Large amounts of carbon capture as a solution is an 'illusion' | Hacker News Reader

Large amounts of carbon capture as a solution is an 'illusion'

electrek.co

135 pointsvoisin172 comments

If you want to be polite, you can call it an illusion. If you don't, you can call it a scam (wanting to convince public opinion/politicians that continuing to burn fossil fuels is not a problem because the CO2 can be captured and magicked away).

Or worse a scam because it drives additional exploitation that would otherwise be uneconomic without government subsidy.

https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/54079/great-c...

That article could use an update. The scam continues via hundreds of millions of subsidy through the Inflation Reduction Act (thanks Joe Manchin).

A pipe burst recently and asphyxiated people in a nearby town in Louisiana. https://theintercept.com/2023/08/24/carbon-pipeline-ccs-air-...

It’s true, every big industry needs regulation and oversight.

The continuation of fossil fuel emissions and the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere don't have to be tied together. Of course the package of these two combined is a scam.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't scale up direct air capture to billions of tons of CO2 per year. The reduction in climate change effects would be absolutely worth it. It might also be more economical than decarbonizing absolutely everything (ie chemical processes).

It's a logical progression from an industry that depends on it and went from "nah, human CO2 production is marginal" to "ok human CO2 is significant but it doesn't have an effect on climate", now "ok it has an effect but that's ok because someone (else) will come up with a magical solution".

Have we even moved past the first stage yet? My uncle was lecturing me yesterday about how warming is apparently caused by sun spots and burning coal is actually good for the environment because forest fires are natural, lol. And anyone who thinks otherwise is just a member of the deep state.

There's a good podcast called "the climate denier's handbook" that reminds me of those arguments, it usually finishes by a simulated conversation where you get lectured by a family member on these

On this website people both hate carbon sequestration from atmosphere and are worried that the planet is heading to the worst projected path by 2100 simultaneously. I have zero hopes for humanity by now, but observing this bipolar split is amusing. Sad, but amusing.

These are the guys that produced hilariously wrong forecasts for the solar market 12 years in a row. I'm going to go ahead and take their opinion with a grain of salt. https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/07/12/has-the-international...

Yea, https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FpLhuguXsA8YE8V?format=png&name=...

Nice graph. I’d love if they showed the level of what is needed to stay below 1.5C as per the title so the viewer could compare.

my guess is that it's so high, it would change the scale so much and dwarf all the other data

Well I guess that’s sobering. It would still be nice to have some context given the current annual growth rate.

https://en-roads.climateinteractive.org/unsupported.html

here is a great calculator^^

If you can’t spot a flaw in the facts or the arguments, I guess you can always cast doubt on the credibility of organizations presenting the facts and arguments. That way you don’t have to think about something that’s making you uncomfortable to think about.

Well, is the organization in question not supposed be the expert that I could defer to when in doubt? As it stands, since I am not a person who is immersed in this technology, I would like to hear from someone with a decent track record. Now, it is true that the org in question, may have the facts to back up the arguments, but comes to the wrong conclusions, but it does not really help the advocates for one simple reason: "If the experts can't get right, how can I?".

The article didn't cite IEA making an argument or even presenting any facts; rather, it reported an assertion that carbon capture isn't enough.

All we can go on is the credibility of IEA, which GP has argued – with citation – is wanting.

The number one argument against this kind of doomerism is that we don't know what we don't know. Natural CO2 capture is why we have an oxygen atmosphere in the first place. That process wouldn't necessarily work today due to funguses and so on, but perhaps some technological breakthrough (genetically engineered trees? dense organic materials? who knows?) could work as soon as it is discovered.

The article didn't cite IEA making an argument or even presenting any facts; rather, it reported an assertion that carbon capture isn't enough.

Maybe we read different articles, because I distinctly remember reading in the article that the energy cost of CO2 capture to achieve status quo using current technology would require more energy than the world is currently producing (fact), which means the solution is unrealistic (argument).

The number one argument against this kind of doomerism is that we don't know what we don't know

If that's the number one argument, I appreciate that you don't go on to cite number two, and three, because those would have to be incredibly weak arguments.

but perhaps some technological breakthrough (genetically engineered trees? dense organic materials? who knows?) could work as soon as it is discovered.

It's also within the realm of possibilities that aliens will descend and use their superior technology to restore the CO2 levels in the atmosphere. But I would advice against a plan that could only succeed if this were to happen.

no, it said it would require more electrical energy than the world is currently consuming; world marketed energy consumption is several times higher

specifically what it says is (https://iea.blob.core.windows.net/assets/7a4b0c4e-d78c-4a8e-... p. 95)

> If oil and natural gas consumption were to evolve as in the STEPS (i.e. with 97 mb/d oil and 4 200 bcm gas consumption in 2050), this would require 32 Gt CO2 of CCUS by 2050, including 23 Gt CO2 of DAC, to achieve net zero emissions in 2050 and limit the temperature rise to 1.5 °C. 8 The DAC would require around 26 000 TWh of electricity to operate, more than global electricity demand in 2022.

26000 terawatt hours is 94 exajoules; presumably this means per year, so that's 3.0 terawatts. https://yearbook.enerdata.net/total-energy/world-consumption... shows current world energy consumption at over 14000 million tonnes of oil equivalent per year; a toe is conventionally ten billion international-table calories, 41.868 gigajoules, so that's over 580 exajoules per year, over 18 terawatts

so it would only require 16% of current world energy production, even with today's primitive technology (but that is indeed more than current world electricity consumption)

you may also notice a rapid upward trend in that graph of world energy consumption; if that continues then by 02050 the contemplated amount will be about 10% of world marketed energy consumption

but, because i've analyzed the fundamentals, i expect that energy growth to accelerate dramatically rather than continuing the same trend (see my other comments) and to shift dramatically toward electrification

presumably also efficiency will improve if the humans scale up atmospheric carbon capture by the proposed three orders of magnitude; the inherent entropic cost is quite low

That article also concludes that they have significantly improved with the most recent forecasts though.

