We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due to increased energy consumption of manufacturing which we cannot sustain. Thus we must use things which are long term sustainable and circulate and repair these things.
Remove co2 out of the sky is also a good thing. The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth because then the oceans will act as a Co2 buffer sink. Think like carbon beverage, when you cool cans during production for putting carbon in them you cool them. If you heat a can they release stored co2. The same process with the oceans but at a much bigger scale.
The atmospheric CO₂ rates come from burning too much fossil fuel. Not from people wanting things. If you consume and produce things in a way that doesn't release net CO₂, that is perfectly fine from a climate perspective, even if the products are meaningless artefacts of a materialistic life that will never make you happy.
I understand the impulse toward a simpler, less materialistic life. If you like that, argue for it on its own merits.
> The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth
That... is not an action you can take. We don't have that lever. It's a goal of the whole climate change issue. So this is saying that to lower temperatures, we need to lower temperatures.
Mass consumption and CO2 emissions aren't independent problems. It already is an insurmountable challenge to meet current energy demands with green energy. Producing things costs energy, energy costs CO2. Producing things in a carbon-neutral way still requires energy and that energy could have more usefully been spent to replace carbon non-neutral energy.
There needs to be a discussion about economic incentives. It's not people wanting things that is the problem. It's that it's easier and more profitable to produce short-lived crappy things that can be sold for cheap, because the environmental impact of the waste it generates (both CO2 and the actual crappy product itself) is not sufficiently factored into the price.
I would not be surprised if, in our current economic system, simply having more green energy available (or products produced without emitting CO2) is not going to solve anything. With almost 8 billion people on earth, we'll find ways to increase consumption and burn it.
> If you consume and produce things in a way that doesn't release net CO₂
So far global output of wealth and well-being is directly tied to emissions and consumption of fossil fuels. We have a 110-year long precedent for that. You could even argue it started with the Industrial Revolution, so the period is longer.
France is probably the only example of a country that came close enough to decoupling economic prosperity from CO2 production through Nuclear energy, but even they produce 5GT of CO2 per person.
It also isn't particularly evident that Nuclear is reproducible worldwide - it is very expensive, and Uranium is also a finite resource if you were to multiply its use by a factor of 10x/20x, etc. Remember, France is less than 1% of the world's population.
So decoupling prosperity from emissions is pretty much the panacea everyone wants. But it's unrealistic to hope for it and expect it to come in on our timeline. Kind of like fusion.
5 GT (5 000 000 T) is unfathomably large. They produce about 5T = 5000 kg CO₂ / person / year, which is 5 · 12 / (12+2·16) = 1.4 ton of carbon / coal or 1.7 m³ = 1700 l of diesel.
Going by Wikipedia 2017 list[1], they are about 5% above average per-capita CO₂ emissions.
Please don't forget to qualify you mean economic prosperity. It's a wholly different matter than happiness, health etc. The correlation is positive (I guess) but far from 100%.
French track record is not bad, but I would still hesitate to call it good. Going by [1], they haven't notably decreased their emissions since 2011, they are worse than Sweden and Switzerland, and if poorer countries follow, it's still the kind of emissions that take us into wild climate territory with mass migrations, unrest and I would hope not war.
Good for some inspiration, better than my country, but far from enough.
When almost all of the money supply is generated through lending the amount of new loans must be as large as(and because of hoarding even larger) the amount of amortizations for the money supply to remain constant.So we have a system that is dependent on growth, even growth that causes environmental problems.
Unfortunately the effects of which would be different from just cooling the climate in an unpredictable and likely extremely bad ways, so it's not an option.
I've been building a browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you're on a checkout page for a website and redirects you to a screen that shows you how long you had to work to earn the purchase you're about to make. The idea is to get people to more consciously consume and reduce their consumption.
It still needs work, and I'm hoping to find a way to approximate the CO2 impact of their purchases.
Neat idea. Might also have toggles for displaying "how much CO2 you could displace if you donated it to carbon off-set causes." or "how much of a life could you save if you donated it to meleria prevention" (3k a life?)
(I'm not your target audience because I struggle to buy stuff even when its cheap and I'm flush with money hah)
That's a possibility or perhaps they will work less and enjoy their family, relationships, exercise, nature and art more. Maybe they'll decide to pay off their loans or save for retirement or their kids education or donate to a charity. Even if they end up buying something at least they stopped to think about it and committed to it knowing what it took to earn, rather than just hitting the checkout button with a reflex action. Maybe during that time they'll choose to look in to the company they're buying from and look for more sustainable alternatives.
Given that it's already declared to be "necessary" for people to have huge retirement saving to not live in penury .. yes? Also people could work less or retire earlier?
(Although more likely the economic contraction from wasting less stuff will cause incomes to go down!)
People's scarcity mindset makes them think burning less fossil fuels and consuming less stuff will lower their quality of life. On the contrary, most Americans could reduce their consumption by 80% off pure life improvements.
People convolve reducing consumption with returning to the stone age, which is a false dichotomy. It's more like exiting a mindset that stuff means happy to where it means people trying to create craving.
I speak from experience of reducing my consumption by about 90%, leading many others to start reducing through my leadership executive training and podcast. Before they act, they're full of facts and figures arguing why not to act. After they act, they wish they had earlier. The key is to activate their intrinsic motivation, not to tell them what to do. Then what they do feels meaningful.
People don't want to do small things, they want to do meaningful things.
I'm glad to see this as well. I've been working on a site as part of a class project to help surface used items that have a long useful lifetime. My hope is that this will help in a small way to reduce the cycle of consumerism.
Agreed. I spent some time making a calculator [0] to help me understand what matters when it comes to energy consumption. This made it very clear that by far the best way most consumers can make a difference is just to stop buying stuff. In the west we get away with 'low'(er) emissions because we import a huge amount of CO2 though imported goods - maps of total energy consumption are quite interesting here [1]
Stopping buying stuff is hard for most people, and I think the key is to stop _wanting_ stuff. Sadly I think consumption-driven society is incredibly deeply ingrained. I mean, most people seem to devote large proportions of their life pursuing unnecessary luxury goods. This is the mindset that needs to change - and particularly be reversed as we bring up the next generation. A fundamental shift is needed in what people are 'pursuing'.
Breaking the constant want for new things is going to be hard. I know people who basically define themselves by their consumerism, some of them even fully believing that we can somehow consume ourselves out of this climate crisis.
I do try to argue that we should reduce our consumption and buy much fewer, but much higher quality items, which we repair and maintain for a long time, instead of throwing them out and buying a completely new thing.
But I am constantly met with arguments that "no consumption means no growth, and no growth means no life and no progress" and similar arguments. These people have really entrenched themselves in consuming more and more all the time.
How do you define consumption, and how did you come up with the 90% figure? I commend your efforts but that's... A little hard to believe.
You mean to say you used to "consume" 10x what you do now? I'm skeptical that's even possible for someone living in the first world. Just food, clothing, and housing is too much consumption to make that figure reasonable.
My TEDx talks cover some of the major changes http://joshuaspodek.com/my-tedx-talk-is-online-find-your-del.... The important part was shedding the myths erroneously justifying flying or packaged food. Then practicing and finding the joy, community, and connection that life is about when you avoid polluting behavior.
The biggest resource in my experience is to start however you can. People get hung up on toothbrushes while still ordering take-out while their fridges are full, which uses far more plastic than a toothbrush.
The more you do it, the easier it gets and the more horrible the old ways become.
I think this is absolutely right. I've heard people on this website wondering why climate change and plastic soup are seen as the same problem. This is it. We live in an economy based on burning through huge amounts of resources and generating tons of waste. Climate change, plastic soup, and I dare say almost any other environmental problem are all consequences of this mentality. The economic cost of waste is way too low. This is really the fundamental problem.
How would this "circular sustainable economy" work?
People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make.
We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.
We'd need to increase the price of materials compared to labor.
Correct taxation of negative externalities would work towards this.
