Those are things that should happen anyway.
But no joke the world is not in a good place with how things are presently regarding climate change.
Two parts of carbon pollution are difficult.
1. It's a diffuse source pollution problem. You can look a coal fire plant, and yes these are great contributers but so are cows and just general agriculture. Emissions come from everywhere!
2. dealing with gaseous carbon pollution is also tricky because its up high and CO2 is reasonably stable. If we are going to try and filter air from the atmosphere we are probably going to have to either look at biological sequestration solutions ie. algae etc or energy expensive options to break down the carbon.
And conservation of mass being what it is we are going to end up with a lot of waste to store.
And that article talks about 8 million pounds....oh well.
Depends on how you solve it: if you solve it by replacing all diesel engines with petrol ones, you're reducing particulate pollution but increasing CO2 emissions.
London's transport system is at capacity, not just roads but rail and air transport are all operating at 100% and can barely grow. So restricting transport further is politically difficult, for example, it is typically hard to actually get a seat on commuter trains due to overcrowding and my experience is that people frequently turn up to work late or miss trains because there is physically no space left on the transport system to get them to work.
Given that, putting even more load on public transport by restricting vehicle traffic would be politically very difficult. Crossrail will help relieve the pressure along its route (10% capacity bump on rail!) but given the growth in the cities population and the possibility that the population figures are wrong anyway (the UK has not done a census for a long time), planners are anticipating that nearly all the added capacity will be used within just a few years. Hence them starting to plan Crossrail 2 before Crossrail 1 is actually finished.
This couldn't come too soon. We need to start developing the geoengineering knowledge to address climate problems, including problems we don't know about yet.
Well, photosynthesis has been deployed some million years ago and works rather well. Stop deforestation, manage forest wisely and start using wood again. 1 m3 wood = 1 ton of CO2 sequestered.
The UK is already deforested and almost all land is in use, either for cities/towns or agriculture. There is no space to put new forests there. So for the UK to meet its own targets it has to look elsewhere.
"The urban landscape accounts for 10.6% of England, 1.9% of Scotland, 3.6% of Northern Ireland and 4.1% of Wales. Put another way, that means almost 93% of the UK is not urban"
And of that 7% that is designated urban, a large proportion is gardens, parks, allotments, sports pitches etc.
Woodland (i.e. Forests) is 12.6% of the UK which is double the size of designated urban areas even if green spaces are excluded.
The majority of the UK is enclosed farmland. So to significantly increase the forestation of the UK, you would need to repurpose farmland.
Unfortunately, they are (at least in Scotland, which is the bit I know about) mostly just tree farms, growing very fast-growing, densely planted pines (Norway Spruce? can't find a reference), frequently in unsuitable areas, and the results were ecologically... poor. Nothing lives in them and they're alien trees anyway. The phrase 'trash forest' was coined.
These days there's a lot more awareness that this is bad, and they're growing more deciduous wood and relying less on monoculture, but it's still a problem.
Not the best picture, but here's a street view shot of one:
(Incidentally, if you look in the opposite direction; that island in the middle of the loch? That's native woodland. The slopes beyond are supposed to be covered with it. But it was all felled centuries ago, then the deer population rose, and now they're making it impossible for native forest to be properly established. You want to promote forest growth in Scotland? Cull the bloody deer down to about 10% of their current population. And then reintroduce wolves and lynx.)
Wood isn't an effective means of sequestration unless you also bury it.
And it isn't going to fix things in terms of sheer volume either. We've cut down forests and burnt fossil fuels. Replenishing forests only reversed the effects of the former and doesn't account for the carbon released via the latter.
>Wood isn't an effective means of sequestration unless you also bury it.
This is patently false.
Yes each individual tree is only a temporary store (with a half-life somewhere around 100 years), but that's ok because the forest as a whole is continually generating trees, and sequester CO2 in the form of soil. Trees also create conditions that protect that soil from erosion and re-emission (protection from wind, rain, and evaporation).
The total anthropogenic CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution works out to only 30 tonnes of carbon per hectare, which is a few inches of topsoil or a few additional trees per hectare. It's easy to soak up that much carbon just in biomass on the surface.