Edit: Here in the UK, we have been having the public enquiry into the UK's handling of the Covid pandemic. One thing that has come up frequently is that the scientists think about things from a scientific PoV, politicians from politics, economists from economics, etc, etc, but that what was lacking was a more coherent decision making body that was sufficiently skilled to look at all these as a whole. A bit like "clinical medicine" != "public health".

It may well be that the IEA look at the subject from an energy resources PoV, but miss the political pressures that governments feel from climate-supporting electorates. And why shouldn't they, it's not their speciality. As pointed out in the article, their reports are one (albeit important) input into the larger solar energy policy decision making process.

Check the sibling comment for a graph that claims otherwise. And even if they did change after more than a decade it doesn't give me confidence in new predictions from them.

on the contrary, it's precisely the energy resources pov that would predict continued rapid growth in pv

Not if that growth was enabled by political or economic decisions outside the IEA's scope.

that makes no sense

Skepticism is warranted but PV outlook is also a bit tricky since it’s similar to a massively scaled process and China was able to bring an enormous amount of capacity online. I’m not sure that there’s much possibility of that kind of curve for carbon capture.

Given that the primary input to many carbon capture methods is energy, as long as PV keeps scaling (not guaranteed!) it should be possible to scale carbon capture along with it.

yes

there is

Direct Air Capture (DAC) will always be more expensive than reducing emissions, but it could be useful to set the baseline cost in a progressive carbon tax such that all emissions are taxed at a rate that will cover removing them via DAC, creating incentives to reduce emissions and reduce DAC costs.

That would actually also incentivize the greatest emitters to come up with more efficient methods of capturing CO2.

Or, more cheaply, non-emitting alternatives

Combination of both makes the most sense.

There won't likely be battery-based passenger jets anytime soon, for example. Meanwhile, humanity is so mixed up that "everyone" has some family members far away and it would be cruel to deny them the travel.

In that scenario, let the airline think about carbon capture, too.

I mean, sure - I don't think banning CC is sensible. I just have thermodynamic doubts about whether it's ever going to make much sense, and in the short term it seems to be a ploy by fossil fuel interests.

I mean, there is already a solution; it's called Photosynthesis. But we don't have any problem destroying the very ecosystems that captures carbon! I guess we'll jsut destroy the solution that already exists and in the meantime hope for some black magic to happen in distant future.

Photosynthesis won’t really help here without ways to sequester biomass on extremely large scales, which we don’t seem to have.

The original biomass was sequestered via methods/means that don’t seem to exist anymore, and we’ve been digging it out/pumping it out and releasing it.

Without a means to get it back underground, it will just be rereleased when it rots.

So, in addition to ignoring the very solution nature gave us, you argue that we must bury the dead plant matter because the CO2 will be released back into the atmosphere if we don't.

You realize there are bacteria and insects that eat this matter and that it is used as a fertilizer?

the bacteria and the insects release the carbon as carbon dioxide or, worse, as methane

You clearly have no idea how the carbon cycle works, or why fossil fuels are a problem do you?

The carbon being released when burning fossil fuels was previously stuck under ground due to various geological processes. Near as we can tell, over 10’s-100’s of millions of years and due to very disruptive (and relatively unique) geological processes.

Once released into the air again, it will keep cycling between plants and the atmosphere (increasing total average atmospheric co2) until something sticks it back under the ground.

That’s the problem.

Trees, photosynthesis, etc. only temporarily change things. Eventually all the living things rot, burn, or get eaten and digested, and it all ends up back up in the atmosphere again. If there are active/current geologic processes putting some of that carbon back underground where it can’t get back into the atmosphere, it appears to be small in effect and slow.

Everything we see appears to not be doing that. It’s easy to verify in most cases too. A forest permanently storing carbon would be sitting on hundreds of feet of it. it’s typically 3-6 ft at most.

That fossil carbon has to go back under ground or it will go back into the air sooner than later. And continue to be a problem long term.

And near as we can tell, those historic geological processes aren’t happening anymore, at least not at any scale we can rely on here, or timeline that helps us at all.

Let's say a tree takes 25m^2 in space. The average tree can bind roughly 50kg of CO2 per year. If a human emits ~10.000kg of CO2 per year, you need to maintain 200 trees for each human. Let's take Germany as reference. You need to plant 80 million (people) times 200 trees. In total this is an area of 4*10^11 m^2=400.000km^2

Funnily, this is roughly the size of Germany! So that Germany is long term CO2 neutral, you need to plant (and keep healthy) a forest as big as Germany.

No scale this up for the world, impossible.

That's the problem.

The advantage with photosynthesis is that it also produces side products which are usually edible, tasty .. and perhaps useful for making furniture. Also, it is low maintenance compared to a lot of alternate options

Yes but it seems it is at least an order of magnitude (or more) to slow/small to compensate CO2 emission of humanity.

And a lot of plants don't bind CO2 for a long time. Even trees have to be replaced by ~100 years and then if burnt or rotted they release CO2 again.

If you wait very long and you apply the right physical conditions, they might turn into oil again which was a good long term storage.

In WWII the USA spent about 40% of GDP on the war effort. Direct air capture of all carbon emissions with current tech would only cost about 20% of GDP[1]. So if it were a big enough priority, we could be doing it now.

