$100M xPrize for Carbon Removal
xprize.org
xprize.org
For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0].
Not only that but it would still take a century for the trees to reach maturity.
Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again.
[0] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaaz0388.ful...
As much as CO2 emissions befear me, so too does increasingly poor topsoil, globally.
- ed
I'm not even sure we'd need to wait for trees to mature either - we just need work with whatever plant absorbs the most CO2. Perhaps algae, even?
In theory it's energy positive: burning the crop can produce energy.
We (humans) have accelerated emissions (by burning, thus reversing, geosphere capture via oil) and destroyed the biosphere through deforestation. This has also been accelerated as raising temperatures thaw permafrost & destroy ocean life (among others).
Anything we can do to reverse this is beneficial.
Heat could also increase biomass since there would be a longer growing season and higher latitudes opening up.
But like you say, it’s a trade off so hard to predict.
We can't possibly build a machine for every function a tree does.
As I understand it the air carrying the CO₂ is constantly moving and will not create any deficit regions?
Besides, with the large over concentration of carbon dioxide we have at the moment I think increasing temperatures have a higher chance of creating hostile environments.
If we could remove so much CO2 from the air that it prevented plants from growing (even if the effect were highly localized, which is pretty much a certainty), then we might actually have a shot at being able to remove CO2 in a reasonable amount of time. So this definitely sounds like a good problem to have. Personally I think that's pretty unlikely though.
Also mono cultures and replacing natural vegetation with man-made forestation can actually be more limited to the amount of carbon they can capture long term.
Source: https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk:8443/bitstream/10044/1/80271/6...
Not even, say you could transform the Sahara to rain forest, awesome right? I mean it would be an incredible feat, but it would give you exactly 0 with reducing carbon. Contrary to popular belief the Amazon rain forest aren't the "lungs" of the planet, the Amazon rain forest is basically net 0. Why? Because the rain forest also has a tremendous amount of life/animals, those animals use the oxygen and produce carbon. The real "lungs" of the planet are in the ocean.
EDIT: You might find this PBS article interesting as well, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/no-the-amazon-fires-won...
"Forest plants produce lots of oxygen, and forest microbes consume a lot of oxygen. As a result, net production of oxygen by forests – and indeed, all land plants – is very close to zero."
Photosynthesis: 6CO2 + 6H2O → C6H12O6 + 6O2
You can see here that there's glucose (a carbohydrate) being produced in addition to oxygen.
Trees sequester carbon. They also return that carbon to the atmosphere eventually, but as long as they're replaced by new trees, that's fine. That's not what's happening in the Amazon.
From a carbon perspective forests for timber are even better because then we keep several generations of trees worth of carbon locked up in our structures. It's also an easier sell because that has real economic value.
From a biodiversity perspective it's not as good to have monoculture crops of any kind, including trees.
According to the documentary "One Strange Rock", which I admit I have not fact checked, your statement is absolutely false. The documentary claims 100% of the oxygen produced by the Amazon rain forest is used up by the animals that live in it.
EDIT:
Also this PBS article backups the claim. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/no-the-amazon-fires-won...
"Forest plants produce lots of oxygen, and forest microbes consume a lot of oxygen. As a result, net production of oxygen by forests – and indeed, all land plants – is very close to zero."
Forests do sequester carbon for a period, although most of it is released again in fires and decomposition (chemically just a slow fire.)
But the point is that a forest locks up a lot of carbon compared to cleared grazing or cropland.
I merely wanted to try and raise some awareness to those who question the need for technological removal methods as there is a bit of a toxic "trees will save us" attitude when things like this get mentioned.
I thought it was funny to see similar sentiments back to back :)
I'm more into the juxtapositions of interactions between idiots vs experts, specialists vs generalists, startup-billionaire vs unemployed-drug-addict-hacker, and the level of insight that can be gained from these conversations.
I believe that the civility, and desire for unfettered conversation (avoiding ad-hominem, flame-wars. etc···) are more of an instrumental-goal of this process, than the true goal.
I don't really know why the comments on hn are the way they are, and I doubt anyone ever will. But that's what keeps me coming back here. It's the only place on the internet I can get this kind of thing, whatever it is.
I do have to say, there's something special and unique here. Like the userbases of wikipedia, stack overflow, 4chan, or twitter, there's something here that's impossible to recreate and worth preserving.
Hardly a discourse. Both gents above might have a negligible disagreement but they are sticking firmly to radical green agenda shadow-officially endorsed and promoted by Yahoo Combinator. Also, good for karma income. Just the same for praising comments.
What is this radical green agenda that you identify? I'm not disputing that exists, I'm certainly part of it, and I intend to continue leaning into it. I'm just curious how it looks from the outside.
And you can (probably) do better than trees, in terms of carbon captured per time unit. But I guess you'd have to run comparative studies between birch and bamboo for biomass grown per time unit and area.
Hm, that means that a sensible unit for carbon capture would be "kg / (m * m * s)".
But, yes, my main reason for thinking bamboo is that it is pretty fast-growing under the right conditions.
And with a Watt actually being "kg * m^2 / s^3", your unit ends up being s^2 / m^4, which dimensionally looks less pleasant.
But, yes, it'd require some care.
Yes, there is. Trees take a up valuable real estate. As long as people can do something even remotely profitable with land they own, this can not work.
For instance, trees essentially power the entire terrestrial water cycle. Without trees all the water rains out within a few hundred km of the coast. Trees (far moreso than simple evaporation) are responsible for pushing that water back into the air-stream. Isotopic analysis confirms that 80% of the rainfall on land is caused by transpiration, and most of that is trees. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983
This explains why deforestation causes desertification. Cut down the trees and you get a continent-wide desert.
These dynamics aren't well-captured by the present economic system, which only sees "valuable real estate" being "taken up" by trees.
As long as plantation owners and/or illegal loggers do, then all your argumentation is moot.
We don't need to wait 100 years for maturation of the wood in forests, the nice thing about wood is that you can use it for paper and construction, and that effectively sequesters the carbon.
Here in Sweden it is the law that if you cut down a forest you replant it. We have been doing it for a century. All forests here is basically in a constant plant-grow-cut cycle unless the land is claimed for new buildings (farm land has been steady declining every year).
It is debatable if the practice is carbon negative or carbon neutral. Most of wood product do get burned sooner or later, or turned into bio gas which then get burned. Almost nothing remain as stable carbon sink. A planted forest is an future investment to be cut, processed and burned. The only exception is forest reservations and those are much more expensive to make than planting trees.
The advocacy behind replanting might be better invested into a political action of bringing similar replanting laws to other countries. Sweden mostly did it because it looked ugly to have wast areas cut down without regrowth, and because it hurt biodiversity. It also make sense economically in the long run.
Empress seems to be the ideal candidate.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-02/we-alread...
It'll probably start a war, but once natural resources start getting scarce I fully expect the affected nation to deploy SO2.
Why disasterous?
Similar to the GERD but in the sky.
There's also the fact that you're altering a chaotic system, with fundamentally unpredictable side effects, some of which could last longer than a human lifespan. Wanna make California get monthly hurricanes? How about weekly tornados in Colorado? Bury New York city in ice?
It's not that any of those things are probable just that they're possible, and chaotic systems can drastically, catastrophically, and exponentially change configuration, and no matter how good your supercomputer simulations are, you fundamentally cannot predict the consequences.
All of human civilization teeters on the current climate configuration - geoengineering has terrifying potential. Humans have a horrible track record in attempts to predictably alter chaotic systems and ecologies. We damn well better know what we're doing before we use globally acting tools.
We are letting anthropogenic global warming happen because it’s cheaper in the very near term. But climate change is a real thing and will have real, life-threatening effects especially for some geographic regions.
If we accept the reality that: 1) humans often just do what is cheapest and easiest even if the long-term consequences are bad AND 2) global warming will start killing massive numbers of people from things like heat stroke, putting enormous political pressure on governments to do something,
…then The logical conclusion (combined with how insanely cheap SO2 is to deploy, we’re talking maybe $50 billion a year, maybe less) is that there is an extremely high probability that some nation will just unilaterally do sulfur dioxide. Think of a Nation like India, with a large population that will be vulnerable to heat stroke and a big enough budget and military to just unilaterally do something like this to stop the political unrest of hundreds of thousands of heat stroke deaths per yearz
The stuff isn't uranium and not much is needed. Any nation with an airplane should be able to get away with it.
