Physically it will require more energy to extract carbon from the air later. But "cost" is a funny, human construct. We just don't know how much it will cost, because we don't have carbon capture at scale yet. As with everything in economics this is just guessing about the future.
Right, but we shouldn’t recklessly pollute on the basis that we don’t know for certain that it will bite us in the ass later. Banking on technological advancements so we don’t have to reform our energy sector and make our various manufacturing and shipping networks efficient is pretty foolish.
Thermodynamics gives a good idea. You need to pull a huge amount of air through your machine to get some carbon out of it.
"At present there are no proven technologies capable of large-scale air capture of CO2. It has been suggested that, with strong research and development support and industrial scale pilot projects sustained over decades, costs as low as ∼$500/tC may be achievable [226]. Thermodynamic constraints [227] suggest that this cost estimate may be low. An assessment by the American Physical Society [228] argues that the lowest currently achievable cost, using existing approaches, is much greater ($600/tCO2 or $2200/tC)."
The article doesn't go into specifics as to the cost of removing carbon. I imagine those costs will drop as technology approves, but the model may assume that.
There's also a cost of reduction that's not factored into most model, the cost of coordination. A model can just say "suppose every country restricts their carbon emissions to X%" but that would require a lot of coordination and implications on state sovereignty that aren't factored in. There's also the enforcement and game theory aspects that would have to be addressed.
> “Betting on being able to bring temperatures down after a larger overshoot is very risky because of the uncertain technological feasibility and because of the possibility of setting off irreversible processes in the earth system with even a temporary temperature overshoot,” wrote second author Christoph Bertram, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, in an email to Ars Technica. “Furthermore, such an approach would be unfair to future generations, as it basically would shift more of the mitigation burden on them.”
Future generations are likely to be much wealthier than ours. Imagine your great grandparents saving their pennies to buy a nice set of doilys to pass down to you?
There is also an implicit assumption that we will have more abundant green energy - renewables, born again nuclear, fusion etc. The "cost" is largely driven by cost of non-fossil-fuel energy.
Hard to imagine cheaper than planting trees -- but turning atmospheric carbon into rock takes it out of circulation permanently, and with effectively no space constraint.
Planting trees is more expensive than you think! You have to buy the land, maintain it, actually physically plant the trees ( which is rather labor intensive). Plants are a relatively low density place to store carbon ( compared to say carbonate rock). It’s not at all clear that planting trees is a good way to sequester carbon.
It's not enough to plant trees. Fallen trees rot and release CO2 back in the atmosphere. You need to cut the trees down, then use lumber for building something, and bury the rest so that it does not decompose.
“Imagine your great grandparents saving their pennies to buy a nice set of doilys to pass down to you?”
I’m not sure this is an appropriate metaphor.
Partly because a doily in your example is construed as an asset, whereas adaptation to climate (our bequest to our grandchildren) is a cost.
Secondly because apportionment of the costs and benefits will not be equitable. In the west, we benefit disproportionately from burning fossil fuels, but it will be future people in developing states who disproportionately bear the costs.
Thirdly, because the costs of climate change might run very high indeed. Look for reviews of Nordstrom’s climate economics to understand some of his appalling modeling assumptions.
Poor countries have benefited a lot more from industrialization over the last 50 years than wealthy countries. No matter the metric you look at, be it extreme poverty, food security, education, life expectancy etc.
> Poor countries have benefited a lot more from industrialization over the last 50 years than wealthy countries.
Wealthy countries had already industrialized. Poor countries were starting from a _very_ low base. They’re still a lot poorer and their contribution to historical emissions is small.
Re the metrics you present, I agree against those things are much improved. But I sometimes wonder whether those metrics are very western centric, chosen by technocrats to make themselves look good. In the context of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I suspect people in many of these places are in a worse position than they were pre-colonialism. Particularly in terms of self-actualization. But on the other levels too.
If you don't agree with the metric pick another objective metric that could be measured. You would be hard pressed to find a metric in which developing countries have not considerably improved since industrialization.
1. Composite indicator of financial market development. Developing countries saw a big jump from the 1990s in terms of access to capital markets (productive assets) [0]
2. this one is tied into #1. People in developing countries have more access to capital markets and therefore more access to higher yielding products
3. Average annual hours actually worked per worker (OECD) shows a downward trend among practically all countries [1]
1. There is a difference between access and right of access; you’re mixing apples and pears.
2. As above.
3.Your time series starts in 1979 yet should start pre-colonialism, for it to be relevant to your point.
Re:coordination, you've hit on the issue that's likely going to sink us. Specifically, China, the current largest polluter, refuses to commit to any reduction before 2030 (in fact, they plan to increase emissions before they decrease them), and refuses to commit to carbon neutrality before 2060. Both of these timelines are way too late.
Where's your evidence that future generations are going to be richer than ours, though? We're leaving them with a massive problem to deal with that's going to suck up an increasing amount of wealth over time if we don't do anything about it (which nobody's committed to doing).
You post literally what the prevailing attitude has been for the past 50 years, claim to wonder why anyone takes you seriously, then say "just a prank, bro?"
Nobody actually says it out loud. The point of the comment is, nobody cares what the cost is. They only care about what they get now. So we'll pick whichever one has the highest short-term gain especially if there is a plausible promise of future technology solving all the problems.
There's a big difference between merely "now" and "personally" which for most people implies many decades of time horizon left in their lifetimes.
Also many questions were not related to concerns for effects on the personal sphere, eg "Willing to change how they live and work to combat the effects of global warming" which also got high scores.
> What will it cost if the climate exceeds the Paris Agreement temperature goals this century—even if we later remove carbon dioxide from the air and manage to bring temperatures back down to meet those targets by 2100? And how does that compare with the costs of staying below those targets?
Those questions may be good ones for people who are concerned about climate change, but who is going to be persuaded to take action by the argument they induce?
To be persuasive to consumers now, a cost comparison has to appeal to the consumer's hip pocket right now. More like one of these format:
Are you paying too much for gas? Click to save 25% on your next tank.
Save 47% on home heating costs this winter.
Send your kids to college with the money you save over the lifetime of your next car.
It's difficult to do in the context of the article but that's what's required to change behaviour.
Well, it isn't the only thing that's required. What is also required is the alternative energy products to be available to consumers at attractive prices.
How do we make that happen?
As an ordinary person who pays for energy but isn't an energy scientist, I don't know. That's why I'm still spending $700 a month on fossil fuels.
Yes it’ll be more expensive to remove carbon dioxide from the air in the future but i will be dead by then, so why do I care? Also this moral hazard is made worst by decision makers whose financial outcomes are tied to not adopting extreme climate measures.
Especially those without children, taking the long view of society seems to be very difficult.
Inheritance taxes only apply to rich people. So, at best, that tells you rich people care about what happens to their descendents. Do you have any evidence rich people care about the descendents of poor people?
It doesn't matter if rich people care about their own descendents. Everybody knows rich people will be fine. Poor people have minimal capacity to do anything about the situation.
> Especially those without children, taking the long view of society seems to be very difficult.
Hey, that's me! But more importantly, I'm not super worried about it in general. I consider it mostly a number of engineering problems (making things more efficient, consuming less energy while doing the same, dealing with climate change).
