Not even close.
- a noticeable and rapid dip in emissions has proven to be viable due to COVID lockdowns
- Russia’s invasion of Ukraine forced Europe and the US to accelerate plans to diversify energy generation away from natural gas
- China’s insanely rapid growth in green energy production domestically
It seems like 2022 CO2 levels are near 2019 CO2 levels[1], which is impressive.
Imagine if you had $1,000,0000 in your bank account and were spending $100,000 per year, except one year you spent $95,000. That's 2020.
This methane news is on top of CO2 as it has its own added impact. Proper optimism that we can do it first requires taking stock of where we actually are. So far we haven't actually displaced any carbon energy and we are at the all time highest levels of both annually emissions and also CO2 in the atmosphere.
Chart of total CO2 concentration over time: https://gml.noaa.gov/ccgg/trends/
2020 was a 5% dip in the pace of the increase. It's like someone gained ten pounds in 2019, 9.5 pounds in 2020, and 10 pounds in 2021. CO2 emissions are analogous to a total gain, so a 5% one off cut isn't very meaningful.
It's even worse, because there's positive feedback loops we've probably unlocked (mainly artic and tropical methane).
So it's more like every year you put $100K on a credit card with high interest rate with continually compounding interest.*
Even if we stopped spending tomorrow, the debt will continue to grow exponentially.
*And the card is owned by a mob boss that will blow your brains out when your debt exceeds your bank balance.
In that, the world is certainly not going to end, and maybe it's helpful to look at some data that trends positive in order to inspire hope. But we are committed now to living in a world that will be radically different and less pleasant for a lot of people. How fast these trends improve will determine the scope and magnitude of degraded pleasentness.
Regardless of any change, more extreme weather events more frequently will become more normal. The socioeconomic impacts that are likely to be the most jarring in the global north will probably surface from migration pressure as people from the global south are displaced due to heat and sea level rise.
It is optimistic to think that we'll be on track for 2 degrees of warming, let alone 1.5. At this point, the quiet part just starting to be said out loud is that we'll never hit 1.5. We'll probably never achieve any semblance of the paris agreement goals.
And even as we approach 2 degrees, 2050 looks hotter and more extreme than anything humans have ever experienced in the past.
Probably one of the only short term options between now and 2100 will be solar radiation management -- a largely untested tech that is surely a terrible outcome.
I'm just summarizing the latest IPCC synthesis report [1]. Adding a bit of editorialization in perceived outcomes. One of the most conservative organizations on earth, their assessment is bleak: systems are already permanently damaged, and they're likely to become more so in the near-to-distant future.
My goal is not to make anyone reading despondent. I just think these kind of short snipes of perceived positive trends bury the reality of the situation that we are living through.
If the goal is to assure us that the world's not going to end, it's quite a low bar to set. And there's quite a gradient of suffering between.
Committed?
We will have extra energy for carbon capture on the next decade. This is a problem we can solve. Not before it gets worse, but we can stop it from being permanent.
That is, direct air carbon capture means investing an amount on the order of the value of the existing fossile fuel infrastructure to spend energy to achieve nothing of value (except offsetting the damage we caused by not switching to renewables earlier).
It's a complete nonstarter. Only a vehicle used by the fossile industry to delay the transition.
But I guess, no, that's impossible!
Regarding energy transitions and carbon capture:
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
I personally care more about avoiding millions dying of starvation but you do you. I understand that said millions being mostly in Nigeria and India make some in the west care less about them that cute animals, but still.
One day, maybe not so long in future as many may think, our descendants will judge us as primitive barbaric savages. And they will be mostly right.
"According to the IPCC’s Working Group III report, carbon capture is one of the least-effective, most-expensive climate change mitigation options on Earth."
"Even today, some projects already operating around the world have not been as successful as planned. In Australia, the CCS project run by Chevron has not yet made its Gorgon project meet its target of 80% carbon dioxide capture.
A recent report from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) on two Norwegian projects that store carbon dioxide under the seabed called into question the long-term viability of CCS."
"There are currently 42 operational commercial CCS and CCUS projects across the world with the capacity to store 49 million metric tons of carbon dioxide annually, according to the Global CCS Institute, which tracks the industry. That is about 0.13% of the world’s roughly 37 billion metric tons of annual energy and industry-related carbon dioxide emissions."
https://www.nationalobserver.com/2023/03/20/opinion/carbon-c...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/aug/01/is-carbo...
Maybe it's time to put a billion or two into testing all these untested techs then.
Are you running for president of the US? What do you think would happen to either candidate if they made this central their platform in today's political environment?
Spoiler: rich old people will not suffer, if anything, they'll just stop moving to Florida and Arizona.
I am not saying it will be easy to build it, or cheap, or without any drawbacks, but...
It is physically possible to generate energy by cooling the planet.
Its cold in space, its cold up there. To run a heat engine you need 2 temperature baths at different temperatures.
Lets take for the higher temperature our surface temperature, and for the lower temperature the temperature at or slightly above the tropopause (say 11 km above surface, somewhere between polar and equatorial regions).
At that height temperatures might be say -50 deg C.
Now consider the following engineering challenge: a buoyant vessel holds taut ~12 km "atmosphere elevator", made of SCG (single crystal graphene). Along such cables could be suspended chimneys made of light fabric, or perhaps pipes conveying coolant up and down, ...
As a thought exercise: suppose the hook floating in the tropopause/bottom of stratosphere is used to heave up and down buckets of water (the same number of buckes going up and down, so apart from friction this transport costs no energy (think of a pulley).
as the water travels up it freezes, giving off heat at a higher layer, closer to dark cold space where it would end up anyway eventually, as the ice is lowered it absorbs heat from the lower layers. If the water/ice buckets were insulated, and only brought in thermal contact at the top or bottom of the structure, then it would dump the heat at the top only, above the CO2 and water blanket where it can more easily escape to space, and it would absorb heat only at the bottom. This means we could run a heat engine at the surface generating energy, without proliferation concerns (because when we do it its for energy, but when others do it it must be for weapons, or for gaining experience requisite for weapons)...
It's been "last month" for the last 12 months at least. Basically, we've hit the J curve.
The "extraordinarily significant events" you cite amount to little more than a guy who jumped off a bridge thinking: "you know, I think I've changed my mind".
(And yet, we just bought $700 of seedlings and I spent my birthday, and many other days planting them. It's not a pointless exercise, it will improve things in my little corner, but it won't materially affect anything either).
Unfortunately, yes, even after we hit a plateau of emissions, we’re going to see effects.
The important bit is that, yes, we are seeing changes, and yes, we are seeing dreadful environment effects, we’re making progress to slow this down.
We’re fortunate that the last few years gave us excuses to shift policy that otherwise would’ve had us keep going down this path for another decade+.
I would certainly hope those pushing the “doomerism” takes in this thread do not work for any AI companies, cloud computing, NVIDIA, or other organization responsible for insane datacenter power growth this past year.
funny how that never gets brought up in articles about RTO mandates