But I said $50 billion per year. That’s what probably way too high. Other estimates mention $18 billion per year, I found one that mentioned $2 billion per year, and just doing the calculation by hand based on fuel and per hour operating costs, I get only like $100 million, although that depends on altitude (I think 20km is usually ideal, although most cargo jets can’t go much above 13km).
I even wonder what the effect would be of just using sulfur-rich jet fuel on regular commercial long-haul flights. The cost would be minimal or even negative (as sulfur-rich crude is cheaper). I guess in this way any nation could just decide to do sulfur-rich fuel in their long haul fleet and few would immediately notice.
It’s such a crappy solution to the problem, though, and will doubtless cause a bunch more problems. But it’d be insanely cheap to do.
Still sub optimal compared to other solutions but it’s possible we may need to try something like that.
Sounds like dramatic progress to me. It uses a technology we already have against a problem that is only getting worse by the second. The side effect of fostering sustainable natural resources would be an unquestionable good as well.
While a hectare of forest may be "only" CO2-neutral, a hectare of buildings are typically net CO2 emitters.
In the 2070s things will be very different.
Forests need to be managed to optimize for sequestration; log the right parts at the right time, replant. Also need to invest more in controlling forest fires (hell, use the military if that's the only way to get the budget).
At the other end we need to reduce burning wood for fuel through other renewables and put more lumber into building.
Of course this strategy does have to go hand-in-hand with drastic emission reductions to prevent use getting back to the same point and having nowhere else to put trees.
Hitting the tree equivalent of those sand-filled barrels sounds a lot better than dissipating that same energy by either A) flipping, or B) colliding with oncoming traffic.
It would be interesting to see the videos of "crash testing" various types of orchards!
As I wrote elsewhere in the thread, it's all about maximizing the total carbon stored per hectare. That means more trees in the median, more trees in our suburbs, more trees in the city, and (most importantly) more trees in agriculture.
There's a small set of "farmer's trees" (eg black locust) that coexist with crops right up to the trunk, drop copious mulch, have deep tap roots that bring up minerals, and make nutritious pods that are good fodder for animals. Planting 15-20 of these trees per hectare will actually increase the crop yield beneath.
Tons more carbon stored, better crop yield, cuts down wind erosion, and free fodder too. The cost is that the farmer has to drive around the trees. It's a non-zero cost yes, but it's a much easier switch than transitioning to full-on agroforestry.
Until our technology catches up and provides net carbon-neutral energy, we have to pollute less. And that may be and doing less, and "consuming" less. And that will require force. Public pressure, social pressure, and regulation. No business will do it voluntarily, and no government will make itself unpopular voluntarily.
Long term we need green energy technology. Short term, we need technology is to help force change in our habits.
Do all the other stuff too, sure, but it seems like most of the pollution currently comes from Industry, Agriculture and transport. Things that enhance human quality of life. We need to decide which enhancements are most essential, and cut back.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Hybrid poplars mature within a decade, and a biochar reactor is a net-energy producing reaction that produces soil improving char as a byproduct.
It won't save the world on it's own, but trees can be leveraged in powerful ways.
Great for replacing fossil fuels, but not a carbon sequestration technique.
Or if you wanted you could literally just bury it. Then it becomes a coal plant in reverse
The notion being that nature or even the climate is balanced/stable ?
I think the focus should be on increasing resiliency not hoping everything is going to be alright "if we just undo this one thing".
Having said that I'm all for reverting CO2 emissions, just dislike this implicit notion that nature is harmonious by default and humans fucked it up - there's speculation about weather related disasters pre industrial era, so even very recently in human context. Or the disruptions we have with relatively minor volcanic activity. So many natural thing could screw us way worse than global warming and for the first time in history we're getting technologically advanced enough to protect against it.
Soil, in prodigious quantities. We need to be making it.
Using human waste - food and faecal from our cities; Using whatever plant fixes the most CO2 in a useful form that we can turn into charcoal (quick trees? bamboo grass? something genetically modified?), releasing heat energy, and then fixing carbon in a useful matrix, for soil regeneration a la Terra Preta.
I sort of made this post elsewhere here, I just wanted to repeat and focus on the soil angle.
We have huge swathes of the globe that due to poor historical environmental conditions have poor soil, so not much can grow. Some have become desertified, perhaps some of which is our fault (eg. Mediterranean deforestation). If we add soil to these places, at least hardier plants can grow and we can expand the reach of our efforts.
Strikes me that the most important thing is that plants can grow, and for that we need soil.
Soil.
Given poop isn't even a main constituent ingredient in new soil, but rather forms the 'flavouring' for the development of the biological and mineral matter otherwise, I'd suggest a well-developed bio-recycling infrastructure could be quite productive.
This isn't even factoring in food or farm waste, etc.
People in deserts shit too, I think.
If they'd known to replenish and make broader use of their defecations and organic waste, they might well have kept their 'jungle'.
Certainly, it appears to have worked for ancient Amazonian tribes who are thought to be responsible for much of the quality land in the Amazon basin, much of which would otherwise be quite shallow and sandy with low nutrients.
If you had prodigious quantities of good soil, you could grow trees and food at sea, where we have lots of space to grow, especially at the equator.
The problem then becomes a floating platform, and controlling it all, but those seem less difficult.
Reality's a bitch, sometimes. Often.
Since you're talking about planting chestnuts above, I thought this video of carbon removal entrepreneurs talking about biochar solutions might be of interest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu3g0z7dl38
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Just don't leave bags of chestnuts outside - apparently foxes love them and will utterly lay waste to them. Who knew?
- ed: Oh, actually, it turns out I don't - Horse-chestnuts aren't the same species as sweet or Spanish chestnuts.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesculus_hippocastanum
I'm guessing Musk had some thought process around the expected marginal impact of funding this vs more on energy storage vs energy production. And perhaps capture/sequestration is under-explored.
But I wonder what could be achieved with $100M of funds directed at research to intentionally changing and shifting culture towards consuming stuff with smaller footprints? Tesla made some people want an electric car really badly. For some, very small houses are becoming attractive. But so far this stuff mostly arises from ad-hoc marketing efforts around particular brands, products, influencers. What if we need systematic memetic engineering, to make lower energy consumption actually feel desirable?
But we're going to need CCS technologies to start pulling the carbon back out if we want to avoid really bad outcomes, and those technologies are much less developed.
Follow (policy) research on how to implement this and it should be fine. The biggest hurdle is will, especially to take the first step.
So far, lots of places have not chosen to implement any carbon tax because they value the environment less than their present access to goods and services to which they are accustomed. And even the carbon taxes which have been put in place don't actually address the real externalities of emissions, suggesting that even if the polity there values the environment _some_, it's still less valuable than buying cheap stuff.
EU carbon taxes vary wildly between countries, from €0.07 in Poland to €116 in Sweden. Sweden's tax is at the very low end of recommendations from a 2018 UN report, which gave the extremely broad range of $135 to $5,500 per ton. And only now is there a _proposal_ for an EU border tax to account for emissions in goods entering the EU. So even in Sweden, where perhaps cultural values made a comparatively high rate politically feasible, no one has yet paid a carbon tax which actually addresses the externalities of emissions, because of imports.
My original comment mentioned Tesla as an example of how to get people to actually want the greener goods more than their alternatives. People that really wanted a Tesla wanted it more than any ICE car. They still wanted it after Tesla hit the tax break cap in the US. They perceived a Tesla as smart, glamorous, futuristic, and conveying status. This is qualitatively different than someone who lives in a place with a carbon tax who can be convinced to take a train trip rather than a regional flight, or buys a home which is better sealed and will be cheaper to heat/cool.