I (like everyone else in my neighborhood) have super cheap, barely servicable tools in my shed that I have used once or twice. There's no way that's a reasonable allocation of resources in comparison to neighbor sharing, renting high quality tools or hiring a pro who owns such, but price and convenience heavily push me towards owning disposable crap, and I have to consciously fight it.
Switch the limited liability companies from their current blacklist based regulation to whitelisting allowed behaviour. Focus this entirely on creating highly competitive markets & fostering innovation in technology, logistics and production. Markets should be full of small companies making a specific product or service as efficiently as possible. Comparison of different products should be simple, pricing should be transparent. Basically the market for products and services should resemble as closely as possible the stock market.
It's really telling that the only market the wealthy class needs to care about has incredibly tight regulation on how you describe the 'product' (Accounting standards, auditing, what the CEO tweets...).
Meanwhile the markets every day consumers & workers lives are ruled by are wall to wall lies and deception.
Our current low-regulation markets are basically designed to innovate in manipulating voters, consumers and workers. Where our most profitable industries main focus is buying off their regulators, competitors and focusing on creating moats and monopolies.
In my view a good first step would be to bring in tight regulation on political spending & lobbying. Followed by regulating advertising with a view to nationalized product discovery. Basically if even Amazon can't stop fake reviews we should make it a publicly funded good. Let every company freely list their products and (as with listed companies accounting regulation) any product produced by a big company should have stats which are directly comparable to their competitors products & legally binding. We could also require companies to list the CAD files for replacement parts they no longer make.
> We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable.
That's what happened pre 50s. My mother still uses the sewing machine my grandma was using and it was made in my country, not in buttfuck nowhere SE asia.
As it turns out making long lasting products isn't the most profitable thing so we shifted to producing to the least reliable standards people would still accept
Obviously, if people are buying them. The point is if consumers prefer cheaper, lower quality products, then how is a business offering more expensive, higher quality products supposed to survive?
My point is that the cost of the cheapest got lower, due to industrialisation & globalisation, rather than a shift in habits as people started to think 'actually sod this expensive stuff that lasts a life time, gimme cheap & disposable'.
Oh, I see what you mean. But I think people do choose to cheap and disposable for things they think they won't need. The rule of thumb for household tools is you go to harbor freight and buy the cheapest thing, and only go higher end if and when it breaks or can't do the job. Similar with electronics that keep changing or furniture if you keep moving.
I myself don't see any value to furniture of better quality than IKEA, since my kids won't want it, and I don't gain any utility of getting something of higher quality.
There's also probably some confluence with people's buying power stagnating forcing them to buy cheaper goods.
> People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make.
Then people are wrong. Almost no economy is purely one of the other - even the most "free market" economies have lots of government regulation, government spending makes up huge parts of their economy, etc.
> We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.
Totally doable in a completely free market way. You tax externalities.
This is basic stuff - economists generally agree that if you set up a carbon tax, people will use less carbon.
Taxing externalities reduces to a blame avoidance game in the political arena.
If you think America has "free markets" you haven't been watching the steady march of monopolies and cartels in virtually all sectors.
Corporations own the political process in America to avoid these well past the point of usefulness to reducing emissions/concentrations.
The toothless and ineffective Paris accords show this is roughly the same for even "progressive" economies like Europe.
The privileged will risk complete destruction over the surrender of advantage. That cute quote is frightening accurate when applied to modern partisan republican politics, think tanks, and especially the billionaire donor class, and has been for 40-50 years now with respect to environmental policy.
The only hope right now is the near-miraculous development of solar/wind/EV tech that can challenge and hopefully fundamentally undercut the viability of fossil fuels.
The article's suggestion for mass investment in sequestration technologies is warranted.
But if externality taxing was actually something politically doable as opposed to some policy dream by an economist, then we would have had a carbon tax on gasoline two decades ago, which any look at the cost of sequestration of carbon generally leads to a 3-10$/gallon tax.
And we are probably a decade from it now.
I do agree that it is basic stuff from an economic theory, which is tragically hilarious given the fundamental arrogance of Republican policy towards progressive reforms such as carbon taxation always invokes laissez faire principles.
The fact that basically applicable economic theory is politically untenable means that the people in economics as discipline have utterly failed humanity, sitting on their hands as this happened for some, or actively contributing to its exacerbation from the free market/laissez faire/libertarian wing of the University of Chicago.
One way I recall from college is “producer responsibility”. If you produce it, you’re on the hook for its safe disposal. You can bake disposal deposits or some other such mechanism into the price. Such a mechanism would help deter cheap plastic junk (Chucky Cheese prizes).
> If you produce it, you’re on the hook for its safe disposal
I'd prefer laws that producers are on the hook for enabling safe disposal.
This would cover the plastic junk issue, because most of those things cannot be recycled. Some can be "downcycled" (recycled into something less valuable), but that's still not great.
The problem with your proposal is that lots of products (like batteries) can be safely disposed, but a consumer could do something malicious, like throwing them into a river. A manufacturer should be responsible for producing products that are easy to use safely, not for the actual safe use.
We see the same thing in other industries: auto makers have to include seatbelts, but they can't be sued if someone chooses not to use one.
You design and build products which are 100% recyclable.
Own less stuff, give away things you do not need.
Price waste and good sustainable eco systems
This won't change much. Nobody will work on Pentium II, drive a gas guzzler or get a low resolution MRI. It's hard to regulate such stuff. You can only improve it a bit e.g. mandatory 3-year warranty with an option to extend it to 6 years. While buying the consumer would see the price for each warranty length.
Many computer programs or websites were more responsive in the times of Pentium II than they are now. It looks like we negated a lot of hardware advancement by inefficient software or by putting advertising in almost every possible place.
Pentium II no, however my desktop machine and main PC is 2011-era (aside from an upgraded GPU) and it still keeps up just fine. It won't play the very latest AAA titles, but just about anything else is fine. It gets ~50fps at 1080p ultra details in GTA V, which is not shabby at all.
For office and graphical work, it's obviously beyond merely capable. 200+ tabs in Firefox, no problem.
Nobody needs to work on a Pentium II- though I think we could probably find a lot of applications for really old CPUs. The main issue is how much power they consume.
My 2013 MacBook Pro retina started having weird, annoying keyboard issues. I could spend 600$ to get it repaired or 1000$ to get a newer, refurbished macbook. However I'm finding a hand me down 2009 MacBook is working just fine after putting an ssd in it.
Just today on NPR I heard about upscale retailers and brands getting into the second hand (thrift) market (albeit still expensive).
The idea is “conscientious” people will buy second hand items so that fewer resources are used, net.
But it’s wholly beside the point. They could make durable stylish (maybe not fashionable) clothing that cradle to grave would be less impactful to the enviro than this recycling PR nonsense.
What would economics aimed at a sustainable planet look like? I guess this is quite an interesting question, are there any elegant solutions to penalising climate change in the same way a land-value tax penalises passively holding on to land? We definitely need to wean ourselves off unbridled consumption at any rate, even if it wasn't an ecological nightmare it's terrible for people's mental health. Existing to consume like chickens in a human battery farm is no way for a sentient species to live.
Any country attempting to combat climate change using economic means would absolutely have to use "green tariffs" I think, otherwise businesses would simply export their emissions to the developing world on an even greater scale than they do today.
> We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need.
I think it’s at least partly driven by people’s desire to status signal, if not their desire to consume anyway to occupy their time.
While endurance helps it isn't so straightforward as /just/ increasing endurance. Efficency gains can more than pay for the cost of additional manufacturing for one. It is something which calls for doing math on a case by case basis essentially.
Going from Incandescents to LEDs and similiar caused the energy usage to go down in spite of increased always on electronic device usage. Replacing a hummer with a Prius or Yaris wins out quickly.
The whole "reduce, reuse, recycle" approach isn't tenable. Even a very environmentally conscious US lifestyle still produces a very substantial appoint of carbon emissions.
