I love the enthusiasm of people reading this and supporting it, but something we need to understand is the scale of carbon in the atmosphere. We've released more carbon into the air than contained in all the plants alive on earth today, and we're on the path emitting more carbon than contained in all living organisms on the planet. Our climate is on the path to Miocene where temperatures were 3-4C above today's levels.
I like to imagine CO2 in solid form (dry ice) to help visualize the scale of the problem.
1) Burning a gallon of gasoline releases almost 10 kgs of CO2 into the atmosphere. Let's say the average driving American consumes 1.5 gallons of gas a day. That's almost 15 kgs of matter to deal with every day. Imagine instead of it being released as gaseous CO2, it accumulated in your car's trunk as dry ice. After a few days, what would you do with it all? Maybe you'd throw it in your basement or your backyard. After a week or two, all free space in even a large home would be totally occupied with the waste. And this is only for personal travel done by individuals. All transportation (including the transportation of goods) is less than a 3rd of U.S. CO2 emissions. If dealing with the waste of driving on an individual level is so hard, how can we possibly hope to deal with all CO2 emissions?
2) You can also do the same thought experiment with total CO2 emissions per capita, which is currently about 15.25 metric tons per year per person in the U.S. That averages out to 41 kg of CO2 per day. How could you possibly find a way to deal with 41 kg of dry ice per day.
Right now, our solution is to happily dump it into the atmosphere, which conveniently carries the CO2 away from us without us needing to worry. There really isn't a solution to this problem. It's a tragedy of the commons.
I like the idea of stacking up a lot of 1 meter cubes of pure carbon (graphite, or diamond!) into nice shapes. Each cube is just over 2 metric tons (2266 kg) of carbon, or the equivalent of 8 metric tons of carbon dioxide. 20 cubic kilometers per year is enough to get us back to pre-industrial levels in no time, and build some interesting monuments while we're at it. A roughly 4-kilometer tall pyramid, anyone? Low low price of ~4 trillion dollars each.
Casually building pyramids out of the ~57 cubic kilometers of carbon blocks would be pretty neat. Three 4 kilometer tall square based pyramids would do it.
They would also be the largest structures ever built by humanity by an order of magnitude. If we did it in Australia, we could employ the entire country twice over, and they would be the 3 new tallest mountains in Down Under (by 1,772m).
Its a wonderful image, but how do you propose sequestering the carbon? Without a powerful source of truly carbon-neutral energy, the losses incurred would simply see more carbon released downstream as a result of whatever process you choose to create such artful carbon chunks.
I still really enjoy the mental image of a post-industrial society in a few thousand years sitting on a foundation of diamond bricks. :)
Well, that's kind of down stream of what I was talking about - I am assuming that we can get to $250 per ton of direct carbon capture and then use something like a solar CO2 reduction system with a metal catalyst to strip the O2 off. But it's "merely a matter of money" at that point.
There's almost certainly some coking issues to overcome, but hey, we're already hypothetically taking on the largest industrial project of all time, roughly equivalent to all the effort spent to extract fossil fuels ever.
One thing I find particularly concerning in these plans is how people want to use them. Lots of people inevitably suggest under these posts that we just use DAC as counterbalance instead of reducing emissions. This is very much impossible as optimistic reduction scenarios still need trillions annually from every country and a no-reduction scheme would lead to hundreds upon hundreds of trillions of global DAC funding, far more than the GDP of the Earth is right now. This is the scale of the megaproject we need to undertake.
The only way we can make these things viable is massive funding and incredible carbon emissions reduction. This is very literally the largest industrial project that ever has happened, a re-terraforming of our own planet. There is absolutely no way we are going to succeed without full effort from all countries.
Honestly I don't expect it to happen. It's depressing, but I just don't think humanity collectively can take action on a scale like this without direct personal incentives, and I don't think there are any. I think we're going to drown in our waste products like yeast in a fermentation tank due to the tragedy of the commons.
With a properly designed electricity grid with interconnects to other grids and using all those idle electric cars as batteries we surely can solve this problem. The wind is always blowing somewhere, the sun is always shining somewhere, and most electric vehicles are idle at night when the sun is not shining and they could be used to smooth out the peaks and troughs. Most private vehicles are idle for more than 90% of the time.
If those were all electric with, say 50 kWh batteries they would be able to deliver an instantaneous power of something like 58 TW if the connectors could take it. But even if we assume that they are connected to only 7 kW charging points they could deliver 2 TW instantaneously. They could keep this up for an hour at the cost of losing less than 20% of a full charge.
Average US electricity consumption is about 500 GW so vehicle to grid plus an upgraded and properly interconnected grid should be able to solve the problem of intermittent generation.
I hope I haven't made a mistake in the arithmetic!
Also, we have lots of energy storage options that produce minimal amounts of waste.
Flywheels, molten salt, iron air batteries, literally dozens of alternative systems exist that are all viable and variably scalable power grid stabilization systems that can work harmoniously with renewable generation to keep electricity available to the consumer at both the individual and commercial level.
It needs a lot of financial and engineering investment to make headway, and these decisions would have to come from government leadership as otherwise there are too many cats to corral to ever make is succeed.
Sure, but if you separate the carbon from the oxygen and return the oxygen to the atmosphere you reverse the process and you’re back to, simply, having to deal with roughly the same mass of fuel as you originally burned. Which is obviously a tractable problem since you burned it in the first place.
If we had a good way to make synthetic gasoline from energy + carbon, we could have a totally carbon neutral fuel cycle where we use nuclear power to extract carbon from the air and produce synthetic gasoline.
It's monstrously inefficient to use nuclear power to create hydrocarbon fuels, truck them to petrol stations, and then burn them.
"Modern gasoline engines have a maximum thermal efficiency of more than 50%,[1] but road legal cars are only about 20% to 35% when used to power a car. In other words, even when the engine is operating at its point of maximum thermal efficiency, of the total heat energy released by the gasoline consumed, about 65-80% of total power is emitted as heat without being turned into useful work, i.e. turning the crankshaft"
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#Gasoline_(pe...
And the heat engine efficiency limits are only one part of the problem. Extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere also costs a lot of energy.
It is more efficient and simpler to just use the existing electricity grid to charge electric vehicles.
Charging the battery itself alone might be efficient. Take your 90% efficiency as true, and assume electric motor efficiency as 90% too, now the net efficiency drops to 81%. To reach your home, there most likely at least one step-up transformer and 2 or more step-down transformers. Assuming all those transformers are super efficient with a efficiency of 90% too, then the efficiency now becomes 65.61% for two transformers scenarios, 59.049% for 3 transforms scenarios. Considering the cost of manufacturing the battery, the huge weigh of the battery(85kWh now weighs around 540kg), the overhead of the power grid as a result of staggeringly over provisioning needed: assuming charging a 85kWh battery from 0% to 100% in 1 hour, using 220V AC power, nominal current required is 85 * 1000(kW) / 220(V) = 386.36A. Assuming power factor 80%, then the required currency is 386.36/0.8=482.95A, how much is going to cost for that capacity? 1 hour might be too aggressive, let take a concession to 8 hours, then the currency required is 60.37A. Just take look at your home's fuse, how much is that rating? Let's take another concession to require only 50% charge, then the required currency is ~30.19A, which is still around 10 times normal off-peak usage or ~3 times peak hour usage. Are you seriously considering to increase the capacity of the whole power grid by 3 to 10 times just for charging the car at home to 50% juice in 8 hours?
You're making some low assumptions for efficiency there - 90% is an absolute low end efficiency for transformers under full and non-linear load. Transmission losses for the UK grid average 8% total - regardless of how many transformers are involved.
You also forgot to take into account that most cars don't drive 300+ miles every day. The average car drives (depending on country) maybe 7000 - 10,000 miles a year. That means it will either be fully charged rarely, or topped up a little bit every night. We don't have to have a grid which can charge every car in the country from empty every night, we just need a grid which can charge a small fraction them.
In fact, in the UK where the average car drives about 7000 miles a year, the overall average power requirement is something like 200 W. That's well within the capacity of our grid.
We will have to take care to limit the surge effect of every car being plugged in at 6pm - but that just means delaying the nightly top up of most cars until the early hours (or whenever electricity is available).
While not familar with how things are in the UK, I understand DNO, which is the layer of the distribution network. Which means the part from power-plant->substation->high voltage line to at least one other substation near a city, or so. That does not include middle voltage into the city, or further downstepping until it is fit for your wall socket or similar.
If it claims to, it is a political fiction like so many other. In reality transmission losses from the one virtual plant powering the grid to your wall socket range from about
50% to 60% depending on the grid and many other factors.
Seems you have more detailed info. I just checked full-load efficiencies of transformers and it turned out to vary from 95% to 98.5% and the comprehensive efficiency can actually drop below 90%. If we factor in the loss on wires, I guess my estimate of loss per transformer layer 10% should be pretty close to actual. So I'm not surprised to see a transmission loss of 50% to 60%.
10% loss was just meant for quick calc, and I did not even factor in the loss in power generation etc.
And the assumption was only 50% of the capacity, so that would drop to ~150 miles. Again, it's claimed value, how much you can actually get out of it really varies.
If you just want to get 30 miles per day, then you will need ~ 6A, which is within household circuit rating but will still double the load of the ordinary family peak.
Please don't simply use Watts to calculate AC load, it will not give you the real current demand.
Using 10% for a quick calc is fine, if you only use it once. But you then multiplied that error by 3. The resulting assumption - that the transmission losses with 3 transformers would be ~73% (0.9^3) is completely wrong, given that we know total grid transmission losses are in the order of <10%
Well, look at your calc again. Transmission loss per my calc is actually 1 - 0.9^3 = 27.1%. At grid level, high efficient part(mainly stable industry loads) will cover up low efficiency of household loads.
Then don't. Use it for producing hydrogen. Compress, liquify it, slush it. Use the surplus electricity by nuclear, fantastic fusion, whatever, to suck the carbon out of the air, and make zeolites out of it to mix it into agriculturally used grounds, cat litter, whatever.
But the details may differ. If you can generate the synthetic fuel near the energy source, let's say a wind, farm you can shift the cost of transportation from one medium to another. That opens up possibilities to optimize on a network scale. In Germany, there is a pipeline network to transport and store natural gas to many many places. That transport is happening without trucks or ships driving around, I assume there are some pumps involved. But you don't have to move overhead mass.
Depending on your definition of "good" we already have ways to make liquid fuel from CO2+energy [1]. It just that you lose something like 90% of the energy from power plant to motion. Electric cars are much more efficient.
Nice graphic, but the ideal scenario would be to find a method that strips the carbon out of the CO2. We're putting about 50 Billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
However, the Atomic weight of carbon is 12 whereas the Atomic weight of Oxygen is 16, and there are 2 oxygen atoms in every CO2 molecule, so 1 ton of pure sequestered carbon is 12+16+16 = 44/12 = 3 & 2/3 tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere.
2.27 tons of carbon compacted together makes an approximately 1 meter cube.
Of course, that would mean we would have to sequester ~6 billion cubic meters (13.6 billion tons or the equivalent of 4,079 hoover dams in size, probably enough to resurface every highway and road in America 2-3 inches deep) of pure carbon every year to reach carbon neutral, and then we would need to go beyond that to begin to reverse the effects.
It would literally be the largest human undertaking in the history of the planet.
"Burning a gallon of gasoline releases almost 10 kgs of CO2 into the atmosphere"
I am not sure I understand the math here. 1 gallon of gasoline weights about 5kg, so how is that 10 kg of CO2 are released? Looks like mass will not be conserved in such a process. Am I missing something?
I haven't checked the math, but carbon from the fuel binds with oxygen from the air. CO2 consists of one carbon atom (12g/mol), two oxygen atoms (16g/mol). So, most of the weight comes from the oxygen from the air, rather than the fuel itself.
It's not a tragedy of the commons but a tragedy of markets. Markets cannot factor in these externalities. It's a known fault with market systems. And carbon taxes simply won't work for many reasons (hence why oil companies are pro carbon tax).
What we need is carbon rationing. Everyone gets X amount of carbon and prices of things are both in dollars and carbon rations. The rich, who use most of the carbon will have to buy from the poor who use very little. These rations will become more expensive over time until people don't get anymore. So they will only be able to buy things that are carbon neutral/carbon free.
Well, even without a spurce, they did give one very compelling piece of evidence: oil companies support this idea. Given everything we know about them, this is already strong evidence that it will be ineffective at curtailing the oil trade, which means it will be ineffective at affecting CO2.
A recent video leak shows an oil company lobbiest saying thay they publicly support a carbon tax, because they know it won't pass because they privately tell politicians to not pass it.
