That depends; am I a single brain with control over my actions as one conscious being and one single, holistic incentive? Or am I a Balkanised agglomeration of independent agents with incompatible short-term incentives?
The carbon problem is a social one, not a technical one. This analogy focusses on the wrong aspect.
If you have had a noxious gas in your house for already quite a while, and it will soon kill you, do you reduce the toxicity of the air first, or try and figure out the source and stop it?
What if the open fire is the main system of heating your house, that has (both by accident and a stream of unfortunate decisions) long ago been built in the middle of a perpetual blizzard ? (And where most of the occupants demand a 22°C room temperature ?)
(Feel free to suggest a humane way to deal with those occupants, if you're convinced that you're furry enough not to need the open fire.
On the other hand, we're having this discussion on computers connected to the Internet, which, for the sake of analogy, we might as well call "the barbecue on top of the open fire in the living room.")
The first thing is not to give up hope. The forest planting may not abate enough to remediate but it's still worth doing for associated reasons like its effect in microclimate and wildlife.
Biochar may not help much either but is still net beneficial and pyrolysis is going to be one of the paths to the feedstock we need for chemicals I would think. The absorbing concrete can be priced right and carbon taxing would drive there.
Deep sea storage, olivine and other rock formation, all useful.
Mainly, it's not giving up hope. Because giving up would be way, way worse.
Sometimes reading these realism write-ups is not very hope inducing. Even stoics don't always give up hope.
There is no better world. We have to try and make the best of all possible worlds here.
"I am a pessimist by nature. Many people can only keep on fighting when they expect to win. I'm not like that, I always expect to lose. I fight anyway, and sometimes I win."
-- Richard Stallman
What I am trying to say is that even one lost all hope and thinks catastrophic climate change is already unstoppable and human civilization is going to collapse and the game is over, one can still fight. Because it's the right thing to do. Fuck hope.
> We have to try and make the best of all possible worlds here.
In this specific context, it's primarily the things outside of your control - far outside of your borders and political influence - that make that an impossible action for a given person.
China is currently adding nearly as much coal power output (+121 GW) as exist in the whole of the EU combined. [1][2] Their companies are working on adding even more output and plants than that around other parts of Asia. Domestically China is building more new coal plants than the rest of the world combined, in fact.
China has approximately 987 GW of coal power in operation, soon to be 1,100 GW. The EU has 149 GW. China passed the EU in coal plant GW output around the year 2000 at 200 GW, they passed the US in 2006 at around 340 GW, and are now closing in on 1,000 GW this year. Next year they will have 4x the coal plant GW output of the US.
The US has reduced its coal-based power output by ~80 GW (1/4 reduction) in about 12 years and continues to close coal plants. China has an additional 149 GW of coal power output under construction. China's actions trivially wipe out anything the rest of the world can do to counter it.
The article properly lists the US as a mega emissions culprit, along with China and India. Except the US isn't massively expanding its emissions, it's reducing. The US isn't opening new coal plants, it's rapidly closing them. The problem in the US is that it isn't moving fast enough.
How does a person from, say, Finland do anything about any of that to try to make this the best possible of worlds? China's actions alone will wipe out any chance of stopping (much less reversing) the accelerating climate damage. It guarantees there can be no positive outcome. How do you force China to stop building hundreds of new coal plants? You can't and they won't.
The world generates 40% of its electricity from coal. It has been like this for decades. Seems like addressing this now instead of complicated solutions later would be a good idea.
What happens if, today, 4th December at 13:05:00 GMT, the UK specifically stops using coal is that it switches from exporting 802 MW to France to importing 1290 MW from France.
Right now, even though we’re pretty close to the Winter solstice, the UK is producing about 1.5 times more electricity from solar than from coal.
Yes, there are other fossil fuels besides coal in the UK, and yes renewables only supply about a third of the UK’s electricity right now, but coal itself is practically dead.
It's even nearer dead than that small number implies. Much of that is from keeping the few coal plants idling on standby or tiny load for fast spin up, if the grid asks, with coal as source of last resort.
Two of the six plants we have left announced last month they wouldn't be bothering going to the 2025 coal elimination date, and will close in 2020. Leaves 4 I think.
Same month the lovely government approved a new deep coal mine in Cumbria. huh?
I mean, you could let the remaining coal miners dig it up but don't allow it to be burned. At the same time work hard to establish new ways of earning money in the communities.
Individual action is indeed of very limited effect. That's why we need political action. It's not just coal that matters, and not just in China; all the other fossil fuels, methane emissions, and deforestation matter as well. As do all the other countries.
Where? Political action int he U.S. or Europe doesn't do much to China and telling China "sorry, you can't have cheap electricity, your people don't get to have a lifestyle like ours as a result" isn't likely to make the Chinese go "oh, ok, we'll stop growing our middle class and go back to a basic village lifestyle to save the rest of you".
Unless we miraculously convert to a global government then reducing emissions just isn't likely to happen. Reduce in one place and it'll continue to increase in a few others.
The fact of the matter is, the only realistic solution out of this is a majority of the world's population goes "Ok we'll only drive to work/school/the grocery, we'll never take travelling vacations unless we walk or bicycle there, we'll stop eating all meat, we'll give up plastic packaging and we won't replace our electronics when they wear out".
Otherwise we have to hope and pray that a fleet of alien trade ships show up on orbit and are like "If you give us syndication rights to the galactic hegemony for Everybody Loves Raymond and I Love Lucy we'll go ahead and install a thousand of our zero point modules around the planet and tie them into your local grids to solve your energy needs. If you give us the syndication rights to The Simpsons we'll give you a few thousand of these solid state devices that attract carbon out of the air causing it to solidify into inert bricks that you can then fill your pit mines with".
We're seriously in that sort of state. You either outlaw electricity from fossil fuels in every country in the world or you hope for a true miracle.
Even if someone figures out cold fusion today and can start churning out the first power plants in January, replacing the 60,000~ power plants in the world it would take decades at best to replace them and making the concrete for pouring the foundations alone would create an insane amount of CO2 not to mention all of the structural steel.
Short of ET intervention, the best we can hope is that developing nations stop building fossil fuel power plants and that people start leaving coastal cities and building better designed, more eco-friendly, more distributed, with equally dispersed permaculture centers, with rail lines in grids to provide for efficient transportation of people and goods, cities far inland.
Firstly see my comment above, China and india take climate change more seriously than any US government ever did and invest more than anyone else in renewables.
Secondly,you are kind of right, the IPCC already has calculated that to keep the rise to 1.5C is only possible if we invest in negative emissions, that is pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This is never discussed in out brain-dead media, as obvious it is much more expensive to pull carbon out of the air than not to emit it in the first place.
>China and india take climate change more seriously
China is adding millions of new drivers to the roads, in fossil-fuel powered vehicles with fossil fuel (and tree) derived tires, annually.
What about the fact that China is actively constructing hundreds of coal power plants? Or the fact their middle-class is rapidly growing which will mean more energy demands (which will mean more fossil fuel consumption) and more consumer goods (more plastics, from fossil fuels)?
>Since the early 2000s, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 29 million in 1999 (2 percent of population) to roughly 531 million in 2013 (39 percent of population).
China has hundreds of millions of people that will, presumably, continue to be added to their middle class resulting in more cars, more electricity, more gadgets, more plastics, etc.
Unless China says "no, only the people that have stuff now can have stuff" they're going to consume more fossil fuels, construct more things with concrete, etc.
And in terms of global coordination, it helps to negotiate from a position of moral high ground if you can show that your country is doing its part to reduce emissions.
What seems completely, off-the-charts crazy to me is NOT the "China is emitting too much CO2" claim. It's the "therefore" that people stick on the end, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit: "therefore we should do nothing." I lack the language to fully describe how crazy that way of thinking is.
When I faced a global warming threat playing Civ2 because my neighbours were not cleaning up pollution, I just bombed them into oblivion, then moved in my settlers and cleaned up the debris.
You can't fix climate change with a war. Modern climate change modeling and concerns grew out of Cold War studies of the atmospheric impact of thermonuclear weapons (referred to as "Nuclear Winter"). Bombing a major country into submission is very likely a humanity ending event because of the amount of material blown into the upper atmosphere (the Nuclear Winter research was itself a direct result of modeling done at Cornell to understand the aftermath of a large asteroid or comet hitting the earth's atmosphere at the end of the Cretaceous era to kill off the dinosaurs). We've reached the point where MAD isn't just mutually assured destruction for you and your opponent, it is for everyone.