Even in farmland the addition of selected "farmer's trees" (carub, honey locust, acacia, leucaena) can be used. These are selected species of tree that actually increase yield when planted into a field at 20-30/acre, despite casting some shade on the crops. These trees typically have deep roots that harvest minerals and recycle nutrients that would otherwise leach down to the aquifer, and their root system can coexist with crops right up to the butt of the tree. The nutrients are dropped as mulch, and they also make nutritious pods for animal feed.
...plus, if you're careful, you get to use the wood for things. Obviously you can't burn it, but sequestered carbon remains just as sequestered if you build buildings out of it than if you left it in the forest --- frequently better, because preserved structural wood doesn't rot as quickly as a dead tree in the forest.
Of course, you still need a lot of trees. The internets say that a rough rule of thumb for the amount of carbon in a tree is about a tonne. Therefore, given current carbon emissions of about 10^10 tonnes a year you'd need to plant more trees than that --- every year. (And then wait multiple decades. This isn't a short term solution.)
As you say, another reason to plant them is for local benefit. You don't mention that trees also regulate the local microclimate; they tend to make rain, for example. When Cyprus was deforested, it got a lot drier. I knew someone who was working to try and reforest a lot of it with the explicit goal of trying to fix some of the water supply issues; I don't know if they got anywhere. And, of course, they're just nice to be around.
Recent research show that there are about 10^12 trees in the world.
>You don't mention that trees also regulate the local microclimate; they tend to make rain, for example.
Good point. I'm usually so eager to mention that, too!
Trees regulate not only the microclimate, but the macroclimate as well. Isotopic analysis shows that about 80% of all terrestrial rainfall is caused by transpiration from trees and other plants. Trees essentially act as a giant inland irrigation network, using solar power to transport water via the airstream to power the water cycle. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983
So trees cause rain. This explains why deforestation causes desertification. I would also recommend the excellent Greening the Desert documentary for an example of the reverse process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcZS7arcgk
... because removing carbon from 99% pure flue gas is a lot easier than removing carbon at 400PPM from the atmosphere.
Even if every bit of farmland on the planet was growing sugarcane for BECCS, we still would only pull ~9GT/y out of the atmosphere, on par with our current net emissions.
Of course, solving climate change is not actually a difficult problem. A $50/ton carbon tax would make all of these things profitable, including CCS on existing natural gas plants.
Unfortunately I am not the right person to ask on phytoplankton, but the main concern I have is about geologic stability. Noteably the percentage of the bloom that actually stays out of the food chain.
The models for this, when I spoke with some oceanography folks, were still really fuzzy.
Carbon Capture and Storage (particularly on biomass) appears to be one of the more realistic solutions. So it was a huge shame when the UK Conservative government cancelled planned investment in CCS (breaking a manifesto promise in the process).
It's not a technical or economic problem. It's a political and social problem.
Only if you kill all cows. Or most farmed animals. I'd be interested in numbers around emissions created by now trying to produce enough produce for the world.
You still have a left over population. Are you going to destroy whole species? You would need to cull all of the domesticated animals to remove their impact. Otherwise you don't solve the problem or have ferrel chickens and cows roaming about causing havoc on the environment.
Any ideas what kind of DIY experiments I could do to replicate/outperform them on carbon sequestration? If they're the first group in the world to work on it, I imagine there's a lot of potential for hackers to fiddle. I have access to hardware lab and biohacker lab.
They're far from the first group to work on it. Just for a sense of scale, the International Energy Agency (IEA) oversees the Greenhouse Gas Control Technologies conference (GHGT) which has been going since 1997. It's the main Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) conference, held every other year, with more than a thousand people attending.
As one concrete example of companies working on direct capture from air, ETH Zürich has a spinoff/startup called Climeworks, who have alredy built machines that do this. They started in 2009 and did e.g. a $3 million series B round back in 2014. Currently assembling their first large-scale plant AFAIK. (No affiliation to the project. I'm not really a believer in direct air capture myself, I don't think we'll ever see the cost become low enough for large scale adoption. US DoE has estimated the cost will be around 6x the cost of capture from e.g. natural gas powerplants, so I think it makes much more sense to focus on that.)
These type of solutions seem like the only reasonable ones to address climate change. Goals of cutting carbon emissions often tend to be misaligned with other activities that would be hard to stop en masse, such as everyone still driving a fossil fuel emitting vehicle, farms using fertilizer to grow their crops or individuals who want to use their AC because they're hot.