1. Oil companies support carbon taxes because they know they are politically dead in the water.
2. Yellow vest movement shows that if you punish the vast population for problems elite created, you will get mass protests.
3. The tax will be miss priced because it will be set by policy. Likely won't be high enough to stop global warming.
While a carbon ration doesn't have these problems since we know what the carbon budget is. Once it's spent it's spent and provides the right incentive. Instead of punishing regular people with a tax, it rewards people who use less carbon by giving them an asset. Since the vast majority of people use very little carbon if you divide up the the carbon budget evenly, you suddenly have a method to lower inequality and provide the right incentives for industry to move to a zero carbon world because when the rations are expired, they won't be able to have a business.
Carbon taxes simply have too many flaws and bad incentives and don't address the underlying problem, that we have a limited resource (carbon budget).
>What we need is carbon rationing. Everyone gets X amount of carbon and prices of things are both in dollars and carbon rations. The rich, who use most of the carbon will have to buy from the poor who use very little. These rations will become more expensive over time until people don't get anymore. So they will only be able to buy things that are carbon neutral/carbon free.
When you talk about "carbon rations," are you referring just to fossil fuels and petroleum-based products? Or are you referring to everything that contains carbon?
Given that life here is just brimming with carbon (we are, after all, carbon-based life), does that "carbon ration" include food? Pets? Yeast?
I'm not being snarky here, but it's not clear to me what exactly you mean. If you'd expand on that, it would be much appreciated.
Gawking at the enormity of the challenge and ultimately never doing anything isn't acceptable though.
I'm not saying that's all you're suggesting, and realism is certainly a requirement for working out what we actually need to achieve here, but this enthusiasm is essential. We need it to drive policy in the face of economic penalty and limiting nutritional choice. We need the enthusiasm if we want to be able to tell our kids (and theirs) that we actually tried.
It's a balance. "I love the enthusiasm but" might be accurate, but as-is, serves to smother that spark of hope that we need from everybody right now. Don't give up completely on our species.
Capturing CO₂ from typical atmosphere is a very difficult problem, and it's a big problem too. Talking about that distracts from a problem that's much smaller and more accessible, namely capturing CO₂ from the parts of the atmosphere where there's very much CO₂.
The photo shows a number of pipelines that guide CO₂ up and release it. Capturing it at the top of the photo, in the open air, is very much more difficult and expensive than capturing it near the middle, in those big vertical things.
If you start thinking about how to capture it in the middle of the photo, you very quickly also consider other ways of achieving the same goal at the same site. Capturing CO₂ is damned expensive compared to those other ways, and the discussion is a distraction.
IMO capturing old CO₂ is necessary (as the article says) but when discussed it's usually contrasted to current emissions rather than old emissions, and it's hopelessly inefficient compared to current emissions. We can't go back in time and avoid old emissions, so avoiding capture isn't IMO possible. For the time being it's irrelevant because there current level of emissions (the highest of all time) presents us with very much to do that's both simpler and cheaper.
FYI, there probably aren't coal stacks aren't visible in that photo. Or if they are they aren't obvious. What it is showcasing is the cooling towers (ie, water vapour). There is a reason that there is a large lake in the frame. It isn't decorative or accidental.
The coal stacks are likely to be much thinner and the gasses less visible.
Stop pumping C02 into the atmosphere and massive reforestation (not directly for binding C02 but to give moisture into the air which gives other plants a chance to grow for them self's and strengthen the ground)...in short, try to reinstate nature as it was, because we little humans cannot do what nature did for millions of years (washing and binding C02 out the atmosphere and into the ground).
The point is on "millions" of years. We really went too far and there is nothing we can do to "revers" it, for the first time in ~100 years humans will have to adapt to nature and not the other way around.
That part that is taking time to get out and have people understand is that we can't do a thing about it. Some of the proposals out there are flat-out crazy. The very article you posted has a line that is just plain insane: "This means that to avoid disaster, we must confront capitalism." Sorry, that's a complete joke.
Here's the plain and simple truth: If all of humanity left the planet next week, and we took all of our technology and capitalism with us. In other words, Captain Kirk beams all of us up into somewhere in space. Even if we did that, it would still take somewhere in the order of 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2.
It is sad to see just how political climate change has become. The data is out there. The studies are out there. The understanding is out there. We need to stop talking about magically capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere and start talking about adaptation. That is the only thing we can do.
Switch our entire economy to renewable energy?
No. That won't fix it. It won't even slow it down.
Switch the entire world economy to the most optimal --yet to be invented-- forms of renewables?
Nope. That won't fix it.
In fact, we already know that, even if we were able to do it, not only would atmospheric CO2 concentration not drop, it would continue to rise.
We need to start having conversations about the truth, not the fantasy du jour, which is the endless loop we seem to be locked into. I get why, it has political value. The ignorant masses are driven into a self-righteous state where support for fantasy merchants actually feels like they are "saving the planet". The entire thing is a silly fantasy. Sorry.
I have written about this on HN before, complete with sources and data. If interested you can find my comments on multiple threads.
As you say, most fail to recognize the scale of the problem. It's a planetary scale issue. Fixing it would require more energy and resources than we could possibly imagine --we might not even have enough on the planet. Even worse, deploying such "solutions" at the scale (energy, materials, etc.) necessary to affect change on a human timeline (decades rather than tens of thousands of years) is far more likely to kill everything on earth than to save the planet. We really, truly, need to stop with this fantasy and come back to a manageable reality. Urgently. This is getting silly.
Basic concept:
In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it.
Basic physics. From that principle there's only one possibly conclusion when it comes to climate change: We can't do a damn thing about it.
I firmly agree that we've crossed several tipping points and that adaptation is a large and necessary part of our response. You seem to ignore that there are degrees of badness here, though!
Limiting warming to 2 or 3 degrees C is going to result in a situation that's a heck of a lot better than what 6 or 7 degrees C looks like. When asked if we should adapt or spend money on renewables/carbon capture/etc, the answer should be "Yes". We should be doing all of these things.
> You seem to ignore that there are degrees of badness here, though!
No, I am not doing that. I devoted a little over a year to taking a deep dive into this subject. I really wanted to understand. This was a few years ago, when I started to get this feeling that climate change was becoming a religion. It quickly became obvious that both non-believers and zealots are nothing less than delusional. Nobody devotes one iota of work and effort towards understanding the subject and everyone jumps on their respective bandwagon.
If you study that data --very reliable data going back 800,000 years--, do a little analysis, and read just a few documents, it becomes very obvious that we can't stop it and we sure as heck can't slow it down.
That DOES NOT mean it will not regulate. The planet is far more powerful than we could ever hope to be. The way our planet regulates CO2 is through weather events. That's the first reality we need to understand and accept. We are going to have lots more hurricanes, rains, cyclones, etc.
Every time I post about this people respond with negative comments and not one person bothers to look at the data and documents. I have had this conversation with people with advanced degrees in science over the last several years. Not one person has come back with a scientifically sound dismissal of my hypothesis. It goes as follows:
We know, from ice core atmospheric sample data going back 800K years, without a shadow of a doubt, how the planet behaves without humanity around.
The rate of change of atmospheric CO2 without humanity around (or when we were a rounding error in the planetary context) is about 100 ppm in 50K to 100K years. For easy numbers, let's call it 1,000 years/1 ppm.
It's a simple matter to fit lines to the up and down slopes and get a rough measurement of what I call the natural rate of change. That is, the rate of change with humanity being insignificant.
That rate of change is the baseline from which anything else has to be measured. Examples:
"Let's shut down the entire United States and move to Mars"
Nope, won't work. That is not better than if humanity left the entire planet, which would give us 1 ppm every thousand years.
"Let's cover the entire ecuatorial band with solar panels and have wind turbines everywhere we can put them"
No, again, how is that better than all of humanity leaving the planet?
"Let's build huge filters and suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere in every city"
Nope. First of all, building something like that at a scale sufficiently large to actually make any kind of an impact on a shortened time scale (50 to 100 years) would require resources to build, operate and maintain the systems of an unimaginable scale. Just the processing and transportation of the construction materials to build the thing on every major city on this planet would likely emit more CO2 than the system could ever consume. And then you have to power it. No, solar won't do it.
And then, on top of that, all seven-going-on-eight billion of us are still on the planet, which means that we can't do better than the baseline 1K years for 1 ppm reduction.
"Let's use magic dust to seed the ocean and capture CO2"
I don't even want to imagine the disaster and CO2 contribution just mining, transporting and deploying this stuff would entail. We are far more likely to kill everything in the ocean than to fix a darn thing with the atmosphere.
And, once more, billions of us would still be here, which means we can't do any better than the baseline.
Here's the easiest-to-read paper I found on this. In fact, back in 2014-ish, when I read it, this is the document that launched me into a year-long deep dive into this subject. I always give credit to the authors. They were full-on believers on saving the planet with renewables and set out to, once and for all, prove it. They say so in the paper. What they discovered was precisely the opposite, and, as good scientists do, accepted the failure of their hypothesis and published the result. In this charged political environment this took huge balls.
To paraphrase: Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of renewables, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2, it will continue to rise exponentially.
This paper stopped at that conclusion (because it was the answer to the hypothesis they were trying to prove). I wish they had continued or done another paper evaluating the reality of controlling CO2 through any other means. The conclusion would have been the same.
Thankfully a group out of Germany asked that question and published results about a year later (2015):
"Scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany say that if we were to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate of 2.5 times that of the current annual emissions, oceans would not recover to a low-emission state by 2700."
And that is a best case scenario. In reality, anyone who has ever done real work of any kind in the real world knows that these estimates are, at best, optimistic and in most cases a complete fantasy. It is useful to have a number of some kind just to get a sense of proportion. The 700 year estimate means "not measured in a scale corresponding to a human lifetime". Generations. And, if we go back to the baseline I introduced, the real number, with all of humanity still around and growing, the real number is in the high tens of thousands of years.
I know I am going to get pounded on any time I post this. The vast majority of people who believe or do not believe have done near zero work to actually understand the subject, they take the conclusions from whatever side of the argument they like and go with it. That's OK. I am one who decided to stop regurgitating what I was being told and actually go out and try to confirm it first. If I just make a few people take that scientifically necessary path of skepticism and do the work, mission accomplished.
Yes, we have to clean-up our act. No, we are not going to save the planet. There are plenty of reasons for which we should clean-up our act. And, yes, climate change is real. And, yes, of course, we made a significant contribution to the problem. We just need to stop pushing fantasies and address reality.
What do you think about off-planet solutions (like space mirrors, etc)? Dealing with temperature regulation would mitigate a lot of negative effects of hight CO2.
No opinion at this point other than a sense that, if we did the math, we might very well discover that we would burn so much fuel and produce so much CO2 in manufacturing and transporting everything we might need (and then launch it) that it could be a complete non-starter.
What really worries me about some of these ideas is that they could go horribly wrong. We are talking about changing the fundamental energy equation for an entire planet. We can't even control the ecological effects of our technology at the local level and we are actually convincing ourselves we can hit the mark with a planetary scale process? This is scary.
So...having actually worked for companies in aerospace making rockets that leave the planet...
The cost per kilogram to orbit today is likely around $2000. That same kilogram landing on the moon (I also worked on a device that will get to the moon's surface in a future Artemis mission and dealt with all the lander companies) is somewhere in the two million USD range.
And asteroid? And mining equipment? Well, it will be a lot more than that. 10x? 100x? No clue.
Let's assume the cost is the same. Lets' further assume we need, say, 50,000 kg in equipment, supplies and fuel/energy to get there, mine and bring it back.
At $2MM per kg this would mean a one-way trip cost of $100 billion dollars. Round trip? Let's call it $200 billion. My guess is that might bring back somewhere between 500 and 1,000 kg of whatever was mined.
This is all hypothetical, of course. Just having fun.
Let's say we mine gold. Current value per kg is about $60K. So, a thousand kilograms of gold brought back from an asteroid would yield $60 million dollars. That would represent a loss of $199,940,000,000 dollars.
Diamonds? They are worth about 1,000x more than gold per weight. That still represents a loss of $140 billion.
The same is the story with fabrication in space. Getting tools, equipment, energy production means and raw materials there and back cost tons of cash (literally). If it can be done in low orbit it's much more manageable, still tons of cash though. Try to move farther away from earth and costs go exponential very quickly.
Asteroid mining is one of those neat concepts that people keep talking about over the years. Fun and interesting, of course. I just don't see it ever making financial sense.
Minion on mars to build stuff on mars is a different matter. Well, it will still cost tons of cash to get everything there, but at least you don't have to bring it back!