For more, see how Hans Rosling covered the idea in his 2011 "Magic Washing Machine" presentation.
oh and absurd heating too, I saw black water buckets in the caribeans. Every high sun rate place should use that and never have an electric heated tank ever again
What the article leaves to the conclusion is what needs to be stated up front and center: it's virtually impossible to do this efficiently, cheaply, or effectively because there's so little CO2 in the air, meaning
a) adding even a little bit more greatly affects the CO2 levels
b) with a global ppm of ~400, it basically means that you need to filter 2500 molecules of air to get a single molecule of CO2, and that's assuming perfect binding and effectiveness. There is no magic powder we can mix that'll cause CO2 to precipitate out of the atmosphere and fall to the ground like snow; it's a grueling energy intensive process to filter that out of the air around us.
It only has to do it cheaply now because there is NO COST to putting CO2 into the air.
Why are people surprised that if something is free (pumping CO2 into air) demand for it is high?
You are telling me that doing a charge of let's say $10 - $100/ton of CO2 wouldn't have a DRAMATIC impact on emissions? Is $10 - $100/ton too little for a supposed climate emergency?
There is so much funding and lawmaking and finger pointing and shaming - but still - dumping CO2 into the atmosphere if free and dumping remains high and people pretend to be surprised.
On energy: CA curtails (turns off) solar (and wind) power because there is not enough demand. In 2019 CA had 921,000 MWhs of curtailment.
Let's start by charging something for CO2 emissions.
The tax that applies to every single business, every single product, every single process, everything. The one that causes every single vested interest to come out of the woodwork and join together to make it politically toxic.
We tried this in Australia. It has killed every government that even dared to discuss it. And politically it is utterly impossible to defend e.g. "Carbon tax that raises power prices for pensioners".
... "will be used to offset costs for pensioners."
Our carbon tax worked at reducing emissions, and at being low economic impact. It was removed because we are a corrupt banana republic, not because it's unworkable.
Why not have the level of sales tax (VAT in the UK) vary depending on amount of C02 was used to create a product. The consumer would not pay any more on average.
This is the secret. The average citizen would actually come out ahead financially, making it a progressive tax, as opposed to the de-facto regressive taxes that have received popular opposition in other attempts.
> The average citizen would actually come out ahead financially
For a while. But if the carbon tax works and society switches to clean energy, then there is no more emissions and no more dividends pay to the citizens.
I suspect there will be always be use cases for fossil fuels; for instance, even when 99% of all cars are electric, I wouldn't want to deny auto enthusiasts muscle cars and the like, if they're willing to pay for the societal externality. The carbon tax can continue to go up to cover these cases.
Moreover, I think the same model can apply to other negative externalities (aka, Pigovian Tax [0]). But to the extent that the public will someday complain that their carbon dividend is going down: (a) I call that a good problem to have, and (b) because the collective action problem now points the other direction, there's no individual incentive to over-consume such that the dividend goes up again.
This has been the Canadian model and the Right has still weaponized the worst kind of vitriol against it (despite a carbon tax being the most market friendly mechanism).
Opponents of carbon tax and similar measures need to decide which they like less... some lost profits, an escalating carbon tax, and reshuffling their investment portfolios -- or food riots, mass migration, the massive resurgence of left wing populism, and even civil war, once the effects of climate change become intense and obvious to the populace.
Canada is likely to be spared the worst effects of climate change due to geography so it might not seem like such a serious problem to them. Even under the worst case scenario, Canada will still be self sufficient in staple crops. And any mass migrations will have to pass through the USA first.
People living through massive record forest fires in B.C. and Alberta probably won't agree with you.
Not to mention the water supply of Calgary and many other western Canadian cities is glacier fed, and the Bow Glacier that provides to Calgary may not be able to meet demand within the next 30 years... a problem that will only get worse with climate change.
Yes, the great lakes region looks better than most. And it will look desirable to a lot of displaced people...
Which ones would that be? I know of many which have a tax on various forms of energy consumption. And even then, industrial consumers are exempt or have a reduced rate.
IMHO, the first step is to migrate coal power plants to capture and storage. It is much easier to drop emissions than to pull from the air. I would like to see more tax pressure globally incentivizing carbon release reductions. Instead you get weird stuff like Japan's carbon tax where coal pays the lowest carbon tax of gasoline and diesel.
> It has killed every government that even dared to discuss it. And politically it is utterly impossible to defend
Then pull it out of political discussion! We don't have political discussion about "how to hang people of color Q better" anywhere in the world (mostly) anymore because we've wrote it in the text of our f laws that violence and racial discrimination are forbidden! Not on the political menu anymore.
Same needs to happen with lots of stuff concerning climate, ecology, sustainability etc. - we need to restrict the political menu to only the right choices.
And use the states' monopoly on violence to enforce these choices.
I have some very bad news for you: there are lots of people actively trying to work to bring those back on the menu. It's almost impossible to put things "beyond politics" so long as someone wants to bring them back.
Once some things are off the menu, people need to work really hard to change things. And, more importantly, violence can be used against those people - I mean throw-them-in-prison type of violence, not more. Just like with freedom - in order to preserve it, you need to, "paradoxically", shut some toxic persons' mouths forcefully (eg. "hate speech").
Yeah, sure, you can philosophise in the most general terms but that's not how you get people and companies stop doing wrong things. You get them when the people/entities who want to re-bring the despicable things back into discussion can be fined / closed / put-in-prison etc.
I don't argue for eco-fascism. But with some things we need to be ruthless, especially in order to be able to carry on our peaceful, understanding and democratic discussions concerning all the other things!
Given the extremely uneven distribution of money I suspect that you'd reach "couldn't afford exhaling" levels at one end before making anything resembling a dent at the other. I'm not against a carbon tax, far from it, but it's a difficult problem.
The most direct approach would be to levy the tax at the time buried carbon is taken out of its geological grave, but good luck enforcing that globally. The most realistic approach (still a total sci-fi fantasy, with plenty of room for a dystopian touch) would be a fundamental removal of resource extraction sovereignty, implemented through a combination of military force and buying out whoever is currently in charge of representing that sovereignty.
We need to treat climate change like the existential crisis that it is, and start spending like we're at war. If we can drop 2000 billion dollars on war in Iraq, why can we not do the same for something actually worthwhile like ensuring that our children and grandchildren inherit a livable planet?
We can. However that would fundamentally shift the economy off fossil fuels which is one of the largest lobbying groups in Washington and specifically the GOP.
Judging from the tone and rhetoric of the so-called "left" in the US Democratic party, it isn't limited to the GOP by any means. Watching a few minutes (all I could stand) of the South Carolina debate last night was depressing.
It's not an existential crisis. That's not what the science says. There's no evidence that climate change will make humans extinct or end civilization. If that's not what you mean by existential crisis, then don't use that word because that's what it means.
It's anticipated that at least millions, more likely hundreds of millions of humans will die to the consequences of climate change including effects of extreme weather, flooding and (especially) famine. This won't extinct all of humanity but can be expected to severely impact civilization(s), with a chance of this impact being fatal to individual cultures.
For a prospectus of what could happen, I point to the large-scale devastation of (ancient) civilization attributed to the Sea Peoples (https://www.history.com/news/who-were-the-sea-peoples). They're believed to have toppled the Hittite Empire and severely weakened the Egyptian one. "some historians believe they had been displaced from their homeland by famine or natural disasters." -- the parallels to the anticipated effects of climate change should be clear.
Large-scale political unrest, very possibly including a WW3, is something I feel justified in considering "an existential crisis." Your mileage may vary.
100's of millions is not necessarily an existential crisis because it already happened in the 1900's due to war, disease, and famine. Even if that absolute scale of deaths happens again because of climate change, it will be proportionally smaller due to the global population being an order of magnitude larger.
Do you have a reference to that prediction of it probably killing 100's of millions of people? On it's own, it doesn't really mean much because what time scale and what's the no-climate-change number to compare to?
Famine, meteorites, large scale war, atomic bombs, infectious disease, the plague - all survivable by society at large. With your definition almost nothing qualifies as existential crisis.
That's just being pedantic and obviously not what the GP's post means. If it were, then walking in the garden is an existential crisis because you're bound to step on a bug and that individual will cease to exist.