Sure reducing emissions and or developing better tech would make that much cheaper, but even the worst case scenario with current tech seems affordable if you take it seriously as an existential risk.

[1] my own rough calculation based on looking up the current market cost of the already commercially available carbon capture technologies, not considering challenges or economies of scale

"The amount of electricity needed to power these technologies would be greater than the entire world’s electricity demand today"

This is where the argument falls off. For what its worth I think they are right in the sense that relying solely on carbon capture is bad economics, but having it in the mix makes a tonne of sense. I do expect carbon capture to become more efficient over time just as much as I expect energy to become more abundant, and part of that energy budget should go towards capturing the carbon output into the environment from legacy technologies.

Enough sunlight falls on Earth every 2 minutes to power humanity for a year [1]. If we need more power, we construct additional renewables. We will need to generate enough aggregate power in order to sequester all of the excess carbon emitted into the atmosphere since the beginning of the industrial age. When the price of power goes to zero or negative, that is the ideal time for batteries to charge that provide power to carbon capture facilities.

Of course, we should still be leaning into generation and consumption that does not emit carbon. Otherwise we continue to rack up carbon debt we will have to pay back with future clean energy.

[1] https://www.ku.ac.ae/two-minutes-of-sun-enough-to-power-a-ye...

Covering just 20% of the Sahara with solar panels causes a 1.5 C increase in global temperatures.

Solar panels are dark, and dark absorbs heat. Solar panels are what, not even 30% efficient yet?

So for every watt generated of useful energy, is two watts of extra heat.

Not a problem small scale, definitely something to think about long term.

Similar feedback loop to ice sheets melting exposing darker land and ocean beneath.

Also explored in the sci-fi book "Project Hail Mary"

[citation needed]

also though if we're talking about such mega-engineering projects you can float them on the ocean, which has a lower albedo than solar panels. or use some of the energy to make a lot of white plastic netting and drape it over a low-albedo region

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...

Don't quote me on the exact numbers, I wrote my original post from memory of an article summarizing the above paper but I never read the actual paper and do not know the accuracy of the claims.

thanks, this is great! it looks like the effects are complex enough that you could probably have the opposite effect just by choosing a different desert; it's not just a simple additive thermal forcing model as i was assuming

I like how you frame "covering 20% of the Sahara" as a "just". Like it would be some trivial feat easily accomplished.

For reference, 20% of the Sahara is around the size of Mexico.

That comes straight from an article[0] I do admit I do not know if it accurately quotes its source but it was not just a made up example.

It is also relevent to the story of Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir (2021) where they needed 2 trillion square meters of solar panels for an emergency. The study quoted in the article below was in 2018, book released in 2021, the article itself in 2021, might be some covergent evolution to the story.

[0] https://theconversation.com/solar-panels-in-sahara-could-boo...

Plant trees. Chop trees. Build stuff. Bury wood. Repeat.

Note: it doesn't mean keep burning gas at the same time.

Yeah, this is pretty much the only solution. The only step I'd add is "make charcoal, bury charcoal". That ultimately releases H2O back to the ecosystem and you only bury the carbon.

As a bonus, it's an exothermic process, so you could recapture some of that energy to make electricity.

If you are worried about rising sea levels, why try to release the H2O back into the ecosystem?

That's...not how this works at all. Is this a joke?

No, it's not a joke.

Please explain this to me.

The rising sea levels aren't about more water being in the environment, it's about more water being in liquid form rather than stored in solid form in glaciers on land.

The small amount of water being in a tree trunk vs released back into the atmosphere isn't even close to registering.

But enough water does matter.

By the argument of insignificance, all North American CO2 emissions from 2024 will not matter.

Use actual evidence for your argument. You claimed ignorance, why should I believe anything you say?

The water cycle is much faster than the carbon cycle, so that makes very little difference.

But even if it didn't work like that, rising sea levels are only one of many different impacts of increased CO2 in the atmosphere.

Couldn't you just bury the wood? Ala Hugelkultur

You could but biological processes are liable to turn it partially into outright methane or a peat bog, which can emit methane.

note that methane is a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide

I'm not an expert, but presumably you need to bury wood in a sterile place so that it doesn't get eaten by bugs/microbes and turned back into greenhouse gases?

Bury in a dry place, or under water without much oxygen. Mines could work in both cases. Basically filling up coal mines with coal again.

So, transport the wood emitting some GHG doing it. No problems with that plan whatsoever. ;)

Actually mines tend to get wet and require serious drainage (pumps) to exploit. They're only dry for the moment, over time they will become waterlogged.

the greenhouse gases emitted by any conceivable transportation range are an order of magnitude less than those captured

please do the math instead of just posting bullshit without any regard to whether it is true or false

you're right about the mines tho

Some of it will turn into gases. Some will turn into those bugs and microbes and other forms of biomass.

> Some of it will turn into gases.

Yeah, and this is definitely bad.

> Some will turn into those bugs and microbes and other forms of biomass.

This is the part I'm not sure about. Does this decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere enough to counter said increase in greenhouse gases?

After burying wood you are growing more wood, so yeah, as long as you are using land that wasn't forested before you are net negative

There is a huge movement in my country to entirely ban ikea from the country. It would be as usefull as shutting down all the nuclear powerplants.

What is the argument here?

They say that there is no biodiversity in forests made for wood harvest.

I suspect that other options aren't quite better than Ikea

Much, MUCH worse.

My favourite approach is to make biochar. You heat the wood in an oxygen free environment and so can control the amount of hydrocarbons you extract. The carbon left over is fairly inert and so relatively easy to store long term. You can get enough hydrocarbon out of the process to pay for it.