I would claim that aside from typical corporate marketing activities which center around a given product or brand (which is what I was thinking of when I referred to a "portfolio of expensive one-offs"), the other primary precedents for getting people to want differently have been religious evangelism and state propaganda, neither of which ever yielded an engineering discipline of predictable, well-understood mechanisms.
One huge positive I see from the creation of this prize is the publicity and interest in carbon removal. From my experience more people are learning about the requirement for carbon removal and realizing how expensive it is.
For those of us who want to leave a minimal footprint, becoming aware of how expensive it is to undo our footprint incentivizes us to reduce too.
(Credit where credit is due, Stripe, Shopify and Microsoft are also really helping this area grow too. )
Making people believe that some magic techno fix will swoop in and somehow solve the climate change problem is undesirable. People need to accept that a large reduction in emissions is necessary and this will require many people to change at least some of their habits.
Regarding your point about carbon capture, XPRIZE recently closed a $20 million prize for making products out of carbon emissions captured at industrial sources: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/carbon/articles/xprize-announc...
The plants absorb about 25% of that and the oceans another 25%. If we absorb 10 gigatons yearly by 2050, that might be good enough.
And that's assuming the ocean and plants will infinitely capture more and more carbon, which I sincerely doubt as well, but I'll go ahead and assume you mean this as a bridging method to get us another decade or two to finalize real solutions.
But yeah, we would have to reduce our emissions by at least 8GT to get to zero. That is totally doable, advanced economies are already reducing CO2 at a faster rate than 25% over 30 years: the US has reduced it's emissions by 1GT in 10 years (16% reduction).
We could, theoretically, grow enough plants to get down to pre-industrial levels. However, plants decompose when they die, re-releasing their carbon into the atmosphere, and lots of the plants alive to die are grown using petrochemical fertilizer, which was taken from under the ground, not the atmosphere.. So, we'd have to keep all of those new plants alive, forever, or maintain that extreme level of plant growth forever. This seems like an even harder problem.
Plants don't sequester the carbon, like you said. But on the other hand, the extra CO2 is causing a bigger plant mass growth. So called greening of the deserts (but not just deserts). So basically the living biosphere is growing and absorbing CO2 as it does, because it can.
The plants evolved when there was more CO2 around, 200-300 is very close to starvation, they thrive in 1000+ environments.
Total Earth biomass is 550 gigatons, much larger than 36 which is what we emit every year. But obviously it cannot keep up...since the year 1750 we emitted 1700 gigatons, so more than 3 times the weight of the biosphere. That being said, I can see how the biosphere can grow by 2% with all the extra CO2 and go from 550 to 560, 570 and so on.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fer...
https://theconversation.com/yes-more-carbon-dioxide-in-the-a...
It's not futile if we don't remove atmospheric CO2, but we would have to get to net zero warming without cheating and we would have to get there within our emission budget to stay below <insert your temperature target>.
Reducing footprints through innovation will go a ways. Changing "culture" (i.e. coerced minimalism) is a thing, but it's a band-aid solution on a leaking hoover-dam; virtue signaling for the most part.
Carbon footprints scale up with population. Everyone eats, wants gadgets, wants a home, good infrastructure. If these demands can't be met without excess encroachment of land and destruction of the environment, then there's too many people. Innovation and increased efficiency can't outrun growth. Yes, it's poised to level off in the next 100 or so years after adding an extra few billion to the total, but the interventions needed are more urgent and by extension the reduced rate should be more urgent. Though changes to the energy sector alone can make a substantial dent in emissions in the near-term, given political will.
All of this would be a moot point if the global population were halved and remained stagnant.
The rampant op-ed push for minimalism on the part of the consumer, for housing especially, seems almost like a nefarious ploy to plant the idea that commoners should now be content with less, with environmentalism as the red herring. So being unable to afford a detached home is to be thought of as a happy virtuous accident.
Life at the advent of the industrial revolution sucked. The Victorian age was also one of high inequality. I'm not sure what that's supposed to inspire.
> inherently unsustainable
What part? You're not addressing that. I did, however: increase in population increases demand for things.
Environmental destruction is scaling with population, not consumer voraciousness.
> “Buy less sh*t” should be the first and most powerful front in our fight against climate change, but it isn’t because we are selfish and gluttonous beasts.
Look at the stuff you have lying around in your domicile. That's somewhere near the average of what people in the West own.
Digital consumption has increased on average, people aren't tripping over things in their ever-shrinking domiciles with ever-shrinking purchasing power owing to stagnant wages.
Not only are you overestimating consumption of "shit", you're failing to make a meaningful connection between consumer habits and lack of sustainability. It's a question of scale.
There are more viable and compassionate solutions to accelerate stagnation of global growth. One is universal access to contraceptives, the other is eliminating global poverty and improving economic stability. This is no less politically viable than coercing Westerners to consume less, and far more effective.
Add to that, our governments *target a growth rate of 3-4% per year through immigration*. That is purely through policy, and the entire point to increase GDP through, you guessed it, consumption. As you well know, our minimum carbon footprints are higher in the West. The minimum. If decimating consumption is such a priority for green advocates, then it should follow that they staunchly oppose increases in immigration rates, and in fact favor reductions. That would actually be consistent with the argument. This is an obvious connection that people coyly dance around. And while it's a separate discussion, many economists agree today that GDP is not a reliable measure of a nation's prosperity and chasing perpetual growth is not required.
> Less beef, which is hugely polluting.
There have been some interesting strides in innovation that reduce methane emissions some 90+% using a fraction of kelp/seaweed in feed, and this may be rolled out as a matter of policy. That would eliminate issues related to methane emissions in a fell swoop, in a way that discouragement of consumption can't touch. It's a ways off, but it doesn't have to be, it's right there.
Land-use, contrary to popular belief, is actually decreasing in the U.S. for cattle in spite of the small uptick in demand growth. However, it has been growing in Brazil, presumably due to the growing Chinese market and they're supplying of soy to just about everyone.
> The average American child owns between 70 and 100 toys.
Citation?
> The average American woman owns 100+ items of clothing.
Citation?
> It is too much; it is more than we need.
There is no metric offered for what is enough / too much. It's entirely arbitrary. And yet, the difference between a perceived low consumption and average consumption, in aggregate, across the population, would not result in a significant change as the environment is concerned, since we all still use power, water, transportation, food, as the most basic form of living. The industry giants are responsible for most destruction. We can pat ourselves on the back for buying fewer material goods but it doesn't put a dent in the problem. Given the approx 36 gigatons of annual emissions, you won't even get down to 35 with a persuasive campaign. You won't even get down to 35.5.
Blaming the consumer is foolhardy. Most problems with regards to energy and waste can be resolved through policy. People want these problems fixed but feel dismayed when most of what they throw in the recycling bin, typically related to food stuffs, ends up at the dump.
Living well means more than mere survival. You don't "need" your little device you use to browse hackernews and your daily caffeinated drink and all the comforts you take for granted, and no one gets to decide for you that you don't need them, in a free country. This is important because blaming consumers will not save the environment, strong policy and innovation will.
Yup! I’m a big fan of contraception and options for women. That will probably start to bring the global population down slowly within about a hundred years. But we have less than thirty years to fix the climate problem.
Per-person carbon emissions in the developing world are <1 ton per year. For Europe, China, India its 5-10 tons per year. Which is bad enough. For the United States, it’s TWENTY TONS PER PERSON PER YEAR.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_...
That isn’t because we for some reason have worse power plants or worse ways of making steel. It’s because we eat too much; we drive too much, in cars that are too big; we use too much heat and air-conditioning, in houses that, in spite of what you keep saying, are the largest in the world, and getting bigger every decade (you can google this too). We fly too much, we buy too much, we use too much, we consume more than literally any other people on the planet, and if we don’t stop, we are going to kill everyone, ourselves included.
To put this another way, if every American started living, not even like people in Kenya, but like people in France, that would take 3 gigatons off of global annual emissions. Holy shit.
Did, and did not find what you suggested. I did find a 300 dollar figure which just reflects cost, not the number of toys.
> For the United States, it’s TWENTY TONS PER PERSON PER YEAR
As I said: everyone has a higher carbon footprint in the West, mainly owing to infrastructure and industry. The combined consumer spending choices are not what is leading to the extra tonnage.