At the same time, I see plenty of people who say they're super concerned about it hopping from one plane to the next. When questioned, they say that talking about their individual contributions would just deflect from talking about "the system". If you want me to get behind those ideas (and that's a pretty easy sell, tbh, I'd barely have to change my lifestyle), you (not you specifically, I don't know you) need to act as if you mean it.
So far it feels like the upper class saying the lower classes shouldn't travel, eat exotic food or meat, drive cars or heat their homes, while they obviously do all of those things. From my limited circle of friends, that's a pretty common perception, even among those with children.
Talking about indidivual contributions is pointless without context. The richest 1% of humanity emits more than double the amount of CO2 as the poorest half.
Air travel could use alternative fuel sources (or even solar) and I'm sure other large carbon emitters like concrete will become more efficient. What I'm not sure is that the richest 1% of the globe are willing to live like everyone else to avoid cooking the planet and passing that cost onto everyone else.
I travel by plane once or twice a year, haven't had meat in years, own a car with good fuel efficiency, heat my home with gas, and it still doesn't register on the scale. If you want me to live like an ascetic to convince you that I am serious about the runaway consequences of increased average surface temperatures I don't know what to tell you. We are already seeing those effects, and it is doubtful that Miami, Dhubai, etc exist at the end of this century.
There is no way to adjust individual consumption fast enough to fully decarbonize industrial economies so as to avoid 2C+ increases. Hence the systems problem. Why is Australia and the US subsidizing fossil fuels? Who is served by firing up retired coalfire power plants to mine Bitcoin?
That's only looking at CO2, forget about our other biosphere limits (nitrogen, phosphorus to name a few) that we're rapidly approaching the ceiling of. Optimizing for profit means you have an incentive to gain today with tomorrow as collateral. Until companies and governments feel the full financial and human cost of their carbon economies we'll continue to get Chevron advertising about how it's all of our responsibility to turn off the lights when not in use, and that will somehow "turn off" climate change.
> There is no way to adjust individual consumption fast enough to fully decarbonize industrial economies so as to avoid 2C+ increases. Hence the systems problem.
I think there is, and it's trivial: don't use products from industries that are large contributors.
The problem is that everybody wants to keep using them (understandable) and somehow also make them produce less (also understandable, but wishful thinking). Feels like they're asking other people to stop in order to achieve that goal.
Sure, each person can drive half as much, or we can ask half of the population to stop driving (or travel half as much, or buy half as much x, or use half as much y). Maybe not the top 0.1% (they don't seem to care at all), but these demands reliably come from the top 1-5%, who are also reliably unwilling to make substantial changes personally, with their much larger contributions to the problem. And yet, "the system" is a lot of individuals making decisions. If you won't make them, how do you expect everyone else to?
It's like someone promoting veganism but continuing to eat meat themselves. I wouldn't believe that person is actually worried about meat consumption.
Again, you don't need to sell me on the whole idea, I already have a much lighter footprint than you (barely any traveling, no air-travel, no car, very well-insulated flat and all that jazz). Yet if you want to convince me that you're serious and I should do more, you'll have to do more. If you're racking up 40k miles in a plane every other year, I have trouble believing you. And from looking at the average person, they're not reaching those numbers either, so I find it very understandable if they have doubts as well.
It's a trivial solution, though it might not be easy to do for each person to give up their habits and luxuries. We don't need to outlaw air-travel or design complicated tax-schemes to disincentivize it, we just need to stop traveling by plane.
The complexity comes from "okay, but I don't want to do that, what other ways are there", and I don't think there are many.
How about you "get behind those ideas" because they are factual, based on widely accepted science and policy consensus and just generally a good idea. Why is that not enough for you?
Demanding people do stuff that they already told you they know won't help solve the actual problem before you agree with objective reality seems pretty childish?
The ideas are, from what I can tell, to further limit my quality of life while those making the demands are not. Why should that be enough for me?
And why wouldn't e.g. less plane travel help with the problem? Their demands are for people to travel less by plane ... it's just that it should be other people, not them.
So these people you know are, for no stated reason, wanting to abitrarily limit your quality of life and that of everyone else who isn't them, and yet you claimed you could be easily won over to their side if they just personally flew less themselves?
Those people sound terrible, and you shouldn't let them convince you, I'm confused as to why you would be so open to their arguments, they sound terrible.
I mistakenly thought you were talking about real people who actually exist, who know that systemic action is required to deal with climate change and called you out on your obvious concern trolling about their personal choices within the current system. Agreeing with those people would make sense, because they are correct, which is generally a good rule of thumb when deciding who to agree with, hence my assumption that you were talking about them when you said you nearly agreed with them (though still confused about why'd you'd hold back on that agreement based on things unrelated to the actual issue).
>Well, it isn't the only thing that's required. What is also required is the alternative energy products to be available to consumers at attractive prices.
And before any wise ass says the solution is "just" to tax dirty energy I would like to remind everyone to stop projecting stupidity and apathy onto the general public. A couple percent here and there to incentive things at the margin may fly but if their energy bills double they're not gonna just roll over and take it. At the next opportunity they'll vote you out of office because that is the more direct and more effective way of solving their immediate problem of financial hardship.
You could just nationalize these inefficient plutocratic utilities and provide free renewable energy, but that's communism
I don't know why the answer is always to make the serfs pay more when a more attractive and simple solution would be, I don't know, not having private jets and fossil fuel subsidies and ...
Even the kibbutzim had to introduce energy meters in their semi-utopian communities, because with no personal interest in keeping their bills low, some people would just waste communal energy.
There isn't any personal incentive not to waste a free resource, save individual conscientiousness, which many people score low upon.
> You could just nationalize these inefficient plutocratic utilities and provide free renewable energy, but that's communism
This is a joke right? Using other people's money doesn't make it free. You have to pay for it with taxes.
Whether it's government or private is mostly tangential to cost. It's not like municipalities with utility co-ops pay tons more or less. The differences seem to mostly be around what the accountability looks like when the utility inevitably screws up (Flint, PG&E, etc, etc).
Those fossil fuel subsidies are what's making the serfs (your word) pay less for energy than otherwise; removing them would increase the price of fossil fuels.
California (specifically the CPUC, as servant of the for-profit utilities here) is choosing to make electricity extremely expensive, which is making it short-term economically less favorable than it could be to switch.
I have an EV, which makes sense economically especially because I can charge somewhere that power isn't produced or delivered by PG&E. But I burn gas to keep warm because my own home electricity is too expensive.
Municipalities are removing residents' ability to choose by banning gas. I expect this will accelerate the failure of companies like PG&E (and the grid) by driving new construction to be off-grid. I've been inching my way there on my own home. Cars as storage batteries is inevitable and will be game changing.
In about two years I will have an egregious excess of solar capacity. And hopefully no grid connection. I'd love to have a way to use that excess to suck carbon out of the air and ideally make a product I can use out of it. Pyrolitic graphite sheets would be fantastic, or liquid hydrocarbons I can burn in my legacy vehicles or a backup generator. But I would settle for something I can throw away and have buried in a landfill.