If we redirected the bulk of our wood waste through a process like that - rather than it all being burnt (and so releasing all of the carbon in the wood) - we could probably sequester a few percent of global emissions.

Yeah I never understood why this wasn't more talked about.

I suppose that leftover "char" is just a little to close to coal for everyone's comfort. This is how charcoal is made, after all.

Its also a large component of terra preta. I think you could sell it as soil amendment and flip the perception on its head.

Honestly, if you can make material that's soil-like enough out of things that would otherwise be process waste, it'd be a handy way to directly combat rising sea levels. Just dump it somewhere and reclaim the land.

there is a natural gas variant of that where instead of using steam in the steam reformation process to generate hydrogen and CO2 you use more of the energy contained in the gas to cook it off into atomic carbon and hydrogen. you can then bury the carbon.

I think it would be fabolous if you could use up all the natural gas that way.

If you want to know more Google "natural gas pyrolysis".

Depends on how demand plays out. It’s possible China will oversupply green hydrogen, leaving blue hydrogen a stranded asset. I do wish hydrogen were a bigger part of the conversation today, and I think down-only emissions policy makes balancing supply and demand for emerging resources simply too hard. The $3/kg subsidy in the IRA would’ve gone a lot further if applied to grey hydrogen.

blue hydrogen is an abomination. I don't count pyrolysis derived hydrogen as blue because I can actually see some chance that the carbon gets sequestered. The pessemist in me sees the resulting carbon being sold to coal plants tho :P

That said hydrogen as a direct fuel replacement for individual transportation is something I am very much against. I simply see that we will need hydrogen for some applications but most have nothing to do with transportation whatsoever.

That’s basically LARPing the Carboniferous epoch that buried most of the stuff in the first place.

The UK government is adopting a slight variant of this schema that turns it from net-neutral to net positive: have somebody else do the chopping, buy the already chopped wood, prevent the wood you bought from turning into emissions. Now you're emitting negative carbon/s.

According to the IPCC, to meet the 1.5 degree C target we need to be doing 6 GtCO2 of carbon dioxide removal per year by 2050.

It would be very difficult to reach that scale with reforestation and afforestation along in the next 27 years.

Plus, if you simply bury wood it will be broken down over time and release methane. No one has yet developed a scalable way to bury large quantities of wood and keep them from decomposing (startups/researchers are starting to work in this area).

The breakdown of wood a few feet beneath the surface is actually extremely slow.

If converted to charcoal ("biochar") through pyrolisis first it's much better, and won't release methane or CO2 (and enriches soil)

The bigger issue would be the logistics, and the amount of CO2 emissions simply involved in processing and burying it.

We are going past 1.5C.

That being said, the way you do this isn't specifically with reforestation, rather, this needs to be tree farming with fast growing trees. Perhaps even geneticly engineering trees for this specific purpose.

Ok - carbon dioxide removal is going to be needed to meet to the 2 degree C target too.

Sure, you can reforest or afforest with whatever trees you want. It certainly will help but won't solve the issue alone.

Trees require more time and land to capture a given amount of carbon compared to direct air capture.

I have wondered if, on a net scale, burying said wood (in the form of chips or sawdust) in desert regions would actually net out as net-negative for CO2. Add organic matter back into the mostly sterile soils, increase moisture retention, and once a certain % of soil organic matter is restored, in turn plant trees or perennial crops back into that locale.

obviously it needs to be scaled up to 'inconceivable' levels, yes, but the only problem with that is that it would require abundant cheap energy

guess what, pv modules are down to €0.10 per peak watt this month: https://www.solarserver.de/photovoltaik-preis-pv-modul-preis...

that's half the price they've been at during 02019-02022, which is ten times cheaper than the price a decade earlier; it seems like the price-fixing cartel announced at davos in 02019 has collapsed. but already at those prices they were putting coal plants out of business with energy prices so low they don't cover the cost of the coal, even if the power plant were free. and they've just dropped by half from that price

the available global solar resource is about 2000× world marketed energy consumption (excluding crops)

the iea is unparalleled in its history of failing to conceive the consequences of cheap pv; see modeless's link https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2020/07/12/has-the-international...

the future is already here, it just isn't widely distributed

The energy required for carbon capture is larger than the all energy produced by burning fossil fuels over the past 100 years (00100 years?). It's not literally impossible, but energy would have to be "too cheap to meter" for it to be even worth thinking about.

In a world with unlimited energy (green or not) the problems caused by global warming are no longer that big of a deal. Neither are the other problems the world faces today. Unlimited energy results in, more or less, unlimited prosperity.

your figures on carbon capture energy costs are incorrect, because we don't have to reduce the carbon dioxide back to carbon to sequester it

your conception of human nature may also be unrealistic; unlimited warfare is another possible result of unlimited energy

Currently the DoE or some other USG agency has been doing a lot of modeling of just pumping CO2 into underground caverns. (It was in Physics Today.)

Was this it?https://pubs.aip.org/physicstoday/article/76/7/22/2900205/Ca...

Quite a lot of places where solar energy is abundant are uninhabited deserts.

In theory, you could ask Mali or Egypt nicely to allow a massive build-up of solar-powered carbon capture plants there. NIMBYs won't likely be a problem, and neither will be the intermittency of solar energy.

intermittency depends on the details of the atmospheric carbon capture process, but there are some for which this is true

Nah, the other problem with DAC is the plain material costs and time and scale of building them to deploy. Did you think all this steel and composites for high pressures and turbopumps are free? A lot of DAC also assumes favorable geographic conditions to sink carbon in...

there are dac approaches that do not require steel, composites, high pressures, or turbopumps; historically they have not been competitive because they use more energy

carbon sequestration is cheaper in some geologies but feasible everywhere

Feasible by doing what exactly? Digging or drilling? Making concrete casts? Using lime we already are kind of low on worldwide?

most places have olivines that can be serpentinized, though some have more than others. other approaches include salt domes

lime doesn't help with sequestration; we certainly aren't low on it, but you make it by driving carbon dioxide out of calcite. it's a candidate sorbent in the dac process but not a candidate sequestration approach

> 02019

Error: invalid octal digit

My favorite form of carbon capture is building habitat for organisms. Then you are increasing the carrying capacity of the planet for life, which also stores carbon. And you are addressing the extinction event.