As you write, plants can do this quite efficiently via photosynthesis. So there is at least one working example where CO2 capture is resource-efficient (even solar-powered). From photosynthesis we get sugar. From sugar we can get to raw (solid) carbon for long-term storage.
Forests are not the only option. Imagine large installations with tanks of algae under a white canopy. I imagine the economies of scale are huge once this is ramped up to industrial levels.
The question is who will pay for it. Nobody wants to indirectly subsidize coal plants on another contintent.
Photosynthesis manages to convert about 1% of the sunlight into chemical energy. I wouldn't call that efficient. The big benefit of plants is of course that they're relatively low maintenance. You still need to cut them down and turn them into charcoal if you want to capture that carbon for good.
Now look at the gigatons of coal we already dug out of the soil and burnt. That's a lot of forests you need to plant, cut down, and turn into charcoal. It might be doable, but it certainly won't be cheap or easy.
AFAIK tree sequestration is marginal compared to the amount of co2 to be captured. Also, trees rot, and the decomposition process reverts a chunk of the process (releases co2)
> AFAIK tree sequestration is marginal compared to the amount of co2 to be captured
Nope. Tree sequestration is extremely effective on a global scale. That's why it's so important that we prevent deforestation.
"Intact forests and those re-growing after disturbance (like harvesting or windthrow) sequestered around 4 billion tonnes of carbon per year over the measurement period — equivalent to almost 60% of emissions from fossil fuel burning and cement production combined."
Well, the study considers already existing forests. Is it feasible to eg. increase global forestation by 100% to offset 60% of emissions? Not sure. Also, it considers a limited timespan. While it is not that relevant for undisturbed forests that usually have a stable ecosystem (trees born and die gradually), it may be an issue with disturbed ones; trees will tend to have about the same age and the same duration; this will cause release spikes related to decomposition. Also, "planting trees" usually is a placeholder response that largely ignores the impact of monocultures in the soil, subterranean water reservations and propagation of forest fires, plus the fact that co2 tends to concentrate higher in the atmosphere, way above the average tree line.
In summary: its not as bad as I thought when I wrote the previous reply, sure. But it is still far from feasible.
The efficiency of photosynthesis isn't all that great.
There's a reason energy based on organic matter has gotten a bad reputation. It's just not a very efficient way of getting energy from the sun compared to e.g. solar.
The calculation for carbon storage will be a bit different, but not by that much.
The mechanisms for us (people everywhere) to begin paying for it is crucial, as there are a number of technologies on the cusp of being useful for tackling this problem, however they are not cheap. Cheap solutions to CO2 are rare and tend to only apply to point sources at best.
Large scale solutions that help mitigate the existing CO2 are going to require some significant capital and operational expenditure.
The cheapest large scale solution actually requires less money, and more legal / willpower. But I’d argue it’s also harder to measure concrete impact and “monetise” oceanic surface iron enrichment. It’s harder to convince people to pay for estimated results even ones based on measurement and science, than results containing physical outputs, like actual solid/liquid/gaseous CO2.
(I wrote the post) This is good feedback that this is buried in the appendix -- I pulled that section up and made it inline with the flow of the post. Does that help?
Two (small) comments:
- Perhaps the review of the re-forestation option could mention that this has a number of positive side effects (outside of carbon capture), for example on rainfall and wildlife.
- as there is a time constraint on co2 capture (e.g. 2050), and as the various co2 capture solutions are not all at the same stage of maturity, it could be useful to have a table/chart that summarizes which co2 capture options are deployable now vs. at some stage in the future
I'm not sure what this is? You might be thinking of solar radiation management or other "geoengineering" techniques to try to make the earth shiner and reflect more sunlight, making us cooler at a constant CO2 concentration. Theres a ton of interesting topics within that to write about, I mention it briefly as "things I didn't include"
You carefully compress incoming air. Separate water vapors (and liquids, and hopefully not solids) from it. Cool this air in thermal exchanger - at this point CO2 falls off. Then you pass that air through turbo detander, which returns you some energy, and get a pre-liquified air, which pass to the thermal exchanger. Clean air of normal temperature is released to atmosphere.
You have to compress the air - but you also cool air, so compression is easier, and you also get some energy from the turbine where you decrease the pressure. Subject to optimizations. How much energy will you need?
Air compression is not cheap, energetically. Chilling is also energetically expensive. You'll need to do both. This would be pretty much the "brute force" method, like O(n!) in software engineering. The concept would be to bring half the planet's atmosphere down to near its liquid temperature. Currently in most US homes, Air Conditioning (air cooling) contributes the majority of each home's energy use. This would be much greater than that, it requires chilling air to -140 °C to get CO2 to "drop out".
In contrast, seeding the ocean with iron would be fairly close to O(1). However, potential side effects of this process concern some scientists greatly. Googling 'Russ George' may provide more insight.
Side note: The press material for sesinnovation also says the outlet stream is nearly 100% nitrogen...that means they're using a stream which already has oxygen removed from it (likely because the air was just used for combusting fuels). Air is roughly 21% oxygen so you can't take air, only remove CO2, and get 100% nitrogen out. Generally these "Carbon Capture" technologies only work on feed streams with high CO2. So hey're placed at industrial outlets, where fuel/coal is being burned. These streams can be > 10% CO2. Often they don't work as well, or at all, on diffuse streams like 0.04% atmospheric CO2. The technical reasons why this is the case deal with "partial pressures" as well as general entropy.
> Air compression is not cheap, energetically. Chilling is also energetically expensive. You'll need to do both.
Not exactly.
The idea is that you don't just compress air - and let the heated compressed air cool to the atmosphere in order to then expand it so it would cool some more, and then just release whatever's left back to the atmosphere. No, you use those leftovers to cool the incoming air - so you need to compress air spending less energy - and you also get the expanding air to help you to compress incoming air.
The principal point where you have non-reversibility is that extra cooling - making compressed cold air to do the work - which you need to reach necessary temperature. And you only need that temperature to separate gases; after that you can use the cold products to help with compression.
So - without colorful metaphors - I'd like to figure out how much energy will you need.
I see the approach of SES with flue gases. I'm not sure how it will look like with regular air.
having not read the article (yet), i the OP is referring to “cooling down air until it liquifies then using fractional distillation to pull out the CO2”?
You don't want to do unnecessary transformations, to preserve as much energy as possible (so the turbine, which is needed for cooling, should work on small pressure difference). So, no air liquification - just let CO2 separate and send cleaned air back to the heat exchanger.
If you can capture the CO2 using transient power from wind or solar and use it to make a synthetic fuel, then you have a potentially viable option. Carbon Engineering in Squamish BC is doing this for $100 a tonne. Their synthetic fuel costs about $2/L to make - still too expensive, but not if the carbon price rises to about $100/T.
The World Bank has compiled a database that you can query [1]. Sweden's carbon tax is USD $121, the highest in the world. Next best is Switzerland and Lichtenstein tied at $97, followed by Finland at $68.
Sweden's tax covers 40% of emissions from that country. Finland covers 36%. Switzerland covers 33%.
British Columbia's tax is lower, but it covers 70% of carbon emissions - a very broad-based tax. It will be USD $38 in 2021.
Personally, I think it's better for governments to focus on total coverage rather than the price. The more broad-based the tax is, the more efficient it is in shaping the economic development of the region. You don't want carbon "leaking" into sectors where it's cheap to pollute - that's inefficient. Far better to have all sectors equally incentivized to decarbonize.
There is exactly one technology that can affordably bind CO2 at scale and that is plants. We are just very, very far from measures to keep that carbon from reescaping back. And rightfully so, because burning carbon freshly captured by plants is infinitely less bad than burning carbon that has been nicely stashed away for geological timespans (the carbon captured by contemporary plants would recycle back into the air anyways, energy use is merely a minor latency reduction). Sequestration at burn site might be an improvement on that, but that still doesn't answer the question of where to put it. Geologically buried hydrocarbons are really hard to beat at keeping carbon out of the atmosphere, that is unless there happens an industrialization event...