Sure, but you seem willing to instead get something high in carbon that’s economically valueless and pay to bury it in the ground. That seems unlikely to be more carbon-efficient than curtailing someone else’s use of the fuel of last resort.
Right, but I'm not trying to optimize carbon efficiency. And neither are the regulators. If they were trying to reduce GHG emissions, they'd keep the nuclear plants operational, try to drive down the price of electricity relative to everything else, and have better pricing to feed in to the grid.
As it is, the cheapest way for me to get electricity is to buy a turbine generator and burn natural gas myself. Which is completely insane.
That's a total fantasy. New construction in urban / suburban areas is never going to be off grid. The only homes that can even potentially be off grid are detached houses in rural areas with enough space for large solar panels and battery storage. Denser housing simply lacks the space. In most cities I don't think you could even get a building permit or certificate of occupancy without a grid connection.
Since PG&E is a regulated monopoly it is too big to fail. The CPUC and other parts of the state government will simply change the rules to ensure that PG&E continues operating in some form.
The SFBA is, for better or for worse, largely zoned R-1 for single family home construction. At that density just about everyone gets enough sunlight to support their needs.
In my previous place - a townhouse where I owned much less roof - I still got enough sunlight to fully cover my needs.
PG&E is primarily a transmission company, and the demand for that is going to dwindle as the cost rises far faster than inflation. Distribution will fracture into smaller islands, potentially at the municipal level. We're already seeing the writing on the wall with new apartment complexes setting up "virtual power plants".
It's just not going to make sense to put a plant dozens of miles away from where the power gets used. The infrastructure is too expensive compared to local generation. That pendulum could swing back if Western cost disease were somehow cured.
Would you be willing to pay to offset your carbon usage sans the market pricing it into the price of goods and services you already consumed? Right now, there's no reason to suspect the market creators of the world WILL nor CAN force carbon offsets into market prices.
There are options to reduce your carbon footprint but from my experience they've been captured by sleazy companies with deceptive practices.
I get a letter regularly telling me to switch my energy to green by signing up for this service where I'll pay more. But if you read the fine print you're not actually switching to green energy. You're paying more for the same energy and they're taking the money and doing something with it that is maybe green? Giving it to green companies? I don't know but it's not what I immediately thought when I saw the main claim.
Same is true with solar panels where they finance it through a senior lien on your property while all the calculations of savings are based on current subsidy levels. And they're budening people with senior debt that can prevent them from selling their home in the future without paying off the senior claim or passing it on.
You even see it with EV cars where the listed price includes cost savings from gas. It's just dishonest. You don't see that math on fuel efficient cars.
If a homeowner has an existing mortgage (as most do), I doubt the solar companies are getting a senior lien on the property. (How could they without the consent of the existing senior lien holder?)
Exactly what I'm talking about. Most people don't know this and get duped into thinking the solar panels are a personal loan.
> Lender Notification and Consent: Existing property lenders must receive notification and give approval for C-PACE financing in most states. This is important because C-PACE loans displace other liens. Normally, R-PACE loans don’t require consent from the mortgage lender. [0]
> One of the biggest risks of the PACE program is the risk for foreclosure. The contract for the funding will act as a lien on the property. If you fall behind on your payments, you risk losing their home or business to foreclosure. Even if you're current on your mortgage payments, the PACE program moves in front of it, and they can start foreclosure proceedings. [1]
Right. So commercial (C-PACE) require the original first lien to approve. However residential (R-PACE) don't require the original first lien's approval (the bank that gave them the mortgage). So if its a bad financial decision, the mortgage borrower can't interject. And residential PACE participants can be duped into taking a second lien on their property that they won't be able to discharge and will have to pay back in full if they want to sell their homes. You can go from a healthy loan to value to being underwater with the stroke of a pen.
And the R-PACE lender, being the junior lienholder, is the one at risk of losing money if the homeowner defaults and the house doesn’t sell for enough, which makes the system have a built-in limit.
The primary lienholder doesn’t get a chance to object because there’s no reason for them to be able to object. Their economic position is not hindered by a junior loan and as a homeowner, I’d be incredibly annoyed if my mortgage holder had a right to butt in to and potentially block any secondary financing I wanted to do. C-PACE requires approval because the current senior lienholder has to agree to give up their senior position.
The primary lien holder absolutely has a right object (practically not legally). Because its a lien senior to the original lien. So in case of a foreclosure, the PACE loans would be repaid first. No other loan can trump seniority of the primary lien. PACE is an exception by law
For instance, if someone buys a home for 100k putting down 20k (standard 20% in the US). Then the owner takes out a PACE loan for 20k, the loan to value for the bank is now 100% (as opposed to original 80%). In case of foreclosure, the 20k PACE is paid down first or becomes the obligation of the buyer. And these panel depreciate, so its unlikely the panels are worth 20k after a few years. So in case its liquidated for 70k, the PACE gets paid off 20k, and the bank gets 50k. Without the loan, the bank would get their back 70k.
The R-PACE loan principal is not senior to the senior lienholder's position. Past due payments (only) are treated as tax obligations, meaning that only past due payments are senior to the first mortgage holder. In your example the original bank would likely get well over $65K of the $70K sales price, and the new buyer would be on the hook for the remaining (not yet due) PACE loan.
> The R-PACE loan principal is not senior to the senior lienholder's position.
That's not correct. The loan is on the property not the person taking out the loan. And it is a senior claim to any other potential claim since its technically a tax obligation.
>> Potential resistance by lenders/mortgage-holders whose claims to the property may be subordinated to the unpaid assessment amount should the property go into foreclosure. [0]
>> For consumers, PACE type programs have several problems if programs are not properly designed and administrated. Because the financing is designed to stay with the property, eligibility is based primarily on property information rather than income and FICO scores ... A problem with PACE for both residential lenders and consumers is that the tax liens for PACE financing take priority over other lien-holders, and those lien-holders may not be notified or given an opportunity to object [1]
The buyer of a property would have to pay that loan down although, like you said, not immediately. That's because the loan is on the property, rather than the individual who took it out.
Not GP, but in a cold winter month in New England, I can easily be over $700 for combined electric and natural gas (not all of which is fossil fuel, of course; some is distribution, taxes, salaries of workers, capital recovery, etc).
It’s a 1920s structural brick house with limited insulation, 1950s boiler converted to gas. My year-round average is just under $500/mo for the house and around $80/mo for our 25mpg Honda CR-V (other car is a LEAF).
Retrofitting the house to modern insulation is not remotely cost-effective. (We’ve already done the low-hanging fruit.) Modern boiler conversion is on the schedule for next summer, but driven in large part by wanting to reclaim space in the basement. Economically, that project probably won’t pay for itself either (absent the value of the space reclaimed). Buying a 40 mpg car to replace our perfectly functional 25 mpg 2005 CR-V to save $30/mo in fuel is economically nonsensical as well.
Fossil fuels are incredibly cheap and their cheapness makes them attractive to continue burning. As long as they stay cheap, people will continue to extract the surplus value from them.
We cannot get even the most basic thing done in our own country (wear a mask to protect yourself and the people around you).
Any vision of cooperation in the future must factor in some of the insanity we have seen over the last few years. And my words and views are only from inside the US. Imagine having to get everyone on the globe to agree to something. I am certain there are large groups of crazies in every country who think this is god's plan or just want everything to burn for their own reasons.