Indeed. Look at Syria. Not long ago a country well enough off. The destruction is total. This with conventional weapons and the superpowers weren't even trying hard..
Hey, in Civ2 I wasn't bombing people with nuclear weapons! It just creates more waste!! No, basic rockets work just fine. And SDI to kill off enemy nukes.
>Bombing a major country into submission is very likely a humanity ending event
WW2 disagrees, I think. You don't need to carpet the place with nukes - a few well-placed, climatically-harmless strikes will do. Will it trigger a species-ending global nuclear war? Maybe - but very likely not. Maybe people are smart enough not to end the species over such a thing. Maybe other people are smart enough to abuse that fact.
You post suggest China doesnt care about climate change, and that's super misleading.
China is investing more in renewables than any other country [1], they have the most electric buses in the world [2], the largest high-speed rail network so you don't have to take a plane, the largest nuclear power build-out in the world and their emissions per capita are lower than US.
The younger and poorer countries actually take climate change more seriously than the West, we had 50 years to address the issue and did nothing about it. I would bet on China and India achieving 100% renewable energy before US does, despite them being poorer.
China is trying to avoid importing oil and reducing pollution in its large cities. Electric vehicles solves this problem.
Coal is cheaper and they can dictate exactly where they’re built.
Moving 1 billion people a year by high-speed rail is far more efficient and flexible than by plane. 20,000 miles of rail in a country the size of the United States makes perfect economic sense.
China is making its decisions for reasons other than climate change.
The scope of China's coal is incredible. Truly Mordor-like on the Carbon Monoxide map. Every time there's a forest fire issue around climate change I go look at the map to remind myself. Examples I documented with screenshots:
I should have documented Brazil, too. Those fires cause serious pollution and carbon emissions, but they're peanuts compared to every single day in China.
China's per capita emissions are about half those of US or Canada (though still over the global average). That should help you understand how incredibly profligate North America is. China's growth in per-capita emissions also seems to be slowing while in the US, the per-capita emissions are basically static since 2012.
The USA is also the world leader in cumulative emissions (which is what really matters if you're trying to draw up a carbon budget or assign blame). While the biggest historical emitters continue to do so little it's no wonder that others don't take climate change as seriously as we might want.
These emissions figures will be assigning the manufacturing emissions of exported goods to the country that exports them, not the one that imports them. This is one contributor to China's high emissions: manufacturing loads of stuff for the west. Those emissions should really be attributed to the purchaser.
The closer you get to the present day, the closer you are to the time on the historical timeline where climate change is understood to be a threat, and the more moral urgency there is to reign in emissions. It also makes more sense to consider what should be done differently about emissions last year, this year, and next year than emissions from decades ago.
Nearly twice the emissions with over four times the population. Nearly 20% of the world's population is in China. Of course they're going to emit more.
But if China were rapidly increasing its emissions per capita, that could still be a problem, but that doesn't seem to be the case.
China seem to have held their emissions more or less still for the last few years where data is available:
In the same period, the US, and indeed most states have achieved only quite small changes to their per capita emissions. So the US has reduced emissions a bit, but from a much higher starting point.
My gripe is that westerners often leap to talking about China and India or, worse, overpopulation.
The implicit belief seems to be that foreigners are an inconvenient drain on global resources, that they deserve less than us.
There's a part of what you're saying that I really strongly agree with, which is that I don't think anyone in their right mind can just say "Well look at China" and use that as a basis to give up on trying to curb emissions everywhere that isn't China. Some people are making that argument in this thread, and I think that way of thinking is deeply confused, and you are right to criticize it.
What I'm not sure I follow is the relationship you seem to believe exists between per-capita emissions and responsibility to curb them. Emissions need to be curbed in proportion to their percentage of overall global emissions, not in proportion to per-capita consumption. You can vary the per-capita statistics however you like, and as long as the absolute emissions are the same, the damage to the planet is the same. Those emissions could be coming from one person or a trillion. If China had ten billion people, or fifty billion or a hundred it would still be just as incumbent upon them to curb such emissions as they are producing.
Everything else about "implicit beliefs", the "leaps" you believe people to be taking, the questions of who should or shouldn't be blamed are abstract, highly subjective, and while important, should be considered without letting them derail the conversations around needed next steps to curb emissions.
> the time when a forest pulls down the most carbon is when it’s first growing
I believe this has been disproved long ago. Trees don’t ever stop growing, and it takes carbon to grow. Recent studies show that large old trees still capture a significant amount of co2 due to their massive surface area.
> But decaying wood and organic material releases carbon back into the air. A climax forest is close to a steady state: The rate at which it removes carbon from the air is roughly equal to the rate at which it releases this carbon.
Trees keep on growing, yes, but it’s the old, decaying material that releases CO2 back in the air again, compensating tree growth.
And when they're old enough, those trees die, and does not consume co2 anymore.
I think the point is that a forest reaches an equilibrium at some point.
The forest has new trees growning and consuming co2, it has old trees still growing and consuming co2, it has dead trees/branches that releases co2. It's mostly at a steady state when it has matured.
Still, if you planted that forest at a place where there was no forest, the co2 it has bound up in the trunks and roots is removed from the atmosphere as long as the forest stands. Which might be tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
> I think the point is that a forest reaches an equilibrium at some point. The forest has new trees growning and consuming co2, it has old trees still growing and consuming co2, it has dead trees/branches that releases co2. It's mostly at a steady state when it has matured.
A forest can be in any unbalanced state at any age, it obviously depends on the ratio of dead to living trees and their size, as well as the climate. It's not a closed system that would need to reach equilibrium at some point. Forests will keep growing and trees will keep growing as fast as the environment allows and unsurprisingly, additional CO2 will help.
Those ideas are well refuted in the research I mentioned. You’re assuming the researchers spending their life careers on this haven’t considered a point you came up with in five minutes?
> the research suggests that almost 70 per cent of all the carbon stored in trees is accumulated in the last half of their lives
Not a game theory expert, but maybe it would be more correct to say that we are stuck in a Nash equilibrium (no player can benefit by changing strategies while the other players keep theirs unchanged).
It's not so much that prisoners can't talk. They just can't influence eachothers decisions which kinda reminds current setup of sovereign nation states.
I don't see what there is to figure out about what we should do with the carbon we sequester from the atmosphere. It seems to me that the only thing we can do is dump it into the ground (maybe as plastic?). That's where the carbon we've put into the atmosphere came from, and that is exactly where we should put it back. Planting forests, using it as fuel, using it for plastic goods, putting it into the oceans are all temporary measures. The carbon from that will enter the cycle again rather quickly.
Of course this will be energy intensive. We essentially need to put the energy back into carbon that we got from burning those carbon fuels over the last two centuries. That is obviously a tremendous amount of energy. There probably is no way around this.
>we will probably need to be removing about 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air each year by 2050, and double that by 2100.
>They’re hoping to use these gadgets to make carbonated water for soft drinks—or create greenhouses that have lots of carbon dioxide in the air, for tastier vegetables. This sounds very exciting … until you learn that currently their method of getting carbon dioxide costs about $500 per ton.
The numbers don't even look as bad as I thought they would. They at least seem achievable if we really wanted it. $500 per ton for 10 billion tons comes out at $5 trillion. The world's GDP is around $80 trillion. From a numbers perspective it seems like this is at least possible. Whether this solution will work politically is another matter though. My own suspicion is that politicking and corruption will make this a much more difficult and expensive process than it should be.
This article makes the future look less bleak to me than what I hear on the news.
Or we could spend $1B seeding the ocean with iron sulphate to create algal blooms that reflect sunlight well. Harvest the excess salmon to balance the ecosystem, and repeat whenever we need to dump some heat. As the co2 continues to climb buffer the oceans with a cheap base to counter acidification. Which will sequester that carbon as a salt.
Oh, how I love these handwaving arguments.
You don't think that a huge algal bloom in our oceans, a prime protein source for billions of people, will not have an effect on the life in the ocean? Just one of a plethora of inadvertent effects that would need to be thoroughly studied...