> There is no magic powder we can mix that'll cause CO2 to precipitate out of the atmosphere and fall to the ground like snow; it's a grueling energy intensive process to filter that out of the air around us.
Why not to cool down air so that CO2 would fall off? Cooled air can be used for pre-cooling incoming "dirty" air stream?
I had the same thought as well. It's an option, but the energy required to cool air to the precipitation point of CO2 (-79C) is pretty large, and the cooling process itself will produce greenhouse gas, so you end up with a pretty small return.
I made some slightly more detailed posts elsewhere but this article addresses your point directly. Essentially, this is not a viable method for removing CO2 from the sky, because there's so little CO2 in the sky that it changes all the basic physics assumptions.
This is actually relatively basic undergraduate level napkin math from a chemical engineering perspective, but outside of that discipline most people understandably don't have experience with estimating physical states of mixed gases.
You would use cooled separated products to pre-cool incoming stream of "dirty" air. CO2, having low concentration, won't fall off at -79C (or we'd have that effect in Antarctica today), but if you go to ~-140C, you'll have some results.
Why cooling process will produce greenhouse gas? You'd use energy from "green" sources to compensate for required expenses.
This isn’t something you can just assert as if by magic.
By using this kind of technology, you increase the total power requirements of our civilization. That power has to come from somewhere. If you earmark green energy sources for it, something else will need to use a dirty energy source.
This remains true as long as green energy production falls short of planetary demand (modulo carbon taxes/credits/caps which change the math here a bit depending on specifics). The leftover slack will be met by burning fossil fuels.
That's why I'm trying to estimate energy requirements of such a process. Somebody experienced with gas liquification could perhaps help.
You have to build these cleaning devices, and you'll need to build energy sources for them. We do have both power and increase in power supply with time; the question is specific numbers, which I'm trying to estimate.
But that’s the problem. When you say you could just build new clean energy sources for these things, you’d be better off by only doing that.
Every kWh of clean energy produced is far more effective at addressing climate change when it replaces a kWh generated by fossil fuel than it is trying to remove the carbon from that fossil fuel after the fact.
> Every kWh of clean energy produced is far more effective at addressing climate change when it replaces a kWh generated by fossil fuel than it is trying to remove the carbon from that fossil fuel after the fact.
True. However, here are two significant, in my opinion, notes.
1) We already have a lot of CO2 in the air. We'd better get it out, and sooner.
2) We're proving every day our limited abilities in organizing focused efforts in fighting climate crisis, particularly by a single specific way. So, if we could reduce organizational problems by choosing a solution which has less of them, we could win in practice.
It's rather obvious that it's better not to get CO2 into the air in the first place. Looks like we can't avoid doing that now. So other options become interesting.
-140C only works for CO2-rich streams (> 10%). As the partial pressure of CO2 decreases, you'll need to get asymptotically closer to the melting point of oxygen/nitrogen. You'll also need to increase the pressure, but again that only gets you reasonable temperature gains if the partial pressure of CO2 is >>0mmHg. Currently it is 0.3mmHg @ 400ppm. In short, this is not a viable method for removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Net negative emissions must be a global goal within 5 years because this is a climate change emergency. It doesn't mean no emissions, it means deeply net negative. Even going crazy to get to zero emissions, it doesn't change the inconvenient fact that an excess of GHGs are already in the air. Sequestration (CCS) and solar shades (SRM) are the primary, big-$tretch approaches that are most readily-apparent to moderating insolation. CCS seems much more doable than sending a giant blackout curtain into space or spraying tons of SO2 into the air to return as acid rain.
Here's the thing about CCS: direct air capture is like a junior engineer's naive, brute-force solution because it's way too expensive and not scalable for the several teratons that need to be sequestered.
Bio CCS remediation approaches are superior because they use biology to do more of the work for less resources. Kelp, phytoplankton (including ferrous seeding) and other ocean-based CC are the natural solutions to lock-up carbon. There's a massive kelp forest right now off the Yucatan in Mexico stretching nearly to Africa. Harvesting, expanding and fertilizing such an ecosystem with an army of specialized ships seems like a better plan for tackling it. Such a plan would still require assuring the Sequestration in CCS such that biomass sinks to deep ocean trenches OR harvesting, compacting and pumping underground. If we can manage and offset GHGs down to a sane level at some point in the future, then it should be an immutable prime-directive that GHGs cannot be emitted without first purchasing or accomplishing an equivalent assured CCS.
PS: As luck would have it, I happen to subscribe to several climatology and related academics on various video platforms, including Paul Beckwith, who does a good job of summarizing the latest research and underscoring events and trends. EDIT: https://paulbeckwith.net
My biggest concern about CO2 is the cognitive impact it has on humans - at levels 800ppm and higher, mental performance is impacted. It will take a while for the atmosphere to reach this level (hopefully it never does), but it is common inside houses and offices. As atmospheric CO2 rises, it becomes more difficult to ventilate buildings, and human mental performance degrades.
In terms of geoengineering, it seems like these two are our best bets:
In any case it seems absolutely bonkers that we are still selling fossil-fueled-vehicles and building coal power plants when we clearly have the technology and capability to replace both of them.
The amazing thing about stratospheric aerosol injection is that fully negating the effect of global warming would cost less than $5 billion per year.[1] That's less than 0.01% of world GDP. That's cheap enough for a single major country to unilaterally take on itself.
In contrast going fully carbon neutral would cost the economy at least 100 times that amount. And even then it would still result in some amount of warming between 1.5-3 C. Plus require multilateral commitment from nearly every country.
To me the calculus seems to strongly favor forgetting about carbon mitigation completely. Instead just focusing on immediately starting aerosol injections. The tech already exists and is ready to be deployed. Starting sooner will give us time to get better at using it, and discover any potential pitfalls.
Then in 100 or 200 years, we can switch over to more advanced geoengineering that fully and permanently scrubs carbon out of the atmosphere. Aerosol injection would act as a stopgap measure until the carbon-scrubbing is cost-effective.
I don't like those sorts of articles because they dismiss the idea of reducing CO2 emissions, while only talking about hypothetical technologies.
I don't think it's a good idea to wait for such undeveloped technology to mature, because the clock is already ticking. It is still much more important to reduce emissions now.
What would be much better, for example, is developing smaller cars. I would rather see society organize for a voluntary reduction of co2, because capturing co2 seems like scientifically too fastidious.
Also, I'm european and I tend to be very pessimistic when looking at US co2 emissions per capita.
I think the author actually agrees with you, per the article itself:
"there are two general approaches to keep warming to below a certain level:
- Reducing emissions
- Removing previous emissions from the sky
If you remember one thing from this piece, it should be that we need to do both.
Gone are the days where optimistic emissions reductions kept us below a 2-degree warming target."
The alternative to reducing emissions etc. is called "Geoengineering" and there are dozens of proposed methods. [1] In fact some have even been tested in the field, like growing algae. Unfortunately most solutions have unlikely but quite extreme risk scenarios. Although some surface reflection techniques seem actually reasonable [2]
The article seems to ignore scientific research from the field that actually started decades ago, so it's difficult to take that very seriously. To me most of these methods look more like emergency measures when sh* literally hits the fan...
Except reducing emissions seems much more doable, safe and simple. It's just politically difficult. I have little hope that technology will be able to capture co2 in a manner that will be sufficient.
I don't like those sorts of techs because people will brandish them as a solution, while it's highly unlikely they will help at all.
Changing minds and habits of billions of people is more simple and feasible? For me it's ridiculous. Any technological solution looks way better for me.
The US may have a high CO2 per capita but also look at surface area. Because that reflects how polluted a piece of land is. The Netherlands (my country) is high on the list with 3859 tonnes of CO2 per square kilometer. Belgium at 3279. Germany at 2239. Switzerland at 970.6. And then all the way to the bottom the USA at 547 tonnes, sandwiched in between Hungary and Spain.
Even better than developing smaller cars would be to reduce meat intake. AFAIK that's the single biggest improvement a single person can make to their CO2 footprint. And it's not that hard to pull off - just tax meat more heavily. I'm not sure the party who passes such a law would get reelected though.