Life usually sequesters carbon only until it rots.

An implication of this is that maintaining the Amazon is good for us, not because it captures more carbon -- it's biomass is not on net growing -- but because if we cut it down its biomass shrinks (because it goes into the air).

If you are building new habitat you can lock up carbon permanently by creating a self-replenishing ecosystem. This can be jump-started with dead organic matter but will eventually become a living system.

Only carbon capture keeping with the current level of emissions (from us and from the feedback loops that we are triggering is an illusion.

Is essentially taking water from a lake with an expensive dropper while multiple firehoses (making profit for doing that) are feeding even more water to it.

But, it is part of the solution. Even shutting down the firehoses from one day to the next won’t stop the cumulative effect of all the water that is already in the lake. Things will fall by its own weight. Anything that tries to be “solution” should target both things.

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So the claim is that it's impossible because it's too expensive energy wise? Kind of an insane take, how would this be different than claiming renewables aren't a solution 50 years ago because they're too expensive? Things get cheaper over time, and we're only just starting to scale CC.

I would say we should invest way more in CC. we need to see alot more stuff like the AMC from Frontier, ideally from governments.

Carbon dioxide capture requires more energy than the amount released by combustion which produced that CO2 in the first place.

this is not correct, and i am surprised to see such careless errors from you, because you are usually so trustworthy

> The IEA also points out that carbon capture can’t be used as a linchpin by the fossil fuel industry to maintain the status quo.

I think 90% of people working on CC agree with this already. We will still need CC because we’ve already emitted too much carbon and because we will need cleanly produced CO2 for industrial use after fossil fuels have been phased out.

I don’t see how fossil fuels could possibly be phased out. Is there another way to make plastics?

You're mixing things up here. We're talking about the "fuel" part where we used fossil fuels to make energy. This isn't about making plastics.

Does making plastic not release co2?

So the only counter-solution they offer is to force the gas- and oil-industry to invest more into green solutions?

Sounds good

The O&G industry won't invest judiciously (they'll do it reluctantly). Anyone else would do it better. And the best employees in that industry can easily move to the green tech market so there's nothing to lose in the transition.

Let's outlaw the extraction and burning of fossil fuels, and tax it as much as possible to make the alternatives more economical until renewables are crushing O&G for good. It isn't like renewables (or nuclear is necessary) is a saturated market already.

The cost of manufacturing renewals doesn't seem to be accounted for. As example, it takes a lot of chemicals to produce batteries and electronics and it is unknown what happens to the waste in the manufactoring process.

We see now the negative impact the increase of oil and gas price has on the European markets. Everything becomes more expensive if energy itself becomes more expensive. Outlawing gas and oil while cheaper or equally cheap alternatives are not present wouldn't work

Yes, but these scams help people to feel better while also laundering money.

Reduce usage, plant trees, and build more stuff with wood, and turn the leftovers into charcoal to help support the soil.

I think we need to approach climate change from every possible angle. More green energy production, reducing overall energy consumption, and carbon capture are all avenues we should pursue. Who knows if there will be a breakthrough in 20 years that’ll make carbon capture even more economical?

I'm starting to think some kind of shade megastructure in orbit might might be the only solution to lowering global temperature. I know that light exerts pressure and that keeping it in place would be a major challenge, but still.

Isn't it easier/cheaper to build infrastructure for renewable energy and make laws that disincentives consumption of products with large external costs?

Why explore exotic untested and potentially dangerous geo-engineering before even trying to apply the solutions people have known for decades?

Cool worlds has a great new video discussing the difficulties with carbon capture.

https://youtu.be/EBN9JeX3iDs?si=fwkVomJUsw2_4Oa9

Large carbon capture has been solved and demonstrated using a technique called iron fertilization. Basically just dump iron sulphate into ocean to simulate large algae bloom (nature best carbon capturer). They will then die to sink to bottom of ocean or eaten as part of ocean food chain. It was so successful weather actually registered temporary cooling in one of the experiment. It scared the regional government (Canada if I recalled correctly - probably directed by USA) this can solve the global warming and swiftly banned it. Government loves carbon taxation. Solving carbon issue is never a consideration. Even Greta has been trained to not touch about the real solution iron fertilization to solve climate change. Everything else solution at this stage can be effectively smoke and mirror scam encourage by worldwide governments. You can talk to Putin about how much he wants Siberia thawed. USA and EU loves the carbon taxes. Anyone thinking governments wanted reverse carbon capture, I have plenty of climate change books to sell you.

We can capture just as well as we can recycle plastic.

Plastic recycling is pretty much a dead industry. There is so little municipal plastic recycling done, and so precious little done with what plastic is recycled, that plastic continues to just build up in waste.

Some companies are attempting to use recycled plastic, such as the building industries, but where it is most needed, consumer plastics, is badically dead. Even LEGO declined to use recycled plastic.

We must move away from plastic as rapidly as possible. That is a monumental endeavor but it is necessary.

Meh. Geoengineering is the actual solution, even thought it's politically impossible to voice. See global warming after ships stopped burning sulfur. We're stuck on "carbon" as if this is the only variable we can control.