Studied by testing the effects, I assume? A large contingent don't want this research done because it may point to a technological solution, reducing political pressure of reducing emissions.
"Good news! We found out how to have far greater control of the environment. This will allow us to fix the environment we already had control of and completely ruined!"
They talk about how little carbon is actually sequestered. I assumed it was actually none. The goal was actually to make large swaths of ocean reflective. At IR algae mats are almost as white as snow.
It is temporary in nature. I envision it as a bandaid to bridge us until we finish burning anything we can dig up that is cheaper than carbon neutral energy sources. That is unless you used too much and the ice sheets expanded too far locking us in a snowball earth. Napkin math puts that at around $1.5B
Back in the 1990s Jeff Shrager (then at the Carnegie institute at Stanford) built a library of algae strains that thrived at different concentrations of O2 and CO2 as a last ditch hedge against climate change. Then he lost funding and the library was discarded.
Some forms of sequestered carbon, like compressed CO2 injected back into salt domes and magnesite, are much lower energy than the hydrocarbons and coal the humans burned. So it isn't necessary to put the energy back, necessarily. Just the carbon.
Even if it is, though, the Earth receives about 1000 years of world marketed energy consumption in the form of sunlight every year. So even energy-intensive carbon sequestration approaches like algal photosynthesis (promoted with iron sulfate, say) may be feasible.
> So even energy-intensive carbon sequestration approaches like algal photosynthesis (promoted with iron sulfate, say) may be feasible.
They aren't though, algae is more than carbon and pure water. They still need various minerals which you have to input into the system somehow. To do this at any scale it means mining massive amounts and feeding the system, that's just one of the reasons why YC's own idea to turn to Sahara into a bunch of shallow algae pools [1] is absurd.
> They aren't though, algae is more than carbon and pure water. They still need various minerals which you have to input into the system somehow
Yes, that's why iron fertilization is so effective.
> To do this at any scale it means mining massive amounts and feeding the system
Actually not. In conditions where iron is the limiting nutrient, each kg of iron fixes 83 tonnes of carbon, 304 tonnes of CO2. So sequestering a billion tonnes a year would require 3 million tonnes of iron per year. That probably sounds like a “massive amount” to somebody like you, but it's about 16 tankships full. The humans currently mine some 2.3 billion tonnes of iron ore per year, so we're talking about increasing iron mining by about 0.2%.
The Sahara idea might be better, I don't know. Certainly there are a lot more minerals in the Sahara than in the middle of the ocean surface. The mass of water you'd have to transport (and desalinate!) is clearly much larger than the amount of iron, and they call that out as the major cost. It wouldn't be limited by the iron-poor regions of the ocean, though, but ironically, it might create more of them. The US$50b cost estimate seems higher than other sequestration approaches.
This is the same sort of problem YC has with their proposed solutions, people on YC tend to be overly optimistic with the mindset of everything works 100% of the time with 100% efficiency with 0 unforeseen consequences so let me play devil's advocate with a dose of reality:
In a perfect system. In the ocean most of it will sink. In YC's Sahara project it would still settle and need to be skimmed and processed for release again (which only adds to the energy demands of the project, just the desalination and pumping requires more energy than civilization currently produces...)
> So sequestering a billion tonnes a year would require 3 million tonnes of iron per year. That probably sounds like a “massive amount” to somebody like you
And how many tonnes would you generate mining, transporting, crushing, transporting/deploying that iron?
>but it's about 16 tankships full.
"tankship" doesn't appear to be a specific thing according to Google but a 'bulk carrier' however:
"Most iron ore is carried in Cape-size ships, i.e. larger than 80,000 tonnes deadweight" [1]
and
"brokers should now assume speeds of 12 knots with cargo and 13 knots without for Capesize vessels, with fuel use of about 44 metric tonnes (mt) per day, Bloomberg reports" [2]
12 knots is 13.8094 miles per hour, let's assume each load needs to only be moved 1000 miles, that gives us 132.76 metric tonnes of fuel per 1000 miles. It looks like these ships release CO2, NOx and SOx and also pollute oceans via ballast water and biocides.
"Heavy fuel oil(No.6/Bunker C)" appears to be 0.85kg of carbon per kg of fuel [3].
So we need 4,978.5 tonnes of fuel, generating 4,231.725 tonnes of carbon just to ship that processed iron powder 1000 miles by sea and I'm guessing this is the smallest percentage of carbon that will be produced - I suspect the mining, trucking across land and processing will generate far more carbon but I can not find how much CO2 is generated to yield 1 kilogram of pure iron. Just grinding it to a fine enough powder that it actually suspends in the water for a reasonable amount of time and doesn't sink like a rock is going to be a huge power cost.
Of course if you are doing this in the open ocean, realistically you'll need much smaller purpose-built ships to cover a wide area and to disperse the iron in any reasonable amount of time. More smaller ships will be less efficient from a fuel standpoint than the larger ships, building purpose built ships for dispersing it means a lot more steeel/paint/etc being produced etc etc so on and so forth.
Never mind the unintended impact to marine life outside of the algae. What will that iron do to sea temperatures? What sort of toxicity might it cause for other marine life? How much will end up in polar waters possibly causing issues with ice formation or heating ice? What impact will it have on ships in waters that are being seeded?
Sounds like you have some more reading to do about the basics of iron fertilization and shipping, but you're off to a good start by having calculated that the carbon emissions from the shipping would be insignificant—even if the ships were powered from fossil fuels rather than kites, PV, and Fischer–Tropsch. Wikipedia is a good place to start reading, and most of the papers are on sci-hub. Good luck!
There are three main problems with your argument. The first is that, even taking the calculation on its own terms, you erred by three orders of magnitude in favor of iron fertilization. The second is that your fuel use calculation, even with the calculation error corrected, would show that iron fertilization is a vastly carbon-negative use of fuel. The third is that your entire argument is based on a massive set of misconceptions.
So it's a terrible devil's advocate argument. I'd advise Old Scratch to fire you and see if he can get a public defender instead.
First, let's correct the calculation results. You've calculated that shipping 3 billion tonnes of iron powder 1000 miles from shore would burn almost 5000 tonnes of bunker fuel. But that is incorrect. It would burn almost 5 million tonnes of bunker fuel, according to your numbers:
You have: (3 billion tonnes / 80000 tonnes) (1000 miles / 12 knots) * 44 tonnes/day
You want: tonnes
* 4978509.7
/ 2.0086332e-07
That is, the calculation comes out to 4.98 million tonnes of bunker fuel, not 4.98 thousand tonnes of fuel as you said.
Second, let's tackle the implications of this calculation, if it were correct. 4.98 million tonnes of bunker fuel, taking your figure, is 4.23 million tonnes of carbon, which is 0.004 billion tonnes. Since we're stipulating that this is the cost of removing 1 billion tonnes of carbon (and a larger amount of carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere, this is 0.996 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide removed, net. Your hypothetical fleet of ships used less than 0.5% of the carbon dioxide removal budget. According to your calculation error, it would have been 0.0005%, entirely insignificant. If you're trying to advocate for Old Nick, you're doing a terrible job.
Third, let's tackle some of the underlying misconceptions behind your argument, although I have neither the time, nor the patience, nor the knowledge to refute all of them. Iron fertilization is not carried out with iron powder; it is carried out with ferrous sulfate, which is water-soluble and consequently does not sink to the bottom as you suggest.
Ferrous sulfate solution is commonly carried in tankships, which are in fact "a specific thing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankship. Ferrous sulfate is enormously cheaper to prepare from rock than iron is, and in particular produces enormously less carbon dioxide emissions, because it does not require reducing the iron to its metallic state, much less "grinding [iron] to a powder". In fact, in many cases, it does not require reducing the iron at all, because it's already in the ferrous state in rocks. It is industrially produced in vast quantities as an industrial byproduct of steel pickling and titanium refining (mostly for pigment production, not for the titanium metal), and, where required, by burning fool's gold. According to news reports, it's about a billion-dollar-a-year industry; it costs about US$2 per kg at the garden store, which puts a floor of 500,000 tonnes produced at present per year; however, a lot of it is currently treated as merely a slightly hazardous chemical waste.
