menu, because we don't want them to even be considered!
Maybe we can do the same with things that are are really bad for the environment, like not having eco-externalities priced into things! This can be done without killing democracy as a whole. You cut a finger to save the whole organism! Maybe we should start seeing the environment as an extension of our bodies and treat violence against it similarly to how we treat physical violence - take it off the f menu!
Not doing this would only make things worse and, yeah, sooner or later some "(pseudo)eco-fascist" group would spring up and find groups to blame (for the f-up resulting from people not acting because they couldn't find a democratically-acceptable solution) and manage to sell hate well enough to get in power. And at that point everyone will be double-screwed: you'll have wrecked environment + "eco"-fascists!
> The problem of climate change has been cause precisely by a lack of democracy
Well, yeah, but ya know, sometimes you treat cancer with radiation... Just like you sometime need to apply more force and violence to end a war sooner and minimize overall destruction. Expecting for the Marshall island's vote to be considered in the US or the EU is not practical problem solving.
It would have a couple of benefits: First CCS would be feasible. Second if (non-fossil) energy is dirt cheap, nobody bothers digging fossil energy sources from ground. Third, there are always more fun things available when energy is cheap vs when energy is expensive) So, keep on pushing solar and try to make nuclear competitive with something like small modular reactors, they are pretty much only ones with massive enough potential to properly disrupt energy markets.
What we need actually is a Global Manhattan project which focuses on something like the 100 most promising approaches and builds and tests prototypes. This should be funded both by Govts. and the rich individuals. I think sharing of intellectual property can do a lot of good in solving the Carbon free energy conundrum and then getting it cheap enough for everything else. My guess is that a project like this can deliver solution(s) 10-20 years before free market will.
Why are there two climate tech on the upvoted list on Hacker News. What causes topics to trend like this? Are they being cherry picked?
That's okay, I'm trying to understand here.
"The event coincides precisely with a catastrophic decline in carbon dioxide levels, which fell from 3500 ppm in the early Eocene to 650 ppm during this event."
* which areas are suitable
* how much energy is required
* how much area of land is required.
I hesitate to give credibility to any answer that starts with 'just... [do this thing]'.
If you have any references I'd be curious to learn more
Reference: https://e360.yale.edu/features/freeman_dyson_takes_on_the_cl...
The conclusion is always (from my point of vue) : we are fucked.
We need a magic device that will remove gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere in less than 30 years and we need it to do it without using energy or consuming rare material. And you can't do much with CO2 at the end.
The harm it will do is still finite and not even really known. Maybe we can just suck it up and suffer the consequences? Do you have an idea of how bad it will really be? Worse than World War II? Worse than communism? Worse than the Spanish Flu? All that stuff happened in the same century and killed close to 10% of the earth's entire population! Yet somehow we're doing great.
In the same way that a year's worth of health insurance is wasted if you don't get sick. So, not wasted.
Which country(s) will own the machine?
Who will decide what we dial the CO2 back to? You'd think it would be back to pre-industrial times but who knows?
Will regions that have benefited from climate change and can now grow crops be on board? Or will they prefer to keep things as they are?
Considering how much excise taxes Europeans pay on their gasoline, you would think that climate change would already be a solved issue. Taxes are a larger part of the cost of gasoline than the gasoline itself. Yet somehow there isn't enough money to fight climate change?! The Netherlands pays $3.53 per gallon purely in excise taxes.[0] Bulgaria, a country with an average income of $9000 a year[1], pays $1.61 a gallon in excise taxes.
They do not address the fundamental causes of emissions which are steadily growing.
They have some merits for mitigation of the problem but not as a long-term solution
So... you're saying that there's not an accumulation of plastic waste / microplastics in the environment, or that we know any impacts or benign or negligible?
Good news if true, would like to know what position there's the most credible evidence for.
> and "landfills = bad".
I'm a fan of consumer goods, so naturally it's convenient for me if landfills == good, but I also tend to wonder (a) exactly how effectively they isolate waste issues from, say, groundwater or other environmental circulation and (b) if there might be some volume threshold past which landfills aren't an adequate solution for addressing waste streams.
We are only now starting to measure up the microplastics impact and their origin. Switching to reusable cups is a drop in the ocean, when tons of the stuff is released by simply washing clothes or makeup off your face.
> wont be solved while big economies decide to export their waste
Western countries do not have proper regulations if one of the possible outcome for waste is to be exported where those regulations do not exist.
We cut forests, and burned oil. Offsets help revert one of these things. But, we’d need to do more than that to reverse the change.
So the offsets you can buy now are low hanging fruit. Actual carbon sucking costs vastly more than wren’s offsets.
Though still achiveble? Would be about $10,000 usd per person at average european emissions. About $20,000 usd per person at average american emisisons. Includes children.
https://climeworks.shop/?utm_source=CW-Website&utm_medium=ba...
If those costs go down, the costs become realistic. I don’t mean politically realistic, just possible to do.