That would be (if at all) for the first mission only. The 'bootstrap'. And in-situ utilizing the shit out of anything available to build as much as possible of the equipment up there. And why would I care about the money? That's just a few wars, peanuts so to speak. By stopping that shit alone you'd burn way less carbon! See? Wheee!
Anyways, read the book I suggested and see if it changes your assumptions, or not.
edit: Btw. nobody needs gold from space. Maybe infrastructure needs gold in space. Be it for reflectors, wires, chips... don't know. Don't care about your experience either, because that tends to lead to institutional blindness and inability to think 'out of the box'.
> Don't care about your experience either, because that tends to lead to institutional blindness and inability to think 'out of the box'
Very funny.
Hey, if you ever need surgery, repeat the above to your experienced surgeon and ask that they bring over some dumb-shit with a two year old degree who can thing out of the box. Sit back. Relax. Enjoy.
Not really, not when you consider the entire process.
Also, I did not say "turn CO2 back into hydrocarbons", that would be preposterous. No, it would take an unimaginable amount of energy to go out and take it out of the atmosphere and turn it into anything of any form.
The super simplistic example I use is: Take a bag of flour and let your building air conditioning system spread the dust all over the building. Now go pick up every single particle you released. And no, you can't open the windows and let outside wind clear out most of it. It's a closed building.
This is not a perfect analog, it is just an illustration of how it is very easy to create a mess and many, many times harder to clean it up.
>> In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it.
>> Basic physics. From that principle there's only one possibly conclusion when it comes to climate change: We can't do a damn thing about it.
I agree that the climate crisis is grim and that geoengineering is not a cure all. I do not think your reasoning makes much sense. Say it takes 100x as much energy to capture C02 as to create it. If the energy it takes does not warm the atmosphere it is not a problem. For example, if solar energy was removed to C02 it would not contribute to the warming of the planet either by directly releasing heat or a greenhouse gas.
That's a perfectly good "had wavy" argument. However, once you start attaching numbers to such a thing you will quickly discover reality is not as nice and clean as writing two lines of text.
There's nothing grim about climate change reality. We just have to accept it, clean up our act to the extent possible and adapt. The planet has survived billions of years. We are insignificant. We either pretend we can fix it (which is a mistake) or understand that the planet can make us disappear in an instant.
I mean, look at this pandemic. Had we not developed vaccines so quickly it would have been perfectly plausible for half the population of this plante to perish. Thinking we can control things at a planetary scale is pure ignorant hubris. We cannot. And we stand a far greater chance of killing everything on earth than to save the planet. The planet does not need saving.
> We really, truly, need to stop with this fantasy and come back to a manageable reality. Urgently. This is getting silly.
You're truly living in a fantasy world if you imagine it's possible to keep the current rate of CO2 production and just adapt to the effects in the long term.
We first need to transition the economy to renewables, drastically reduce production and consumption of many goods, get rid of the incentive structures that have kept things in this state. We could then hope to reach 0 emissions, which would mean maybe 2-4 degrees of warming. Catastrophic, but not world ending. To live in this world, we will indeed have to start looking at adaptation.
If we do it your way, with no reduction in emissions, bit focusing on adaptation, we'll be looking at 6-10 degrees of warming, which there would definitely be no adapting around.
Back in 2014-ish, when I read it, this is the document that launched me into a year-long deep dive into this subject. I always give credit to the authors. They were full-on believers on saving the planet with renewables and set out to, once and for all, prove it. They say so in the paper. What they discovered was precisely the opposite, and, as good scientists do, accepted the failure of their hypothesis and published the result. In this charged political environment this took huge balls.
The conclusion, paraphrasing:
Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of renewables, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2, it will continue to rise exponentially.
> We could then hope to reach 0 emissions
No, we cannot. That is a fantasy.
For starters, we consume about 35 billion barrels of oil per year, nearly 100 million per day. Our very lives are so dependent on this stuff that we are not going to dent this level of consumption. Even if we cut it in half, this will not slow down atmospheric CO2 contributions enough.
And, not, a conversion to electric transportation will not make this happen. There are 1.5 billion vehicles in the world. Replacing that entire fleet with electric powered vehicles will likely take somewhere in the order of 50 years, if even possible. We also have to manufacture 1.5 new electric vehicles to replace them, which means producing massive amounts of CO2 and consuming equally massive amounts of resources.
And then we have to CHARGE 1.5 billion vehicles per day, every day, all around the world. The global power generation system cannot handle this. In the US alone we would need somewhere in the order of one hundred giga-watt class nuclear power plants just to be able to deliver the kind of power (not energy, power is the problem) we would need to handle our entire fleet going electric. Even if I am off by 75%, we need 25 new nuclear power plants, along with changes to our power distribution infrastructure to be able to handle it all. We did not build an infrastructure that has a 100% excess generation and transportation capacity. Most power plants operate very close to full capacity.
And then there's the reality of what would happen if we reached 0 emissions (again, impossible, we have forest fires that release more CO2 in a few weeks than the entire fleet of automobiles in the US).
Let's say for a moment that we could actually reach zero emissions world wide. You do understand that if it is only the US or the US and Europe it is pointless, right? You do understand that seven billion people cooking food every day by burning something will produce a massive amount of CO2, right? Analyze any process, making clothes, preparing food, transporting and processing our excrement in towns and cities, you will quickly discover zero emissions is an absolute fantasy.
Let's ignore all of that reality and actually believe we can get to zero emission world wide. The entirety of humanity, zero emissions. Like we do not exist.
Do we actually know what will happen if we could achieve this fantasy?
These are atmospheric composition records extracted from ice core samples going back 800K years. In other words, we have good reliable and accurate data of a scenario, hundreds of thousands of years in duration, when humanity was "zero emissions" due to either being insignificant or not actually existing as we do today (7 billion people and our toys).
What does this data say?
It says that, if we did achieve zero emissions it would take about 100,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
That is the baseline. Zero emissions == 1,000 years for a 1 ppm drop.
Now, go back and evaluate any proposed solution from this baseline.
"Cover the entire equatorial band with solar panels?"
Nope. This would violate the zero emissions scenario, therefore creating a situation where we would not be able to achieve a 1 ppm drop in a thousand years.
"Convert the entire transportation fleet to electricity?"
Nope. We would contribute even more CO2 and it would take somewhere in the order of 50 years. We would need to build thousands of new power generation plants. And, of course, there is no way to predict what the population of our planet would be, we are at seven billion today. Eight billion? Nine? Ten? More cooking. More clothing. More housing. More food. More everything. More CO2.
It does not take an advanced degree in math and physics to look at this and quickly understand the entire thing is a huge fantasy. This does not mean climate change is not real. It is very real. And this does not mean we should clean-up our act. We should. Yet not for some religious blind belief that we are going to save the planet. We cannot. And, if we act on some of the nonsense being pushed around we are bound to do more harm than good. Climate change has become a horrifically powerful political tool because both believers and zealots are following their "leader" blindly off the cliff. There's delusion on both ends of the scale. Some of us are in the middle saying "No! Stop! This is crazy!". Our voices, for the most part, are being drowned out by the delusion. I can only hope someone listens.
As other already pointed out, Earth isn't a closed system! That fundamental misunderstanding of you invalidates your whole reasoning.
About 173,000 TW of energy strikes earth continuously. We have all the technology and we have all the resources we need to rapidly limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels and to start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
The only thing that is lacking is political will. This is our great tragedy.
> About 173,000 TW of energy strikes earth continuously. We have all the technology and we have all the resources we need to rapidly limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels and to start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
No, we don't. Great sounding assertion, no analysis whatsoever.
And then do this math. Let's use your number, "173,000 TW of energy" coming into our blue marble in space.
BTW, the Watt is a unit of POWER, not energy. Ignoring that minor detail for a second...
How is petroleum made?
Dead plants + dead animals + dead insects + possibly other stuff + lots of solar energy + millions of years
How much energy goes into creating one gallon of oil?
n<followed by an unimaginably large number of zeros>
How was it possible for humanity to affect such a dramatic change in atmospheric CO2 concentration?
Well, we burned oil.
Why was that so effective?
Because burning one gallon of oil, to put it in simple terms, is like burning an entire chunk of a forest...and we can burn a gallon of oil much faster than the equivalent forest area would burn. In other words, we can burn the result of a massive amount of raw matter, combined with a massive amount of solar energy and millions of years to produce it, in mere seconds.
In fact, one estimate says that one gallon of gasoline (not oil, that's worse) required some 98 tons of plants to produce:
""Can you imagine loading 40 acres worth of wheat – stalks, roots and all – into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles?" asks ecologist Jeff Dukes, whose study will be published in the November issue of the journal Climatic Change.""
So, by burning one gallon of gasoline, we are burning the equivalent of some 40 acres of plant matter in roughly 20 minutes on every vehicle on earth (seat of the pants average, it's likely worse than that).
Wow! OK, how many gallons of oil do we burn per year?
Barrels. We burn about 35 BILLION barrels per year:
Going back to my "it's a closed system" observation. All we have is some amount of energy coming in and some being lost to space. No magical vacuum cleaner to help us fix anything. And we have resources, minerals, etc. under and above ground. That's it.
What you have to balance in an equation when evaluating a proposed solution is the amount of energy it took to create the materials we used to be able to release so much CO2 into the atmosphere. It will not take less energy to claw it back, in any form. It will take more. Even if we found parity and it took the same amount of energy, it would be an impossibly large number. Even if we found a magical juju bean that could do it for 1/10 the the energy, it would still be an unimaginably large number, not to mention what it would take to go mine, process, transport, deploy and clean-up the magical juju beans.
Just a little bit of thought and high school math quickly reveals we are being sold fantasy after fantasy. We can't fix this. We need to start talking about adapting. There is no Superman.
About your first link from 2014: renewable energy is already cheaper.
About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible.
Apparently I have to teach you that power is energy per unit of time, that is we have 173,000 TJ/s. And then we can do some simple calculation from energy equivalence of 35 billion barrels of oil (213,000,000 TJ) and find that corresponds to about 20 minutes of sunlight hitting Earth. Or calculating from power instead, we burn 6.75 GW of oil, or about 3e-11 of the incoming sun power. There's plenty of energy available, and nowadays sun energy is cheaper than coal. You don't even need high school math for this.
So, as you see, the "not closed system", is kind of relevant. What is irrelevant is how much plant matter that is required to produce said oil. No one, absolutely no one, has suggested that we should make new oil by burying plant matter for a long time.
Nice bit of high school math after a google search. Good job. Pointless though.
You are pointing at solar energy coming into the planet as if it were some magical juju bean that can solve all of our problems. Well, it isn't. Had you actually read the report from which you got some of this information you would know just how wrong you are in trying to reduce the entirety of reality into a single variable: Solar energy. The whole idea is preposterous.
In your attempt to look smart and convert power to energy using a google search you fail to understand the key difference between power and energy in real life.
Using a simple example: The solar array I built in the back of my house can produce a theoretical maximum of 14,000 W any given instant (power). Assuming that is true (not even close), this means I could collect a theoretical 104 kW hours of energy over eight hours (also not true). Talking about energy is pointless because we do not use energy, we use power, we use the instantaneous version of, in this case, using electrons to do some work.
If you add-up the energy production capacity of all the power plants in the US (multiply their power output by 24 hours and add them all up) you can easily believe we have enough to charge 300 million electric cars. And that would be wrong. We do not have enough POWER generating capacity to support such a fleet. The energy calculation isn't correct because you can't use it to deliver power beyond the instantaneous power delivery capacity we have. The only way this would be true is if our future electric cars sat there for 24 hours to charge.
And then there's the reality that converting solar energy to anything useful is a horribly inefficient process. My 13 kW array covers about 80 square meters. That is a theoretical 80 kW (round numbers) of solar energy. At best, with all conditions being perfect, I have generated 11 kW. My average peak over several years in operation is about 8 kW. So 10% of the energy that hits it, at the PEAK moment in the day, much worse on either side of that curve. Counting energy, when what you need is power is a fantasy.
Oher solar energy conversion processes are even worse, as an example, geothermal is about 2% efficient, at best.
Do not reduce reality to a single variable. It isn't. It is a complex multivariate problem.
> About your first link from 2014: renewable energy is already cheaper.
You probably didn't even read it. Did you? The paper has NOTHING to do with cost. It has everything to do with "can we achieve zero emissions with renewables". And that means all renewables, not just solar. The answer is a solid "no".
> About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible.
No idea what you are saying. You probably didn't read that either.