Iron ores are mostly not, as you incorrectly assume, trucked across land, because they are sufficiently low in value that it is not profitable to do so. Instead they are transported by ship or train. But this is irrelevant, because no iron ore would be mined for iron fertilization.
However, even if iron were to be mined and reduced to obtain the iron required, this would be an insignificantly small impact. 3 million tonnes of iron per year are required to sequester a billion tonnes of carbon; current global steel production is about 1600 million tonnes, so this would be about 0.2% of current global steel production....
The carbon cycle you mention was an important realization to me, one I learned rather late compared to many I think.
We pull carbon out of the ground with no way to ever (relative to human life spans) put it back, and it doesn't just "dissolve into nothing" like so much of what we do seems too, it stays in various forms on the surface "forever". We also pull so much oil from the ground that running out world wide is a concern we give some thought too. It's going to have an effect.
If I seem stuck on first base, it's because I regularly deal with people who don't believe in climate change.
If we could replace concrete and steel for pressed/processed wood in most construction, that works out well for removing sources of carbon and incentivizing sequestration.
I have been talking about this with my wife, how many trees would I have to plant to alleviate the amount of carbon I put into the atmosphere up to now. Since I'm retiring soon, I hope to have a hobby that will be productive.
If we cut the trees and ship them somewhere they will not decay(south pole?). And then grow new trees and do the same thing again. That should remove carbon from the carbon cycle. Is this doable and sensible?
If you instead use the wood as lumber for durable items (such as houses and furniture), you will drastically slow the decay rate, reduce usage of other carbon-emitting processes, and make room for new trees to grow (which is extremely carbon negative). It won't solve the problem on its own, but it would certainly help.
So the trees that grew in the Jurassic age, which were covered with soil and over millennium became coal and oil, did not sequester carbon? Using the above logic, no, because we, in the millions of years since burned it and now it's in the air? Trees may mostly buffer carbon, but they have the potential to buffer it for a really really long time.
Why? An acre of land converted _permanently_ from field/desert/parking lot to forest translates to X tons of carbon permanently removed from the atmosphere.
I've also thought about that! And I seem to recall being surprised by the answer --- something like 2 trees per year per person roughly balances out on average (assuming the trees are healthy, never die, and grow forever).
As a citation, I give a tongue-in-cheek blog post from some years ago [1].
The main problem I have with some of the carbon sequestering methods like dumping waste biomass at the bottom of the sea is that that biomass is a mixture of carbon we want to sequester, and nutrients that we really want to put back into the land. Constantly removing biomass from a land area is a really effective method of turning that land into a totally useless area that doesn't grow anything any more.
I was recently thinking about this. Farming is essentially constant repeated removal of extreme amounts of biomass from a land area. We rely heavily on fertilizers for industrial farming.
What is the ultimate source of most of the nutrients that are used to produce the fertilizers? There are massive amounts of carbon, phosphorous, nitrogen, and potassium required.
Any business person should see the most important action immediately. If you want to make a company profitable, lowering costs is almost always essential and more effective than raising revenues. Do both, of course, but keep costs down.
If you want to lower greenhouse gas concentrations, do everything, but lowering emissions is essential. The article barely mentioned it, but the most effective emissions reductions limit concentrations more than all capturing technologies combined.
The number one technologies to combat environmental problems such as climate change (but also all others -- extinctions, resource depletion, plastic, mercury, etc) are the pill, IUDs, vasectomies, condoms, and the like, combined with educating everyone on family planning. People knee-jerk respond with concerns about China's policy or eugenics, but many nations have reduced birth rates non-coercively, increasing prosperity -- Thailand, Costa Rica, Iran, and more.
A few generations of a global 1.5 children per woman average brings human population to sustainable levels with a reasonable level of material abundance, around 2 billion people -- for reference, the population before the Haber-Bosch process allowed us to turn oil into food. Any population more than sustainable only forestalls collapse. I'd like to say otherwise, and achieving on a global scale what a few nations did on a national scale is hard, but nature doesn't make allowances for something being hard. And we've known this for generations.
At the same time, probably everyone reading these words emits beyond the IPCC recommendations per person. Combining personal action by those willing to lead and set examples with education and legislation can reduce emissions per person. As ineffective as personal action is alone, it is a necessary first step to create role models and show that living sustainably is joyful and creates community and connection, not the burden and sacrifice people erroneously fear when they think of flying less or eating less meat. On the contrary, stewardship and taking responsibility for how our behavior affects others, especially those helpless to defend themselves, such as those breathing our jet fuel exhaust, creates some of the most joy, meaning, value, and purpose, as any parent will tell you.
We'll have to change our values to a steady-state economy based on increasing gross happiness and community from a growth economy based on increasing GDP. There are many examples of steady-state economies working for longer than our growth economy producing prosperous, stable communities, and one huge example of a growth economy wrecking the entire planet's biosphere, making it clear to all except economists that we have to stop growth or nature will do it for us.
Bottom line: 1) Reducing emissions is by far the most effective means to avert the worst disasters, even if some are inevitable. We can do a lot more and once we start we'll love it. 2) Personal action is not enough, but it's a necessary first step. It's also called leadership. Most don't want to lead, but those willing to will be the Mandelas, MLK's, Rosa Parks, etc of the environment.
In addition to planting forests that we then harvest and convert to biochar at peak rather than letting them decay and release carbon back to the cycle, we need to use energy intensive means to capture carbon.
I have seen one proposal linked on HN that suggested direct use of a nuclear reactor's energy to do it... something like that would have the necessary power (pardon the expression) to make a dent in atmospheric CO2.
Essentially, we need to build machines like the ones on LV427 in the movie "Aliens"...large structures that are essentially nuclear reactors with some extra equipment to use all their energy to terraform.... Terra.
I find it disturbing how popular science articles on climate change seem to find it unimportant to convince the reader that human CO2 emissions are causing most of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in recent years.
Here's a challenge to illustrate my point. Where can I find the best popular science treatment of the specific question:
How do we know with certainty that human-produced CO2 is responsible for most (or all) of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in the last 100 years?
I have looked for such a treatment and found... nothing compelling. This is especially worrisome given that nebulous ideas of what caused previous ice ages and numerous interglacial periods within them.
If the source of previous events that grew an ice sheet 1 mile thick over New York and then melted it completely 12,000 years ago isn't understood, then how can anyone expect smart non-experts to jump onboard the notion that we know what's causing warming in the last 100 years?
This question relates directly to the article in the sense that we as a species are very good at causing unintended consequences. Sulfa and penicillin were seen as wonder drugs and started to be used everywhere prophylactically and misused. We now face the specter of planet-wide extinction events based on antibiotic resistance.
Pulling vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere could lead to unintended consequences on an even larger scale without a solid understanding of the system we're dealing with.
> I have looked for such a treatment and found... nothing compelling. This is especially worrisome given that nebulous ideas of what caused previous ice ages and numerous interglacial periods within them.
I'll add to this the known fact that plants and other organisms require CO2 to live and if we were to become "carbon-negative", it would be guaranteed to have an adverse effect on life on earth.
How do you figure that? The aim is to get back to pre-industrial levels, not to keep reducing in perpetuity. Pre-industrial gives a figure we know all current species do OK with, and most seem to have been doing better with. So where's the adverse effect from reducing the ppm by 10 a year - or month (hah, unlikely), until we hit target?
> So where's the adverse effect from reducing the ppm by 10 a year - or month (hah, unlikely), until we hit target?
Apart from reversing the recently observed greening of the planet, it will be dangerous if we have built all our infrastructure around zero/negative CO2 and are not able to stop removing CO2 just like now we don't seem to be able to limit the increase quickly enough.
> How do we know with certainty that human-produced CO2 is responsible for most (or all) of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in the last 100 years?
If you want to know facts, the science (inc. raw data) is out there in open access journals. If you don't want to believe the science ("nothing compelling"), then nothing I can link will change your mind.
This just documents increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1970 and theories about what effects it might have. It completely leaves out the temperature changes in the 20th century and how there were warming and cooling periods despite steady increase in CO2, which quite obviously means there are stronger mechanisms involved (if there was cooling despite CO2 increase in the 60s/70s).
The section "Why carbon dioxide matters" directly discusses that (the link in your quote is broken fyi).