Fwiw I use both wren and climeworks. And maybe if enough people used wren they might find non-forest offsets that are achievable at low cost. But right now it wouldn’t obviously scale if all did it.
Last talked to him some time around 1998 but, you know, the logic was sound.
Regrettably, the numbers involved make me pessimistic. I think your idea of some deus ex machina technology is ungrounded optimism, wishful thinking, or denial. Nothing in the linked article gives any cause for such optimism.
Climate change math is like the ballistics equation. It is just a cold hard reality check. There is no free lunch in terms of the energy of a chemical reaction.
We are all getting really, really close to failing here. I think it's imperative not to be hopeless about it, but we should be honest with ourselves that we may not have modern human civilization as we understand it within a generation or two [edit: unless we act immediately, not soon]
I expect that we will eventually develop technology for CO2 extraction, but it's not going to be easy or convenient. 500 joules per kilogram is a lot and I doubt chemical methods will beat it. Currently there are about 3.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere, or about 3.5 * 10^15 kg. To decrease the concentration by 1/3, returning us to preindustrial CO2 levels, you'd need about 600 petajoules or 170 terawatt-hours of input energy assuming thermodynamically perfect isothermal compression (which is impossible to actually achieve). Global world electricity consumption per year is about 21000 TWh.
No current method of CO2 extraction comes close to this limit and it's very unlikely that any ever will. Nonetheless, we have several orders of magnitude of wiggle room to let real-life methods work out okay. But the energy cost is not small and the negative effects of present-day CO2 emissions should not be considered easily curable.
And just for the fun of it, a human being releases about 4 * 10^5 kg of CO2 during their lifetime, requiring about 2 * 10^8 J. So the most efficient CO2 pump possible would require at least 200 million watts of power (about a thousand Tesla Roadsters at maximum output) to confine this CO2 within a second.
Also, you can't restore the initial pressure because at the initial pressure the CO2 takes up a whole atmosphere of space!
I didn't get your last line though. I assume you compress "dirty" air.
To be clear: all real processes probably require many times more energy than this. There is no way I know of to selectively compress one component of a gas mixture. But if you did, this would be the energy cost.
I'm afraid it will be more than that - but how much more exactly?
The reason for calculating the bare minimum "magic compressor" cost is because it also applies to techniques like pressure-swing adsorption:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pressure_swing_adsorption
Using PSA can reduce the energy cost of CO2 extraction significantly relative to direct compression technology. But because we know that the adsorbent is used in a cyclic process, we have dW[compression] = p dV + dE[adsorbent] and the long-time integral of dE[adsorbent] is effectively zero because the adsorbent cannot absorb or release energy forever, so ΔW[compression] = int[p dV] and thus any technology, compression-based or not, incorporating some finite amount of external components, is subject to the work limit.
This is also why, for example, thermodynamic analyses of engine types are always concerned about the possible compression ratio. You could consider the partial pressure of atmospheric and stored CO2 as the compression ratio of a hypothetical compressed-air motor, which can then be run to extract thermal energy (i.e. violate the second law of thermodynamics) from any process more efficient than 500 J/kg CO2, since again W[motor] = int[p dV]. You can improve the compression ratio by taking advantage of the P-T curve and performing the whole compression at the South Pole, which saves you about 100 J/kg.
Also, I was off by a factor of ten when I plugged in the vapor pressure of CO2. Correcting this is left as an exercise to the reader.
Technologies not subject to the work limit include e.g. olivine crushing, somehow inhibiting volcanic activity (???), planting trees, etc. Another technology I just thought of would be to to form CO2@H2O clathrates in seawater starting with air, which would also lower the compression ratio, and extracting the (solid) clathrates to recover CO2 and desalinated water. Here the pressure required is much lower and additionally desalinated water is produced; this only works if we form the clathrates in a cold environment and decompose them in a warm one, which is kind of inconvenient. Then again, shipping gigatons of fresh water to LA might become necessary anyway!
We can solve it by letting less enter, or otherwise sinking some of it. Consider if we stored the excess energy as chemical energy? or reflected some fraction of the energy back out away from us?
reducing consumption is a failing project and the greener technology gets the more people increase their consumption in a compensatory way (Heat – George Monbiot) ...
Broad-spectrum sunlight hits the earth, and is later emitted as infrared. CO2 is transparent to UV, but absorbs infrared. So global warming is a consequence of the fact that the major fossil fuel emission is opaque to a wavelength of light emitted by the sunlit earth.
"Letting less enter", "stored the excess energy", and "reflected some fraction" are all huge engineering solutions to the global warming crisis. And I support them all! But space mirrors and geo-scale energy sinks are sci-fi, they will not save us any time soon.
Reducing consumption buys time. Switching to renewables buys time too. Maybe you use renewable biofuels and capture the CO2 emissions: now your car is carbon negative, without launching a space mirror!
While it is an energy imbalance which causes the climate to change, modifying the energy input or output via geoengineering will also cause the climate to change, even if the overall balance stays the same.