No, I don’t read the old, long papers after a short glance seeing that their initial assumptions are wrong or the subject doesn’t seem to relevant. If you have a point to make, make it. Then you can cite papers if say your numbers need some backing by actual research.
I really get the feeling that you don’t understand how power relates to energy. What are you trying to say about peak power capacity and charging of cars? You do know that not all cars are driven at exactly the same time or are charged at exactly the same time?
Also, of course we need to increase our electricity production if more things, like cars, are going to be run on electricity.
The efficiency of solar panels doesn’t matter much. You remember that ratio between incoming energy and energy usage? We have a lot of zeros to take from. It doesn’t matter that the average solar panel only converts about a fifth of incoming energy, because the incoming energy is abundant and completely free. The same argument can be made about geothermal. And the same argument can be made about storing energy as hydrogen. Yes, the conversation will be inefficient, but that doesn’t matter because you do it sunny, windy days, electricity will be more or less free.
Finally, I’m sorry you think my argument is too simple. But calling it magical juju doesn’t refute it. The amount of solar radiation hitting earth is a very well established, and easy to understand, scientific fact. And if you remember, that fact was used to refute your statement that earth should be seen as a closed system. You didn’t even try to defend that statement, so I hope you never try to use it again without embarrassment.
It is a closed system. Energy in -> Energy out. No magic.
What this means is that we don't get to claim "and then a miracle occurs" when proposing a solutions. This is exactly what all so-called solutions boil down to. Including what you are talking about.
You are citing the total energy landing on a hemisphere and completely ignoring that we can't harvest even a small fraction of that. Solar energy is very, very far from free. I built a 13 kW array on my property, I can assure you it was not free. I can also assure likely produced far more CO2 than it will ever save us. This is where you need to understand manufacturing and construction. I won't even go into the shit I had to go through with the County of Los Angeles. I have 64,000 POUNDS of concrete anchoring this array to the ground --which LA County forced upon me. How much CO2 do you think it cost to produce, transport and install that? How about the non-trivial structure it is mounted on? I could go on.
This idea that solar energy is free is just plain silly.
You are refusing to read one of the most scientifically honest papers ever done on the question of whether or not solar energy (actually, all renewables combined) can stop atmospheric CO2 build-up and reverse it and you actually want to school me on having a valid argument.
And, speaking of energy vs. power. Lots of sunlight falls above and below latitudes where converting it into other usable forms of energy is just pointless. If you want to be honest about solar energy, well, you have to do the math. It isn't what you think it is. Do you even have solar?
Here's the output of my 13 kW array on an average day:
Do you see what happens? No, it isn't magical juju beans. You can't quote some theoretical number and actually believe this stuff is usable.
Besides, you could convert the entire planet to the most optimal forms of solar and wind power and you would still do nothing to stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation. Not sure why you are even arguing about solar. It's pointless.
> I really get the feeling that you don’t understand how power relates to energy. What are you trying to say about peak power capacity and charging of cars? You do know that not all cars are driven at exactly the same time or are charged at exactly the same time?
That's very funny. I have a nasty habit. I do not open my mouth unless I know what I am talking about. Which means I go way --ridiculously so-- out of my way to research things as far as necessary in order to understand and verify my claims. In the case of cars charging in the US, I actually developed a mathematical model that included behavioral elements and charging cars across our various time zones.
This, for example, is one of the outputs of the analysis:
This includes considering such things as a portion of the fleet fast-charging while others slow charge. I considers the effect of people going to work and coming home at different times across our six time zones, etc. I am not typing stuff I pull out of my ass my friend. You can either make the effort to understand and attempt to do your own math or just ignore it and believe whatever you might wish.
The only thing that would be better than this model would be to write more complex behavioral simulation code and take into account far more variables than I did. I'll do that one day when I have the time. I don't think the end-result will be radically different from the simpler model.
Like I said, unlike most people, I go very far towards actually understanding things before I open my mouth.
Back to my nasty habit. I said I do not open my mouth unless I know what I am talking about and I do enough research to confirm it. This also means I am constantly checking my assumptions.
Back to energy and electric vehicles. I told you that my models predicted a requirement for a massive increase in energy generation capacity to be able to go to full electric vehicles. I then shared an image from one of my simulation model run calculations. This one:
It shows a "new energy" need in the range of roughly 900 to 1,400 GW. Unimaginable. Right? That's over a thousand 1 GW class nuclear power plants.
I am delusional. Right?
Well, I decided to, once again, check my assumptions and math. They make sense to me. And then, looking around some more, I came across this from earlier this year:
Here you have Elon Musk saying (paraphrasing) "If we convert all of our transportation to electric, electricity demand more than doubles". He goes on to explain that it isn't just about generation, it is, as I said, about transportation as well (which really means it is about POWER, not energy).
So, what does "more than doubles" mean?
Well, let's start with what our current energy generation capacity is in the US:
Elon's "more than doubles" means we need more than 1,200 GW in new energy generation capacity. Interestingly enough, my model gave a range of between 900 GW and 1,400 GW. I created these models about five years ago.
We don't get to use all the solar energy landing on the planet. Not even close.
Why?
Because, if you did, you would kill every single forest and all of agriculture. You would kill every single animal. You would likely kill the oceans. You might kill bacteria, insects and seriously disrupt weather. I can't even think about all the variables that would be deeply disturbed if humanity decided we are going to attempt to use a big chunk of what solar energy lands on the planet.
And blocking it from space? Seriously? Again, refer to the prior paragraph, let's go ahead and kill everything on earth.
These ideas might sound good after a beer or two but are nothing less than laughable once someone sits down and really puts pen to paper.
We are proposing to mess with forces we can't possibly understand. I have said this many times, we can't even take care of small-scale ecosystems and we are actually lending credence to nut-cases suggesting such things as deploying devices in space to block the sun. Wonderful.
"In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it."
You can do it elsewhere, though. And by different means.
Sahara is really big, really empty and has a lot of sunlight. If we had some at least semiefficient method of dumping carbon from the air back to solid form using electricity, the whole mankind could pay Niger or Chad or Libya or Algeria to rent 100 000 sqkm of dry desert, build a huge solar power station there and bury the resulting carbon mass in large, kilometer-deep trenches covered by stone and sand.
This further proves my point. People never bother to even attempt to do the math. People "know" the truth and "believe" in climate change and "solutions", yet nobody seems to have any interest in actually confirming what they are being told.
It's as bad as anti-vaxxers believing the government is installing tiny remote control radios in vaccines to control our minds. It really is that crazy, if not more.
Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around?
The power system on my solar shed is, admittedly, somewhat overkill in an attempt to get through the winter without having to light the generator (so far, I've failed at this, our inversions are nasty). The flip side is that I have quite a bit of surplus power most of the year (on the order of 10-15kWh/day). If I use it, great, if not... it just doesn't get pulled out of the panels. The office is standalone (and way more trouble than it's worth to grid tie), so when the battery bank is full, there's nowhere to stick extra energy.
I've considered various methods to use some of the surplus in useful ways, which so far has looked like donating a lot of compute to various BOINC projects (including cpdn, which is now out of work...). But I've not seen much work in the way of "things that could actually capture concrete amounts of carbon and store them" at this scale. It's all huge facilities, big multinational investment, etc.
I've considered an algae grow system that would cycle air through some grow tanks (I have a lot of sun, growing algae in containers is sort of the default around here) and then bury the algae down some holes, but I'm not sure it really accomplishes that much.
Another option I've considered is making use of some of the basalt laying around, getting a rock crusher to grind it into powder, and then either spreading it on the hill, or trying to find some sort of more rapid system for weathering it (tanks of water with airflow through them?). Of course, if algae likes basalt... I could combine the two!
I just can't find any information on smaller scale systems like this, and I lack the bio and chem background to really be able to do things like analyze rock dust for carbon content.
I have quite a bit of surplus power most of the year (on the order of 10-15kWh/day). If I use it, great, if not... it just doesn't get pulled out of the panels. The office is standalone (and way more trouble than it's worth to grid tie)
I know you said grid-tie isn't worth the trouble, but until the USA moves to more renewable energy for power production, that might yield the best carbon reduction, depending on how much you could otherwise sequester per KWh.
The national average CO2 emissions for power production is 947.2 lbs CO2 per megawatt-hour [1] (or 0.947 lbs/KWh).
So unless you can sequester 10-15lbs or more of CO2 a day, then you may be better off sending your excess power to the grid if your goal is carbon reduction.
Though I'm not sure how to account for the actual CO2 reduction - is the national average fair? Should you use the average per state since states vary widely in their renewable energy status? Is there some other way to determine how much CO2 you've offset?
I guarantee my office is radically more trouble than it's worth to grid tie. I'd have to put a second meter in, or lose net metering on my house, I'd have to trench across an awful lot of quite hostile ground (literal rock outcroppings between "where my office is" and "where the grid tie would be"), upgrade my house's electrical panel, and pretty much entirely redo my office power system from the ground up, get a permit for my office (it's under the size minimum, but with hard wired power it would need a permit), rebuild my panel mounts, and an awful lot of other stuff.
It would easily run me $10k to do all this, before I was able to cross tie a single kWh. And, in the bargain, I'd lose the standalone power system that is my office, because getting battery backed stuff approved out here is basically impossible. I tried for the house system, and after 18 months of fighting red tape that exists to fund the red tape, I gave up and built a grid tie system without a backup.
I get that it sounds easy, but it would cost more to interconnect it than the standalone system cost in the first place, drop me out of a very sweet 25 year net metering grandfathering, and leave me with a far less capable property in the deal. Sorry, just not interested in that.
When I redo the wiring in my shed, that's one of the things I plan on doing - more exterior outlets. Right now, I don't have an easy way to plug the Volt in down there, but on days when it's used early and has the full day to recover, I probably could. The main limit is that I only have a 2kW single phase (120V) inverter down there, so I can't really charge at a full 2kW, and I can't charge hard while also running my air conditioner. I can spare 500-800W, no problem, but beyond that, it starts to be harder. I've got a bigger inverter on a trailer I can parallel in, though, and that might work - run 900W out of my office into the aux charger on that, with another 900W coming in from solar, and then charge the car at 3.3kW, buffering off the battery pack. I need to play with it a bit more this winter, but having some good outdoor outlets on my office will make things easier.
Given how much you are curtailing it could be the case that your system is worse off with respect to carbon than if you just used grid electricity. We'd have to do the math but there are large embodied emissions in your pv panels and battery, your curtailing means you are making up for those more slowly.
Oh, I'm almost certain it is. But, given that, the more energy I can make and utilize with it, the lower the effective carbon per kWh is. It's also, of value to me, a totally standalone power system, and a good R&D system for me to experiment with, because I can do things without bothering the house system. If I screw up and black out my office, well... I've blacked out my office.
However, my system is also rather a good bit more reliable than the grid power on the house, which is nice for remote work.
Advocate for more efficient land use requiring less transportation, heating, and cooling.
Advocate for increased carbon taxes, extraction duties, and limits on new uses and loads.
Encourage wetlands and forest preservation and expansion. Wetlands, by unit area are the most productive carbon sequestering ecosystems on Earth.
Grow plants. Compost.
Reduce your own carbon footprint. Reduce meat consumption, use of manufactured goods (most especially with high embedded energy content), and energy useage. Reduce, reuse, and recycle, in that order.
> Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around?
Gardening.
If you garden without fertilizers, and compost garden waste, then you are capturing carbon in the soil. If you use a composting toilet too, you capture even more.
If you compost only the garden waste, and only( spread that compost on your garden, then the amount of stored carbon won't increase much, because a lot of what goes into your compost must have come from the soil. But if you also compost food-waste, and if you add soil-conditioners such as farmyard manure, then the amount of stored carbon will increase steadily.
But as has been noted up-comment, the easiest, cheapest way to get carbon into the ground is to not dig it up in the first place.
It's not a great idea, but you can pump air into lime water and it'll turn into calcium carbonate. Basaltic rock will also form calcium carbonate when CO2 infused water is passed through it.
I'm not sure these work at such small scales, but it could at least give you a starting point and a project. If you start a blog about these experiments I'd love to follow. Hard to know if your operating emissions would be offset by your sequestration. If anyone has better ideas I'd also like to know.
There could also be a monetary reason to do carbon capture at home. There can be a lot of CO2 buildup in homes and offices with poor ventilation (read: most).
If I do any experimentation, it would be over at my normal blog. My operating emissions, if powered by my office, are zero incremental emissions - the system is overpaneled and there's no cost for extra production within the bounds of what it can do.
I don't know if there's any sane way to do this on a small scale and without concentrated CO2, but the first thing that comes to mind is to make synthetic methane using a Sabatier process. I think the way this works is you create hydrogen through electrolysis of water, and then react it CO2 to make methane.
Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, but if you burn it as fuel it's a carbon-neutral energy source.
Alternatively, you could use electrolysis to make hydrogen, but hydrogen is harder to store.
(I'm not a chemist, so I have no idea if this could work. And it probably wouldn't be very practical even if it did.)
I do like your idea of experimenting with a rock crusher. The article mentions that finding the least-energy means of crushing rocks to the appropriate size is something of an open problem.
Assuming it's possible to use this process on a home scale with a decent solar grid and energy storage, it seems to me that you would be sequestering the carbon only very temporarily. Wouldn't the electrical energy used to produce the methane heat your home more efficiently (assuming you have an electric heating system) as you would be inviting energy losses through the Sabatier process?
Seems you would need to produce industrial levels of methane and distribute it (which would almost certainly be carbon expensive in it's own right) as substitute for naturally occuring methane being extracted from deposits.
It's a cool idea though. If there were a process to produce solid carbon, this would be much more promising (disclaimer: definitely not a chemist).
The general idea is you can make methane that's equivalent to the methane that comes out of the ground, but in a carbon neutral way. So it's a benefit if you can give it someone who was going to burn methane anyways, like to run their natural gas furnace.
That's not as satisfying as just plain sequestering the carbon somehow. I mean, it would almost certainly be better to just run an extension cord to a neighbors house and let them run an electric space heater or heat pump off of the excess electricity.
Maybe methane could be used as an ingredient to make something else that's possible to store or bury long term, like some kind of plastic or liquid? (Most of what I know about the processing of hydrocarbons is probably wildly inaccurate because I learned it from Factorio.)
Time-shifting. If you have a good way of storing it you could generate methane during the months when you have surplus solar power and use it in winter after you've depleted your batteries and the sun is not bright enough.
Probably (over) insulating the house is the most efficient way of minimizing energy loss. But then does an over-insulated house get overly warm in summer or easier to cool?
The air-sourced methane could be used for things that are hard to electrify/de-carbonify, and could reduce the use of ground based sources.
I'm wondering at what level of carbon tax it makes more sense to extract the carbon from the air to turn it into plastic than to use ground-based oil.
I know nothing about the practicalities, but could you run grow lights and head pads to raise seedlings and hydroponic food and then donate to the neighbourhood? Meagre, but might save on some tiny transport cost somewhere.
Trees are a temporary carbon store, but the issue is that they eventually die and rot, and then that carbon gets released right back into the atmosphere. A permanent solution would be to grow trees, chop them down, and then bury them.
Alternately, let new trees grow to take the place of trees that die.
This is yet another stock/flow issue, where the sequestered carbon is a function of the stock of living trees, which itself grows with the delta of trees added - trees removed. You don't need to manually manage the lifecycle of each individual plant, just focus on the increasing the living stock, or rather, letting the living stock increase all on its own in response to more carbon in the air. So this is about land zoning and habitat protection, not building little coffins for individual trees. Let forests grow and protect their habitat, they will grow all on their own if allowed to.
FYI we've added 60 million hectares of forests since 2000. That process can be even expanded.
Yes, this is true. If you can create a stable forest then that becomes a carbon sink for the lifetime of the forest. It is still hard to see how this is going to make a big difference. The biomass of the Amazon rainforest is ~120 gigatons. Annual CO2 emissions are right now around 30-36 gigatons. Growing a new forest the size of the Amazon would make up for about four years of emissions.
Of course that doesn't mean that reforestation isn't valuable. It certainly is. But even enormous growth of forest wouldn't make a big dent in atmospheric CO2 levels. The carbon came from underground and almost all of it will have to return underground to get CO2 levels down.
Those are valid points. But you don't need to add the square footage of the Amazon, what also happens is that forests become more dense per square foot. But not only forests, grassland sequesters about 343 gigatons and that rate has been growing at half a gigaton/year as the grassland gets taller/denser due to increasing carbon in the air. Biomass in topsoil itself sequestors twice as much carbon as biomass in trees, but this covers only 3% of the earth's surface. This paper has a nice overview[1]
“the issue is that they eventually die and rot, and then that carbon gets released right back into the atmosphere”
You make it sound like a rapid process. Univ of Arizona did a study that showed CO2 emissions of dead trees was lower than living ones due to the rotting process being very slow compared to a living trees normal respiration cycle
Well the timescale of climate change is on the order of a few decades to a century. The decomposition process is somewhat slow by human standards, but it's still fast compared to a century. In order to effectively remove CO2 from the atmosphere to prevent climate change, it needs to be removed on timescales longer than a century.
You can cut them down regularly and turn the wood to biochar and bury it. That is fairly stable in the soil. If you just bury them normally they'll decompose back to carbon dioxide much faster.
Bacterial rot is not the only thing that trees can turn into: their carbon can enrich the soil and be consumed by insects, fungus, lichens etc that goes onto feed higher species on the food chain. On top of that, rotting trees is fantastic habitat for animals, which are also made of carbon.
While I believe this comment is well intended, I don't believe it addresses the parent's question. The extra resource they have is electrical power, not land. They are asking if there is a way to turn electrical power into carbon capture.
I also want to say that the planting trees method is a bit more nuanced than everyone makes it out to be. But don't trust me, let's ask someone who knows better: Forrest Fleischman[0][1]. I'm not saying "don't plant trees" (do) but that this is often everyone's go to response to CCS and it is a bit naive (as explained in the threads).
It is something that have to be done anyway, as the other benefits matter too. But how it is done could be the difference between a solution and a far worse problem.
Global warming is already pushing toward more frequent forest fires, or droughts in vast regions that if they have trees will end burning up as well.
Intensive tree planting in relatively small areas probably is a bad idea, or will have a big maintenance cost to try to avoid that risk.
But, in any case, it is the low hanging fruit of carbon capture. I just hope that it is done in the right way.
Those calculations are for oxygen required to breathe, not carbon dioxide exhaled by people. The cycle for biologically produced and consumed CO2 tends to be carbon neutral.
As far as I'm aware, the issue isn't with CO2 produced by cellular respiration, the issue is the burning of fuels dug up from the ground and the destruction of natural carbon sinks.
The maths may be right but the thought is wrong since it takes zero trees to offset the whole world's population of air-breathing organisms as all the CO₂ they produce started out as... CO₂. This is taken up by algae and plants, which are eaten by organisms which are eaten themselves until the target organism is reached, which will use the energy gained from consuming the previous hop in the carbon chain, breathing out CO₂ upon which the circle is complete.
Had humans consumed fossilised carbon the thought would still be wrong since trees only store the carbon temporarily, eventually it is released as CO₂ when the tree burns up or rots away.
This leaves aside the whole discussion on whether there is any need to offset CO₂ from non-fossil sources - which there is not as far as I can see.
If I could grow the things... I struggle to get them watered properly.
Practically, though, I'm out in some fairly high desert, and I have to pump water for irrigation out of a deep well. I can certainly do it, but I'm looking for something of a bit more "geologic scale" sequestration, if it's possible.
I'm actually planning to get a backhoe for a couple years to build a large basalt greenhouse, then do aquaponics - combine growing fish and plants in something that removes most of the downsides of aquaculture and hydroponics. Done properly, it's a synthetic pond ecosystem that doesn't require flushing the water ever.
If only there’s a market network for quick-swappable rechargeable battery packs for electric cars.
Here’s how it would work: you pass by a convenience store or gas station on your way home or to work, pick up some depleted battery packs, you get home and recharge those battery packs with your excess solar power, then bring the recharged battery packs back to convenience store or gas station for a bit of money. That way you don’t need to grid tie your solar installation. :P
A grid (even if local) is far more efficient. Moving things takes a lot of energy. It would be more efficient to just put those batteries in the grid, since everyone will be generating surplus at the same time, and it would never be unutilized while disconnected.
Is it safe to just leave the panels in the sun without letting them convert sun energy into electricity?
If connecting into the grid isn't possible you could maybe attempt to charge batteries that you then take home and use there. Would require some calculations to check if it's worth it though... Would maybe be best if it were an electric car that can feed back into the grid.
> The office is standalone (and way more trouble than it's worth to grid tie), so when the battery bank is full, there's nowhere to stick extra energy.
I don’t know the details of your site/situation, but I suspect any alternatives to grid-tying your system will turn out to be a lot less efficient than whatever (mostly one-time) trenching, cabling, and paperwork would be required.
I have a mind-blowing idea.
Don't have children...?
Birth rate decrease -> demand decrease -> CO2 decrease
If we have the same birth rate as Korea or Japan, the population would drop more than 20% in 50 years according to the population prediction in these two countries. This means lots of demand would not need anymore, and might be the best practice which could be done by individual.
We don't have to reduce carbon emissions by 20% in 50 years, we have to reduce them by >100% in less than thirty years. Reducing birth rates is both, much too slow, and not sufficient (unless you propose reducing population to 0).
Sure, replace fossil fuels for electricity generation with renewables and/or nuclear. Replace fossil fuels in cars with batteries. Replace fossil fuels for heating with electricity.
Each of those saves on the order of 20% of emissions and could be done in less than a decade if we put maximum effort into it.
I really doubt convincing a sufficient number of people to not have children is easier than any one of those measures. Just imagine the political backslash if the government suggested not to have kids for the climate. It's a lot easier to convince people to stop eating meat for the climate and even that is essentially impossible.
In the scale of country, East Asia did quite well without any policies (exclude China, they have a special policy on it). Just keep raising the price of estate, and then birth rate would drop and never come back.
For the part of energy, according to the EPA report[1], the emissions by electricity and heat are around 25% in total. If we want to reduce 20% in total, we need to close 80% of fossil plants. For me, it is nearly impossible. There are some countries may not have the land or safe area to place nuclear/renewable plants. (e.g. Singapore...) I know there is a plan for Singapore to buy the clean solar energy from Australia, but it only covers 1/5 of the consumption. Also, there must be security issues for transferring power between countries.
Global numbers are not representative of industrialized countries. E.g. in the US electricity is about 25% of GHG emissions. Many individuals too can choose to use an electric car (or even no car at all), to install solar panels (or at least pay for greenwashed electricity), and improve insulation and switch to electricity for heating (if they own a house).
"Workable" is arguable, "easy" is a bit of a stretch.(assuming you're not trolling.)
I suspect most westerners are not going to be thrilled when receiving the government email about their mandatory sterilization.
Usually the idea floats in circles of people convinced we'll reduce the birth rate of "other" people (wink wink dog whistle yeah they're thinking of Africans)
You can utilize the excess electricity to gasify waste woody biomass from tree trimming, etc; store the syngas that is produced for heat production during the winter, and bury the biochar (carbon) that is left over build soil health and recapture carbon.
I'm sure it won't be as efficient as a large operation, but neither can I get my surplus power to an industrial operation. And I'd happily follow the power supplies - run equipment during the day, when it's clear, not run it at night, etc. I'm already used to using energy based on what's available, this would just be something additional to add into the blend.
I've got an awful lot of basalt laying around, though...
I'm not sure if that holds - wouldn't additional work on the network encourage others to then add more capacity to recapture their share?
I've looked into it briefly, and came to the conclusion that the BOINC stuff (it used to be F@H but I gave that GPU to a friend for some CAD work) was more useful than crypto mining, because I simply couldn't mine enough to matter out here - a dollar or less a day sort of thing, with my annual power profile.
We need to first stop adding more CO2 to the sky. That's vastly cheaper and easier than trying to reverse the process. And potentially quite profitable.
The most effective form of carbon capture is to leave it in the ground. We need to stop any form of wacky carbon capture scheme that excuses companies into releasing more of it. This BTW. is exactly what most carbon capture adds up to. Burn a few tonnes of coal and plant a few trees or go to ridiculous lengths of trouble to pump less than a percent of the emissions in some underground cavity. It's a scam and it's the current reality of the industry. You hype it up, get the government subsidies & photo opportunity with the local government stooges and then a few years later it adds up to nothing worth mentioning. The planted forest has wilted away (or burned off), and the vast majority of the carbon that was supposed to go in the ground instead got released into the atmosphere. Australia has a carbon capture facility right next to a brown coal plant. It's beyond cynical if you start looking at the numbers.
The only way of even getting to net zero (never mind negative carbon) is by fixing the economics around the whole topic.
Releasing CO2 needs to be an expensive hobby with extremely low cost alternatives. That removes much more carbon from the equation than the cumulative carbon capture efforts (past, present, and planned future). Better still, it drives companies away from the business of making things worse. We are still subsidizing that even. Just stop doing that.
