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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

Al Gore gave a TED talk about this just a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgZC6da4mco (What the Fossil Fuel Industry Doesn't Want You To Know)

He says the same thing, with receipts. All these carbon capture things are just fossil fuel companies extending their lifetime. They spend X million on "solving" carbon capture while spending 2*X million telling people how hard they're working on solving carbon capture.

This has been going on for decades with very very minimal progress.

But the fossil fuel companies like to tout how they will increase their carbon capture by 500% by 2030. They do not mention how that increase brings them from 0.01% of their total carbon output to 0.05% in 10 years.

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Gore said in that talk that a number of countries are still increasing their production of fossil fuels. There's nothing we can do, short of war, to force other countries to stop releasing CO2, so it seems to me that carbon capture is the only solution. As the article says, "That fight of leave it in the ground we're not going to win."

The top comment makes effective carbon capture sound impossible, but to put it in perspective, the Interstate Highway System in the US alone used "enough [aggregates] to make 700 mounds the size of the largest Egyptian pyramids."[1]

If the numbers here are right, carbon capture would be (very) roughly 2x the size of the IHS, compressed into a single year, and repeated every year. An enormous project, but spread out across many willing nations, and perhaps helped by the fact that CO2 diffuses naturally through the atmosphere and doesn't have to be transported like sand and gravel.

Difficult but doable, if the political will existed.

1: https://highways.dot.gov/highway-history/interstate-system/5...

> There's nothing we can do, short of war, to force other countries to stop releasing CO2

Well forcing ultimately ends in forcing violently, so this seems to be a bit tautological.

We (and other wealthy nations) can directly subsidize the replacement of carbon emitting processes to the extent possible with the agreement not to build more. This won't happen of course, but the idea that the only way forward is to force people is ridiculous.

> but spread out across many willing nations

Right after you just wrote off international cooperation to reduce emissions?

We don't have to convince every nation to contribute to carbon capture.

OTOH, reducing emissions demands cooperation from everyone.

No it doesn't. e.g. the top three countries already emit about 50% of global CO2 annually

Because wealthy countries pay high prices for fossil fuels, and less wealthy countries can't afford them. If rich countries stop using them and the price falls, there will be a lot of new demand.

The top three countries are not exactly known for getting along or adopting policies that help each other.

We aren't bound by reality in the conservation — the baseline is the likelihood of these countries and others doing ungodly amounts of carbon capture

The countries which emit the most are also the only ones who could deploy carbon capture on a large scale.

The cooperation either happens or it doesn't, but either way carbon capture is significantly less effective than decarbonising.

The top three countries _today_, and China is > 2x the US, who is ~ 2x India -- China alone emits 30% of the CO2.

How should we force China to stop emitting?

India wasn't even in the top 50% 20 years ago -- the nation is developing, they're burning fossil fuels and they're going to keep doing it to bring their people out of poverty. Should they keep their population in poverty?

What about other developing nations? Will Nigeria and Indonesia and Pakistan and Brazil decide that they'd rather keep their populations poor than build fossil fuel plants?

How should we force China to contribute to our greenwashing fantasy about carbon capture?

China doesn't have to contribute for carbon capture to work.

Why focus on other countries if most CO2 per capita is produced in the US?

Why focus on CO2 per capita? Total emissions is the measure that affects the climate. The same emissions, spread among more people, would cause the same climate change.

And the US only accounts for about 15% of total emissions.

Because people have a right to a decent life. You can't demand Chinese and Indian and African people live without power and AC just because they can't afford state of the art power grids, while smugly living off of more than a hundred years of being ~the only CO2 emitters, on which we've built our way of life (and this includes not just the USA but the EEA and a few other rich countries as well - India especially has lower CO2 emissions per capita than any of the self-proclaimed "green" nations in Europe).

And note that the solution for reducing emissions in China and India is relatively simple: commit string-free resources and money to building renewable grids and nuclear instead of coal.

> the solution for reducing emissions in China and India is relatively simple: commit string-free resources and money to building renewable grids and nuclear instead of coal

Money is fungible. Subsidising Chinese power means subsidising its military. Given it’s presently a dictatorship, that’s a dangerous proposition.

We should focus on decarbonising ourselves. Once our per-capita emissions are lower than others’, we can show them the way.

You could in principle stipulate that the aid is only offered as long as no new coal power is being constructed (so maybe just a few strings attached). That would get rid of the option to siphon [too much of] the money for military purposes.

Regardless, my point was that there are many options besides war for quite directly reducing other cointries' emissions. There may be second order effects, so I'm not necessarily advocating for it, but there is certainly no reason to say "we've done all we can".