Sure it'd be great if we find alternatives to a majority of things that contribute to carbon emissions, but then there's the difficulty of getting everyone to use these alternatives across the board (along with the messy politics of it) and if you succeed at that, you'll still have to deal with other countries who aren't going to change their habits. It's essentially a global game of whack-a-mole. And it needs to happen soon. Some scientists claim we're already beyond the ability to reverse climate change by eliminating these activities.
Given what we're up against, it seems far more reasonable to explore ways of negating our emissions, terraforming the planet or trying to find a way to live on a far less hospital earth. I'm all for continuing our march towards a globally smaller carbon footprint, but it should be done concurrently while we try to address the sobering possibility that it might not be enough.
The challenges of "messy politics" and rigid habits of existing carbon emitters pale in comparison to reactive solutions.
For example, it'd be far, far cheaper to forcibly take over the world and shut down every carbon emitting machine than to find another planet and terraform it.
Surely we're collectively smart enough to find a global solution to this in the near future, given that our resources are appropriately allocated.
Any far-away technology looks promising, as long as you don't think too much about who's going to pay for it.
If you think it's hard to persuade people to drive electric vehicles, imagine telling them to pay up enough $$$ to buy several Teslas per person, so that the government can run a carbon-capture plant somewhere you've never been to.
Because it's safe to assume that atmospheric carbon capture will remain more expensive than not emitting it in the first place. Maybe somebody will invent a unicorn technology next year, but I wouldn't bet my planet's future on that.
But who and how will you limit the babies? For example, babies from the Middle East will outpace European babies by a large number. Should Europe limit immigrants' ability to conceive? If so, how? Would you force sterilization? Would you trade money for sterilization? This general idea is fraught with moral problems.
Why the down votes? Would some people say why they are against talking about how the human population could enforce the idea of limiting itself? Given that it goes against the core biological imperative, I don't think I'm wrong in asking this.
You are not wrong in asking this, but the way you asked led people to believe that you are against such a thing, and people who object to what they perceive as your belief will down-vote you.
As Scott Adams has so rightly pointed out, we are victims of our bias, and it is very difficult to think coherently on an emotive subject like this.
I agree. You face a problem: the western world has done this. What's left is introducing this to Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia. Given those areas current social evolution, you're going to be hard pressed to make an in road with out the sword.
This makes me think of the old adage "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". We're basically saying "eh we'll just take the cure at the last minute." except we don't even know if the cure exists, we're hoping we can create one in time.
Accepting the circumstances that we are in as a result of decades of targeted misinformation is like saying it will be easier to learn to live with less air when being repeatedly dunked in a toilet by bully's.
Dear god, there i was investing all my money in land that would become future coastal - and or harbour property depending on a flood prognosis map for 2050. And now i have to reverse all this. Does anyone need farmland near the upper missisippi?
Upriver London?
Florida Inland hills?
http://geology.com/sea-level-rise/
Come on people, i got a sale going on here. Dont get wet feet now, and leave me out here to dry.
"Worlds first" seems to be exaggerated [1]. Nevertheless this may become very interesting as power2gas becomes commercially feasable with cheap solar power like the 2.4ct/kWh farms in Dubai. Transporting gas from the farm to the user and transporting CO_2 back might be one option, carbon capture another.
The question that always springs to my mind when "brute force" solutions are brought up is: with what energy? Separating C from O2 inherently takes a bunch of energy, same as reacting them releases a bunch; it's the whole reason we're in this mess. Often the answer is handwaved as "renewables", but then you've pulled a fast one: if you have enough renewable energy to undo the damage done by fossil fuels, you have enough to replace fossil fuels entirely and then some. If we're postulating magic energy sources, far better to use them directly than to try and offset the continued burning of carbon.
I work in cleantech, and the smart people working on carbon capture and conversion (Opus12, etc.) are assuming renewable prices will drop to the point where they can use excess power to run the catalyst reactions needed.
Unlike the grid, carbon capture power doesn't need to be dispatchable. So you don't need to worry about the intermittemcy of solar and wind.
The same strategy is true for water desalination. They can run the plants whenever there is cheap power.
So, I'm not saying it's a bad idea, necessarily; but since it all boils down to power, at that point aren't you basically just using atmospheric carbon as a... battery?
Especially if you compressed your sequestered carbon into nifty charcoal bricks and burned them for fuel, instead of wasting all that effort digging up coal...