It actually can work quite fast too. Ten years ago, offshore wind was barely a thing, now it's heading to double digit percentages of energy supply in a lot of places. Same with domestic solar, batteries, etc. EV sales are going through the roof. All of that adds up to CO2 that we leave in the ground. Lots of it. Why is that happening? It's cheaper this way now. Simply accelerating what's already happening here will speed things up.
> We need to first stop adding more CO2 to the sky.
We need to do both.
Every single comment on an article that talks about one has commenters like you arguing "no but check this out, doing the other is so much easier/better/whatever".
We could use both, but only one option is viable with current technology.
Existing carbon capture should not be subsidized because it's pointless. Sponsoring research into carbon capture would be good, but existing methods don't achieve anything wrt the climate crises.
Sure, we need to spend in proportion to the effectiveness of the spending on this. So, $ per tonnes not added or removed. If you can remove a giga tonne for the same money it would take to avoid adding a mega-tonne, go for it. Unfortunately that's far from the current practice of carbon capture.
That line of reasoning would lead you to de-fund any form of carbon capture scheme because there is about a 3-4 orders of magnitude efficiency difference between the two. Much cheaper to prevent a million tonnes from being added than to capture a few tonnes. It just doesn't add up to meaningful results. And arguably keeping the polluters that push for this in business actually adds to the problem to a large extent than their own ability to offset their carbon.
... But at the current pace, we _will_ need active capture, so that we get back down from the suspected 2.5-3° temperature increase. Sure, carbon capture from air might not be the most efficient use of energy, but if you're overproducing energy (e.g. solar at a sunny day, and grid is otherwise saturated) then I would very much like to have all that energy go into removing carbon from the air.
We do. But it's so much easier to not pump carbon up, than to use tons of energy to put carbon back in the ground. Even if you'd use carbon free energy, for a long time coming that energy can offset existing fossil energy...
It's not about what's easier, and it's not an either/or proposal. Atmospheric CO2 is currently around 419ppm. Even if we cut our CO2 emissions to zero tomorrow, we still have 419ppm. The temperature might stop going up, but it's not going to go back down unless we get greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere.
Most importantly, it's not certain that runaway warming can't happen even at our current temperature. Methane is being released from permafrost at our current levels of warming and is 20x as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Also, our natural carbon sinks (the ocean, macroalgae, forests, soil) are in decline whether or not we stop emitting CO2 - so CO2 may keep going up anyway as we lose biomass.
And let's be honest with ourselves here, we're not cutting emissions to 0 tomorrow. Or next year. Or by 2030. Or by 2050 most likely.
We have to reduce emissions, at a level that seems inconceivable. We ALSO have to pull CO2 back out, again, at a level that seems inconceivable. The ability to scale up CO2 removal to a planetary scale requires that we accelerate development right now.
I wonder if atmospheric CO2 increase is correlated with the massive reduction in insect biomass we've seen. If so, would it be possible for us to reverse if we decrease insecticides and allow insect population regrowth.
> I wonder if atmospheric CO2 increase is correlated with the massive reduction in insect biomass we've seen.
A byproduct of increased atmospheric CO2 levels is an increase in vegetative growth. My naive assumption is that more plant mass means more food and habitat for insects.
This is not true and is based on the naive assumption that more CO2 means more food for plants. Far more important for plants and biomes in general is the climate. Plants might have more CO2 making it more available for sugar production, but this leads to plants creating more sugars but less nutrient rich. Getting back to the climate, plants can only grow if their climates are hospitable to them, but look at the wildfires in California and the Taiga. Trees can't grow there like they used to because the climate has shifted rapidly and are no longer the right conditions, they're too dry and turning into grasslands and deserts.
We've created a world that is vastly different in climate than what came before. This is the problem with the climate crisis in general, all our ecosystems are in the wrong places
look at the wildfires in California and the Taiga. Trees can't grow there like they used to because the climate has shifted rapidly and are no longer the right conditions
Can't speak to Taiga, but trees are growing just fine in California. Overgrowth of trees creating fuel for fires is as much a problem as anything.
We’re going to need as much carbon neutral energy as possible no matter what. (If only we had somehow invented an extremely plentiful, carbon-neutral energy source in the 1940’s, we might not be in this mess right now….)
Once you get to the hardest marginal cases, I’m not actually sure what the most efficient way of offsetting the carbon emissions of airplanes is. It might actually be more efficient to just capture and sequester enough CO2 to offset the emissions of jet engines than to find a new energy source that works on airplanes.
Planes can run off of biodiesel made from oil extracted from algae or waste vegetable oil. The remaining carbohydrates in the algae can be turned into ethyl alcohol by yeast, or Acetone/Butanol/Ethanol by the ABE fermentation cycle and the protein can be used for animal consumption, or anaerobic respiration into methane. All of these are suitable fuel sources.
I agree with this to some extent, but at the same time it seems like so long as there exists carbon in the volatile format of fossil fuels, someone or something will eventually find it expedient to burn it.
Hell, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that certain superpowers (namely Russia) decide that climate change is actually in their long term interest, as it devastates regions near the equator and opens up currently difficult to tap resources in their own.
Slowing down carbon emission is definitely worth pursuing as much as possible, if for no other reason than it buys us time to solve the problem. But I doubt we'll ever get to a safe steady state until all the fossil fuel has been converted into a format that can't be burned.
> I agree with this to some extent, but at the same time it seems like so long as there exists carbon in the volatile format of fossil fuels, someone or something will eventually find it expedient to burn it.
wouldn't it be cheaper to buy fossil fuels on the open market, somehow convert it to a non-harmful form (eg. pure carbon) and then dump it in the ocean?
IDK. Maybe someone more in tune with the physics and chemistry can chime in, but I'd imagine you have to release the energy stored in the chemical bonds in some way before you can convert the carbon to a more stable form.
The simple answer might be that you'd still have to burn it, but immediately convert the exhaust to a stable solid. I'm unaware if this conversion can be done with less energy than can be extracted from burning it.
Yeah, carbon capture can be done with less energy, see BECCS for an example (where people grow trees/grasses to capture carbon from the air, then burn it for energy, and capture the CO2 for immediate sequestration).
If there's still demand then the market will spur more development and exploration. It turns there's a lot of oil in the world, the fracking revolution in the US proved that. It would take $Ts to make a dent. And it wouldn't even work, as most oil reserves are held by national governments, who would thank you for raising the price of oil.
But let's suppose you did spend $Ts to shut in specific wells. You've spend all that money and gotten no economic benefit, except for other fossil fuel producers. If you had instead spent those $Ts on encouraging the deployment of fossil fuel free transportation and industrial processes you would destroy demand for that oil and (hopefully) leave it in the ground because its not economic to take it out.
Yeah, makes sense. In fact I don't care much if oil is taken out or not.
I just came up with a funny scheme. Each person submits a bid saying "I'd like to receive X dollars per 1MT increase in net daily emissions, and I'm willing to pay the same sum per 1MT decrease". The tricky part is paying for second derivative: not CO2 concentration, not emissions, but change in emissions. Then as the emissions actually happen, they get tallied up by the government, an average "price per 1MT increase" gets determined, and emitters are forced to pay that price, so everyone gets paid (or pays) exactly as they asked. If carbon capture also happens, then carbon capture companies also get paid, either by emitters if there's a net increase, or from people's stated bids if there's a net decrease.
This seems weird at first, what if everyone submits million-dollar bids? Well, then emitters reduce emissions for a short time and take everyone's money. On the other hand, what if everyone submits zero? Then emitters keep increasing emissions, and everyone misses out on being paid. So there's some optimal bid in between. Anyone who wants emissions to go down just submits a larger bid.
For now, it's true that we should focus on low hanging fruits like energy production and transportation. For them, we know what to do and some of them already have viable technologies. Perhaps we can achieve 80~90% of the goal by focusing on carbon reduction specifically optimized for those industries.
But what do we do next when we're running out of these low hanging goals? It's more of death by a thousand cuts spanning across every industries you can ever imagine. And we've had a long, hard time to make politics work even on a very few number of those obvious low hanging fruits and it's still dysfunctional... Political will is a limited resource and we cannot really waste them on efforts with negligible impacts.
This is why we need to prepare more general and economically scalable solutions that directly deal with carbon emission itself. Keep in mind that we're not trying to handle all of carbon emission problems with carbon capture. It's more of an auxiliary one on top of highly optimized carbon reduction solutions.
> But what do we do next when we're running out of these low hanging goals?
Housing insulation retrofits next, and then metro-area roading and zoning reform to heavily encourage walking, with neighborhood shops, cafes, and communal spaces every few streets, and public transport to get between neighborhoods.
The first hangs lower than restructuring built-up areas, true. The second has great public health benefits though.
But I agree about political will. The political way to deal with climate change is not in policy documents, it's to produce policy documents.
Stratospheric aerosol injections are the logical stopgap measure until carbon scrubbing tech reaches maturity.
Stratospheric aerosols are extremely well understood and the tech is mature today. We know from historical volcanoes exactly how the climate respond to dosage. The cost is dirt cheap, $10 billion/year, a rounding error for the US military budget. Moreover it requires no exotic tech, simply pre-existing missile delivery systems.
The only downside is that the aerosols have to be refreshed semi-annually. So if civilization breaks down for some reason we get a sudden slingshot heating effect. For that reason, it’s not a long-long term solution. But it will more than suffice for 50-100 years to get carbon scrubbing tech enough time to mature.
The chemtrail crowd will love that. Our experience with covid has stolen any hope I had that humanity would be able to rally around scientifically sound solutions to a common enemy.
It's time to stop caring about what the "chemtrail crowd" will or will not like, and consider how to politically neuter them to prevent them from harming themselves and others.
When they stop armed stormings of government centres, kidnappings, and coup plots, ignoring them may be viable. I'd not advise letting them determine policy, goals, or methods, but I'd keep a very alert and wary eye on them for the forseable future.
Fair enough regards neuter, though you did suggest we "stop caring". I disagree with that specific advice.
Note that "caring" != sympathise, hear out, or otherwise contenance repeated misinformation and disinformation. It does mean being aware of what responses might be and/or are.
Ah yes, I so missed the good old concentration camps.
/S
This thread is pure totalitarian thinking. You think you know the Truth (TM) because there's a "science" label on it but in fact you're listening to humans that may or may not be good at science (or are just lying to advance an agenda).
When people think they know the Truth and start to discriminate society based on that it will ALWAYS end with camps.
A society that gives up on knowledge and knowing, or actively rejects the notion, has no chance of succeeding in a difficult world. The "chem-trail crowd" is an example of a group that has rejected the very idea of knowledge. There is no argument to make. There are no facts to point to. All that is left is to minimize the political damage done by, not to put too fine a point on it, the kind of morons who believe in chemtrails.
In any event, you believe what you do, and I'll believe what I do, and we'll see who's society does better. That's the only test that counts, in the end, and requires neither our consent or interaction.
Oh it will piss of elements of the left and the right. The Chem trail crowd and the crowd that wants to deal with climate change by creating a big bureaucracy. Oh, and the crowd that thinks this isn't real.
Fortunately it doesn't matter, because we can just get started, buy in is nice, but not really necessary. Heck I don't even think congressional buy in is necessary, as Biden can order the military to start doing this.
I mean the reason there is a Congress and a presidency is to get around having elections for everything. I am not commenting on whether it would be better to have direct democracy or not, but it seems a weird place to complain about it.
1. Building the Tres Amigas SuperStation would have the biggest physical impact. Only eliminating industrial subsides would be easier, which is why the latest draft infrastructure bill is a sad joke. https://theintercept.com/2021/08/03/bipartisan-infrastructur...
This might sound dumb, but it's crazy to me that we're actually (going to) use superconductors in real projects. Still sounds like science fiction to my ear... but I'm getting old :)
Question: if we take CO2 out of the oceans, will the oceans take it out of the air? And is it easier to take it out of the oceans than it is to take it out of the air/can we take out stuff out of ocean water at the same time (lithium, gold, etc.) that would make processing all that water worth it?
It looks like a group at the University of Exeter is working on that exact plan.
"SeaCURE harnesses two natural properties of the ocean that can circumvent this problem. (1) The amount of carbon dissolved in a seawater is approximately 150 times higher than its concentration in air, making extraction significantly easier and quicker, (2) we can utilise the ocean’s vast surface area to remove CO2 from the enormous volume of air sitting above it, rather than having to push all of that air through air-based CO2 capture facilities."