Maybe if there are some Hollywood sized extinction events that can be traced back to climate change. But even then you will get large groups of people claiming it did not happen. Or was caused by some race. Or will claim Bill Gates caused climate change.
What I am really saying is cooperation inside of a supposed group of United States is currently impossible. Now do that across the globe. If we have to act now in unison to save ourselves we are in fact doomed.
I see a lot of mask wearing where it’s legally mandated. I see limited mask wearing where it’s not required. Neither of those is surprising, of course.
That seems like it’s compatible with a framework for atmospheric carbon reduction. I think the challenges are mostly economic and technical, not societal.
In New York City, I have been seeing decreased compliance with mask mandates as the pandemic has gone on. It really seems like people have limited capacity to comply with unpleasant rules. Carbon rules may end up in the same category, with rampant noncompliance.
This is where policy has to be focused on the science, both environmental and medical. For example, cloth masks did little during the Delta phase of Covid (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fFCYv0X4kf4). Another issue that even where people wore cloth masks, many did not wear them properly. They had their noses sticking out (which transmit more than their mouths). They had beards, which allow the virus out through air gaps caused by the hair. The States that pushed for cloth masks essentially prompted hygiene theater. Research out of Ontario shows that for men under 40, it's probably a good idea to limit the number of required boosters (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzVoS-1TIWI).
We need to take a measured approach to environmental changes too. Suddenly causing the US or any other advanced economy to have rolling blackouts will probably not help humanity in the long run. Instead it will continue the political vitriol. We can't mandate all houses have solar because that places the already expensive house out the reach of the poor, which we see happening in California.
You might be right that resolving climate change may be politically impossible.
But…what we saw emerge at COP26 - spearheaded by John Kerry - is an _attempt_ to get around this problem.
By (1) a demand-side response, ie not dependent on regulating against fossil fuel extraction, and (2) creating groups of first movers who will invest to reduce demand and dependence on fossil fuels and force a market adjustment.
Will it work? Who knows. But there’s a lot depending on it!
The laws of thermodynamics mean we'll have to expend at least as much energy removing CO2 as we did emissing it initially.
Right now, from what google searching I've done, the best option would be planting the fastest growing bamboo species and sequestering them once cut down. The sequestering is 'tough', but I suspect more surmountable via a range of means than other carbon removal strategies. Anything else is a poor approximation of a tree.
Regular forests work just fine, and we have been doing logging for a while so sequestration is not a problem. We just need to do it more, and selectively, not cutting down everything at once.
The laws of thermodynamics doesn't take into account the assumption that future energy production is cheaper then today's.
If there is a change in energy production like a breakthrough in fusion or an over production of renewables, it is at least theoretically possible that would be cheaper to remove then to not emit
Right. The costs of future production have to be less than they were in the past or it’s even worse. Regardless though it represents a huge transfer of wealth from the future to the past.
Even if we get working fusion power the laws of thermodynamics tell us that it's not going to be much cheaper than current fission power. The heat will be generated in a different way but the process for using that heat to boil water and spin a turbine will be basically the same. That means huge capital investments and then constant maintenance to keep everything running.
When you’re talking about thermal power generation - the process is the same in any power plant, so you could use your same argument with gas, coal, or geothermal - all steam and turbines. It’s not fair to use this to just make the comparison to nuclear power alone.
You're gaining energy in combustion by going from CH4/etc + O2 and producing CO2 + H2O.
The added energy comes from breaking those carbon-hydrogen bonds.
You're then sequestering CO2. Not C2. You're not doing anything other than concentration.
Yes it takes energy to re-concentrate it for sequestration. No, that's not necessary as much energy as you gain from combustion. It's energy positive overal from a thermodynamic perspective.
Yes, practicalities make that more energy intensive and more difficult (e.g. capture after emission into the air instead of from a high concentration source), but it's not quite what folks keep articulating when claiming "thermodynamics demands that this takes at least as much energy".
The original article is about those practalities and whether or not they amount to more energy than what's released during combustion. It's far from obvious whether or not they do overall, though.
Unless what you call emitting energy to be what you gain by dispersing it into the air (that we never capture, by the way), the energy cost of removing CO2 can be orders of magnitude lower than what we get by burning it. And if you are talking about the dispersion only, then it's exactly the same.
If you look at the chemical reaction of a hydrocarbon and then what CO2 sequestration is you’ll see that it’s still within the laws of thermodynamics.
You’d potentially have a thermodynamics problem if you were trying to remake synthetic fuel from the air and hydrogen. And even if you’re doing that - there’s still an argument that it’s better to recycle the carbon than to continue to dig it out of the ground.
This is going to be very difficult. But we should be able to do it if all of us thought real hard about it.
Think of how to remove CO2 most efficiently from the air. Then scale to global while keeping it cheap.
Then get all the world citizens involved. We can have movies, concerts, video games, political campaigns, social media campaigns, support from big tech like Apple, Alphabet, Amazon.
Then when all the world citizens will come together and they will push together, this will be achievable and we will win the race against time and humanity will survive and thrive.
It is not impossible. Because impossible means i m possible.
> Then get all the world citizens involved. We can have movies, concerts, video games, political campaigns, social media campaigns, support from big tech like Apple, Alphabet, Amazon.
The problem here is that we will, once again, ask developing nations to also pull the weight and pay the cost that allowed developed countries to reach their current position.
Why is it a problem? They are people too and they too contribute to climate change.
I can understand reducing the demands on them appropriately, but letting them off the hook completely does not really make sense to me.
At the end of the day, you do not want to create any totally exempted zones (carbon tax paradises?), because that is where the polluting industry will move if having the opportunity to do so.
The only thing that makes it difficult is human nature. We already know how to remove co2 from the air. Plant large amounts of fast growing plants like bamboo, sequester them after they grow. Repeat. But there is no financial incentive to do so, and therefore it doesn't happen. This is not a technical program. It's a persuasion problem and therefore way more difficult to pull off.
"Plant large amounts of fast growing plants like bamboo, sequester them after they grow. "
Where? Good soil that supports fast growing plants is generally used for growing food. Poor soil won't do.
Not to mention the risk of habitat destruction. See: palm oil production, once considered ecological, now understood as a danger to tropical rainforests.
Ideally, you would have to do this in a non-corrupt, not very much populated, country that has warm climate, a lot of rain and a lot of good soil. IDK who exactly fulfills these criteria.
This is probably more of a feature than a problem. Those are the exact countries that we are asking to shoulder a higher burden than the others since they are behind the curve on development. If richer countries provided financial opportunities via this with proper oversight it might overcome some of the pushback from those countries. But again, this is a human problem not a technical one.
It was cheaper to stop emitting ten, twenty, thirty years ago, but capitalism can't see very far ahead. People are making too much money still, and societies are too slow to change without immediate incentives. Whether it's cheaper or not is irrelevant if we are incapable of action, so, we'll have to pull it out of the air anyway.
Please, let's stop being silly and start being realistic. We aren't going to meet the lofty emissions targets or pull GHGs from the atmosphere. It's just not viable. Even if we halted emissions completely today it wouldn't be enough.