There's no need to tax meat specifically. A blanket tax on CO2 emissions would suffice. Regenerative agriculture allows for carbon neutral meat production.
Thanks. I actually just took a look around there and was disappointed there wasn't a 'News' section or something like that, so glad to hear there will be updates soon!
I do have one other question: is there any chance you'll partner with a Canadian charity, or other ex-US charities for that matter, to accept tax-free donations from other countries?
One of the problems I see with CO2 sequestration is that it will be a nice way for companies to suck at the teat of taxpayers the world over.
I'm sure Halliburton-like companies have a 3 step plan to be right at the front of the money firehose when governments are forced to reduce CO2 or face even bigger costs (both financially and politically) in the coming decades.
This assumes that the only way a project like this could be pulled off would be for the state to open a "money firehose" and spray it onto buckets held by private corporations. Is there any reason it couldn't, in theory, be a state controlled venture? Especially for something as seemingly basic as "planting trees", I don't see where the corporate expertise comes in that the state could never replicate.
"The state will handle this" is not only a legitimate structure in totalitarian dictatorships, it's used across the developed western world for most public services.
Trees take about 10 years[1] to reach their peak CO2 consumption. That’s a long time to wait. Also, trees and other plants seem to be decreasing in how much carbon they are absorbing, compared to what they did a decade ago. [2]
Sure, that works, and will continue to work. Forests on the other hand help when new, but reach a steady state.
However the problem is that at least for the near future burning oil, making plastic, and similar other carbon intensive processes make it near impossible to plant enough trees.
Carbon taxes, solar, wind, energy storage, and nuclear offer at least the possibility of offsetting carbon generation.... then plant and sink trees.
I do wonder how hard it would be to make a widget that with sunlight could make pure carbon bricks that would be useful as a building material. I think Cory Doctorow described it in one of his sci-fi books. Ideally self replicating of course.
If you do the math, this essentially doesn't work out. :( Trees are far too slow, even if you have a good way to lock up the carbon once the trees capture it.
For an intuitive understanding, consider: Our surplus of CO2 comes (mostly) from burning fossil fuel that took millions of years for the original plant life to accumulate.
Yes, but forests capture carbon quickly until the average age of the trees starts increasing. So zero to 50 years is good, but after that things really slow down. The amount of wood becomes relatively constant.
So slowly, very slowly leaves fall/get eaten by bugs, break down, and get absorbed by new trees. But there is a net gain, just a very slow one. Then things like continents collide, mountain ranges come and go, and significant biomass gets buried and under pressure and time turns into oil/gas.
So for scale we could cut down all trees and bury it and take 638 gigatonnes out of our ecosystem. Not sure of the average tree age, but assuming it was replanted we could likely repeat that every 20-30 years.
The annual oil consumption looks to be around 36 billion barrels. Each weighs around 300 pounds. If my conversion is right that's about 4.9 Gigatonne.
So burying all trees every 30 years would be about 21.2 gigatonne a year or enough to offset all oil consumption AND decrease our current levels to pre-industrial levels.
Consider the scale of what you're describing now: cutting down and burying all trees on earth every 30 years.
We could certainly _burn_ all of them every 30 years, but that wouldn't help. The figure you need is the marginal capture after the emissions from the process.
Wikipedia says our current emissions from fossil fules and cement production is estimated at 10GtC (not absurd compared to your numbers, since you count only crude oil).
So restating, if somehow without adding any new carbon buried _all_ the vegetation on earth every 30 years, we'd remove 21 GtC per year or a net reduction of 11. To get back to pre-industrial levels it would still take 34 years even ignoring the >1000 GtC currently in the ocean surface that would come out of solution and fight the reduction. (I have no idea how to setup the diff eqs for solving for the ocean contributions...)
The fact that an emission free removal and replacement of all vegetation of earth would still take a long time is basically my point around "planting trees" not being a sufficient plan. :)
Not that planting trees is bad, but solving this is going to take some mixture of reduction and magic (presumably both the political and technological kind).
Heh, well I just wanted an idea on scale. It doesn't take millions of years, but less than 100.
Certainly it wouldn't likely be 100% every 30 years, but 3.3% every year. As far as geo-engineering significant climate change this looks like one of the easier approaches actually.
Of course it's much more feasible with the continued migration towards solar, wind, hydro, and related.
Sadly I think Nuclear got the short end of the stick for mostly political reasons. Things like putting a nuke plant in a known tsunami zone, without protection, because of political lobbying.
I'm wondering if the CO2 stored could be optimised through coppicing. Historically this technique was used to maximise the amount of wood for shipbuilding.
One danger of promoting carbon sequestration is that people might think that they can emit as much as they want, since its' going to be removed from the atmosphere anyways.
More dangerous yet, lobbies pushing this way of thinking to the public and trying to get away with more emissions: "Yes we are extracting oil, but we also spend X$ each year for carbon sequestration.
This is a little bit how these lobbies have been pushing changing personal habits "turn of the water while brushing your teeth, don't use plastic straws". Or also CO2 compensation (or absolution as I call it).
Not to say that we shouldn't invest in sequestration, but just need to be careful with the phrasing. This article does a good job, saying BOTH need to happen (reduction of emission and sequestration).
I agree. We need to move to more renewables like solar but that is just for the future, burning less CO2 in 30 years from now. The warming will continue to happen, technology can't stop it. The population will grow to 9B but the global growth rate keeps dropping. This planet can't support that many people, no matter how clean we use energy. Look at all the water resources and food resources we are burning and the biodiversity we are killing so people can eat and make a living. It feels like 4B is about as much as we can sustain. The population will continue to drop and the places where the birth rate is high, we need education and empowerment of women to drive the birth rate down to more western rates. This is where we should be spending money, not a machine to pull CO2 out of the air. Nature already knows how to do that quite efficiently but it will take time. We'll have a few hundred years of consequences but it will eventually fix itself.
You could also plant 100 trees every month for the same amount, and in 5 years you would have a small forest + removed 1079 tons of C02 instead of 60.
In 10 years, you would have 12000 trees and removed 4283 tons of C02 instead of 120.
Trees are not really the best carbon removal tool that one could hope for, but at least they're a decent comparison.
PS: Very approximate carbon removal per tree per year rate of 5.9kg. Bigger trees can remove more carbon (>22kg for a 10yo tree) and the tree species also have a role to play, but you get the point, climeworks effectiveness is extremely small and you're lighting piles of cash on fire.
How much CO2, on scale, let's say, 10 years, planting 1000 trees a month would remove? I have https://teamtrees.org/ in mind, they claim to plant one tree for each dollar.
10 years, with 1000 trees a month (it's a lot of trees!) make 42834 tons of CO2 (with very average calculation and constant CO2 removal rate instead of linear growth)
By comparison, climeworks would have removed 120 tons of CO2.
Look, it's cool that we consider all these fancy solutions, but we had and still have a more obvious solution of pricing-externalities into things - a proper carbon-tax and recycling-taxes for plastics high enough to make them undesirable, increase gas (and coal) prices enough to make electric everything look cheap and maybe even nuclear power look cheaper in the new comparison!
Stop pending the argument that "it's politically impossible / toxic / whatever / unenforceable etc.", that's a dumb argument.
Just take politics out of the equation! Or more precisely, take "democratic choice" out of this particular policy decision!
If countries amend their constitutions to disallow any party or individual not in support of this to even be part of any election, then this particular aspect would simply not appear in political campaigns. Have "dark room" deals in most countries of the world put this into place and move on.
And once the major international players are on board, for any country not playing the same game, just kindly point the missiles at them!
In the end, most national governments would approve of such taxation because they'll have the opportunity to formulate it in their own terms and slightly increase national budgets (maybe investing a bit more in the military and gaining an advantage over their neighbors that don't do it... ugly but any incentive in the right direction helps). And multinational corporations would also not mind it much if it's done across the board, without favoring anyone... and actually corporations could be "hired to enforce the tax" in more advanced schemas, offering opportunities to profit while punishing misbehaving countries.