"SeaCURE will combine and refine existing approaches to develop a new system that removes CO2 from seawater and releases the CO2-depleted water back to the ocean, where it will naturally re-absorb an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Specifically, at the University of Exeter and Plymouth Marine Laboratory we will benchmark established approaches to prepare seawater for CO2 extraction, strip that CO2 from the seawater, and collaborating with Brunel University concentrate the CO2 to high purity. TP Group, a UK based technology and engineering firm with world leading expertise in gas extraction from seawater, will then develop and upscale the most cost effective approach from this toolkit. The SeaCURE team will design a portable pilot plant to remove at least 100 tonnes of CO2 a year. Future testing using the pilot plant would generate the data required to develop commercially viable CO2 removal at the megaton scale, aimed at public and private sector offsetting and the carbon trading market."
Energy costs of carbon sequestration from seawater is far lower than from the atmosphere directly, carbon does cycle fairly rapidly to the oceans, and increased ocean acidification is itself a major concern. I think the question is well-worth exploring. I'm mostly familiar with it in the context of synfuel production, one possible application (though of course burning such fuels re-introduces an captured carbon to the atmosphere).
A set of papers, several of which address energy costs of carbon sequestration from seawater:
Biomass that falls into the deep ocean doesn't quickly cycle back into the carbon cycle, so some companies are look at the opposite, with the deep ocean as a sink. https://www.phykos.co/
But your idea is somewhat correct, and it has to do with desalinization tailings. There are companies like Heimdal which can take the high mineral runoff from desalinization and use it to make concrete. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/heimdal
This article doesn't talk about farming the ocean. It's hypothesized that Azolla water ferns drew atmospheric CO2 from 3500 to 650 ppm over 800000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
And where do you put it? A billion tons of CO2 doesn't convert to nothing. A ton of CO2 will convert to several tons of non-gaseous product like (say) calcium carbonate.
For the sake of illustration:
CO2 -> CaCO3
44 -> 100 (molar numbers)
so one ton of CO2 gives you just over 2 tons of calcium carbonate. Extrapolating that to roughly 35 gigatons of CO2 per year means that we would have to find somewhere to put about 80 gigatons of calcium carbonate per year.
I like converting it to soil and wood. Forests and grasslands store hundreds of gigatons of carbon. It can't just be planting trees, it has to be cultivating rich ecosystems: the more living things the better.
I've been converted by Charles Eisenstein's book "Climate: a new story" - he makes a strong case that we're only obsessed with carbon because we don't have good ways of measuring anything else, and that while of course the greenhouse effect is real, the negative effects of climate change including unpredictable weather and stronger storms can be mitigated by restoring forests, coral reefs, marshes, barrier islands, anything that lives will act as a buffer to fast changes in weather.
There's some good stuff in there too explaining the feedback loops between life and the weather, such as forests releasing aerosols that act as cloud seeds that bring moisture toward the forest.
Wood is carbon neutral, not carbon negative. Trees take carbon out of the air and produce wood. When they die and decompose or burn, the carbon is released back into the atmosphere. Oil in the ground was produced during a time that wood was so abundant it almost suffocated the surface of the earth because nothing could decompose it. Somehow, brining all that oil back to the surface and turning it back into wood doesn’t seem like a good idea.
Eh if you keep it dry, it can hold it for a few hundred years. Permanent sequestration is ideal, but we’re really trying to minimize the area under the excess carbon curve in the near future to buy some time, so even shorter term stuff can be helpful. Reduction of excess carbon-ton-years is the way to think of it, IMO.
if you build with the wood then it doesn’t burn or decompose (yes, eventually, it will burn or decompose, but the more buildings on earth made of wood at any one time is carbon that isnt in the air.)
If the wood is converted to syngas and biochar through gasification, the biochar is chemically inactive in the soil for thousands of years. The syngas can be used as an energy source.
Bogs are actually great sinks of carbon, all of the biomass created in the bog will sink below the waters surface and remain inert.
Honestly, you can do a similar calculation for things like trees and algae. But the thing is that we didn't get that carbon from thin air in the first place. We dug it out of the ground. I'm not sure how much we mine every year, but I wouldn't be surprised if we mined a "mountain range" per decade.
Also I think your mountain estimate is off. Mt Everest is 158.76 gigatons (~350e12 lbs). I don't think this detracts from your point (that's a TON of mass each year) but I thought I'd make the correction. I mean we're still talking half an Everest every year.
For reference, I did also find a source that says we mine between 32 and 50 billion tonnes of aggregate (sand and gravel) every year. So maybe 80 isn't that bad?
This is a weird argument because it’s not like CO2 is being produced from thin air (heh). Most of the CO2 we produce comes from fossil fuels stored deep inside the earth or inside literal mountain ranges. We can put it back there. Mountain top addition instead of mountain top removal.
Naïve take, just use it? Even if it ends up back there by escaping as a gas, better that it was 'used' in carbonation or for some other purpose than merely converted to something storable?
Or do the quantities just not work out, and (to the non-naïfs) that's too obvious for words?
As a very rough first approximation, a person consumes 1 million food calories (kilocalories) per year. As carbohydrate, that's 4 cal/gram. Total population is about 8 billion.
8 billion cal * 1 million / (4 cal/g) / 1 million g / tonne = 2 billion tonnes net carbohydrate
That's a rough estimate (carbohydrate is neither pure carbon nor CO2, there is a humidity content) and undercounts total ag production (animal protein consumes a large amount of input feed for a much smaller amount of protein) , but gives a rough order-of-magnitude sense: 1e9 tonnes food vs. 1e11 tonnes net emissions.
FWIW, Our World in Data gives 2.7 billion tonnes net cereal production in 2018:
That does put it into perspective, thanks. To be clear though I meant CO2 used as gas in (for example) food processing, rather than somehow converting it back into other carbon forms and ultimately carbohydrates in the foods themselves.
Keep in mind that a gas is roughly 1000x larger than an equivalent solid mass.
So take all the food grown on Earth in a year, multiply it 100x, and multiply that 1,000x, to come up with the volume of gas you'd be dealing with sequestering somehow.
Gas doesn't like being sequestered, less so for hundreds or thousands of years. (Natural gas formations are interesting accidents of geological history in which sufficient source material, methane conversion of that material, and a geological substrate in which that gas is trapped in the earth, all coincide.) There's also the fact that eventually re-introducing that gas to the biosphere is probably beneficial (on the order of tens to hundreds of millions of years), as biologically-active carbon is weathered out of the system (though solar irradiance will also be increasing over this period, and by various accounts, the happy music stops in about 800 million to 1 billion years).
It really is difficult to convey the volumes of resources humans use on an annual basis. Vaclav Smil's books on the topics of energy and material resource uilisation are highly recommended, especially Making the Modern World:
You'd want to reduce it and convert it to some organic solid. When that becomes remotely economical it will likely compete with crypto mining as a use for spare electrical power and won't need further incentives.
I'm not convinced that forests are carbon neutral, once they are mature they can continue to support ecosystem growth where more and larger animals can exist: keystone species are made out of carbon too ;)
I mean, to me this seems like a minor concern. There are tons of places on earth that are essentially a whole lotta nothing. I mean, have you ever driven east-to-west across Texas?
Step one should be stopping subsidies to animal feed (corn, soy, etc) and moving those subsidies to plant foods (vegetables, grains, legumes, etc) that humans can directly eat.
This would drive up the cost of rib eye, and drive down the production of methane from cow burps. Cutting methane would be a quick win.
We need to make our farm land as efficient as possible and return as much land to forests that we can. We also need to repopulate the worlds oceans.
If we want to discourage meat production, I think it would have to be something more direct. All of the crops you described are things that humans and non-human animals can eat. Cows can be fed wheat and soybeans. Farmers will feed them whatever is cheapest per calorie.
"Should" isn't always a great word when it comes to real world economics. I agree with you in theory, but realistically one would need to subsidize these crops: the market isn't equipped for the entire American Midwest (for instance) to suddenly begin growing beans, potatoes, and other staple crops at the frequency that they were raising beef cattle.
It's a deep hole we're in, and its going to take considerable effort and a lengthy process to dig ourselves out.
> the market isn't equipped for the entire American Midwest (for instance) to suddenly begin growing beans, potatoes, and other staple crops at the frequency that they were raising beef cattle.
Subsidies won't change that. Yes, it takes time to shift an entire economic sector to a significantly different distribution of production and consumption. That just means we need to get started on the shift now--by stopping subsidies. Shifting the subsidies to something different just makes it take even longer to get to the only really sustainable state, which is nothing being subsidized and the free market determining what gets produced and what gets consumed.
It's going to be a lot easier to take it out of the ocean. I don't know why people insist on working on the atmosphere. The ocean is a natural carbon buffer, the perfect place for us to draw down from with easy options for disposal.
Direct air is a red herring. Please let’s not put more money in that tech, it takes away talent and capital from what already works. That and large scale CCS. Both technologies have high risk, super expensive and require heavy subsidies, and only hypothetically work at huge scales (which requires large investments to find out of it even works). Don’t even start me on the pure insanity of geoengineering - we will literally kill our own race or a range of other species by effing that up so bad.
For those jumping in the climate train, welcome on this long slow painful journey. It appears there is some movement to fix it again, and I am hopeful that the balance of power swings towards climate and protecting the planet. We are a funny creature and I don’t trust us in large numbers to do the right thing.
Energy system transformation, reforestation/protecting against development, political power and policy change, are some of the great high impact areas that are already getting lots of momentum but need continual work and effort.
Taking CO2 "out of the sky" will naturally be seen as a way of offsetting fossil-fuel consumption. It would reduce the incentives to stop digging-up fossil fuels.
This doesn't just apply to mining/drilling companies; it applies to all of us. We all need energy - individuals, our employers, our suppliers. None of us want to pay a lot of money for that energy; even eco-nutters will blench at the prospect of higher bills or taxes.
So I'm against all excuses for mining and burning fossils. I'm against offsetting and (feeble attempts at) CC&S. And I'm against attempts to reduce emissions by means of taxes and regulation - that's all very well, but many places in the world have quite weak law enforcement, and many large countries seem to be perfectly OK with building new coal-fired power stations.
Instead, we need to just stop digging up and burning fossils. EVs, solar and wind-power, enery storage systems, CHP systems and so on can't (easily) be used as excuses for continued fossil energy generation.
Frankly, I despair. The biggest producers of emissions is rich people. Rich people also have the greatest lobbying clout and the most influence on governments. Their pensions are invested in oil and gas companies. Even if an individual expresses support for climate-change mitigation, the manager of his pension fund may well have other views.
So I'm pretty certain that my grand-daughters are going to be faced with worse problems than we face today. The sooner we act, the easier and cheaper it will be; but evidently we are not willing to act, until we are face-to-face with death and apocalypse. That will be my legacy to my grand-daughters, I fear.
The only vaguely practical large scale carbon capture I've seen proposed is to convert plants into biochar which can then be buried [1]. Any "machine" based method just needs huge amounts of capital, manufacturing and energy to be done on a big enough scale.
It's attractive for a few reasons:
1. The actual carbon capture is pretty hands off
2. You can extract some (carbon negative) hydrocarbon fuel from the pyrolisis process to help pay for everything
3. The carbon you get is fairly stable as solid carbon - there's no worrying about CO2 gas escaping.
There's pretty much no way we could do this at a scale big enough to cancel out current emissions (I'd say maybe 10-20% would be feasible). But as a way of reducing CO2 once we've managed to stop burning as many fossil fuels, it's pretty attractive.
Great and we should invest in this tech but be weary of politicians who use this as a misdirection. Australia is investing large amounts into carbon capture even though the grid is mostly fossil fuels. It's a misdirection to avoid changing the grid and a corrupt transfer of wealth from regular people to oil and gas firms.
I think a lot of "Earth Is Dimming Due to Climate Change"[1] (a lack of clouds), and I start to think: even removing CO2 is not enough. We've already changed things too much. We have to make the earth shinier, reject more heat coming in.
I'm not exactly thrilled to be at the "let's build an electric drone fleet that sprays sulfure dioxide into the sky", and that or whatever else would have some probably ungood reprecussions. But I think we've got to. The existential risk of not starting right now is too damned high.
I'm not entirely sure our reaction to dealing with the expected and unexpected effects of man's continual technological and global reach is to run global experiments that will impact everyone on earth without any democratic mechanism behind that decision.
It's more or less exactly how we got where we are now. "More of the same, but in the opposite direction" isn't very convincing.
Fun fact @akira2501, 2501 happens to be my exact karma right now. Which will probably dive a bit tonight. ;)
I don't see doing radical things to try to improve the earth as "exactly how we got where we are now." I see exploitation and capitalism & lack of governance & steerage as how we fucked shit up wicked bad. I see a lack of trying bold ambitious things to try and help rectify our situation as causing a colossal negative impact on earth, already, against our cloud cover, against our ocean oxygenation, against our planetwide survivable temperatures, against our more-moderate weather.