A mix of naturalistic fallacy with tribalism, maybe? The politically correct truth is that carbon is the only thing we've ever changed in nature, so it's the proper and safe act to move it back. Any attempt to point out that neither is true gets coded as a political attack and wrongthink.

Either way it's a non issue. AIG or not, we're definitely going to have at least much better ML models allowing for real predictions of interventions. Chances of global warming actually being a problem long term are hovering around zero right now.

You can't argue with "the truth" here. Global warming has been a mainstream scarecrow for decades now.

In truth, it was just a way to slow down the growth of rival industrialized countries, or countries that are yet to industrialize. By promoting expensive, inefficient "clean" energy sources (but not nuclear!), they are stunting the growth of developing nations.

You think? To me it looks like it handicaps developed countries more. For one thing, many developing countries simply ignore the limits, or aren't even close to them yet. Also they have much more choice in choosing their technology stack - they can if they want invest in wind and solar and nuclear. First world has lots of money already sunk in old style generation, and needs to replace it - at much higher levels of consumption.

nothing is a solution, it takes everything to move the needle.

These threads always read like extremists for me. The theme is distilled into carbon capture is a scam and the only solution is reducing our usage of energy.

Well that’s not a realistic solution either so I am very happy that maybe one day some of these techs play out. I want us to use more electricity because of growth. Have cleaner generation and hopefully carbon capture that can work at scale.

Or we could ban private yachts, planes, etc and plant millions of trees to literally hedge against the tech not working

The article highlights one possible problem with carbon capture: that we can't capture enough.

But there is another problem with it. It's still a solution within the system of intense, worldwide consumerism. Therefore, if more carbon is captured, it will make fossil fuel use more attractive and so people will use more of it to consume more of Earth's other resources -- especially since carbon capture reduces the incentive to develop other green technologies.

I expect carbon capture to be much like other 'green incentives' like recycling and driving electric vehicles. Stuff is done but the CO2 keeps on goin', now at around 420ppm.

We need a new dimensions to these solutions: a more active attack against the capitalistic system that causes these emissions in the first place.

1. Fossil fuels can't just run out because they are produced continuously by dead matter decaying over time. It's in the name.

2. Carbon dioxide is good for the plant life. Plants are literally "breathing" it and producing oxygen. As with everything in nature, this is balanced by the fact that animals breathe oxygen and release...you guessed it, carbon dioxide.

3. Vulcanic eruptions all over the planet release three orders of magnitude more CO2 than all of humanity combined over a period of one year. These eruptions happen in the Earth's oceans, as well, where they are more frequent as there is simply more ocean floor than there is land on the surface.

So, please stop with the disinformation already. Or just reduce the carbon footprint in the most developed countries in the world and leave the developing world to go through the fossil fuel phase that those countries went through.

1. Achilles can never catch up with the turtle because whenever Achilles would reach the turtle, the turtle is already a little bit further away.

I knew there were climate skeptics, but this is the first time I encounter such lunacy in the wild.

Let me ask you this - the US economic boom is largely attributable to slavery and WW2 decimating its rivals and forcing them to agree to quasi-vassality. Should we bring back slavery and start a new world war? So that it's "fair" for the developing countries?

"the US economic boom is largely attributable to slavery and WW2 decimating its rivals and forcing them to agree to quasi-vassality. Should we bring back slavery and start a new world war? So that it's "fair" for the developing countries?"

Ah, another strawman I have to argue on the internet. I did not say that, so don't put it in my mouth, please.

Tell me why you think that things science already confirmed are "lunacy" to you?

Asking you to consider an analogous situation is hardly the same as claiming you said anything you didn’t.

The US did benefit from slavery and the fact that most of Europe ended up destroyed in WWII.

However, it did not use green energy to build up its huge industry. It used fossil fuels. If it did use carbon-free energy sources, I would have agreed and wouldn't be such a climate-change skeptic now.

Not an American, so I don't really want to engage in your culture wars, but still... your comment is very Chomsky-ite.

The slavery part is questionable. While slavery made money for the slave owners, the South as a whole was poor and couldn't keep up with the North when it came to actual economic activity. That is why they lost their war of survival.

Looking at other slave-owning societies of the 1800s, none can be described as particularly rich today. One of the reasons why slavery died out in the Western world was that it was becoming uneconomical in a world that was shifting from agriculture to industry. Even the Nazis often lost money on their slave-operated industries; people are just too clever not to be able to sabotage such subtle operations if they hate you enough. Slavery is really only economically efficient in sex, back-breaking work in the fields or mines, or possibly household help.

"Quasi-vassality" is a Putinesque formulation. Neither Japan nor Germany are in any sense of the word American vassal states. They are kept in the American-led coalition mostly by their self-interest, because taking part in a global trade network is, for industrial powers like those two, much preferable to not doing so. And if they find any American political or military action questionable, they stay out of it, unlike actual vassals, who were usually compelled to provide manpower for their liege's wars.

Neither Japan nor Germany engaged themselves in Vietnam or Iraq, for example.

"Neither Japan nor Germany are in any sense of the word American vassal states."

Both states harbor huge US military bases. Bases that were established after literal military occupation and not by choice.

It's safe to say that they can't truly be free and choose their own policies. By definition, they are both occupied states.

Which they want to have out of their self interest and not because they are forced too. And no, they are not occupied by any definition. Ukraine is an example of a country which is partially occupied by a foreign force.

There is something like 40 thousand American soldiers in Germany. Way, way too little to influence actual policy of a rich country with > 80 million people.

I speak German and I can guarantee you that American military presence has approximately zero influence on German politics.