"Just take politics out of the equation! Or more precisely, take "democratic choice" out of this particular policy decision!"
This is such a scary sentence! The problem of climate change has been cause precisely by a lack of democracy. The military, the large oil refiners, the design of our infrastructure has been deeply affected by corporate priorities at the expense of a manipulated populace. We have climate denial in the US in large part because of corporate propaganda (and the fact that if people's oil sector jobs disappear there's no organized democratic approach to help them, they're at the mercy of the private sector).
Furthermore, real democracy would include all the people affected by climate change that didn't cause it! The people of the Marshal islands should certainly have a say in how we approach this problem. Saying we don't need democracy is an extremely America centric approach.
In the circles I'm in, we talk a lot about eco-facsism, which is the way the ecological crisis will be used to promote fascist policies with a green tinge. These include blaming immigrants, cracking down on poor people, and denying democracy in favor of the technocratic actors who caused the problem in the first place.
We need the opposite! We need complete renewal of democracy and democratic practice in order to solve these problems. This idea scares the powerful because solving this crisis necessarily requires democratic control of major parts of the economy, which is a threat to the existing beneficiaries of the economic system.
You don't have "democratic choice" for "how to better improve effectiveness of racial segregation", or how to better "discipline unruly women"... we know that some things like discrimination and violence are BAD, so we've written into law that they are not allowed.
In all the civilized world we've taken certain really BAD options off-the-political-democratic-choice menu, because we don't want them to even be considered!
Maybe we can do the same with things that are are really bad for the environment, like not having eco-externalities priced into things! This can be done without killing democracy as a whole. You cut a finger to save the whole organism! Maybe we should start seeing the environment as an extension of our bodies and treat violence against it similarly to how we treat physical violence - take it off the f menu!
Not doing this would only make things worse and, yeah, sooner or later some "(pseudo)eco-fascist" group would spring up and find groups to blame (for the f-up resulting from people not acting because they couldn't find a democratically-acceptable solution) and manage to sell hate well enough to get in power. And at that point everyone will be double-screwed: you'll have wrecked environment + "eco"-fascists!
> The problem of climate change has been cause precisely by a lack of democracy
Well, yeah, but ya know, sometimes you treat cancer with radiation... Just like you sometime need to apply more force and violence to end a war sooner and minimize overall destruction. Expecting for the Marshall island's vote to be considered in the US or the EU is not practical problem solving.
It would have a couple of benefits: First CCS would be feasible. Second if (non-fossil) energy is dirt cheap, nobody bothers digging fossil energy sources from ground. Third, there are always more fun things available when energy is cheap vs when energy is expensive) So, keep on pushing solar and try to make nuclear competitive with something like small modular reactors, they are pretty much only ones with massive enough potential to properly disrupt energy markets.
I mean if so called wonder materials like Graphene can actually be harnessed to make new generation ultra cheap solar cells may be something might happen.
What we need actually is a Global Manhattan project which focuses on something like the 100 most promising approaches and builds and tests prototypes. This should be funded both by Govts. and the rich individuals. I think sharing of intellectual property can do a lot of good in solving the Carbon free energy conundrum and then getting it cheap enough for everything else. My guess is that a project like this can deliver solution(s) 10-20 years before free market will.
"The event coincides precisely with a catastrophic decline in carbon dioxide levels, which fell from 3500 ppm in the early Eocene to 650 ppm during this event."
that's not true at all. We're trying to measure the human impact on global temperature. The natural zero is whatever our best guess for the temperature would be without human intervention.
If it was constant, I'd agree, but the natural temperature was always changing and whatever it would have been today will also be changing. So you'd be graphing a different quantity, f(t) = temperature(t) - natural_temperature(t). From such a graph, you wouldn't be able to tell if a change was a change in the actual temperature or just a change in the predicted natural temperature. A predicted natural cooling would look the same as a human-caused warming.
Just pump air into ponds of algae/kelp or grow Azolla on the surface. Feed it with fertilizer runoff that's otherwise thrown into the rivers, seas, oceans. No need to build expensive solutions to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
that sounds like an expensive solution. I can't napkin math any of this since I don't know how much CO2 you could extract along with the other engineering and logistical problems:
* which areas are suitable
* how much energy is required
* how much area of land is required.
I hesitate to give credibility to any answer that starts with 'just... [do this thing]'.
If you have any references I'd be curious to learn more
That won't remove the co2 already in the air. And we also produce gases that alleviate warming, not only greenhouse effect ones. Stopping all emissions today would probably result in a temperature increase, not a drop. The facts are, there is no magic today to capture the co2 in the air. To reverse the process, you'd need at least to put the same amount of energy as the one dissipated when co2 was released. So, imagine producing at least the same amount of energy of burni g 100years of fossil fuels.
The conclusion is always (from my point of vue) : we are fucked.
We need a magic device that will remove gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere in less than 30 years and we need it to do it without using energy or consuming rare material.
And you can't do much with CO2 at the end.
Before you get too worried, remember that positive stories about climate change are politically forbidden in most mainstream publications. You're only getting the gloomy side of it.
The harm it will do is still finite and not even really known. Maybe we can just suck it up and suffer the consequences? Do you have an idea of how bad it will really be? Worse than World War II? Worse than communism? Worse than the Spanish Flu? All that stuff happened in the same century and killed close to 10% of the earth's entire population! Yet somehow we're doing great.
I empathize with people who are trying to help by reducing their footprint. Though I fear it'll all be in vain when a machine is invented that can suck a lifetime's worth of frugality out of the air in a fraction of a second.
I have spent a not inconsiderable amount of resources reducing my footprint and I will be thrilled to death if we can manage our way out of this crisis and people get "free lunches". This is just trivial game theory and the sunk cost fallacy.
Regrettably, the numbers involved make me pessimistic. I think your idea of some deus ex machina technology is ungrounded optimism, wishful thinking, or denial. Nothing in the linked article gives any cause for such optimism.
Climate change math is like the ballistics equation. It is just a cold hard reality check. There is no free lunch in terms of the energy of a chemical reaction.
We are all getting really, really close to failing here. I think it's imperative not to be hopeless about it, but we should be honest with ourselves that we may not have modern human civilization as we understand it within a generation or two [edit: unless we act immediately, not soon]
There is a non-negotiable entropy cost associated with removing CO2 from the atmosphere: you need to either pump it, so P0 = 0.0004 atm; if P1 = 5 atm (liquid CO2) then E = M R T ln(5 / 0.0004) / 44 => E/M = about 500 J/kg, or you need to absorb it chemically, which requires a chemical with a vapor pressure of CO2 < 0.0004 atm, (e.g. NaOH) itself generally energy-intensive to produce.
I expect that we will eventually develop technology for CO2 extraction, but it's not going to be easy or convenient. 500 joules per kilogram is a lot and I doubt chemical methods will beat it. Currently there are about 3.5 trillion tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere, or about 3.5 * 10^15 kg. To decrease the concentration by 1/3, returning us to preindustrial CO2 levels, you'd need about 600 petajoules or 170 terawatt-hours of input energy assuming thermodynamically perfect isothermal compression (which is impossible to actually achieve). Global world electricity consumption per year is about 21000 TWh.
No current method of CO2 extraction comes close to this limit and it's very unlikely that any ever will. Nonetheless, we have several orders of magnitude of wiggle room to let real-life methods work out okay. But the energy cost is not small and the negative effects of present-day CO2 emissions should not be considered easily curable.
And just for the fun of it, a human being releases about 4 * 10^5 kg of CO2 during their lifetime, requiring about 2 * 10^8 J. So the most efficient CO2 pump possible would require at least 200 million watts of power (about a thousand Tesla Roadsters at maximum output) to confine this CO2 within a second.
I integrated the PV curve at constant temperature, so P = nRT/V and dW = P dV = nRT dV/V. Then we can write W = nRT log(V0 / V1) = nRT log(P1 / P0), and n = M / 44, the molar mass of CO2.
Also, you can't restore the initial pressure because at the initial pressure the CO2 takes up a whole atmosphere of space!