Here's the breakdown straight from the EPA: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/sources-greenhouse-gas-emis...
Industry. Electricity. Transportation. Agriculture. Commercial and Residential COMBINED are just 13%.
Americans are not consuming so much more than Europeans as to generate 10 extra tons of carbon. The average spending reflects it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_household... . Not to mention this doesn't take into account prices, and digital service & goods consumption.
I hope that clears any doubts.
> That isn’t because we for some reason have worse power plants or worse ways of making steel.
The suburban experiment is a North American one, and America is absolutely huge. Infrastructure is vastly more expensive to maintain in NA, and yes there are inefficiencies everywhere. Simply living, having access to water, electricity and food, creates more emissions in America based on location.
Suburbs are money-losers and subsidized by city-centers, despite the taxes on residents there. Sprawled cities are way more wasteful than dense cities, and America is a nation of sprawled cities.
Ultimately, you're dwelling on a red herring. I addressed the primary issue already. Sustainability matters because of scale. If the population were actually stagnant, a) consumption would not lead to increased emissions anywhere, b) we'd actually address the problem. Bullying consumers does not. It's just a race to the bottom.
Sustainability matters because of scaling.
This is also where the US is pretty bad, because of a culture that aspires to urban sprawl.
More dense cities, more mixed use planning, more active transportation, less detached housing, less parking etc. are ways in which developed countries could really reduce their transportation carbon footprints (and incidentally also footprints related to AC/heating).
Getting less abstract: there are no real technological hurdles for eliminating emissions for personal vehicles, and probably-manageable ones for other surface transport (cargo shipping, etc.). Decarbonizing the electric grid has some technological challenges to solve (mostly around intermittency and storage if we go all renewables, or cost if we go mixed renewables and nuclear), but there are reasonably clear paths forward. On the other hand, we really don't know how to do zero-carbon long haul aviation, or concrete production and curing, or aluminum smelting, or trans-oceanic shipping -- maybe portable/modular nuclear could be used for the last two, but it's still pretty pie-in-the-sky. So, maybe in the future we have electric cars but carbon capture for long-haul jets, or something.
(Aside: the recent Bill Gates climate book has a pretty thorough rundown of all the major current emitters and the levels of technological readiness for decarbonizing each.)
Biofuels seem mostly like a crock, honestly -- the ones we can produce now compete with food for arable land and would do so more aggressively at scale, and the ones that wouldn't do that (algal fuels, maybe cellulosic fuels like switchgrass) still require fundamental R&D to make the economics work. And again: even if they did work, this is a solution where you're burning fuels and emitting carbon, and then remedying by capturing again, this time with plants. So again: it's carbon capture.
The emphasis here is on some people.
Observe the morons who think they are clever/funny "rolling coal".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK6Amk4Hf4Y
My personal belief is that all governments should implement carbon tax/trading schemes which are either revenue neutral or 100% of the revenue is invested into carbon capture schemes.
lol, there has been an unrelenting campaign to do so, going all the way back to the 70s - when global cooling and population control were the hot topics at Davos. Captain Planet, he's our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero...
I'm all for abandoning conspicuous consumption and the treatment of electronics as consumable goods (sent from 2011 vintage Thinkpad), but I'm not on board with weird its-for-your-own-good social engineering/propaganda campaigns. It is a moot point anyway, as you'd be impotently counter-messaging every advertising/branding strategy that has (or will) ever exist.
Then there's the problem that there's no significant process that turns trees into sequestered carbon for longer than the trees' lifespan.
The reason it's important to keep saying this is that lots of people participate in these tree planting drives. They feel all accomplished and that they did their part. But if that doesn't have any real impact on the problem, then we've done lots of work, used up people's goodwill, but not dented the problem.
Does the evidence support that people's goodwill get "used up"?
It seems as plausible a theory to me that, when people get involved and take direct action, it ends up driving them to take further actions. Being personally invested in the result may drive more action rather than using up the goodwill.
(To be clear, I agree that we should always encourage action with the highest impact, and if tree planting actually does nothing to help solve the problem, then we should direct people to other activities. I'm not really jumping in to defend tree-planting initiatives, but more to question the assumption that people have a fixed amount of effort that they're willing to put into a given problem)
That's a good question. I assume it will be both for different groups of people. From my personal experience it seems to be that way, but I'm unaware of any studies on the subject.
Both seem reasonably plausible to me. I'd definitely be interested in what the results turn out to be!
There is of course lumber, which can sequester CO2 for decades or hundreds of years. Lumber sequestration currently only amounts to ~1% of global annual carbon emissions, but regionally it can be big (9% in Sweden) [1]. Lumber might have a bigger impact if purposefully employed for sequestration and prioritized over other carbon positive building materials.
But most of those don't involve trees. And "reducing certain industrial practices" has nothing to do with trees.
So I don't really understand your point. It's correct that we shouldn't be too reductionist, but even if we avoid reductionism it's still correct to say that plants and trees won't do the job, and is not "missing the entire point of regenerative methods".
Tree effectively swampcoolers.
The carbon dioxide sits in the atmosphere for 50 years where it heats the planet, trashes the ecosystem and likely feeds at least as many positive feedbacks as negative - amplifying the climate change effects.
To capture this carbon you (your descendants) are going to have to: Put 4MJ of energy into the breaking the carbon-oxygen bonds... Which will take more than 4MJ of process energy and embodied energy in the capital plant... Once you have collected the diffuse CO2 from the atmosphere, which will not be free.
Our 'plan' for dealing with climate change is that we hand a burning planet to our descendants to deal with, if we can stagger to hand-off without crashing the system first. Future generations will have to be far more responsible than us, for centuries, and imagining what they will have to say makes me squirm.
[1] I am mildly optimistic about techniques that accelerate the weathering of (silicate?) rocks; and more trees will be nice. These technologies will be useful for the centuries of cleanup that will be needed, but cannot keep up with the huge rate of current emission.
[2] Yes, much of our current consumption delivers real benefits to people's lives; but much (most) of it doesn't. The point of my analogy is that the sheer wastefulness of the present excess will be paid for in the future at far greater cost and is being spent on such trivial or actively harmful goals.
In other words, wouldn’t the co2 concentration go down naturally within the next 100 years even if we let thing run naturally?
The former is more relevant to the discussion, and is stated as ~30 years.
We are in such a situation that every +0.01°C increase in global warming is gained more or less indefinitely.
The only thing we can do is stopping net emissions and learn to live with the climate as it is when we achieve this.
We really don’t care a lot about concentrations going down in the next centuries because by the time it happens, the harm would be done already for multiple centuries.
We are really facing today, 50°C in summer and devastating events, for our generation and our kids. This precise battle is already lost but we must fight for it to not be even more dramatic.
Do the math, grab an investor and go get $100M.
"Just plant trees." Okay do the math on how many trees you need. Figure out how your going to build a program to get that many trees planted. What incentives, partnership, funding do you need. How will it scale to the amount needed. What will the full lifecycle look like.
"Just improve soil." Okay do the math on that. What's the timeframe for return on investment. What do the logistics look like for producing soil in huge quantities and deploying it where needed. How do we then use that soil to grow plants that sequester carbon.
90% of the comments in here are just the "middle-brow dismissal" of climate change of all things. As if we can "just do X" to solve it and everyone else is an idiot.
It's a hard problem, especially because part of the problem is determining how to actually implement and incentivize the population to do it. You can't just ignore that part, or just throw up your hands "people are stupid so we're fucked." Solving the incentive problem is actually part of the problem. Any solution that ends with "people just need to learn to do/value X" is dead in the water. You can start with "people just need to learn to do/value X" but you need to end with a plan on how you will bring about that change in mentality/incentive.
Let's get to work.
I feel like I see/hear a lot of uncritical faith in (techno|market|competition)-solutions, with little discussion of what Nth-order effects may travel with those approaches. Just some scattered thoughts:
- The best case for progress is probably technology that leads to profitable unsubsidized capture, but incremental technological progress may give the industry that springs up around it profit motives to overshoot.