> There's nothing we can do, short of war, to force other countries to stop releasing CO2

That's a good point that is not mentioned enough in these discussions. Basically, we cannot stop other countries from releasing CO2, but we can "steal" their air.

That is completely false. Try investing a few billion dollars into building renewable power and grids in India, with no strings attached (that is, without retaining ownership or asking for dividends etc), and see if that doesn't stop them from building more coal plants.

Yep, the CO2 pumped into the well is to simply improve extraction of the existing resource.

> All these carbon capture things are just fossil fuel companies extending their lifetime

Aren't most of them startups? The point of the article is that this is the first time an oil company is doing it (and they're doing it to inject into fields, not for climate reasons). If Gore is really claiming all carbon capture projects are by oil firms then surely he is lying.

The propaganda works: they've made at least some people believe spending their own and other people's money on carbon capture is a good idea.

No.

You're probably confusing carbon capture in general (which already exists in some quantities, although still small to what would be meaningful) with DAC. For the latter, Climeworks is kinda the leader, which is an independent startup. But even there, there's also carbon engineering, which is funded and owned by oil corps. (You may still call that a startup in the sense that it's a relatively young company trying something new, but well...)

But for carbon capture in general, all the large players are fossil fuel corps. Equinor in Norway, Shell in Canada, etc., all big oil. The only meaningful player that is not fossil fuel associated is Carbfix in Iceland.

what's DAC?

Direct air capture, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_air_capture In this context, DAC is the alternative to capturing carbon where you produce it, such as in a Coal power plants chimney.

> You're probably confusing carbon capture in general (which already exists in some quantities, although still small to what would be meaningful) with DAC.

If so, it's the person who posted the Al Gore talk that's confusing it, not the responder who assumed the Gore talk was about DAC, the original post.

IOW, someone did a bait & switch and folks who keep trying to talk about DAC are "confused".

Why can't we have Al Gore as president, again?

Al Gore strikes me as one of the many boring centrist politicians we have been electing here in Denmark for the past 60 years.

Obviously that means he has no chance in the US.

I mean he did win the popular vote when he ran for president. And likely would have won the electoral college if all valid votes had been counted.

So...why weren't all the votes counted???

Two words: hanging chads

That was part of it. Another part was that some Floridian voters were illegally denied the right to vote because their names happened to be the same or similar to names on a (poorly maintained, IIRC) list of convicted felons. The privately owned company in charge of maintaining said list was aligned with the Republican party, and most of the felons were African American. Edit: that may sound like a small number of votes, but in such a close election even a small number can make a huge difference.

Why is a private company in charge of maintaining this list, versus the state police, or a federal agency in charge of census keeping?

Most likely it's basically a corporate handout. It can also be a way to invite reciprocity. I don't know if that was part of the original intent here, but given the raft of voter ID laws that the US has seen in recent years (which prevent such an infinitesimal amount of actual voter fraud, yet coincidentally happen to adversely affect voters of one party much more than the other) it doesn't seem at all far fetched.

Naturally it's never described that way. It's typically framed as something like 'we should delegate this task to the private sector because they're more efficient'.

Yes and: Since corporations are not subject to public records requests, privatization (outsourcing) is a terrific way to transmute even banal administrative functions into black boxes.

Okay, so I looked this up on Wikipedia.

And I suppose my next questions would be:

* "why were those managing the recount so inflexible about when the re-count had to be completed by?"

* "why wasn't there any middle ground that could have been achieved by those (ostensibly) asking for 'openness' and those wanting to do the recount?" --- for example, by this, I am imagining something like the police maintaining order amongst the viewing public, so that they do not physically harm or otherwise distract the re-counting officials, and having professional observers from both parties available to make rounds as the process is being executed?

The most ridiculous detail about that botched election is the hanging chads were caused by those election administrators not clearing the chads from the prior elections.

Just turn each unit over and shake it. (Like a three hole punch.)

Not following procedures. One of the many consequences of conducting elections on the cheap.

So dumb.

Literally, direct action from Republican operatives. It's called the Brooks Brothers Riot. The list of currently high-profile consultants/etc. That were there is quite enlightening.

I'm not sure if I can blame the BBR, when it seems that 1) those doing the recount were remarkably inflexible about the deadline (what matters more? the deadline, or the recount, especially when it is being disrupted?) and 2) those who supplied the deadline were also being remarkably inflexible about the deadline.

The fact that BBR worked is only because those two points were true?

Florida

Al Gore won Florida.

The Supreme Court decided that didn’t matter.

What if we injected the carbon back into the earth

What if we vent the carbon into space

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