We need some big projects. The earth is huge, massive. To begin to have a real effect, we need to start, start making, start experimenting, start scaling. We can assess & learn as we go. We can adapt. With hope, we (Earth) can find sufficient leverage to not become another Drake Equation casualty.
What we cant do is what you propose: refuse to adapt. To gently seek peaceful global consensus, to reach unanimity before we start.
Alright, here's a dumb question that I've pondered on for a while: If capturing CO2 from the atmosphere is so difficult, why aren't we capturing it where it is produced, at the exhaust? Impractical? More impractical than the former? Or just impossible?
There are a number of capture projects doing what you suggest on full scale power plants and other industrial facilities. And yes you are right, its cheaper to catch it at a point source than in the atmosphere.
The projects work by circulating chemicals through the smokestack that latch onto the CO2 in the flue gas. The chemical is then heated up to remove the CO2 which is then pumped underground where it is sequestered, hopefully forever. The chemical is recycled back to the smokestack for the process to begin again.
When working well such systems capture around 80% of the CO2 at a energy penalty of around 20%. The problem is that the system rarely work well, so in the real world those numbers aren't achieved. This is why there are relatively few such systems deployed in the world despite $Bs in subsidies spent.
Lately, oil companies have been feeling the pressure to show results on this, so there are a lot of projects that have gone into development.
Is it possible to produce plastics that don't degrade or return CO2 to the environment? Make everything out of plastic, and then bury it in landfills, seems like one way to capture carbon.
Let's not. Even if you could make this work, sort of, plastics have all sorts of other nasty environmental and biological effects that we should try to avoid - they tend to break into pieces tiny enough to get everywhere in an organism, and then mimic other signaling chemicals well enough to fool systems. There's plenty of writing on microplastics you can dig into if you want to learn more.
Making less out of plastic would be a good step. Making more out of plastic isn't a good idea.
Also just producing less useless plastic. Much packaging can be made out of cardboard. If it needs some water protection, a thin wrapping of plastic is plenty.
The one thing I'm not sure of is food packaging. There's a lot of plastic used in that, but I don't know if we have any alternatives. It's tough to package food because you want much of it to be sealed air-tight. But food packaging does have an advantage because it only has to last as long as the food inside.
I think you're stuck between the anti-plastic and anti-GHG ideologies. This reminds me of when anti-nuclear collided with anti-GHG. Not everything has a single obvious right answer. There are always tradeoffs. In this particular case, the environmental problems are easily solved by using landfills that don't release anything into the environment.
Having said that, plastic production itself is a far bigger GHG emitter than burning it. Plastic product production emits 1.5 Gt of CO2e per year while global CO2 emissions are 35 Gt [1]. That's 4% of global emissions coming from plastic production. Incineration is hardly anything in comparison.
That carbon would have to come from the atmosphere in order to be "capture". Converting oil products (already-captured carbon) into plastics is the wrong direction. It doesn't make sense to take a step back just to attempt a step forward.
Turning atmospheric CO2 into plastic probably isn't as feasible as turning CO2 into some other stable form directly. Diverting petroleum production into plastic and them making sure it ends up in landfills rather than the sea[1] does seem like a good thing to the extent that plastic production funges against fuel production, I'm not sure to what extent these rely on separating different parts of the oil that comes out of the ground in the refinery for different uses rather than having one common pool that could be used for either. But plastic buried in landfills does seem to remain out of the biosphere for long enough to be a useful repository of carbon.
Plastics can be made from starch which would capture CO2. However, bioplastics tend to degrade. Making plastic from oil as the vast majority are doesn't sequester CO2.
The evidence that regenerative agriculture / soil carbon sequestration actually works is really thin. The only way you get functional sequestration over any meaningful time period is for the carbon to subsist below the plow layer of soil (50-60 cm and below). There is little actual evidence this happens.
Just shoving carbon into the soil doesn't mean it actually stays there. Definitely an open question not settled science.
Anyone have some good links to articles about the consequences of higher temperatures?
Personally I dont think we will able to reduce the co2 growth before 2030-2040 since population in developing countries will increase their energy consumption while the west might decrease theirs but in total the energy consumption is going to increase. It takes a while to change from 80% of energy from fossil fuels to 0.
If you agree with the article (I do and so do others, e.g. renowned swiss climate physicist Prof. Dr. Reto Knutti at ETH Zurich) and use Stripe, you can setup some percentages to pay for CO2 removal through Stripe Climate (I do). I helps kick-start early stage technologies.
Couldn't we make use of the excess solar energy that's often shown in the duck curve? That is, in the middle of the day, there's usually a time where more solar energy is produced than needed. We can harness that to capture CO2 during that time. It might not capture much but at least it's not wasted.
What's the amount of carbon in food related waste? If we could turn that into turquoise hydrogen and use the carbon for other stuff what percentage of the problem is that? Seems like an obvious place to start since it'll turn to methane if we don't do anything.
Is there a practical method to achieve sub-atmospheric CO2 concentrations indoors?
If taking CO2 of the atmosphere may take a long time then at least keeping our indoor environments at low levels will prevent the cognitive & health issues.
This isn’t worth worrying about. The atmosphere has a CO2 concentration of about 413 ppm. The International Space Station operates at a maximum CO2 concentration of over 5000 ppm. 5000 ppm is also the maximum safe CO2 concentration recommended by OSHA and the approximate average CO2 concentration aboard nuclear submarines. This still might be slightly too high—astronauts and submariners commonly report headaches, for instance—but it’s about ten times the concentration of the outside atmosphere and the health effects are a little hard to measure. Plus, the people in these conditions are still capable of safely operating space stations and nuclear submarines, which is not a cognitively easy feat. If the CO2 concentration of Earth’s atmosphere got that high, we’d have much bigger problems.
> Is there a practical method to achieve sub-atmospheric CO2 concentrations indoors?
why? just because there's cognitive decline when co2 is above atmospheric levels, doesn't mean you get super-intelligence when it's below atmospheric levels. In that case you're better off ventilating your building than to scrub co2 from the air.
The health effects of high CO2 concentration start to appear in the mid-thousands of ppm. These problems are about an order of magnitude away from each other.
Yes, that's what the data suggests. It's just not what the question was...
Of course, the data is necessarily all about short term exposure, not non-stop. I'm inclined to think that it won't be too bad, if there is a direct effect at lower levels.
I don't know where their data is from. But this graph looks like net zero till 2090 would be enough to limit warming to 2 degree Celsius. But what we need is net zero in 2050 or better tomorrow.
It's not about planting the trees. You have to make sure they survive and thrive for at least 50 years, and that they are sequestering carbon while not destroying downstream ecosystems and livelihoods.
It's not "plant a trillion trees" but "cleverly create huge, benign carbon-sequestering ecosystems".
Trees eventually decay and rot. The problem is fundamentally that we're taking carbon from outside the biosphere and putting it into the biosphere. The Earth has self-regulatory mechanisms to keep that balanced with increased rock weathering going against constant levels of volcanic CO2 emissions but that solves the issue on the order of 10,000 years and trees don't last nearly that long. Plus, growing forests only absorb enough carbon per square meter to offset about watt of coal power production.
Increasing the world's forest cover is worth doing for its own sake, on biodiversity grounds, but its at best a small part of the solution to global warming.
If they're under water they'll probably decay to methane instead of CO2 which is even worse. If you can put them somewhere dry, though, that might work. Bury them in the dessert maybe?
My third grade idea for trapping CO2 was to fill upside down buckets with gas and put them push them to the bottom of the ocean. The pressure would eventually compress the gas into a solid, so it would sink and remain there.
I'm still accepting funding in the from of rare stamps.
You've gotten good answers, but allow me to expand with an eye towards a Cunningham's law situation. We have to address "how did all that carbon get underground in the first place?" I can't tell you much about oil, but coal is buried trees. They buried because there were not yet microorganisms that could break them down. So atmospheric carbon ended up underground due to the extraordinary circumstance of 1) there were tons of trees 2) the trees died 3) the trees could not decompose, so their carbon ended up buried then subjected to geological processes that turned them into a kind of rock. This takes the thick, CO2 and O2 rich atmosphere that gave us 3 foot wide dragonflies (which, honestly, pretty cool), and turns it into the one where we can live now. This process will never happen again, because now trees can break down.
If you wanted to zoom out and squint and get a little biblical, this is a Garden of Eden situation. There was an atmosphere that could not support our lives. There was a perfect mix of things at the same time to change that atmosphere into the one in which humans flourished. It was something too powerful we'd never be able to replicate ourselves. All we had to do was not exploit buried hydrocarbons. But we've instead made a race to dump as much carbon in the atmosphere as possible, it would seem. And now the comfortable world we live in will doom us to live outside of paradise.
No, they release the stored carbon from the tree in various cycles.
Unless you're doing deep carbon extraction, nature is pretty well carbon neutral. A forest of some given density, over time, will remain carbon neutral. If it gets thicker, the carbon captured is more, but it's also more prone to fires (which obviously then release that carbon).
Nature is circular. Any "waste" from one process is an input into another process. It's humans that think in linear "Resources into products into waste" ways.
Carbon is fungible, so trees will consume carbon emitted by any source. So in equilibrium the carbon consumed by trees and other sources will be equal to carbon emitted by decaying trees, or wildfires, or any other source, whether man made, or coming from a comet or volcano. To the trees, it's all food.
But outside equilibrium, the forest canopy will expand until equilibrium is reached, or the forest canopy will shrink until equilibrium is reached. You will also see more hungry plant life supported in environments with more carbon again until starvation levels are reached.
It is like any other kind of food. We can think of food as sequestered in the living bodies of a population, with deaths matched by births, a constant amount is sequestered. But increase food and population goes up until starvation levels are reached and now more is sequestered. Decrease food and population falls so less is sequestered. It doesn't matter where the food comes from. Currently 20% of the earth's carbon is sequestered in plant biomass. This is why various carbon offset programs do include increasing forests as a legitimate offset, but the land has to be allocated to the forest in perpetuity. It's not like you can grow 10 trees, the point is to support a bigger forest where there are 10 more trees permanently.
Thus nature regulates carbon levels at those altitudes that trees can feed from. I have no knowledge about equilibrating mechanisms in the atmosphere as a whole, this discussion is for carbon accessible to plants.
>Unless you're doing deep carbon extraction, nature is pretty well carbon neutral. A forest of some given density, over time, will remain carbon neutral. If it gets thicker, the carbon captured is more, but it's also more prone to fires (which obviously then release that carbon).
No, you can get it to sequester carbon if you plant trees (or other plant matter), harvest it, convert it to charcoal, then spread that around. Apparently in that form (biochar) it stays sequestered for a few thousand years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
Yes, but that's neither geological scale times, nor something nature does. I can make a forest sequester carbon if I dig big holes and bury trees in them, but that's not a particularly natural process either.
Left alone, nature's cycles are mostly carbon neutral.
I am not a scientist but I don't think that's right. A decay and rot situation should put some amount of carbon in the ground. Where else would all the peat that formed coal have come from otherwise?
Obviously violent combustion will put a great percentage in the air, but I don't see a strong reason to believe that a rotting tree trunk will completely put carbon in the air and none of it in the ground.
All the carbon that makes up most of the mass of plant is from the CO2 in the air. Decay and rot release whatever carbon was captured back into the air.
The same way the food you eat turns to CO2 you breathe out but due to fungi and bacteria.
Regardless of Ethiopia or #TeamTrees, trees are not fast or permanent enough to sequester anything substantial.
Not all tactics will be equally effective. It's worth investing in the approach(es) that are most effective in proof-of-concepts trial runs guided by a first principles perspective. That's how to maximize change. GMO kelp and phythoplankton for oceanic BECCS seem like the leading candidates.
Is there any reason we don't genetically modify trees so that they grow huge? GMOs are some of our most advanced technologies, yet it seems no one has thought to modify trees to grow more.
That's a rosy, invalid assumption and equivocation. Climate drying, and effectively biome changes in the direction of desertification, across much of western North America and other parts of the world due to climate change isn't conducive to replacing biomass lost to forest fires caused by multi-year droughts.
I'm assuming this is done as a part of an effort to actually regrow and maintain forests as natural carbon sinks, and not some weird thing where trees are grown in the desert.
Won't help. We're already in a feedback loop releasing tons of methane from permafrost. Methane is 28 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It is already out of out if our control.
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sources: https://mobile.twitter.com/RARohde/status/144389061943324672... https://medium.com/climate-conscious/cogs-in-the-climate-mac...