This is not how an "occupied" country works. You know how an occupied country looks like? Like Czechoslovakia after 1968. The Soviet troops were permanently stationed there to cow our own Communists into submission to the Moscow line. Once it became clear that Gorbachev was no longer willing to actually use them for this purpose, the regime disintegrated within a few years.

"I speak German and I can guarantee you that American military presence has approximately zero influence on German politics."

Then why the fuck did they put sanctions on Russia? Why the fuck did they agree to buy a much more expensive liquid gas from the US when they had a cheaper alternative that allowed them to have such a great economy? And why did they not react when Nord Stream pipelines, the source of that cheap gas, got blown up?

What, they just sucked it up and said "hell, it's worth it, at least Russia is bad!"?

They tanked their own economy because Uncle Sam told them to do so, and not a single rational decision has ever been made by the German government since February 2022.

Spoiler alert: not everyone elevates money and economy über alles. What you call "rational" I would call "endlessly cynical".

Russian invasion of Ukraine destabilized security relationships in half of Europe and quite a lot of Germans are sensitive about it. Your view that German economy matters the most and the Russian imperial project is morally irrelevant is mostly carried by AfD, which attracts about a quarter of the total vote. I would say that another quarter of the German population genuinely doesn't care that way or the other, but that still leaves about a half which considers Putin an evil guy and does not want to maintain tight contact with him, much like you don't just invite gangsters into your business for some money.

Granted, the balance of views in Germany is nowhere near as one-sided as in Poland where 90 per cent of people hate and loathe and fear Putin as a mortal enemy, but still. German nation as a whole isn't in mood to make happy deals with Putin and the actions of the politicians reflect that mood.

> While slavery made money for the slave owners, the South as a whole was poor and couldn't keep up with the North when it came to actual economic activity. That is why they lost their war of survival.

This is 100% false. The South was wealthy as fuck. The North and South had a very important trade relationship where they both benefited. The southern plantations grew the cotton that the northern industrialists profited from.

> One of the reasons why slavery died out in the Western world was that it was becoming uneconomical in a world that was shifting from agriculture to industry.

This isn't true as far as I know. The South tried to replicate slavery with Jim Crow because the free and cheap labor was immensely profitable. The South fought the Civil War because they were fighting to protect their right to slavery since it made them so rich.

Wealthy in what way? I’m sure the South had massively rich plantation owners and bankers, but like most resource extraction economies I suspect monetary velocity was lower and the general public was much poorer and less educated. Extraction economies usually amass a lot of static wealth but are poor in terms of dynamic wealth.

The relationship with Northern capitalists would have been similar to what you see today with petrostates, resource extraction states, and vendors of cheap labor.

Had the South survived I would suspect it would be much poorer today than the North as its economy would probably get stuck in extraction and labor exploitation. Chattel slavery would probably have ended when fossil fuels were discovered at large scale and it might be a petrostate now.

"Had the South survived I would suspect it would be much poorer today than the North as its economy would probably get stuck in extraction and labor exploitation"

You do know how the US economy works today? You know why everyone accepts the US dollar, a literal piece of paper, in exchange for real, tangible goods?

Because they will be sanctioned and bombed to oblivion if they don't. Now, tell me how this is not a "wealth extraction" economy.

>>Because they will be sanctioned and bombed to oblivion if they don't. Now, tell me how this is not a "wealth extraction" economy.

TIL, people buy iphones and use facebook, because they are afraid to be bombed otherwise. You know there is a good reason why even rich and powerfull people from Russia or China don't want to keep their wealth in their home currencies. And it's not because they are afraid to be bombed by Americans.

Whoa. You are overestimating the American military capacity by a lot.

There are regionally used strong currencies like the Euro. Us Euros mostly do our internal trade in, well, Euros, without being bombed or even sanctioned. That is quite a lot of trade.

Aside from the Euro, there isn't much of a competition in the international arena. China wants to control the renminbi tightly, which precludes its wider adoption as a reserve currency. UK is a shadow of its former imperial self, and so is the pound. The Japanese economy is too weak for the yen to be a serious competitor.

And with currencies like the rupee, you will find that few people outside India are willing to trust them. Russians now sell a lot of oil to India for rupees (and note that there does not seem to be any initiative to bomb India for engaging in this trade), but then are basically forced to use those same rupees to buy stuff from India again, and Indian exports aren't a great match for Russian economic needs.

"Russians now sell a lot of oil to India for rupees (and note that there does not seem to be any initiative to bomb India for engaging in this trade), but then are basically forced to use those same rupees to buy stuff from India again".

That is how the world economy used to work, before the petrodollar.

Now, Saudis or Qatar or pick your favorite Middle eastern monarch sell oil to US and everyone else in exchange for $USD. Since oil is used in nearly every other product line, either for transport or actual product, now world trade depends on how much $USD you have to buy said oil.

Euro is irrelevant outside of Europe.

"That is how the world economy used to work, before the petrodollar."

The petrodollar is about 50 years old, and international trade grew IDK, fivefold? in that period. No surprise that the previous patterns don't hold any more. There is a difference between a market of three villages and a market of fifteen villages. If the # of connections between corporations and nations grows quadratically, it becomes infeasible to juggle around dozens of different currencies. The market will trend towards dominance of one.

"Euro is irrelevant outside of Europe."

But Europe is fairly relevant in the world. About 20 per cent of forex reserves worldwide are kept in Euro, it is the only serious, though not peer, competitor to the USD in this regard.

"The South was wealthy as fuck."

No, the average Southerner was fairly poor. The rich oligarchy was rich, but that is a tautology; the same situation applies in contemporary Gabon or Equatorial Guinea, two countries that are very clearly not wealthy as fuck.