> It completely leaves out the temperature changes in the 20th century and how there were warming and cooling periods despite steady increase in CO2, which quite obviously means there are stronger mechanisms involved (if there was cooling despite CO2 increase in the 60s/70s).
The second graph shows that the warming/cooling is seasonal and that the overall trend has been up, in-line with CO2 levels. I don't understand what you don't understand about the second graph (your question is confusing, aside from explaining how seasons work on earth).
> The second graph shows that the warming/cooling is seasonal
The second graph shows no temperatures at all, it's CO2 ppm / year.
> the overall trend has been up, in-line with CO2 levels.
That's simply not true. If you have more than a decade of cooling with steady increase of CO2 and recently more than a decade of steady temperatures with sharp increase of CO2, it's obvious that there are other factors involved.
> I don't understand what you don't understand about the second graph
There are many subtleties in those discussion that never get mentioned.
For example, the graph of CO2 concentration takes center stage. Fine, have a look at the caption:
> Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years, based on EPICA (ice core) data. The peaks and valleys in carbon dioxide levels track the coming and going of ice ages (low carbon dioxide) and warmer interglacials (higher levels). Throughout these cycles, atmospheric carbon dioxide was never higher than 300 ppm; in 2018, it reached 407.4 ppm (black dot). NOAA Climate.gov, based on EPICA Dome C data (Lüthi, D., et al., 2008) provided by NOAA NCEI Paleoclimatology Program.
So this is all ice core data, apparently. Except that the study was done in 2008. Yet there's a point clearly marked 2018 average in bold. Where did it come from?
I could assume that it came from atmospheric monitoring, but that's not what the site says.
Not good. Probably not ethical. When data from different sources are mixed together, but not identified clearly as having different sources, that's dishonest at best. And I see it all the time in the public presentation of this research.
Let's set aside the issue of whether anthropogenic climate change is real or not. I'm talking about presenting data to try to convince a general audience that something is true.
The mind numbing thing to me is you wouldnt even have to believe in climate change to understand how incredibly screwed we are. We are already done for without multiple degrees of temperature increase. Climate change is just the last nail in the coffin. We are wasting non-replaceable resources at an unfathomable rate to sustain growth for growth sake. A lot of people still dont seem to understand what "finite" means. One day stuff is out. And that day is coming closer. And instead of prolonging the time we have left to search for solutions, we waste the remaining resources for growth as if there is no tomorrow. Which to be fair, there wont.
All of our progress since the industrial revolution was made possible by cheap/free energy. Once we run out of everything from energy to fertilizer to metals to sand to our ecosystem and its biodiversity, there will be no slowing down, there will be collapse. Without fossil fuel based fertilizers we can say goodbye to the idea of food safety. Especially since modern fertilizers are the only thing that allows the dirt we use instead of actual soil to grow anything. And despite that we are still burning this stuff for personal transportation and having ingenious ideas like growing biofuel, of course also unsustainable in overexploitation. Because fuck yeah! Better yet, we are actually trying to replace oil in the transport and energy sectors with natural gas. The natural gas we need to not be faced with an incredible productivity decrease in food production. Its like people are straight up mad, we are talking about electric cars replacing fossil fuel to keep our transportation network running, and of course the freedom of getting to drive around in your own car. Completely ignoring how many batteries we could actually build before we run out of lithium without an real option for recycling. We were all born right in time to witness the waste of the last few hopes we have for decelerating and long term survival of human civilization on a few more years of unsustainable growth. And the best part, none of this was inevitable. And none of it is a surprise.
> I find it disturbing how popular science articles on climate change seem to find it unimportant to convince the reader that human CO2 emissions are causing most of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in recent years.
I understand. You don't want to be convinced. Fair enough. Why not talk about the economic aspect instead? When you pay $3.00 for a gallon of gasoline, the best case scenario is that one third of that gallon is used to propel your car while the remaining two thirds ends up in the atmosphere in the form of wasted heat and emissions.
Have you considered the possibility that oil companies are engaged in a disinformation campaign because they don't want people to stop paying $3.00 for $1.00 worth of movement?
My understanding is that one of the main hurdles is the physical limits of actually catching the carbon to sequester it. Even though it is historically high, it is still relatively dispersed (a few hundred parts per million). Plants are extremely efficient at utilizing carbon, but their main limitation to growth is catching enough of it from the atmosphere.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 218 ms ] threadThe carbon problem is a social one, not a technical one. This analogy focusses on the wrong aspect.
(Feel free to suggest a humane way to deal with those occupants, if you're convinced that you're furry enough not to need the open fire.
On the other hand, we're having this discussion on computers connected to the Internet, which, for the sake of analogy, we might as well call "the barbecue on top of the open fire in the living room.")
Biochar may not help much either but is still net beneficial and pyrolysis is going to be one of the paths to the feedstock we need for chemicals I would think. The absorbing concrete can be priced right and carbon taxing would drive there.
Deep sea storage, olivine and other rock formation, all useful.
Mainly, it's not giving up hope. Because giving up would be way, way worse.
Sometimes reading these realism write-ups is not very hope inducing. Even stoics don't always give up hope.
There is no better world. We have to try and make the best of all possible worlds here.
On the other hand - "We Need Courage, Not Hope, to Face Climate Change" (https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-need-courage-not-hop...)
"I am a pessimist by nature. Many people can only keep on fighting when they expect to win. I'm not like that, I always expect to lose. I fight anyway, and sometimes I win."
-- Richard Stallman
What I am trying to say is that even one lost all hope and thinks catastrophic climate change is already unstoppable and human civilization is going to collapse and the game is over, one can still fight. Because it's the right thing to do. Fuck hope.
and most people would rather just get comfortable and ride out the remainder than to fight.
Yikes! I thought we cancelled that pedophile
In this specific context, it's primarily the things outside of your control - far outside of your borders and political influence - that make that an impossible action for a given person.
China is currently adding nearly as much coal power output (+121 GW) as exist in the whole of the EU combined. [1][2] Their companies are working on adding even more output and plants than that around other parts of Asia. Domestically China is building more new coal plants than the rest of the world combined, in fact.
China has approximately 987 GW of coal power in operation, soon to be 1,100 GW. The EU has 149 GW. China passed the EU in coal plant GW output around the year 2000 at 200 GW, they passed the US in 2006 at around 340 GW, and are now closing in on 1,000 GW this year. Next year they will have 4x the coal plant GW output of the US.
The US has reduced its coal-based power output by ~80 GW (1/4 reduction) in about 12 years and continues to close coal plants. China has an additional 149 GW of coal power output under construction. China's actions trivially wipe out anything the rest of the world can do to counter it.
The article properly lists the US as a mega emissions culprit, along with China and India. Except the US isn't massively expanding its emissions, it's reducing. The US isn't opening new coal plants, it's rapidly closing them. The problem in the US is that it isn't moving fast enough.
How does a person from, say, Finland do anything about any of that to try to make this the best possible of worlds? China's actions alone will wipe out any chance of stopping (much less reversing) the accelerating climate damage. It guarantees there can be no positive outcome. How do you force China to stop building hundreds of new coal plants? You can't and they won't.
[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c1feee40-0add-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957...
[1a] outline version of the FT article: https://outline.com/dbCT6e
[2] https://fortune.com/2019/11/20/china-coal-power-plants-pipel...
Consumers globally can choose “Not coal”
https://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-...
Natural gas is not coal. It’s cheap and much cleaner.
Right now, even though we’re pretty close to the Winter solstice, the UK is producing about 1.5 times more electricity from solar than from coal.
Yes, there are other fossil fuels besides coal in the UK, and yes renewables only supply about a third of the UK’s electricity right now, but coal itself is practically dead.
https://gridwatch.co.uk/
Two of the six plants we have left announced last month they wouldn't be bothering going to the 2025 coal elimination date, and will close in 2020. Leaves 4 I think.
Same month the lovely government approved a new deep coal mine in Cumbria. huh?
Where? Political action int he U.S. or Europe doesn't do much to China and telling China "sorry, you can't have cheap electricity, your people don't get to have a lifestyle like ours as a result" isn't likely to make the Chinese go "oh, ok, we'll stop growing our middle class and go back to a basic village lifestyle to save the rest of you".