54 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 113 ms ] threadTwo parts of carbon pollution are difficult. 1. It's a diffuse source pollution problem. You can look a coal fire plant, and yes these are great contributers but so are cows and just general agriculture. Emissions come from everywhere!
2. dealing with gaseous carbon pollution is also tricky because its up high and CO2 is reasonably stable. If we are going to try and filter air from the atmosphere we are probably going to have to either look at biological sequestration solutions ie. algae etc or energy expensive options to break down the carbon.
And conservation of mass being what it is we are going to end up with a lot of waste to store.
And that article talks about 8 million pounds....oh well.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/02/17/drivers-older-die...
Given that, putting even more load on public transport by restricting vehicle traffic would be politically very difficult. Crossrail will help relieve the pressure along its route (10% capacity bump on rail!) but given the growth in the cities population and the possibility that the population figures are wrong anyway (the UK has not done a census for a long time), planners are anticipating that nearly all the added capacity will be used within just a few years. Hence them starting to plan Crossrail 2 before Crossrail 1 is actually finished.
As usual, it will get put off for lack of funding again and again until the old system finally breaks. Then there will be much action and much loss.
"The urban landscape accounts for 10.6% of England, 1.9% of Scotland, 3.6% of Northern Ireland and 4.1% of Wales. Put another way, that means almost 93% of the UK is not urban"
And of that 7% that is designated urban, a large proportion is gardens, parks, allotments, sports pitches etc.
Woodland (i.e. Forests) is 12.6% of the UK which is double the size of designated urban areas even if green spaces are excluded.
The majority of the UK is enclosed farmland. So to significantly increase the forestation of the UK, you would need to repurpose farmland.
From http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-18623096
https://www.forestry.gov.uk/
Unfortunately, they are (at least in Scotland, which is the bit I know about) mostly just tree farms, growing very fast-growing, densely planted pines (Norway Spruce? can't find a reference), frequently in unsuitable areas, and the results were ecologically... poor. Nothing lives in them and they're alien trees anyway. The phrase 'trash forest' was coined.
These days there's a lot more awareness that this is bad, and they're growing more deciduous wood and relying less on monoculture, but it's still a problem.
Not the best picture, but here's a street view shot of one:
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@57.5275519,-5.186435,3a,75y,2...
(Incidentally, if you look in the opposite direction; that island in the middle of the loch? That's native woodland. The slopes beyond are supposed to be covered with it. But it was all felled centuries ago, then the deer population rose, and now they're making it impossible for native forest to be properly established. You want to promote forest growth in Scotland? Cull the bloody deer down to about 10% of their current population. And then reintroduce wolves and lynx.)
And it isn't going to fix things in terms of sheer volume either. We've cut down forests and burnt fossil fuels. Replenishing forests only reversed the effects of the former and doesn't account for the carbon released via the latter.
This is patently false.
Yes each individual tree is only a temporary store (with a half-life somewhere around 100 years), but that's ok because the forest as a whole is continually generating trees, and sequester CO2 in the form of soil. Trees also create conditions that protect that soil from erosion and re-emission (protection from wind, rain, and evaporation).
The total anthropogenic CO2 emissions since the industrial revolution works out to only 30 tonnes of carbon per hectare, which is a few inches of topsoil or a few additional trees per hectare. It's easy to soak up that much carbon just in biomass on the surface.
Even in farmland the addition of selected "farmer's trees" (carub, honey locust, acacia, leucaena) can be used. These are selected species of tree that actually increase yield when planted into a field at 20-30/acre, despite casting some shade on the crops. These trees typically have deep roots that harvest minerals and recycle nutrients that would otherwise leach down to the aquifer, and their root system can coexist with crops right up to the butt of the tree. The nutrients are dropped as mulch, and they also make nutritious pods for animal feed.
Of course, you still need a lot of trees. The internets say that a rough rule of thumb for the amount of carbon in a tree is about a tonne. Therefore, given current carbon emissions of about 10^10 tonnes a year you'd need to plant more trees than that --- every year. (And then wait multiple decades. This isn't a short term solution.)
As you say, another reason to plant them is for local benefit. You don't mention that trees also regulate the local microclimate; they tend to make rain, for example. When Cyprus was deforested, it got a lot drier. I knew someone who was working to try and reforest a lot of it with the explicit goal of trying to fix some of the water supply issues; I don't know if they got anywhere. And, of course, they're just nice to be around.