- Profitable capture would, if fossil-fuel producers get in on the action themselves, shift their break-even points around somewhat.
- Even if this operates at a loss and depends on public funding, if the work is done by private industry and not the public sector, a few decades of capture may avert/blunt the crisis but leave us with yet another powerful lobby. It'll likely be flush with good-will and hard to regulate, let alone wind down once it has served its use.
- As @knodi123 puts it: "I can not-pump 100M of oil in my own back yard. And you wouldn't believe the rate I can not pump it at!" If all of the operators depend on subsidy, there will be a decent incentive towards graft/corruption/fraud. There'll have to be some amount of administrative overhead going to verifying what is captured, that it isn't double-counted, that it actually gets sequestered, and so on. A deepening crisis could mean more of this money sloshing around and less will to build the compliance mechanisms that ensure it accomplishes the goal. Rampant graft could be enough to sink the program.
But I worry that this path is already the one we're disposed to fail/default into, and that a rose-tinted view of it will only make it easier for other opportunities slip through our fingers while gobs of smart people focus on the technological half of the moon-shot.
Put another way, the degree of optimism I hear on these approaches smells like the kind of hubris that causes people to lose races they think they've won.
In any case, I do not intend to suggest any subsidy to fossil fuel producers, here. When I say operators, I mean the operators of capture operations. The only context in which I intentionally point to producers is around the possibility that they might also become capture operators if it was profitable.
Casually building pyramids out of the ~57 cubic kilometers of carbon blocks would be pretty neat. three 4 kilometer tall square based pyramids would do it.
They would also be the largest structures ever built by humanity by an order of magnitude.
$36/ton would raise the price of gasoline about 36 cents. The cost to capture ALL 6.5B tons of US emissions would be about $236B per year, or 1.1% of GDP. I think even getting it down to a $100/ton would change the discussion.
These are real, manageable numbers that should undermine opposition to mitigating climate change and get something resembling a carbon tax based on a feasible number. Policies like "A 39 cent/gallon tax on gasoline" is much more understandable and politically feasible then "you'll have to change everything you do." And then, once in place, we'll see the economic effects of taxing carbon accelerate movement away from carbon emitting solutions, which are already becoming non-competitive in many scenarios.
None of this means we shouldn't do things SOONER, espicially since DACC might never get that cheap, but I like the way this XPrize has the potential to change people's political calculus.
Sources: https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php#:...
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas....
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...
The elephant in the room is that most of the proposed process chemistry does not have the necessary scale. If I need a billion tons of mined mineral per year to make a dent -- the reality for many of these proposals -- and current global production is a few thousand tons, you have a serious practicality problem. Not only would you need to develop those mines and the corresponding power generation facilities to manufacture the chemicals (which is energy intensive), we may not have the necessary mineral reserves. Addressing these all require massive amounts of capital investment that are not included in the cost per ton of the process at current scales. Buying a liter of water has completely different economics than buying a trillion liters of the same water, and the cost is always calculated as if it was the former case.
While recycling of reactant chemicals is always a part of these proposals, they are typically only ~90% efficient as designed (each marginal increase in recycling efficiency tends to be exponentially more expensive). At the scales involved, that requires billions of tons of reactants being produced that don't exist today. It would be the largest mining and chemical manufacturing endeavor ever undertaken on the planet, starting from zero.
The beauty of proof of work is the hashing algo is both 1) very hard to solve and 2) very easy to verify by anyone anywhere.
Furthermore, 3) miners have a financial incentive to solve the algo and 4) They may do so in anyway they see fit.
At a minimum a crypto-like solution should have these four properties.
Now we already have a lot of unpaid CO2 miners (plants) doing it inefficiently, ad hoc and short-term. The first stage should be to allow these to opt in to get rewarded. Like you could mine bitcoin with spare CPU back in the day.
Most mining devices don't actually ever successfully win a single bitcoin. But they get paid pro rata for their contribution to the combined hashing power, which did.
For miners in a pool hashing power is the saleable commodity. Perhaps this was the point you were making.
Even if it didn't fulfill its potential (yet), we must remember what made bitcoin so special: eliminating the double-spend and central authority problems. How do you intend to sell your sequestered CO2 and prove that it's still yours to sell?
This is all hypothetical anyway. To my knowledge there's no scheme that satisfies those criteria wrt proof of sequestration.
You could ban oil as a store, but people will use it as a power source for net positive emissions processes to sequester CO2 in another form.
It also makes money laundering laughably easy (plant trees). Then again, maybe we care less if we can turn that money towards good.
And there are also the general issues with using a physical currency. It's hard to transact across distances. You could do a bank-like system, but at that point it starts to look like carbon credits and calls into question the necessity of a parallel currency.
There's a lot of great work on the "this is a huge problem, how do we fix it?" side of things; we need to keep encouraging more on the "there's an abundance of this stuff that people consider bad and worthless, how can I use it?" side of things.
Imagine if every CO2 molecule were somehow unique: carrying with it a physical hash that could cheaply identify the processes that produced it. In this scenario, such an economy would become feasible.
To reduce complexity and cost, it needn't be every molecule. Say just one in a quadrillion, at an exactly fixed rate.
Of course CO2 is actually generic, as far as I know. Yet with only one wave of the magic wand, an economic solution has appeared.
Assuming regulatory and societal support, which should be forthcoming in this current climate (pun intended).
(No affiliation, just intrigued by what they're promising)
Project vesta tries to use the sea and waves to accelerate this process. It's a bit of an unproven experiment however it definitely has potential and needs supporting to prove the hypothesis and improve the method.
i've found https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.energy... to be a pretty good overview.
Don't get me wrong it's possibly a great weapon against clime change and we are going to need every single one.
I've been working on carbon removal for the past few years, eager to help anyone who is considering actually making a leap into this industry for their own curiosity or even career.
That said there are plenty of other massive juicy challenges facing the climate. Whatever you choose, good luck!
How? And can I join?
One you go through that, there's a 5 week group discussion on carbon removal basics, check out AirMiners Boot Up: https://bootup.airminers.org/
Great, guess you should tell more about your experience.
If you're working on carbon removal or want to support carbon removal please feel free to email me directly:
ewan (at) above website
We're not on AirMiners - will check it out tomorrow. Have to sign off shortly unfortunately but will check back tomorrow for replies.
Enjoy that pool!
I offset my emissions with Wren (https://wren.co – I am not affiliated) and wonder how it compares to Carbon Removed. My current plan there is ~$23 to offset 200% of my emissions for a total of 1.3 tons of CO2/month (if that seems low: I have no car, no commute, live in a 1-bedroom apartment and rarely eat meat).
The plans for Carbon Removed are at $15 for 100 kg, $42 for 300 kg, and $65 for 500 kg. Why such a difference? That's $0.13-0.15/kg for Carbon Removed and $0.018/kg at Wren.
Where is the difference coming from?
A key difference between us and Wren (and other offset based services) is that we focus on carbon removal - actively undoing a carbon footprint, rather than offsetting it. The way we see it this way: if we emit a ton of CO₂, we should remove a ton resulting in 0 emissions in the atmosphere. If we offset (by paying typically developing countries to change their behaviour), there is still a ton in the atmosphere.
As a result, sequestering carbon dioxide is much harder and expensive. For example, removing via Direct Air Capture is currently around $1000/ton. Via bio-oil is close to $700/ton. At the other end of the scale offsets are typically $32/ton.
I don't want to diminish the efforts of offsets - they have a place and help developing nations transition to more sustainable alternatives - but we want to focus on bringing carbon removal down the curve. To try and make this more affordable we also mix in calculated removals via forestation which is cheaper.
Does that make things a little clearer?
On my Wren profile, it says "Your annual carbon emissions are equivalent to..." with a few equivalent amounts like "18793 miles driven in a car" or "The amount of CO2 349 pine trees absorb in a year". So isn't planting 349 pine trees in a year offsetting my emissions, literally removing the CO2 my lifestyle produced? (maybe once they're grown).