Unless we miraculously convert to a global government then reducing emissions just isn't likely to happen. Reduce in one place and it'll continue to increase in a few others.
The fact of the matter is, the only realistic solution out of this is a majority of the world's population goes "Ok we'll only drive to work/school/the grocery, we'll never take travelling vacations unless we walk or bicycle there, we'll stop eating all meat, we'll give up plastic packaging and we won't replace our electronics when they wear out".
Otherwise we have to hope and pray that a fleet of alien trade ships show up on orbit and are like "If you give us syndication rights to the galactic hegemony for Everybody Loves Raymond and I Love Lucy we'll go ahead and install a thousand of our zero point modules around the planet and tie them into your local grids to solve your energy needs. If you give us the syndication rights to The Simpsons we'll give you a few thousand of these solid state devices that attract carbon out of the air causing it to solidify into inert bricks that you can then fill your pit mines with".
We're seriously in that sort of state. You either outlaw electricity from fossil fuels in every country in the world or you hope for a true miracle.
Even if someone figures out cold fusion today and can start churning out the first power plants in January, replacing the 60,000~ power plants in the world it would take decades at best to replace them and making the concrete for pouring the foundations alone would create an insane amount of CO2 not to mention all of the structural steel.
Short of ET intervention, the best we can hope is that developing nations stop building fossil fuel power plants and that people start leaving coastal cities and building better designed, more eco-friendly, more distributed, with equally dispersed permaculture centers, with rail lines in grids to provide for efficient transportation of people and goods, cities far inland.
Secondly,you are kind of right, the IPCC already has calculated that to keep the rise to 1.5C is only possible if we invest in negative emissions, that is pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This is never discussed in out brain-dead media, as obvious it is much more expensive to pull carbon out of the air than not to emit it in the first place.
China is adding millions of new drivers to the roads, in fossil-fuel powered vehicles with fossil fuel (and tree) derived tires, annually.
What about the fact that China is actively constructing hundreds of coal power plants? Or the fact their middle-class is rapidly growing which will mean more energy demands (which will mean more fossil fuel consumption) and more consumer goods (more plastics, from fossil fuels)?
>Since the early 2000s, China's middle class has been among the fastest growing in the world, swelling from 29 million in 1999 (2 percent of population) to roughly 531 million in 2013 (39 percent of population).
https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/
China has hundreds of millions of people that will, presumably, continue to be added to their middle class resulting in more cars, more electricity, more gadgets, more plastics, etc.
Unless China says "no, only the people that have stuff now can have stuff" they're going to consume more fossil fuels, construct more things with concrete, etc.
And in terms of global coordination, it helps to negotiate from a position of moral high ground if you can show that your country is doing its part to reduce emissions.
What seems completely, off-the-charts crazy to me is NOT the "China is emitting too much CO2" claim. It's the "therefore" that people stick on the end, sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit: "therefore we should do nothing." I lack the language to fully describe how crazy that way of thinking is.
WW2 disagrees, I think. You don't need to carpet the place with nukes - a few well-placed, climatically-harmless strikes will do. Will it trigger a species-ending global nuclear war? Maybe - but very likely not. Maybe people are smart enough not to end the species over such a thing. Maybe other people are smart enough to abuse that fact.
China is investing more in renewables than any other country [1], they have the most electric buses in the world [2], the largest high-speed rail network so you don't have to take a plane, the largest nuclear power build-out in the world and their emissions per capita are lower than US.
The younger and poorer countries actually take climate change more seriously than the West, we had 50 years to address the issue and did nothing about it. I would bet on China and India achieving 100% renewable energy before US does, despite them being poorer.
[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/799098/global-clean-ener...
[2]https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-05-15/in-sh...
Coal is cheaper and they can dictate exactly where they’re built.
Moving 1 billion people a year by high-speed rail is far more efficient and flexible than by plane. 20,000 miles of rail in a country the size of the United States makes perfect economic sense.
China is making its decisions for reasons other than climate change.
Australian bush fires vs... China and India: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1197612762039554048
The October California forest fires vs a Normal Day In China: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1189229024951881728
I should have documented Brazil, too. Those fires cause serious pollution and carbon emissions, but they're peanuts compared to every single day in China.
China's per capita emissions are about half those of US or Canada (though still over the global average). That should help you understand how incredibly profligate North America is. China's growth in per-capita emissions also seems to be slowing while in the US, the per-capita emissions are basically static since 2012.
The USA is also the world leader in cumulative emissions (which is what really matters if you're trying to draw up a carbon budget or assign blame). While the biggest historical emitters continue to do so little it's no wonder that others don't take climate change as seriously as we might want.
Cumulative emissions sources and plots:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t... https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/uploads/historic... https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/uploads/cumulati...
These emissions figures will be assigning the manufacturing emissions of exported goods to the country that exports them, not the one that imports them. This is one contributor to China's high emissions: manufacturing loads of stuff for the west. Those emissions should really be attributed to the purchaser.
Source for CO2 emissions over time:
Nice table: https://knoema.com/atlas/ranks/CO2-emissions-per-capita?base...
Source data for that table: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=booklet2019&ds...
The closer you get to the present day, the closer you are to the time on the historical timeline where climate change is understood to be a threat, and the more moral urgency there is to reign in emissions. It also makes more sense to consider what should be done differently about emissions last year, this year, and next year than emissions from decades ago.
But if China were rapidly increasing its emissions per capita, that could still be a problem, but that doesn't seem to be the case. China seem to have held their emissions more or less still for the last few years where data is available:
consumption adjusted: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/prod-cons-co2-per-capita
per capita with comparison countries: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita?t...
In the same period, the US, and indeed most states have achieved only quite small changes to their per capita emissions. So the US has reduced emissions a bit, but from a much higher starting point.
My gripe is that westerners often leap to talking about China and India or, worse, overpopulation.
The implicit belief seems to be that foreigners are an inconvenient drain on global resources, that they deserve less than us.
This is not true.
What I'm not sure I follow is the relationship you seem to believe exists between per-capita emissions and responsibility to curb them. Emissions need to be curbed in proportion to their percentage of overall global emissions, not in proportion to per-capita consumption. You can vary the per-capita statistics however you like, and as long as the absolute emissions are the same, the damage to the planet is the same. Those emissions could be coming from one person or a trillion. If China had ten billion people, or fifty billion or a hundred it would still be just as incumbent upon them to curb such emissions as they are producing.
Everything else about "implicit beliefs", the "leaps" you believe people to be taking, the questions of who should or shouldn't be blamed are abstract, highly subjective, and while important, should be considered without letting them derail the conversations around needed next steps to curb emissions.
I believe this has been disproved long ago. Trees don’t ever stop growing, and it takes carbon to grow. Recent studies show that large old trees still capture a significant amount of co2 due to their massive surface area.
Literally two lines later:
> But decaying wood and organic material releases carbon back into the air. A climax forest is close to a steady state: The rate at which it removes carbon from the air is roughly equal to the rate at which it releases this carbon.
Trees keep on growing, yes, but it’s the old, decaying material that releases CO2 back in the air again, compensating tree growth.
Edit: clarity.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/how-old-trees-help-climate-1....
I think the point is that a forest reaches an equilibrium at some point.
The forest has new trees growning and consuming co2, it has old trees still growing and consuming co2, it has dead trees/branches that releases co2. It's mostly at a steady state when it has matured.
Still, if you planted that forest at a place where there was no forest, the co2 it has bound up in the trunks and roots is removed from the atmosphere as long as the forest stands. Which might be tens or hundreds of thousands of years.
A forest can be in any unbalanced state at any age, it obviously depends on the ratio of dead to living trees and their size, as well as the climate. It's not a closed system that would need to reach equilibrium at some point. Forests will keep growing and trees will keep growing as fast as the environment allows and unsurprisingly, additional CO2 will help.
> the research suggests that almost 70 per cent of all the carbon stored in trees is accumulated in the last half of their lives
https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080910/full/news.2008.1092....
http://www.flanderstoday.eu/current-affairs/old-diverse-fore...
Of course this will be energy intensive. We essentially need to put the energy back into carbon that we got from burning those carbon fuels over the last two centuries. That is obviously a tremendous amount of energy. There probably is no way around this.
>we will probably need to be removing about 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air each year by 2050, and double that by 2100.