Recent research show that there are about 10^12 trees in the world.
http://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/09/02/43691905...
Good point. I'm usually so eager to mention that, too!
Trees regulate not only the microclimate, but the macroclimate as well. Isotopic analysis shows that about 80% of all terrestrial rainfall is caused by transpiration from trees and other plants. Trees essentially act as a giant inland irrigation network, using solar power to transport water via the airstream to power the water cycle. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983
So trees cause rain. This explains why deforestation causes desertification. I would also recommend the excellent Greening the Desert documentary for an example of the reverse process. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcZS7arcgk
... because removing carbon from 99% pure flue gas is a lot easier than removing carbon at 400PPM from the atmosphere.
Even if every bit of farmland on the planet was growing sugarcane for BECCS, we still would only pull ~9GT/y out of the atmosphere, on par with our current net emissions.
Of course, solving climate change is not actually a difficult problem. A $50/ton carbon tax would make all of these things profitable, including CCS on existing natural gas plants.
(source: climate R&D group)
The models for this, when I spoke with some oceanography folks, were still really fuzzy.
It's not a technical or economic problem. It's a political and social problem.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/25/uk-cance...
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/jul/20/treasury...
As one concrete example of companies working on direct capture from air, ETH Zürich has a spinoff/startup called Climeworks, who have alredy built machines that do this. They started in 2009 and did e.g. a $3 million series B round back in 2014. Currently assembling their first large-scale plant AFAIK. (No affiliation to the project. I'm not really a believer in direct air capture myself, I don't think we'll ever see the cost become low enough for large scale adoption. US DoE has estimated the cost will be around 6x the cost of capture from e.g. natural gas powerplants, so I think it makes much more sense to focus on that.)
Cool company, and a serious looking machine, thanks for sharing!
I also like what they're up to at OakBio: http://www.oakbio.com
tito@impossiblelabs.io
Sure it'd be great if we find alternatives to a majority of things that contribute to carbon emissions, but then there's the difficulty of getting everyone to use these alternatives across the board (along with the messy politics of it) and if you succeed at that, you'll still have to deal with other countries who aren't going to change their habits. It's essentially a global game of whack-a-mole. And it needs to happen soon. Some scientists claim we're already beyond the ability to reverse climate change by eliminating these activities.
Given what we're up against, it seems far more reasonable to explore ways of negating our emissions, terraforming the planet or trying to find a way to live on a far less hospital earth. I'm all for continuing our march towards a globally smaller carbon footprint, but it should be done concurrently while we try to address the sobering possibility that it might not be enough.
For example, it'd be far, far cheaper to forcibly take over the world and shut down every carbon emitting machine than to find another planet and terraform it.
Surely we're collectively smart enough to find a global solution to this in the near future, given that our resources are appropriately allocated.
If you think it's hard to persuade people to drive electric vehicles, imagine telling them to pay up enough $$$ to buy several Teslas per person, so that the government can run a carbon-capture plant somewhere you've never been to.
Because it's safe to assume that atmospheric carbon capture will remain more expensive than not emitting it in the first place. Maybe somebody will invent a unicorn technology next year, but I wouldn't bet my planet's future on that.
Equally important:
- Reducing consumption (which, in my experience, increases happiness)
- Having fewer babies
As Scott Adams has so rightly pointed out, we are victims of our bias, and it is very difficult to think coherently on an emotive subject like this.
Those things are (apart from one for some people) not significant moral problems. Improved education of women also tends to reduce child mortality.
The combination of these things and societal shifts has changed the total fertility rate in many countries to below replacement.
Perhaps that's a sensible first step?
Accepting the circumstances that we are in as a result of decades of targeted misinformation is like saying it will be easier to learn to live with less air when being repeatedly dunked in a toilet by bully's.
Making the world a wetter place
[1] https://www.newscientist.com/article/2091214-first-commercia...
Unlike the grid, carbon capture power doesn't need to be dispatchable. So you don't need to worry about the intermittemcy of solar and wind.
The same strategy is true for water desalination. They can run the plants whenever there is cheap power.
Especially if you compressed your sequestered carbon into nifty charcoal bricks and burned them for fuel, instead of wasting all that effort digging up coal...