If what you mean by offsets is more something like "pay to have N people switch to cleaner fuels instead of cooking with coal", then sure. But on Wren you can choose how to distribute the amount you pay; some can go to planting trees, some can go to cleaner fuels, or rainforest protection, etc.
I looked up other similar services yesterday and found Terrapass (https://www.terrapass.com/ – also not affiliated) and their plan for 13,000 lbs/year costs $4.86/month or $58.32/5,897kg or ≈ 1c/kg. That said, it wasn't exactly clear from a quick look whether it was lowering emissions by this amount of removing the same amount.
I do get your point though, and the distinction is definitely important. The name Carbon Removed certainly makes this goal clear. I wish other services clearly differentiated how much CO2 was actively removed per dollar spent.
In any case, best of luck! I'm glad to see more of these initiatives and wish you success.
These all get certified that they do _something_ however the quantity of CO₂ mitigated is vague. Bloomberg actually did a short video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI) on how tree based offsets can be abused within the rules set out by the verification systems.
On top of this trees take time to reach maturity, die from disease & wildfires releasing their CO₂ and in some cases encourage farmers to deforest to replant for the offset credits.
This is all very negative but I am trying to provide the other side of the coin.
Trees are not enough to reverse the impact we, as a society, have had on the climate, but they are a very important part and should be supported. Our approach is to use forestation (we also double plant and calculate carbon sequestered over 10 years) in combination with much needed technological solutions to help develop them and bring them down the price curve.
Thank you so much for this discussion and your luck. Keep up the great work learning and doing good for the climate.
Also check out AirMiners, the hub for everything carbon removal at https://airminers.org/
And those who are interested in a 5 week group discussion on carbon removal basics check out Boot Up: https://bootup.airminers.org/
AirMiners has a #jobs channel on Slack that's one of the most popular. However because it's on Slack means it's limited to people who are part of the AirMiners community. Which would miss folks like you!
I appreciate your perspective that someone with your background might not join AirMiners itself, but may be an excellent candidate for a job at a carbon removal company.
For all of his social flaws this thought alone gives him my deep respect. I don't think he is infallible but in my opinion a lot of attempts at character assassination don't truly understand the underlying purpose of why he does what he does. I still look at developments in his companies with a critical eye - for example neuralink is rather close to making me uncomfortable with how soon we may have commerically viable high-speed BMI. And then I remember all the medical good that can be done with it. I am wary of Starlink interfering with space observation and science, and yet I can think of all the good that can come from more minds having better access to humanity's greatest learning tool, the internet.
He's not perfect, and I most certainly cannot defend the work ethic required of those employed under him. But if I were to have a chance to do it for a year, I would know the reasons I was going through it for.
Good. If you invested without thinking into crypto, 100% full responsibility is on you. Elon is just a litmus test how fragile crypto currencies are and how they can be manipulated. Fully functional adults need to be a bit more cautious with their funds. We're not talking about people with mental issues here.
Elon has got a shitty attitude regarding his popularity/celebrity status but the things he has done to improve the world dwarfs his misdeeds. For some reason public loves grocery-store aisle tabloids and Elon is no exception to this gossip. The tabloid now is in the form of Twitter.
I think we need to experiment with new political systems. One I am interested in is democracy + communism. I think it's time to start a new city where everyone earns the same salary. I have many ideas for how to start and build the city and make it a great place to live.
[0]: https://www.prometheusfuels.com/on-the-road/happy-earth-day-...
But I'm not clear on wether their price point includes the revenue they get from selling the carbon (in the form of fuels or plastic)?
I.e, does it cost them 36 USD, or 351 USD? [0]
[0]: 36 USD + (1 tonne of Co2 / 19 lbs of Co2 per gallon of fuel) * 3 USD / gallon of fuel ≈ 36 + 105*3 = 351 USD. Makes a huge difference...
That's so much better than what I could have thought!
Even though my skeptical self almost falls in the "too god to be true" category I see you mention on Twitter, I'm very excited about following Prometheus' progress :-)
BTW: Make sure to let people know when/if human-drinkable ethanol "fuels" from Co2 are available for order! ;-)
I guess in that future we're getting power mainly from renewables and using hydrocarbons as power storage? We'd probably be using those same hydrocarbons to make plastics and the like as well.
Still, halting new fossil fuel extraction would be an excellent first step, even though the energy costs don't make much sense to me.
As far as I know there is no research paper on the topic ... nothing to indicate it actually is a viable solution.
They also don't want to talk to anyone about hard questions. It's like the Theranos of carbon removal, using Silicon-valley style secrecy.
I can't help but feel that if we are to successfully save the climate, it won't be dependent on secrecy.
Come on.
Remora is literally founded from their CTO’s PhD thesis.
From their website: “ Christina pioneered Remora’s technology during her engineering PhD at the University of Michigan, becoming one of the world’s leading experts on mobile carbon capture. She went on to test a mobile carbon capture prototype in the EPA’s National Vehicle and Fuel Emissions Lab”
If you Google “Christina Reynolds Carbon Capture” you will get, as a first result, a link to her PhD thesis:
https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/1515...
have to rely directly on solar energy (not intermediated by PV cell). To this end azolla ferns [1] and olivine weathering seem to be the most promising.
Assuming carbon sequestration can be done at scale, it will likely require energy, maybe even a lot of energy.
So where's this energy going to come from? Well... global energy demand is increasing as-is and the winners are: coal, oil and "natural" gas (which is a fossil fuel): https://www.statista.com/statistics/222066/projected-global-...
Even assuming the forecast 5x increase in "renewables*" (I can't find the double asterisk footnote) until 2050, it seems unreasonable that a ~250EJ "blue team" (hydro, nuclear, other renewables) could plug a ~500EJ hole created by the "red team" (coal, oil, fossil gas).
We need a magnitude more clean power and all the wind, solar and wishful thinking in the world aren't going to cut it.
And geo-thermal - that is currently being used in Iceland by Carbfix + Climeworks.
Also worth noting that a lot of these technologies do thorough lifecycle analysis to make sure that despite the energy usage required they are still carbon negative.
I don't know where these figures come from, but the IEA underestimating the deployment of renewable energy, as well as cost reductions, has become a running joke among people who model energy or study the electric grid.
Renewable energy is a growing and profitable field, and if you're concerned about not having enough clean electricity to power carbon removal, there are many opportunities to work full time on expanding renewable energy.
> I don't know where these figures come from /../
There is a link to a well respected statistics site right above the line you are quoting, so if you don't know where the figures are coming from, that says a lot.
So, no, it is not clear where these data actually come from, it's not straightforward to find out without paying, and my point, about the IEA being very, very wrong in its projections about renewable energy for more than a decade, still stands.
As for your claim about the IEA, you're welcome to post some source to back that claim, other readers may be interested.
Next you'd probably build geothermal power stations at a huge scale in iceland or a similarly volcanic places. That power is still cheaper than solar or natural gas by a decent margin.
Nuclear is a contender only if you can find a place willing to let you skip all the red tape and build rather unsafe 1970's designs...
Yes, but that doesn't mean we won't need it.
Take air planes. We can't just put batteries in there: too low energy density or something (I'm no physicist, but they won't fly very far is what I gather). But by capturing the CO2 (at exhaust, or atmospherically) that they put out, we can have both airplanes and a stable climate -- assuming it's all done right.
Who wants to have a wind turbine in their back yard? A nuclear power plant? Who lives near that hydro plant in the middle of nowhere? We could instead capture CO2 away from people if power is cheap, before sending the rest down a slightly lossy transmission path.
Driving regular passenger vehicles electrically is definitely less energy intensive than capturing the GHGs that a combustion engine produces, so it would obviously be counter-productive to use capture technology for those sorts of things. But we can use it for other things like chemical processes that produce a GHG as a byproduct where it's hard to capture (new buildings using concrete, for example) or when we don't have the technology to get rid of the emissions.
Right now, the quickest wins are from emission reduction. This capture technology is something we need to have ready for the next phase of keeping our natural habitat stable.
Here in Los Angeles we have honest-to-god oil derricks in our neighborhoods and the NIMBYs don't even notice. Apartments OTOH...