>They’re hoping to use these gadgets to make carbonated water for soft drinks—or create greenhouses that have lots of carbon dioxide in the air, for tastier vegetables. This sounds very exciting … until you learn that currently their method of getting carbon dioxide costs about $500 per ton.
The numbers don't even look as bad as I thought they would. They at least seem achievable if we really wanted it. $500 per ton for 10 billion tons comes out at $5 trillion. The world's GDP is around $80 trillion. From a numbers perspective it seems like this is at least possible. Whether this solution will work politically is another matter though. My own suspicion is that politicking and corruption will make this a much more difficult and expensive process than it should be.
This article makes the future look less bleak to me than what I hear on the news.
They have a point I think.
https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change-oce...
Even if it is, though, the Earth receives about 1000 years of world marketed energy consumption in the form of sunlight every year. So even energy-intensive carbon sequestration approaches like algal photosynthesis (promoted with iron sulfate, say) may be feasible.
They aren't though, algae is more than carbon and pure water. They still need various minerals which you have to input into the system somehow. To do this at any scale it means mining massive amounts and feeding the system, that's just one of the reasons why YC's own idea to turn to Sahara into a bunch of shallow algae pools [1] is absurd.
[1] http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/
Yes, that's why iron fertilization is so effective.
> To do this at any scale it means mining massive amounts and feeding the system
Actually not. In conditions where iron is the limiting nutrient, each kg of iron fixes 83 tonnes of carbon, 304 tonnes of CO2. So sequestering a billion tonnes a year would require 3 million tonnes of iron per year. That probably sounds like a “massive amount” to somebody like you, but it's about 16 tankships full. The humans currently mine some 2.3 billion tonnes of iron ore per year, so we're talking about increasing iron mining by about 0.2%.
The Sahara idea might be better, I don't know. Certainly there are a lot more minerals in the Sahara than in the middle of the ocean surface. The mass of water you'd have to transport (and desalinate!) is clearly much larger than the amount of iron, and they call that out as the major cost. It wouldn't be limited by the iron-poor regions of the ocean, though, but ironically, it might create more of them. The US$50b cost estimate seems higher than other sequestration approaches.
This is the same sort of problem YC has with their proposed solutions, people on YC tend to be overly optimistic with the mindset of everything works 100% of the time with 100% efficiency with 0 unforeseen consequences so let me play devil's advocate with a dose of reality:
In a perfect system. In the ocean most of it will sink. In YC's Sahara project it would still settle and need to be skimmed and processed for release again (which only adds to the energy demands of the project, just the desalination and pumping requires more energy than civilization currently produces...)
> So sequestering a billion tonnes a year would require 3 million tonnes of iron per year. That probably sounds like a “massive amount” to somebody like you
And how many tonnes would you generate mining, transporting, crushing, transporting/deploying that iron?
>but it's about 16 tankships full.
"tankship" doesn't appear to be a specific thing according to Google but a 'bulk carrier' however:
"Most iron ore is carried in Cape-size ships, i.e. larger than 80,000 tonnes deadweight" [1]
and
"brokers should now assume speeds of 12 knots with cargo and 13 knots without for Capesize vessels, with fuel use of about 44 metric tonnes (mt) per day, Bloomberg reports" [2]
12 knots is 13.8094 miles per hour, let's assume each load needs to only be moved 1000 miles, that gives us 132.76 metric tonnes of fuel per 1000 miles. It looks like these ships release CO2, NOx and SOx and also pollute oceans via ballast water and biocides.
"Heavy fuel oil(No.6/Bunker C)" appears to be 0.85kg of carbon per kg of fuel [3].
So we need 4,978.5 tonnes of fuel, generating 4,231.725 tonnes of carbon just to ship that processed iron powder 1000 miles by sea and I'm guessing this is the smallest percentage of carbon that will be produced - I suspect the mining, trucking across land and processing will generate far more carbon but I can not find how much CO2 is generated to yield 1 kilogram of pure iron. Just grinding it to a fine enough powder that it actually suspends in the water for a reasonable amount of time and doesn't sink like a rock is going to be a huge power cost.
Of course if you are doing this in the open ocean, realistically you'll need much smaller purpose-built ships to cover a wide area and to disperse the iron in any reasonable amount of time. More smaller ships will be less efficient from a fuel standpoint than the larger ships, building purpose built ships for dispersing it means a lot more steeel/paint/etc being produced etc etc so on and so forth.
Never mind the unintended impact to marine life outside of the algae. What will that iron do to sea temperatures? What sort of toxicity might it cause for other marine life? How much will end up in polar waters possibly causing issues with ice formation or heating ice? What impact will it have on ships in waters that are being seeded?
[1] http://bulkcarrierguide.com/iron-ore.html
[2] https://shipandbunker.com/news/emea/779990-new-guidance-on-c...
[3] https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/co2-emission-fuels-d_1085...
So it's a terrible devil's advocate argument. I'd advise Old Scratch to fire you and see if he can get a public defender instead.
First, let's correct the calculation results. You've calculated that shipping 3 billion tonnes of iron powder 1000 miles from shore would burn almost 5000 tonnes of bunker fuel. But that is incorrect. It would burn almost 5 million tonnes of bunker fuel, according to your numbers:
That is, the calculation comes out to 4.98 million tonnes of bunker fuel, not 4.98 thousand tonnes of fuel as you said.Second, let's tackle the implications of this calculation, if it were correct. 4.98 million tonnes of bunker fuel, taking your figure, is 4.23 million tonnes of carbon, which is 0.004 billion tonnes. Since we're stipulating that this is the cost of removing 1 billion tonnes of carbon (and a larger amount of carbon dioxide) from the atmosphere, this is 0.996 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide removed, net. Your hypothetical fleet of ships used less than 0.5% of the carbon dioxide removal budget. According to your calculation error, it would have been 0.0005%, entirely insignificant. If you're trying to advocate for Old Nick, you're doing a terrible job.
Third, let's tackle some of the underlying misconceptions behind your argument, although I have neither the time, nor the patience, nor the knowledge to refute all of them. Iron fertilization is not carried out with iron powder; it is carried out with ferrous sulfate, which is water-soluble and consequently does not sink to the bottom as you suggest.
Ferrous sulfate solution is commonly carried in tankships, which are in fact "a specific thing": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tankship. Ferrous sulfate is enormously cheaper to prepare from rock than iron is, and in particular produces enormously less carbon dioxide emissions, because it does not require reducing the iron to its metallic state, much less "grinding [iron] to a powder". In fact, in many cases, it does not require reducing the iron at all, because it's already in the ferrous state in rocks. It is industrially produced in vast quantities as an industrial byproduct of steel pickling and titanium refining (mostly for pigment production, not for the titanium metal), and, where required, by burning fool's gold. According to news reports, it's about a billion-dollar-a-year industry; it costs about US$2 per kg at the garden store, which puts a floor of 500,000 tonnes produced at present per year; however, a lot of it is currently treated as merely a slightly hazardous chemical waste.
Iron ores are mostly not, as you incorrectly assume, trucked across land, because they are sufficiently low in value that it is not profitable to do so. Instead they are transported by ship or train. But this is irrelevant, because no iron ore would be mined for iron fertilization.
However, even if iron were to be mined and reduced to obtain the iron required, this would be an insignificantly small impact. 3 million tonnes of iron per year are required to sequester a billion tonnes of carbon; current global steel production is about 1600 million tonnes, so this would be about 0.2% of current global steel production....
We pull carbon out of the ground with no way to ever (relative to human life spans) put it back, and it doesn't just "dissolve into nothing" like so much of what we do seems too, it stays in various forms on the surface "forever". We also pull so much oil from the ground that running out world wide is a concern we give some thought too. It's going to have an effect.
If I seem stuck on first base, it's because I regularly deal with people who don't believe in climate change.
If you instead use the wood as lumber for durable items (such as houses and furniture), you will drastically slow the decay rate, reduce usage of other carbon-emitting processes, and make room for new trees to grow (which is extremely carbon negative). It won't solve the problem on its own, but it would certainly help.
As a citation, I give a tongue-in-cheek blog post from some years ago [1].
[1]: https://davidlowryduda.com/how-fat-would-we-have-to-get-to-b...
