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Comment by slantedview | Hacker News Reader

It's worth noting that the promise of mastering climate engineering is largely being pushed by fossil fuel interests, and it appears to be delusional at this point that climate engineering will be our savior. For that reason, we can't let hope get in the way of taking actions that we know will help.

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Unfortunately the practical answer is probably both. We've collectively f*cked up by failing to curtail emissions more quickly. The only path forward now is to continue to move to carbon neutral fuel sources as quickly as possible while using geoengineering to buy ourselves time.

Unfortunately, if we successfully pause global warming via geoengineering, my bet is that'll give us the excuse to slow down or stop CO2 emission curtailment, and that way lies disaster as oceans acidify and food chains fall apart.

The only real exception is atmospheric carbon capture. Capturing a gallon of gas worth of CO2 would cost $1-2 if we ramped the known technologies up. That’s equivalent to a 20-40% gas tax, which is totally feasible (or would be if politicians weren’t so bought off).

> Capturing a gallon of gas worth of CO2 would cost $1-2 if we ramped the known technologies up.

Capturing from the general atmosphere, or capturing at the moment of emission? I think those have very different efficiencies.

General atmosphere. A gallon of gas emits 1/100th of a ton of CO2, and companies are projecting $100-200 per ton of CO2 captured from the atmosphere.

Which technologies are these? I've read about a few some time ago, but they were all quite pie in the sky deals then.

There are two categories of technologies that tend to land in that price range. There are things that cause existing rocks to react with CO2 faster (such as crushing olivine), and there are ones that use a combination of electricity and catalysts / reversible chemical reactions to either concentrate the CO2 or cause it to fix to some abundant chemical.

They are all quite pie in the sky in the sense that they're mostly startups with no operational experience in large scale chemical manufacturing trying to build up plants (and organizations to build the plants) from scratch.

However, at least some of them rely on bog-standard chemistry, and the chemistry only requires chemical reactions that we already perform at industrial scale.

I get the distinct impression that if US said it was going to federalize any oil company that still had net CO2 emissions in 2028 (and also suspend any patents in this space as part of an emergency action), the logistics would magically work themselves out. I'd guess it would only cost a few weeks of oil industry profits (so, ~ $10B) total to prove out a half dozen technologies. At that point, many copies of the top two or three plants could be replicated out globally.

We could stop burning fossil fuels tomorrow and it would already be a continuing problem. The only savior here is both transitioning to green energy and geoengineering.

It would be a worsening problem if we stopped burning fossil fuels today; we’re already committed to more warming. Seas take a while to get up to the new thermal equilibrium.

Spot on. There's not a lot of evidence climate engineering can be done quickly, to scale and with known and acceptable side effects. People are desperately clawing for any excuse to focus on the positive so they can return to an apathetic existence. Lots of trees, lots of regulations and fines, lots of investment in less damaging technologies, lots of stuff that we know works.

To be clear, there absolutely is evidence climate engineering can be done quickly: we may have ready done it by moving to and then from sulphur bearing marine fuels over the course of a couple decades:

https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shippin...

I've hear of the shipping cloud trails. How's this going to be employed at scale without creating other massive problems?

Wikipedia has a pretty extensive article on the topic, as usual:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stratospheric_aerosol_injectio...

Short version: Probably aircraft, but anything that can get aloft and dump aerosols (e.g. SO2) into the upper atmosphere.

The scary thing is it's all quite achievable and isn't even that expensive or complex.

Regarding the issue of speed, the wikipedia article even notes one of the benefits as:

> Speed: A common argument is that stratospheric aerosol injection can take place quickly, and would be able to buy time for carbon sequestration projects such as carbon dioxide air capture to be implemented and start acting over decades and centuries.

And ironically, we don't even have to worry that much about side-effects since the effects of atmospheric aerosols are relatively temporary.

But, again: a) doesn't help with ocean acidification, which threatens entire foodchains, and b) gives an easy out to not do the hard and necessary work of cutting down on CO2 emissions.

That said, at this point, I would make a very sizable bet that a major country or countries will engage in some type of geoengineering within the next, oh... 10 years at the outside? The dangers of allowing global warming to continue to run away are just too high for some nation to not do it, prove it, and pave the way for others to follow.

> with known and acceptable side effects

I bet there's some unknown and undesirable ones, too. Law of unintended consequences on a planetary scale.

Not only fossil fuel interests but also shipping and shopping interests. How much fuel is spent shipping useless plastic trinkets from China to the rest of the world only to have them break after a few months/years and end up in the ocean.

I'm starting to think industrial CO2 sequestering is a fantasy too

it always has been. All the projects attempted thus far have failed or been suspended[0][1][2] every time its been meaningfully tried

[0]: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_wholer...

[1]: https://ieefa.org/resources/carbon-capture-crux-lessons-lear...

[2]: https://thebulletin.org/2022/09/plagued-by-failures-carbon-c...

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