Thanks. You've calculated the energy required to pressurize the gas. You can get that energy back if you make the gas doing work; if you pressurize it quasi-statically, you at least won't lose energy while compressing...
I didn't get your last line though. I assume you compress "dirty" air.
You can't get the energy back because I assumed you have a magical compressor that only compresses carbon dioxide. I didn't include any terms for compressing air. You get a slightly cheaper term (ca 420 J/kg) if you set the upper pressure to atmospheric but then you're storing gaseous CO2 which is not practical. But recovering energy by restoring the original [partial] pressure of 0.0004 atm is not possible unless you somehow jettison the CO2 into outer space.
To be clear: all real processes probably require many times more energy than this. There is no way I know of to selectively compress one component of a gas mixture. But if you did, this would be the energy cost.
Ok, let's take 500 J/kg of CO2. Do you think it's a lot? To get 1 kg of CO2 you'll need to process roughly a ton of air. There are ~5e15 tons of air in the atmosphere, so it's 3e18 J to process all the air. We produce annually 75e18 J annually on the planet - can we handle this expense?
I'm afraid it will be more than that - but how much more exactly?
Using PSA can reduce the energy cost of CO2 extraction significantly relative to direct compression technology. But because we know that the adsorbent is used in a cyclic process, we have dW[compression] = p dV + dE[adsorbent] and the long-time integral of dE[adsorbent] is effectively zero because the adsorbent cannot absorb or release energy forever, so ΔW[compression] = int[p dV] and thus any technology, compression-based or not, incorporating some finite amount of external components, is subject to the work limit.
This is also why, for example, thermodynamic analyses of engine types are always concerned about the possible compression ratio. You could consider the partial pressure of atmospheric and stored CO2 as the compression ratio of a hypothetical compressed-air motor, which can then be run to extract thermal energy (i.e. violate the second law of thermodynamics) from any process more efficient than 500 J/kg CO2, since again W[motor] = int[p dV]. You can improve the compression ratio by taking advantage of the P-T curve and performing the whole compression at the South Pole, which saves you about 100 J/kg.
Also, I was off by a factor of ten when I plugged in the vapor pressure of CO2. Correcting this is left as an exercise to the reader.
Technologies not subject to the work limit include e.g. olivine crushing, somehow inhibiting volcanic activity (???), planting trees, etc. Another technology I just thought of would be to to form CO2@H2O clathrates in seawater starting with air, which would also lower the compression ratio, and extracting the (solid) clathrates to recover CO2 and desalinated water. Here the pressure required is much lower and additionally desalinated water is produced; this only works if we form the clathrates in a cold environment and decompose them in a warm one, which is kind of inconvenient. Then again, shipping gigatons of fresh water to LA might become necessary anyway!
> Though I fear it'll all be in vain when a machine is invented that can suck a lifetime's worth of frugality out of the air in a fraction of a second.
In the same way that a year's worth of health insurance is wasted if you don't get sick. So, not wasted.
The article links to a website where you can calculate your footprint, and buy offsets in various programs to negate that footprint (projectwren.com). It would cost me USD 17 / month to offset my (larger than average for my country) footprint. Why do I even bother with my reusable coffee cup and paper straws for that kind of money? I just don't understand. If an extra charge of $10 / month for everyone in Europe would 'solve' the problem, why don't we do it?
Reducing the use of disposable plastics isn't supposed to prevent climate change, it's about reducing the amount of trash. While any trash that you put in the bin in a western country is highly unlikely to end up in the world's oceans, it still sends a signal against ubiquitous single-use products. That the two are so often treated as one is really unfortunate. Because if people actually cared about reducing their individual carbon emissions, they'd have to give up things like flying and eating meat, not disposable plastics. But that involves actual changes in behaviour, so it's not exactly popular and many people find the mere suggestion offensive.
But they do make you feel like you're doing your part. I wonder how many people are just satisfied with that and whether it wouldn't have made more sense to push other solutions instead.
>If an extra charge of $10 / month for everyone in Europe would 'solve' the problem, why don't we do it?
Considering how much excise taxes Europeans pay on their gasoline, you would think that climate change would already be a solved issue. Taxes are a larger part of the cost of gasoline than the gasoline itself. Yet somehow there isn't enough money to fight climate change?! The Netherlands pays $3.53 per gallon purely in excise taxes.[0] Bulgaria, a country with an average income of $9000 a year[1], pays $1.61 a gallon in excise taxes.
I think at a certain point you need more than offsets. We once had a forested world, with oil in the ground.
We cut forests, and burned oil. Offsets help revert one of these things. But, we’d need to do more than that to reverse the change.
So the offsets you can buy now are low hanging fruit. Actual carbon sucking costs vastly more than wren’s offsets.
Though still achiveble? Would be about $10,000 usd per person at average european emissions. About $20,000 usd per person at average american emisisons. Includes children.
If those costs go down, the costs become realistic. I don’t mean politically realistic, just possible to do.
Fwiw I use both wren and climeworks. And maybe if enough people used wren they might find non-forest offsets that are achievable at low cost. But right now it wouldn’t obviously scale if all did it.
Reusable cups and paper straws aren't for climate change. They're for the quite unreasonable landfill scare. The people who subscribe to that belief have no idea beyond "plastic = bad" and "landfills = bad". Sometimes they try to link it to climate change for added credibilty though.
> The people who subscribe to that belief have no idea beyond "plastic = bad"
So... you're saying that there's not an accumulation of plastic waste / microplastics in the environment, or that we know any impacts or benign or negligible?
Good news if true, would like to know what position there's the most credible evidence for.
> and "landfills = bad".
I'm a fan of consumer goods, so naturally it's convenient for me if landfills == good, but I also tend to wonder (a) exactly how effectively they isolate waste issues from, say, groundwater or other environmental circulation and (b) if there might be some volume threshold past which landfills aren't an adequate solution for addressing waste streams.
Most western countries have proper regulation regarding waste disposal. Plastic pollution is a big is a big issue, but wont be solved while big economies decide to export their waste to places with less strict regulations. This is - in my opinion - the point that needs pressure from conscious citizens.
We are only now starting to measure up the microplastics impact and their origin. Switching to reusable cups is a drop in the ocean, when tons of the stuff is released by simply washing clothes or makeup off your face.
They do. Keep in mind, most of the produced residues arent recyclable or compostable. What gets exported is a small fraction of it. Could legislation be better? That was my point.
Why do we always phrase it as changing the climate instead of facing that it's an energy balance issue? Too much energy is entering the earth and getting trapped.
We can solve it by letting less enter, or otherwise sinking some of it. Consider if we stored the excess energy as chemical energy? or reflected some fraction of the energy back out away from us?
reducing consumption is a failing project and the greener technology gets the more people increase their consumption in a compensatory way (Heat – George Monbiot) ...
"Energy balance" isn't the right diagnosis because the energy balance has not changed significantly: the sun is and has forever been the dominant energy source in climate terms.
Broad-spectrum sunlight hits the earth, and is later emitted as infrared. CO2 is transparent to UV, but absorbs infrared. So global warming is a consequence of the fact that the major fossil fuel emission is opaque to a wavelength of light emitted by the sunlit earth.
"Letting less enter", "stored the excess energy", and "reflected some fraction" are all huge engineering solutions to the global warming crisis. And I support them all! But space mirrors and geo-scale energy sinks are sci-fi, they will not save us any time soon.
Reducing consumption buys time. Switching to renewables buys time too. Maybe you use renewable biofuels and capture the CO2 emissions: now your car is carbon negative, without launching a space mirror!
It is phrased this way because the changing climate is what negatively affects civilization.
While it is an energy imbalance which causes the climate to change, modifying the energy input or output via geoengineering will also cause the climate to change, even if the overall balance stays the same.
Remove co2 out of the sky is also a good thing. The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth because then the oceans will act as a Co2 buffer sink. Think like carbon beverage, when you cool cans during production for putting carbon in them you cool them. If you heat a can they release stored co2. The same process with the oceans but at a much bigger scale.