What is the ultimate source of most of the nutrients that are used to produce the fertilizers? There are massive amounts of carbon, phosphorous, nitrogen, and potassium required.
Some of those nutrients, particularly phosphorus, are in short supply, until they hit a high enough price to start extracting them from seawater.
If you want to lower greenhouse gas concentrations, do everything, but lowering emissions is essential. The article barely mentioned it, but the most effective emissions reductions limit concentrations more than all capturing technologies combined.
The number one technologies to combat environmental problems such as climate change (but also all others -- extinctions, resource depletion, plastic, mercury, etc) are the pill, IUDs, vasectomies, condoms, and the like, combined with educating everyone on family planning. People knee-jerk respond with concerns about China's policy or eugenics, but many nations have reduced birth rates non-coercively, increasing prosperity -- Thailand, Costa Rica, Iran, and more.
A few generations of a global 1.5 children per woman average brings human population to sustainable levels with a reasonable level of material abundance, around 2 billion people -- for reference, the population before the Haber-Bosch process allowed us to turn oil into food. Any population more than sustainable only forestalls collapse. I'd like to say otherwise, and achieving on a global scale what a few nations did on a national scale is hard, but nature doesn't make allowances for something being hard. And we've known this for generations.
At the same time, probably everyone reading these words emits beyond the IPCC recommendations per person. Combining personal action by those willing to lead and set examples with education and legislation can reduce emissions per person. As ineffective as personal action is alone, it is a necessary first step to create role models and show that living sustainably is joyful and creates community and connection, not the burden and sacrifice people erroneously fear when they think of flying less or eating less meat. On the contrary, stewardship and taking responsibility for how our behavior affects others, especially those helpless to defend themselves, such as those breathing our jet fuel exhaust, creates some of the most joy, meaning, value, and purpose, as any parent will tell you.
We'll have to change our values to a steady-state economy based on increasing gross happiness and community from a growth economy based on increasing GDP. There are many examples of steady-state economies working for longer than our growth economy producing prosperous, stable communities, and one huge example of a growth economy wrecking the entire planet's biosphere, making it clear to all except economists that we have to stop growth or nature will do it for us.
Bottom line: 1) Reducing emissions is by far the most effective means to avert the worst disasters, even if some are inevitable. We can do a lot more and once we start we'll love it. 2) Personal action is not enough, but it's a necessary first step. It's also called leadership. Most don't want to lead, but those willing to will be the Mandelas, MLK's, Rosa Parks, etc of the environment.
2. Use the excess energy to sequester CO2 out of the air.
Now if only there was a proven technology to consistently generate lots of energy that is clean, safe and has plenty of readily available fuel...
In addition to planting forests that we then harvest and convert to biochar at peak rather than letting them decay and release carbon back to the cycle, we need to use energy intensive means to capture carbon.
I have seen one proposal linked on HN that suggested direct use of a nuclear reactor's energy to do it... something like that would have the necessary power (pardon the expression) to make a dent in atmospheric CO2.
Essentially, we need to build machines like the ones on LV427 in the movie "Aliens"...large structures that are essentially nuclear reactors with some extra equipment to use all their energy to terraform.... Terra.
Here's a challenge to illustrate my point. Where can I find the best popular science treatment of the specific question:
How do we know with certainty that human-produced CO2 is responsible for most (or all) of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in the last 100 years?
I have looked for such a treatment and found... nothing compelling. This is especially worrisome given that nebulous ideas of what caused previous ice ages and numerous interglacial periods within them.
If the source of previous events that grew an ice sheet 1 mile thick over New York and then melted it completely 12,000 years ago isn't understood, then how can anyone expect smart non-experts to jump onboard the notion that we know what's causing warming in the last 100 years?
This question relates directly to the article in the sense that we as a species are very good at causing unintended consequences. Sulfa and penicillin were seen as wonder drugs and started to be used everywhere prophylactically and misused. We now face the specter of planet-wide extinction events based on antibiotic resistance.
Pulling vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere could lead to unintended consequences on an even larger scale without a solid understanding of the system we're dealing with.
I'll add to this the known fact that plants and other organisms require CO2 to live and if we were to become "carbon-negative", it would be guaranteed to have an adverse effect on life on earth.
Apart from reversing the recently observed greening of the planet, it will be dangerous if we have built all our infrastructure around zero/negative CO2 and are not able to stop removing CO2 just like now we don't seem to be able to limit the increase quickly enough.
Measurements. See:
https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...
https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/
If you want to know facts, the science (inc. raw data) is out there in open access journals. If you don't want to believe the science ("nothing compelling"), then nothing I can link will change your mind.
This just documents increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1970 and theories about what effects it might have. It completely leaves out the temperature changes in the 20th century and how there were warming and cooling periods despite steady increase in CO2, which quite obviously means there are stronger mechanisms involved (if there was cooling despite CO2 increase in the 60s/70s).
> It completely leaves out the temperature changes in the 20th century and how there were warming and cooling periods despite steady increase in CO2, which quite obviously means there are stronger mechanisms involved (if there was cooling despite CO2 increase in the 60s/70s).
The second graph shows that the warming/cooling is seasonal and that the overall trend has been up, in-line with CO2 levels. I don't understand what you don't understand about the second graph (your question is confusing, aside from explaining how seasons work on earth).
The second graph shows no temperatures at all, it's CO2 ppm / year.
> the overall trend has been up, in-line with CO2 levels.
That's simply not true. If you have more than a decade of cooling with steady increase of CO2 and recently more than a decade of steady temperatures with sharp increase of CO2, it's obvious that there are other factors involved.
> I don't understand what you don't understand about the second graph
You should take a closer look at it.
For example, the graph of CO2 concentration takes center stage. Fine, have a look at the caption:
> Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years, based on EPICA (ice core) data. The peaks and valleys in carbon dioxide levels track the coming and going of ice ages (low carbon dioxide) and warmer interglacials (higher levels). Throughout these cycles, atmospheric carbon dioxide was never higher than 300 ppm; in 2018, it reached 407.4 ppm (black dot). NOAA Climate.gov, based on EPICA Dome C data (Lüthi, D., et al., 2008) provided by NOAA NCEI Paleoclimatology Program.
So this is all ice core data, apparently. Except that the study was done in 2008. Yet there's a point clearly marked 2018 average in bold. Where did it come from?
I could assume that it came from atmospheric monitoring, but that's not what the site says.
Not good. Probably not ethical. When data from different sources are mixed together, but not identified clearly as having different sources, that's dishonest at best. And I see it all the time in the public presentation of this research.
Let's set aside the issue of whether anthropogenic climate change is real or not. I'm talking about presenting data to try to convince a general audience that something is true.
What I've seen so far is lacking.
All of our progress since the industrial revolution was made possible by cheap/free energy. Once we run out of everything from energy to fertilizer to metals to sand to our ecosystem and its biodiversity, there will be no slowing down, there will be collapse. Without fossil fuel based fertilizers we can say goodbye to the idea of food safety. Especially since modern fertilizers are the only thing that allows the dirt we use instead of actual soil to grow anything. And despite that we are still burning this stuff for personal transportation and having ingenious ideas like growing biofuel, of course also unsustainable in overexploitation. Because fuck yeah! Better yet, we are actually trying to replace oil in the transport and energy sectors with natural gas. The natural gas we need to not be faced with an incredible productivity decrease in food production. Its like people are straight up mad, we are talking about electric cars replacing fossil fuel to keep our transportation network running, and of course the freedom of getting to drive around in your own car. Completely ignoring how many batteries we could actually build before we run out of lithium without an real option for recycling. We were all born right in time to witness the waste of the last few hopes we have for decelerating and long term survival of human civilization on a few more years of unsustainable growth. And the best part, none of this was inevitable. And none of it is a surprise.
I understand. You don't want to be convinced. Fair enough. Why not talk about the economic aspect instead? When you pay $3.00 for a gallon of gasoline, the best case scenario is that one third of that gallon is used to propel your car while the remaining two thirds ends up in the atmosphere in the form of wasted heat and emissions.
Have you considered the possibility that oil companies are engaged in a disinformation campaign because they don't want people to stop paying $3.00 for $1.00 worth of movement?
And yet I think freezing out CO2 out of air can be used even wider - re-processing air from atmosphere, instead of going only after exhausts.