Let's think about what we're actually trying to prevent. Mainly heatwaves and natural disasters. We could use geoengineering to try to reduce the impact of such disasters, build things with resiliency, and relocate people from disaster zones as a start. The vulnerable land can be repurposed for crops. This would be by far the cheapest option.
Exactly. Stratospheric aerosol injections are ready to roll today. They're extremely well understood because we have so many historical records of natural volcano eruptions lowering global temperatures. The technology is already mature. The cost is dirt cheap. On the order of $10 billion/year to completely neutralize all warming since the industrial revolution.
Are stratospheric aerosols perfect? No, of course not. There's still peripheral issues associated with ocean acidification. It's also not a permanent solution, since the aerosols have to be refreshed every year. But the tech solves 90%+ of the issues with climate change instantly. It also requires no global coordination that's been the perennial issue with emissions reductions. It's cheap enough that even a mid-sized military could unilaterally undertake it.
There's absolutely zero reason that we shouldn't start a pilot program today. Start testing at small doses equivalent to 0.1 C temperature reduction, then scale up quickly over the next 10 years.
While actual climatologists advocate for programs that require an unprecedented level of societal and governmental cooperation? Seems to me a partially proven out technology technology that can be done unilaterally is more feasible than a a cooperative initiate that to this point has zero success. Hell, China has slid back on CFC's, something that was supposed to be solved in the 80's. International cooperation is a pipe dream. Global politics are zero sum game and always will be.
"90%+ of the issues with climate change instantly"
Reducing the global warming (average global temperature) isn't the same as solving climate change. The stratospheric aerosols will affect regions differently and in uncertain ways, just like global warming itself. You also still have the rest of the climate change to deal with, such as ocean acidification, and any other effects of CO2.
I totally support spraying, but I also am scared that it will be like giving a heroin addict a narcan autoinjector on the condition that they stop using heroin.
After decades of 'oh whoops, this new compound we created has enormous unknown consequences, how could we have known' we should just accept that technology is going to get us out of this mess? Count me out, i will fight geo-engineering tooth and nail.
It is not a viable choice, its just the choice that doesn't require any hard decisions or changes.
You know, this is why people keep saying climate change is a religion. A solution can't be just effective, it also has to be _right_. You can't even play with geoengineering because it's sacrilege. We have to abase ourselves and pay the sacrificial price in order to be clean and worthy again.
Every practical solution is rejected out of hand. Carbon capture? Nah. Nuclear power? Dirty. Simply doing the math and trying to be efficient in what we cut? Racist. Suggesting it might not be all bad? Straight out sacrilege.
I actually support nuclear, oddly enough. And I'm not arguing anything out of hand. I would posit that the only rational position to take, when the situation has relentlessly worsened over generations, is to be suspicious of large scale environmental interference.
It genuinely requires religious faith to believe that geo-engineering would be successful without significant consequences.
You position myself and others taking my position as religious zealots, but tell me: why is it so upsetting to you that i might question technology's ability to save us? And why would it upset you so much, that i might not consider humanity in its current state, to be worth saving if it meant risking the global ecosystem?
Humanism is a sick cult, and technologism even more so. Both will destroy us and the planet we live on.
Relocating people (whether intentionally or not) will be what destroys humanity first.
There is no scenario where billions of people leave the tropics and integrate conflict free into northern society. It's not even just down to cultural or racial issues, an agrarian population doesn't have many places to fit in an industrial economy and has no places to fit in a service economy.
Think of climate rise as your body's temperature rising: when you're 1°C over normal, you're sick but that's manageable. When you're at +2°C you're really sick; 4°C over normal your life is at stake.
Or think about this: 20000 years ago, Scandinavia, Canada were under 2 or 3 km of ice (like Greenland today). The oceans were 120 meters lower than today. Most of today's temperate countries (Europe, USA, China) were a cold tundra with reindeer, wholly rhinos, bison and mammoths, cave bears and cave lions. In these harsh conditions, only a few hundred thousand humans could scrape by; and the average globe temperature was only 4 to 5°C lower than in 1850 (let that sink in).
The 4°C temperature rise that brought us the neolithic revolution, agriculture and the first population explosion, was a 4000 years affair. Now we're talking of bringing a similar change over the course of 100 years, on a crowded planet of 8 billion people. The question isn't "what could go wrong?" at this point, but can we imagine ways out of a looming catastrophe?
Figuring out the magnitude of what's coming. Almost everyone still seems to believe that "2°C, who cares, I'll just wear a lighter jacket" or something like that.
My bet is that we'll be crushed between a degraded environment, with declining agricultural yield, more pandemias, etc, and reduced energy availability (no energy == no economy == no efficient action against climate change). Don't worry, you'll live interesting times (as the Chinese curse goes).
Europe will be short on energy most probably around 2025 (all of its oil and gas suppliers are already in decline). That could be pretty bad by itself. Also, +1.5°C is generally anticipated for 2030, and it could be really bad, too. Both together: huge pain is almost a given.
Deeper in geological history we can see what happened at 4 degrees warmer. The result was mass extinction and much less life on the planet, mostly clustered around the poles. Equatorial regions were uninhabitable. Sea levels were quite a bit higher.
No. Earth for the past 2 million years has been in an ice age, several degrees cooler than the hundreds of millions of years before, when there was plenty of life thriving.
quote:
"1.5°C is a disastrous world, no question. 2°C is an impossible world".
I have nothing more to reply to your complacent stupidity but that you're dangerously ignorant and denying basic science because it's inconvenient to your beliefs.
It's pretty sobering to see this toxic mindset so common in the techno-optimist crowd of HN. But this is nothing else than wishful thinking -- the science data is absolutely overwhelming.
That 1ºC over normal is the yearly average global temperature. It doesn't increase evenly over the globe (in the arctic has been over 4ºC, a region where permafrost thawing and ice melting will worsen the problem) and is causing extreme weather events all around the world. Temperature don't uniformly rise by 1ºC evenly all days, for all regions, nice and slowly, but you have weeks with over 40ºC or extreme sub zero temperatures, droughts and floods caused by big storms, hurricanes and so on.
And with more global average temperature you will have even more extreme weather. With wet bulb temperatures you can have a lot of deaths of people that won't see how "the average" will eventually bring colder days.
And it is not a sustained speed change. Positive feedback loops are triggered, adding emissions, reducing Earth's albedo, causing forest fires and so on that will speed up things even if we stop doing emissions.
And remember that are not emissions the ones that are directly rising temperature, but decades of excess of greenhouse gases that keep more heat than what we emit. And that we only stop worsening things by the time we manage to reduce what is in the atmosphere (not just what we keep adding). If somewhat things get rough and we want to drop temperature urgently, dropping by then emissions won't do the trick, we need to capture a century of emitted carbon plus what is being emitted by feedback loops.
It's cheaper from the point of view of entire societies, or the planet. But it's much more expensive from the point of view of a company to stop emitting now, compared to having someone else in the future pay to pull carbon from the air.
It might be cheaper in the present, but we’re richer in the future, and can afford more, because we have invested the savings in the meantime. Article fails to mention discount rates and like assumptions, so I am unable to compare and determine which trend is more powerful.