"The South tried to replicate slavery with Jim Crow because the free and cheap labor was immensely profitable."

If it was immensely profitable, could you name me some big corporations that were built on the top of it? You can't. The South was the sick man of American economy. All the innovative businesses of the Gilded Age were built on free labor.

John D. Rockefeller, Jay Gould, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, Andrew Carnegie, Henry Flagler, Henry Huttleston Rogers, J. P. Morgan, Leland Stanford, Meyer Guggenheim, Jacob Schiff, Charles Crocker, Cornelius Vanderbilt - show me a Southerner among them. The furthest one was born in Pennsylvania.

lol didn't expect anybody to respond to this argumentatively since it's fact but then again we're on hacker news. i'm not meaning to flex, but i have a degree in southern history. not even gonna bother to argue after reading this:

> If it was immensely profitable, could you name me some big corporations that were built on the top of it? You can't.

not even gonna explain why

Try to argue your point without calling me names (in one case a dictator, in another case a professor who got prizes for his peace efforts) and maybe I'll read what you have to say.

If you made it all the way down to Putinesque, you have already read it.

> Fossil fuels can't just run out because they are produced continuously

They can if your rate of consumption is higher than the rate or production. Also this is irrelevant as the objective is to reduce their consumption.

> Carbon dioxide is good for the plant life

I think it is safe to say we are already well equipped with it. Also, as per you next point, natural production yields enough of CO2 to sustain the life, which is proven by the fact that this life exists in the first place.

> Vulcanic eruptions all over the planet release three orders of magnitude more CO2 than all of humanity combined over a period of one year

A quick fact checking yields these numbers: volcanoes produce about 0.3 billion tons of CO2 every year in average. Consumption of fossil fuels alone yields about 35 billion tons of CO2 every year [1], so about 100x more. Also, regardless, if you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

[1] https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits...

"I think it is safe to say we are already well equipped with it, and whatever our plans for its reduction are, we won't eliminate it."

The CO2 current levels in the atmosphere are 0.04%. Levels in the past were well above 1%.

"As a point of reference, pre-industrial CO2 levels were around 280 parts per million (ppm) and today, we stand near 420 ppm.

The most distant period in time for which we have estimated CO2 levels is around the Ordovician period, 500 million years ago. At the time, atmospheric CO2 concentration was at a whopping 3000 to 9000 ppm! The average temperature wasn’t much more than 10 degrees C above today’s, and those of you who have heard of the runaway hothouse Earth scenario may wonder why it didn’t happen then. Major factors were that the Sun was cooler, and the planet’s orbital cycles were different."

https://earth.org/data_visualization/a-brief-history-of-co2/

They somehow knew that the Sun was cooler then, so that was not a problem. Yeah, right. But now, it would be.

Not to mention mammals didn't exist. And even then it caused mass extinctions of shelled waterborne organisms.

So the question is "equipped for what".

> At the time, atmospheric CO2 concentration was at a whopping 3000 to 9000 ppm! The average temperature wasn’t much more than 10 degrees C above today’s

You talk like +10C is nbd. Are you aware of how much landmass was covered by water during that time?

I'm no expert but that would cause human civilization to take a dramatically different form if not outright extinction.

No, I'm saying that 420 parts per million is still much lower than 3000-9000 parts per million.

Also, even a number they chose is plain trolling. Of all numbers, 420 ppm is what they "calculated".

there is a curious lack of verifiable quantitative data in your comment

consider the possible worlds in which you are mistaken. how would you tell whether you are in one or not

because to the rest of us it looks like you are mistaken

"there is a curious lack of verifiable quantitative data in your comment"

Sorry, the climate-change megalomaniacs have skewed every discussion about this in the mainstream media. You will have to search for the data in the alternative sources.

"because to the rest of us it looks like you are mistaken"

I don't see any big changes when compared to the last 30 years, do you? What I do see is one big hysteria by the first-world countries who are imposing expensive, inefficient green energy on the rest of the world. Curiously, they are not doing anything to reduce the emissions they produce.

when i search for the data in the alternative sources it still looks like you're mistaken

probably you don't have data and are just making stuff up

> 1. Fossil fuels can't just run out because they are produced continuously by dead matter decaying over time.

I love this comment for being the perfect example of how something can be technically correct, while also being completely wrong on every conceivable level.

Yes. Fossil fuels are derived from natural ongoing processes (some are at least, coal formation may be over forever), but at a painstakingly slow rate that it is meaningless to any point being made when people talk about "running out of fossil fuels". "Running out of fossil fuels" implicitly refers to human timescales. Not geological ones. Everyone understands this when discussing this topic. So either you are painfully ignorant on the subject of how fossil fuels are formed, or are intentionally trying to derail discussions surrounding the actual problems we face.

2. Not only are we breathing out CO2, we're introducing additional carbon into the atmosphere by burning fossil fuels, upsetting the balance.

>> upsetting the balance

Do we know what the right balance of CO2 is?

Of course we don't have a clue.

But people will pull all kinds of crazy out of their ass to justify the climate-change hoax.

Volcanic emissions amount to around 1%, not 1000x the amount of human CO2 emissions per year.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/volcano-carbon-emissions/

The article debunks the CO2 quantity from only one such emission. There are hundreds of active volcanoes on the Earth's surface and possibly thousands more in the oceans.

No. It uses research from a 2013 paper that estimated the total annual flux from volcanic sources worldwide. Search for “2013 review” in the article.

Totally insane take.

And point 3.) is entirely wrong:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/climate-qa/which-emits...

Humans emit more than 90 times as much Co2 than all active volcanos.

Humans are burning fossil fuels for 100 years, while volcanoes have been erupting for the last 4 billions of years.

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