I never actually saw anyone compare the options. Anyone know if it's cheaper (or less energy-intensive) per ton of CO2 to turn atmospheric CO2 into rock and continue using fossil fuels for another century until oil really starts playing hard to get, or if it's cheaper (or less energy-intensive) to use this air-to-fuel technology?
Actually for completion it is a feasible proposal [0] (Obviously not for jet propulsion though).
[0] https://www.airbus.com/innovation/zero-emission/electric-fli...
This has economics of scale benefits, and I expect reactors such as the ones discussed in this video: https://youtu.be/7gtog_gOaGQ to be produced on a factory line extremely quickly.
We can, and we certainly should, but that does not solve the problem because those trees will eventually die and that carbon will cycle back through the biosphere. Mankind extracted a ton of carbon from the ground, where it was locked away, and we put it back into the air. People are trying to find ways of putting all that extra carbon back somewhere where it won't affect the cycles in nature. Trees just temporarily lock up carbon.
Trees in forests are self-replicating. When one dies another grows in its place.
Yes, this isn't the only solution, but it's certainly part of the solution.
You've accomplished everything other sequestration technology promises, but you've done so in a way that is environmentally friendly.
Stopping deforestation and massively boosting reforestation is one of the most effective things we can already do at scale. At this point we also need active carbon capture and significant reduction in emissions too, though - a multi-pronged approach.
This paper has some interesting ideas: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0...
My approach would be to find the best CO2/$ types of trees, buy them straight from the lumber industry, and sequester them in no-longer-used quarries. Just need to figure out a scalable way to ensure anaerobic conditions to help prevent CO2 release on breakdown.
I would think that a proper solution would require figuring out how to get all that carbon into a chemical form that is chemically stable and won't biodegrade. The ideal looks a whole lot like coal, I'd guess?
For example an old coal mine and then seal it.
Old coal mines are too dangerous for humans to enter so you need some kind of robotics to load them up with trees and other biomatter to bury.
Trees aren't the complete solution and the reason why has nothing to do with the tree dying and releasing the carbon.
What's going on here is that plants are converting CO2 into mass. A tree that isn't growing isn't creating new mass and therefore isn't lowering carbon in the atmosphere.
Western USA has had a "fire season" for every year for the last like 4 years. Last year, other places like Brazil and Africa join in on the fun.
So planting trees without a robust animal/insect ecosystem to decompose them before they combust is an incomplete solution.
AFAIK coal is composed mostly of trees that fell back before microbes evolved that could eat through their cellulose walls, and have had millennia of underground compression to further increase their stability - basically that process isn't available naturally to trees that fall today.
The problem is the space issue and that it takes a decade or two for there to be meaningful carbon uptake.
Most land is private so you can't go around planting willy nilly. What's worse is that you are technically not allowed to plant on most public land either, although for small amounts of native species, you can sneak by.
That’s pretty much how we got here, except instead of planting we mined, cut and burnt.
The pathway back is rather harder.
It seems insane that we aren't looking at trees more seriously. Here we have a self-reproducing, exponential, solar powered, organic, low-tech, carbon capture system. We don't even have to plant them, we can simply allocate land and let them do their thing on their own if we're patient for natural succession. Or we can accelerate the process by planting select species, thinning etc.
We should also be setting aside more of the remaining old-growth forests to protect them from being logged, as these forests represent a standing carbon sink (aside all of the other ecological benefits of protecting old-growth forest).
I know it's not the complete solution and that we need all the cards on the table, but I fear that in our appetite for high tech fixes, we're overlooking this simple biological solution.
As others have said, trees are only temporary as they eventually die and need to be replanted. They're also slow to start, and need to be maintained (which costs carbon as well).
I wrote a short piece about it (with sources)[0]
[0] https://carbonremoved.com/blog/trees-are-not-the-answer-to-c...
Use irrigation canals covered in solar power panels for pumps etc.
Plant vegetation and build up forests slowly. Slowly expand across the desert and connect both ends the block off grids and repeat irrigation and planting until the desert is gone.
If everyone stopped mowing their lawns for 20 years and let trees run wild instead, would that make a dent?
What about that plus turn half of our roads into parks?
Anyone got a link to a good open source interactive simulator?
That's one country, for one year. The world has been burning coal for more than a century. To get back to preindustrial CO2 levels, all that coal needs to be unburned and buried again. That's the scale of the problem.
One aspect is that the required land area - https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2927/examining-the-viability-o... mentions 900 million hectares (2.2 billion acres), which would roughly cover the 10Gt/year asked by the x-prize - is enormous, and it's not an accident or negligence that this land isn't forested now, it's generally because we turned it into farmland or pastures.
Are we willing to take away 900 million hectares of land that produces food for the world and money for the locals away from that productive use and turn all of it into unproductive forest that won't get used for logging? Perhaps we are, but if there are other options for carbon removal that don't require as much land resources, that would be preferable.
I mean, in Canada when they raze a patch of forest they already immediately replant it.
The areas that aren't forested are so because they're being used for agriculture.
I'm picturing a power plant burning coal, then a windmill farm next to it powering a carbon removal process. I guess the potential power generation offset must be accounted for, even if in the solution it's coming from renewable resources.
The solution really seems to be to burn less of it in the first place.
I'm not saying we shouldn't try to be maximally efficient and renewable in our energy usage, but often times a reduction in energy usage requires a loss of functions that improve people's lives.
I agree that not using fossil fuels is the most efficient method, but it's also not easy to take action on. We need to pursue every viable avenue in parallel, and carbon removal solutions are, if not particularly efficient yet, at least very actionable. And with R&D, perhaps they will become more efficient.
1.) it attacks three different problem sources - the carbon already in the air, and the carbon generated by concrete production, and the carbon from steel production. Cement is responsible for about 8% of global CO2 emissions [1], and steel another 8% [2].
2.) it offers profit incentives, since the people using the trees get a direct benefit (unlike people throwing biochar into an ocean trench). Any long-lasting solution to our carbon problem is going to have to find a way to exist on something other than direct carbon-dedicated subsidies. A self-sufficient business can survive shifting political winds much better than a literal money-sink.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46455844
[2] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/metals-and-mining/our-in...
The massive scale of growing bamboo plants that would be needed would best take place in large empty deserts. Finding the right species and water supply should be the main challenge with this concept.
My idiot-layman brain says buy it from AirGas or capture from large emitters and pipe it into a geological structures like the do for storing helium. It could probably only get to gigatons if it's worldwide and we have enough geological structures capable of containing it.
If the solution to carbon capture comes from a company like Deepmind (ala protein folding), i'll eat my shoe.
Carbon neutral or negative alternatives to energy production, concrete production, travel (flight), meat and many others would be incredible.
The best emissions are the ones never emitted in the first place.
My current attempt to support projects like these is to make them as accesible as possible on https://carbonremoved.com
You get your $1M and I will include your removal method in our portfolio!
(0) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/12/magazine/climeworks-busin...
A bunch of people here are getting into the technological solutions to this problem, but I really think the even bigger challenge is the social/cultural barriers to implementing even a proven technology.
Reducing amount of CO2 we emit is good, finding a way to capture/convert released CO2 is better, but there is Bezos-level wealth waiting for the person who invents/discovers an actual use for it. I hope this X-prize helps encourage that style of thinking.
[Happy to be wrong, but I'd be surprised]
that being said, is it possible to just send up a vacuum into space with two very long and wide hoses and a solar panel into lower earth orbit and just have it literally suck out the carbon and blow it into space?
We release about 43 billion tons of CO2 in a year. A forest fire releases about 5-30 tons of CO2 per hectare.
We're burning the equivalent of a forest the size of Africa every year.
It feels like offering free swimming floats to the first one who can swim out to get them.
I just wish it was tiered such that proper seed money backs various alternatives and the best proven tech (not just the first) gets a big boost when attempting to scale.
But not my millions to spend so I just hope it had a good impact.
As an example, we can look at the Netflix Prize [1], which was only $1M. But that $1M bought them way, way more than $1M worth of work: "over 20,000 teams had registered for the competition from over 150 countries. 2,000 teams had submitted over 13,000 prediction sets." It's hard to guess the value of having 20,000 teams working on the Netflix problem, but $1M invested directly by Netflix would probably only pay for 3-4 engineers for 1 year, so it seems like they got a lot of leverage out of that $1M.