Maybe the paper is better?
> We find that discount rates of less than about 2% would make the perceived cumulative costs of most 1.5 and 2 °C scenarios overall less costly without overshoot (see Fig. 2c for the cumulative GDP losses and Supplementary Fig. 1.1-13 for the net present value (NPV) of the carbon price). Assuming higher discount rates on the other hand would favour relatively delayed mitigation with overshoot.
Wow!!! 2% is pretty damn low in terms of discount rate assumptions. Contrary to the article, this paper would advocate against immediate action unless you hold some pretty extreme assumptions. Typical values for the discount rate are more like 3-5% in developed countries, and they can be especially high (like 7-15%) in developing countries.
(The overall merit of intervention now vs later in reality, and not just in this paper, is left as an exercise to others.)
Yes, but this neatly ignores the reason this can't work: to WHOM does it cost more?
The polluters make money now. I bet many are even planning how they'll make money from the damage they're causing. Later costs borne by governments of the world are a potential benefit, not any sort of disincentive at all.
So long as politicians are bought and sold, and so long as capitalism is allowed to run full speed ahead with no regulation, the whole planet will be victim to today's greediness.
The article is totally unconvincing. It estimates 2% higher GDP in 80 years, with initial effects in 50 years. 2% over 80 years is ridiculously low ROI, spending money on literally any other kind of infrastructure will have better returns. That's disregarding that it's a very long term economic prediction, which makes it ridiculously unlikely to be correct.
No one knows what technology will be created that will have an impact on the severity and costs of climate change.
Much better to make progress as fast as possible with research and scientific progress than diverting time and resources to endeavours that will only marginally slow down the pending catastrophe and have the side effect of slowing progress toward solutions that actually solve the underlying problem (dependence on fossil fuels).
The only way out is by increasing our knowledge so we can actually solve the problem. The other way is parochialism and staticity.
Do you, at least, know why the Paris agreement set the limit at 1.5 degrees?
Because over 1.5° we will hit points of non return and feedback loops like the permafrost one. There is no coming back after that, we are talking about a food crisis. We are talking about parts of the earth which won't be possible to cultivate.
I have found nothing so far which convinces me that below 1.5°C rather than below 2.4°C protects us any more or less from positive feedback loops.
There seems to be a lot frightening going around with regards to tipping points into positive feedback loops however if those exist and are so bad how comes that climate models don't show those and rather show that it is possible to reach equilibrium over 2°C?
The excessive focus on carbon will eventually need to change.
The problem is average surface temperature, to which atmospheric carbon levels are only one of many drivers.
The most important driver of surface temperature is TSI. [1]. TSI can be economically moderated, as-needed, to cool the Earth. [2]
If we (as in Humans) ever decide we truly need to do such a thing, we can have all the infrastructure in place within a decade and for merely a few trillion dollars.
Perfectly reasonable for all the carbon to be left in the atmosphere when you control TSI directly through refracting a small percentage (e.g. 0.1%) of TSI by launching moon dust at L2.
People don’t want to admit it’s a relatively* easily solved technological problem, because then the social moderation aspect becomes less existential.
The book “Termination Shock” covered the topic of aerosols in the stratosphere to reduce temperature while we work on actually improving the climate. The book itself is a decent read, but the science behind the premise is surprisingly well researched and understood.
One of the unspoken critiques in the book is that “climate activists” will shun good solutions in favor of a perfect solution, even if the perfect solution is impossible to achieve. Reading the comments here it seems this particular bit of fiction is already playing out in reality.
Can we… organize the governments of the entire world to work toward a singular goal? A goal that will cost a hundred trillion dollars? A goal that we’ve been trying to achieve for decades with virtually zero success?
Or… spend $10B per year on geoengineering. We’re approaching the supposed runaway climate temperature. Shall we act now and do what we can while we wait for technology to advance? Or shall we doom humanity to an uncertain future by refusing to adopt trivially cheap mitigation options?
150 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] thread"At present there are no proven technologies capable of large-scale air capture of CO2. It has been suggested that, with strong research and development support and industrial scale pilot projects sustained over decades, costs as low as ∼$500/tC may be achievable [226]. Thermodynamic constraints [227] suggest that this cost estimate may be low. An assessment by the American Physical Society [228] argues that the lowest currently achievable cost, using existing approaches, is much greater ($600/tCO2 or $2200/tC)."
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
There's also a cost of reduction that's not factored into most model, the cost of coordination. A model can just say "suppose every country restricts their carbon emissions to X%" but that would require a lot of coordination and implications on state sovereignty that aren't factored in. There's also the enforcement and game theory aspects that would have to be addressed.
> “Betting on being able to bring temperatures down after a larger overshoot is very risky because of the uncertain technological feasibility and because of the possibility of setting off irreversible processes in the earth system with even a temporary temperature overshoot,” wrote second author Christoph Bertram, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, in an email to Ars Technica. “Furthermore, such an approach would be unfair to future generations, as it basically would shift more of the mitigation burden on them.”
Future generations are likely to be much wealthier than ours. Imagine your great grandparents saving their pennies to buy a nice set of doilys to pass down to you?
I'm skeptical any tech would go below the price of simply planting trees or growing algae.
I’m not sure this is an appropriate metaphor.
Partly because a doily in your example is construed as an asset, whereas adaptation to climate (our bequest to our grandchildren) is a cost.
Secondly because apportionment of the costs and benefits will not be equitable. In the west, we benefit disproportionately from burning fossil fuels, but it will be future people in developing states who disproportionately bear the costs.
Thirdly, because the costs of climate change might run very high indeed. Look for reviews of Nordstrom’s climate economics to understand some of his appalling modeling assumptions.
https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-condit...
Wealthy countries had already industrialized. Poor countries were starting from a _very_ low base. They’re still a lot poorer and their contribution to historical emissions is small.
Re the metrics you present, I agree against those things are much improved. But I sometimes wonder whether those metrics are very western centric, chosen by technocrats to make themselves look good. In the context of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, I suspect people in many of these places are in a worse position than they were pre-colonialism. Particularly in terms of self-actualization. But on the other levels too.
I say this as a former technocrat.
2. this one is tied into #1. People in developing countries have more access to capital markets and therefore more access to higher yielding products
3. Average annual hours actually worked per worker (OECD) shows a downward trend among practically all countries [1]
[0] https://voxeu.org/article/financial-market-development-econo...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_time#/media/File:Annua...
Where's your evidence that future generations are going to be richer than ours, though? We're leaving them with a massive problem to deal with that's going to suck up an increasing amount of wealth over time if we don't do anything about it (which nobody's committed to doing).
Not sure if this is a US ideology or what, but it definitely seems to be a prevalent view in the states
(look eg under "Many across the world willing to change how they live and work to reduce effects of climate change")
Also many questions were not related to concerns for effects on the personal sphere, eg "Willing to change how they live and work to combat the effects of global warming" which also got high scores.
Those questions may be good ones for people who are concerned about climate change, but who is going to be persuaded to take action by the argument they induce?
To be persuasive to consumers now, a cost comparison has to appeal to the consumer's hip pocket right now. More like one of these format:
Are you paying too much for gas? Click to save 25% on your next tank.
Save 47% on home heating costs this winter.
Send your kids to college with the money you save over the lifetime of your next car.
It's difficult to do in the context of the article but that's what's required to change behaviour.
Well, it isn't the only thing that's required. What is also required is the alternative energy products to be available to consumers at attractive prices.
How do we make that happen?
As an ordinary person who pays for energy but isn't an energy scientist, I don't know. That's why I'm still spending $700 a month on fossil fuels.
But give me a way and I'll click on it.
Yes it’ll be more expensive to remove carbon dioxide from the air in the future but i will be dead by then, so why do I care? Also this moral hazard is made worst by decision makers whose financial outcomes are tied to not adopting extreme climate measures.
Especially those without children, taking the long view of society seems to be very difficult.
No, but people care about their descendants, rich or poor.
It’s only ever something that holds the working and middle class down.
Hey, that's me! But more importantly, I'm not super worried about it in general. I consider it mostly a number of engineering problems (making things more efficient, consuming less energy while doing the same, dealing with climate change).
At the same time, I see plenty of people who say they're super concerned about it hopping from one plane to the next. When questioned, they say that talking about their individual contributions would just deflect from talking about "the system". If you want me to get behind those ideas (and that's a pretty easy sell, tbh, I'd barely have to change my lifestyle), you (not you specifically, I don't know you) need to act as if you mean it.
So far it feels like the upper class saying the lower classes shouldn't travel, eat exotic food or meat, drive cars or heat their homes, while they obviously do all of those things. From my limited circle of friends, that's a pretty common perception, even among those with children.
Air travel could use alternative fuel sources (or even solar) and I'm sure other large carbon emitters like concrete will become more efficient. What I'm not sure is that the richest 1% of the globe are willing to live like everyone else to avoid cooking the planet and passing that cost onto everyone else.
I travel by plane once or twice a year, haven't had meat in years, own a car with good fuel efficiency, heat my home with gas, and it still doesn't register on the scale. If you want me to live like an ascetic to convince you that I am serious about the runaway consequences of increased average surface temperatures I don't know what to tell you. We are already seeing those effects, and it is doubtful that Miami, Dhubai, etc exist at the end of this century.
There is no way to adjust individual consumption fast enough to fully decarbonize industrial economies so as to avoid 2C+ increases. Hence the systems problem. Why is Australia and the US subsidizing fossil fuels? Who is served by firing up retired coalfire power plants to mine Bitcoin?
That's only looking at CO2, forget about our other biosphere limits (nitrogen, phosphorus to name a few) that we're rapidly approaching the ceiling of. Optimizing for profit means you have an incentive to gain today with tomorrow as collateral. Until companies and governments feel the full financial and human cost of their carbon economies we'll continue to get Chevron advertising about how it's all of our responsibility to turn off the lights when not in use, and that will somehow "turn off" climate change.
I think there is, and it's trivial: don't use products from industries that are large contributors.
The problem is that everybody wants to keep using them (understandable) and somehow also make them produce less (also understandable, but wishful thinking). Feels like they're asking other people to stop in order to achieve that goal.
Sure, each person can drive half as much, or we can ask half of the population to stop driving (or travel half as much, or buy half as much x, or use half as much y). Maybe not the top 0.1% (they don't seem to care at all), but these demands reliably come from the top 1-5%, who are also reliably unwilling to make substantial changes personally, with their much larger contributions to the problem. And yet, "the system" is a lot of individuals making decisions. If you won't make them, how do you expect everyone else to?
It's like someone promoting veganism but continuing to eat meat themselves. I wouldn't believe that person is actually worried about meat consumption.
Again, you don't need to sell me on the whole idea, I already have a much lighter footprint than you (barely any traveling, no air-travel, no car, very well-insulated flat and all that jazz). Yet if you want to convince me that you're serious and I should do more, you'll have to do more. If you're racking up 40k miles in a plane every other year, I have trouble believing you. And from looking at the average person, they're not reaching those numbers either, so I find it very understandable if they have doubts as well.
You have a weird definition of trivial.
The complexity comes from "okay, but I don't want to do that, what other ways are there", and I don't think there are many.
Demanding people do stuff that they already told you they know won't help solve the actual problem before you agree with objective reality seems pretty childish?
And why wouldn't e.g. less plane travel help with the problem? Their demands are for people to travel less by plane ... it's just that it should be other people, not them.
Those people sound terrible, and you shouldn't let them convince you, I'm confused as to why you would be so open to their arguments, they sound terrible.
I mistakenly thought you were talking about real people who actually exist, who know that systemic action is required to deal with climate change and called you out on your obvious concern trolling about their personal choices within the current system. Agreeing with those people would make sense, because they are correct, which is generally a good rule of thumb when deciding who to agree with, hence my assumption that you were talking about them when you said you nearly agreed with them (though still confused about why'd you'd hold back on that agreement based on things unrelated to the actual issue).
And before any wise ass says the solution is "just" to tax dirty energy I would like to remind everyone to stop projecting stupidity and apathy onto the general public. A couple percent here and there to incentive things at the margin may fly but if their energy bills double they're not gonna just roll over and take it. At the next opportunity they'll vote you out of office because that is the more direct and more effective way of solving their immediate problem of financial hardship.
I don't know why the answer is always to make the serfs pay more when a more attractive and simple solution would be, I don't know, not having private jets and fossil fuel subsidies and ...
There isn't any personal incentive not to waste a free resource, save individual conscientiousness, which many people score low upon.
This is a joke right? Using other people's money doesn't make it free. You have to pay for it with taxes.
Whether it's government or private is mostly tangential to cost. It's not like municipalities with utility co-ops pay tons more or less. The differences seem to mostly be around what the accountability looks like when the utility inevitably screws up (Flint, PG&E, etc, etc).
I have an EV, which makes sense economically especially because I can charge somewhere that power isn't produced or delivered by PG&E. But I burn gas to keep warm because my own home electricity is too expensive.
Municipalities are removing residents' ability to choose by banning gas. I expect this will accelerate the failure of companies like PG&E (and the grid) by driving new construction to be off-grid. I've been inching my way there on my own home. Cars as storage batteries is inevitable and will be game changing.
In about two years I will have an egregious excess of solar capacity. And hopefully no grid connection. I'd love to have a way to use that excess to suck carbon out of the air and ideally make a product I can use out of it. Pyrolitic graphite sheets would be fantastic, or liquid hydrocarbons I can burn in my legacy vehicles or a backup generator. But I would settle for something I can throw away and have buried in a landfill.
As it is, the cheapest way for me to get electricity is to buy a turbine generator and burn natural gas myself. Which is completely insane.
Since PG&E is a regulated monopoly it is too big to fail. The CPUC and other parts of the state government will simply change the rules to ensure that PG&E continues operating in some form.
In my previous place - a townhouse where I owned much less roof - I still got enough sunlight to fully cover my needs.
PG&E is primarily a transmission company, and the demand for that is going to dwindle as the cost rises far faster than inflation. Distribution will fracture into smaller islands, potentially at the municipal level. We're already seeing the writing on the wall with new apartment complexes setting up "virtual power plants".