By incentivizing economical carbon capture, he might be able to kick off a self-funding industry, which would be an important part of the long term set of solutions needed to address atmospheric carbon increases.
He could also do other things like invest in some power plants too.
But seriously, this is harder than it sounds. Unless you pay him to permanently sequester $100M of oil, I don't see how it would make a difference.
[0]https://www.spglobal.com/platts/en/market-insights/latest-ne...
This will drive up price of oil for everyone which is the most effective way to accelerate the adoption of renewables.
The world spends 6-9bn USD per day on oil (100m barrels at 60-90 USD), maybe we start with spending 1bn per day.
Edit: Fixed calculation.
That doesn't mean that a) we should extract all of it, and b) we won't find more of it.
What about burying it in the ground?
The problem is that driving up the price of oil for everyone significantly (so much that there would be a meaningful reduction in usage, not just a slight decrease) is politically unacceptable. Looking at historical gas crises, even literally doubling the price of gas probably would not cause sufficient reduction in driving; but a government intentionally doubling the price of gas to reduce driving would not get popular support, it get voted out for daring to impose such punitive measures.
You are also right that raising prices was very unpopular in the past. But some things need to be done to curb fossil fuel use and support alternatives. High oil prices are the most effective way.
In that regard, if we're looking at how to motivate change to actually happen, it is appropriate to look at the incentives that would/wouldn't make sense from the national perspective - because otherwise it's just empty PR and wishful thinking, proposals that have no chance to get implemented. And, to put it explicitly, climate change is not currently overriding most other aspects of national interests, far from it, it's not (yet?) the #1 or even #3 concern in most countries elections or unelected leader motivations.
You will have to deal with this problem either way, going straight to the Saudi Arabian oil operator just skips the middleman.
I often wonder if, once the effects of climate change rack up a few million more dead, whether the people directly affected with nothing left to lose might go all Rambo on whatever responsible target of opportunity happens to be at hand. It certainly wouldn't take a $1m bounty. I suspect $1k would be just as effective in a couple of decades.
Doesn't it seem that if you want serious teams / companies putting serious people on this for 4 years you need the prize to be $1 billion+?
Google had 100's of highly paid engineers working on virtual reality for a few years. Amazon had/has 100's working on Alexa. That's 100's of millions per year in each case. To incentivize several teams of 10's or 100's of really solid engineers, there has to be a pretty crazy high payoff given the chances of failure.
Elon how about a prize of $1 billion in Tesla stock?
Yuge
> Seven countries of the Sahel region, an area located just south of the Sahara, therefore initiated a project that will see billions of trees planted across 11 countries by 2030
> A total of 20 countries pledged support to the Sahel countries for the mammoth project. The European Commission has already invested more than €7 million ( $7.5 million).
> But according to the United Nations, the initiative has only reached 15% of its targets after just over a decade. "Progress is slow, but we have learned a lot along the way," said climate consultant Vivekananda.
https://www.dw.com/en/what-happened-to-africas-ambitious-gre...
We could all be doing a little more to reduce our carbon content.
Also, it is difficult to plant trees in a desert. Also, algae blooms are dangerous for other life forms.
However, there are some startups working with super-fast-growing (ugly) trees that are then used as construction material, which would be a longer-term-functioning sink. Not very clear whether that scales.
The trees grow. We cut them down. We make houses out of them, which are wrapped to prevent deterioration. The sunk carbon becomes our buildings.
Other uses of the wood are also usually carbon sinks. Paper either gets recycled (the carbon is preserved) or it gets buried in a sealed landfill where is takes decades or longer to break down.
It'd be cool to calculate how much carbon Weyerhaeuser sucks out of the atmosphere each year.
A 25 year old maple will sequester 400 pounds of co2 in it's lifetime. An average commuter car will emit that in 2 weeks. Hauling all that carbon out of the forest will likely emit far more than that.
If we're building the buildings anyway, we have to compare with alternative building materials. That is, how much more would transporting that lumber emit, compared to transporting for instance brick?
But since CO2 is easier to measure than biomass and ecosystem complexity, everyone is focused on sucking carbon out of the air when we need to be restoring grasslands, forests, and coral reefs.
Source: Charles Eisenstein's "Climate: A New Story"
[1]https://www.oecd.org/env/cc/Outlook%20to%202050_Climate%20Ch... [2]https://www.acer-acre.ca/resources/climate-change-in-context... [3]https://www.businessinsider.com/carbon-dioxide-indoors-could...
That might be slightly more tricky (and less efficient) than you seem to imagine.
Also, the prize is not exclusively for "chemical" carbon extraction, if you can find a way to scale algae bloom to be a long term carbon sink without ruining the environment in other ways you are eligible:
> Any carbon negative solution is eligible: nature-based, direct air capture, oceans, mineralization, or anything else that achieves net negative emissions, sequesters CO2 durably, and show a sustainable path to achieving low cost at gigatonne scale.
TL; DW: planting 20 million trees would equal roughly the CO2 emissions of the USA for half a day.
1. Trees will eventually die and release their CO2 through rot or burning
2. Consequences of changing the ecosystem so rapidly
"Surely the net biomass stored in fossil fuels could be completely resuscitated, so to speak." - that's a strong no - fossil fuels have accumulated over millions of years, having all that carbon become biomass all at once would not be returning to something that existed earlier but something completely unprecedented, it would require many times more biomass than the Earth has now or has had at any particular moment of history.
I was surprised that Sahara has been green cyclically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara#Desertification_and_pre...
Algae can be >100 times as efficient at that than terrestrial plants, so there might be a there there, but even still, fracking basalt probably beats that by a couple of orders of magnitude.
> Certain species of bamboo can grow 910 mm (36 in) within a 24-hour period, at a rate of almost 40 mm (11⁄2 in) an hour (a growth around 1 mm every 90 seconds, or 1 inch {2.54 centimeters} every 40 minutes).
At least it's better than no trees at all.
As long as we don't end up with monocultures (also bad for the environment) they should be part of the solution!
We could plant fast growing bamboo and turn it into biochar/bio-oil? Or use it for sustainable housing?
Sadly, the natural kelp forests are in really bad shape. I haven't seen the stats on giant kelp, but the bull kelp forests have been practically been wiped off the map by sea urchins and warming waters over the past decade or two. The natural kelp forests probably didn't provide much in terms of CO2 absorption, as dead plant matter would decay quickly in the ocean, but it's been a huge loss for aquatic wildlife.
'What the heroin industry can teach us about solar power' - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-53450688
The satellite images show the green areas over the desert increasing.
They're pumping water from underground to irrigate the poppies using electric pumps and solar panels.
I wonder how quickly the water table will be depleted though.
1) Reduce emissions to zero (will take some time).
2) Use more natural solutions (trees, algae, kelp etc. - will also take time).
3) Enhance natural solutions with tech (enhanced weathering).
4) Develop carbon capture tech to reverse the damage done by the fossil-fuel burning tech.
Why do you prefer "freeing up carbon from the ground" ? Usually that's just a sideeffect that happens only because we want some other thing e.g. extract energy from oil or manufacture cement by calcinating limestone; and if we want a stable atmosphere then we can't be freeing up carbon from the ground without putting it back.
How many centuries is it going to take to reduce global emissions to... Half of their current levels?
But this depends on global willingness to do so by choosing (more expensive) sustainable products and voting for politicians who want to enforce/encourage carbon reductions
The New Soviet Man was an experiment only 70 years in the making, and it was in no way a successful one.
2. Let's suppose that actually happens. Let's suppose we get to 50% of current emissions in... 50 years.
We currently increase CO2 concentrations by 2.5 ppm/year. This would put us at over 500 PPM in my expected lifetime... In one of the more optimistic interpretations of your predictions.
For bonus points, even if we hit 50% reduction in 50 years, that would way overachieve what the Paris Accord set out. We are currently not on track to hit any of the targets in the Paris Accord.