It's just not going to make sense to put a plant dozens of miles away from where the power gets used. The infrastructure is too expensive compared to local generation. That pendulum could swing back if Western cost disease were somehow cured.
I'm not even sure what you're asking for here.
I get a letter regularly telling me to switch my energy to green by signing up for this service where I'll pay more. But if you read the fine print you're not actually switching to green energy. You're paying more for the same energy and they're taking the money and doing something with it that is maybe green? Giving it to green companies? I don't know but it's not what I immediately thought when I saw the main claim.
Same is true with solar panels where they finance it through a senior lien on your property while all the calculations of savings are based on current subsidy levels. And they're budening people with senior debt that can prevent them from selling their home in the future without paying off the senior claim or passing it on.
You even see it with EV cars where the listed price includes cost savings from gas. It's just dishonest. You don't see that math on fuel efficient cars.
> Lender Notification and Consent: Existing property lenders must receive notification and give approval for C-PACE financing in most states. This is important because C-PACE loans displace other liens. Normally, R-PACE loans don’t require consent from the mortgage lender. [0]
> One of the biggest risks of the PACE program is the risk for foreclosure. The contract for the funding will act as a lien on the property. If you fall behind on your payments, you risk losing their home or business to foreclosure. Even if you're current on your mortgage payments, the PACE program moves in front of it, and they can start foreclosure proceedings. [1]
[0] https://assetsamerica.com/pace-financing/
[1] https://www.mortgagecalculator.org/helpful-advice/pace-progr...
The primary lienholder doesn’t get a chance to object because there’s no reason for them to be able to object. Their economic position is not hindered by a junior loan and as a homeowner, I’d be incredibly annoyed if my mortgage holder had a right to butt in to and potentially block any secondary financing I wanted to do. C-PACE requires approval because the current senior lienholder has to agree to give up their senior position.
For instance, if someone buys a home for 100k putting down 20k (standard 20% in the US). Then the owner takes out a PACE loan for 20k, the loan to value for the bank is now 100% (as opposed to original 80%). In case of foreclosure, the 20k PACE is paid down first or becomes the obligation of the buyer. And these panel depreciate, so its unlikely the panels are worth 20k after a few years. So in case its liquidated for 70k, the PACE gets paid off 20k, and the bank gets 50k. Without the loan, the bank would get their back 70k.
That's not correct. The loan is on the property not the person taking out the loan. And it is a senior claim to any other potential claim since its technically a tax obligation.
>> Potential resistance by lenders/mortgage-holders whose claims to the property may be subordinated to the unpaid assessment amount should the property go into foreclosure. [0]
>> For consumers, PACE type programs have several problems if programs are not properly designed and administrated. Because the financing is designed to stay with the property, eligibility is based primarily on property information rather than income and FICO scores ... A problem with PACE for both residential lenders and consumers is that the tax liens for PACE financing take priority over other lien-holders, and those lien-holders may not be notified or given an opportunity to object [1]
The buyer of a property would have to pay that loan down although, like you said, not immediately. That's because the loan is on the property, rather than the individual who took it out.
[0] https://www.energy.gov/eere/slsc/property-assessed-clean-ene...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PACE_financing
It’s a 1920s structural brick house with limited insulation, 1950s boiler converted to gas. My year-round average is just under $500/mo for the house and around $80/mo for our 25mpg Honda CR-V (other car is a LEAF).
Retrofitting the house to modern insulation is not remotely cost-effective. (We’ve already done the low-hanging fruit.) Modern boiler conversion is on the schedule for next summer, but driven in large part by wanting to reclaim space in the basement. Economically, that project probably won’t pay for itself either (absent the value of the space reclaimed). Buying a 40 mpg car to replace our perfectly functional 25 mpg 2005 CR-V to save $30/mo in fuel is economically nonsensical as well.
Fossil fuels are incredibly cheap and their cheapness makes them attractive to continue burning. As long as they stay cheap, people will continue to extract the surplus value from them.
We cannot get even the most basic thing done in our own country (wear a mask to protect yourself and the people around you).
Any vision of cooperation in the future must factor in some of the insanity we have seen over the last few years. And my words and views are only from inside the US. Imagine having to get everyone on the globe to agree to something. I am certain there are large groups of crazies in every country who think this is god's plan or just want everything to burn for their own reasons.
Maybe if there are some Hollywood sized extinction events that can be traced back to climate change. But even then you will get large groups of people claiming it did not happen. Or was caused by some race. Or will claim Bill Gates caused climate change.
What I am really saying is cooperation inside of a supposed group of United States is currently impossible. Now do that across the globe. If we have to act now in unison to save ourselves we are in fact doomed.
That seems like it’s compatible with a framework for atmospheric carbon reduction. I think the challenges are mostly economic and technical, not societal.
We need to take a measured approach to environmental changes too. Suddenly causing the US or any other advanced economy to have rolling blackouts will probably not help humanity in the long run. Instead it will continue the political vitriol. We can't mandate all houses have solar because that places the already expensive house out the reach of the poor, which we see happening in California.
But…what we saw emerge at COP26 - spearheaded by John Kerry - is an _attempt_ to get around this problem.
By (1) a demand-side response, ie not dependent on regulating against fossil fuel extraction, and (2) creating groups of first movers who will invest to reduce demand and dependence on fossil fuels and force a market adjustment.
Will it work? Who knows. But there’s a lot depending on it!
Took major international cooperation to tackle that problem so people can obviously get together and coordinate an action plan.
Right now, from what google searching I've done, the best option would be planting the fastest growing bamboo species and sequestering them once cut down. The sequestering is 'tough', but I suspect more surmountable via a range of means than other carbon removal strategies. Anything else is a poor approximation of a tree.
If there is a change in energy production like a breakthrough in fusion or an over production of renewables, it is at least theoretically possible that would be cheaper to remove then to not emit
>The cost of raw uranium contributes about $0.0015/kWh to the cost of nuclear electricity, while in breeder reactors the uranium cost falls to $0.000015/kWh https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_p...
When you’re talking about thermal power generation - the process is the same in any power plant, so you could use your same argument with gas, coal, or geothermal - all steam and turbines. It’s not fair to use this to just make the comparison to nuclear power alone.
You're gaining energy in combustion by going from CH4/etc + O2 and producing CO2 + H2O.
The added energy comes from breaking those carbon-hydrogen bonds.
You're then sequestering CO2. Not C2. You're not doing anything other than concentration.
Yes it takes energy to re-concentrate it for sequestration. No, that's not necessary as much energy as you gain from combustion. It's energy positive overal from a thermodynamic perspective.
Yes, practicalities make that more energy intensive and more difficult (e.g. capture after emission into the air instead of from a high concentration source), but it's not quite what folks keep articulating when claiming "thermodynamics demands that this takes at least as much energy".
The original article is about those practalities and whether or not they amount to more energy than what's released during combustion. It's far from obvious whether or not they do overall, though.
Unless what you call emitting energy to be what you gain by dispersing it into the air (that we never capture, by the way), the energy cost of removing CO2 can be orders of magnitude lower than what we get by burning it. And if you are talking about the dispersion only, then it's exactly the same.
You’d potentially have a thermodynamics problem if you were trying to remake synthetic fuel from the air and hydrogen. And even if you’re doing that - there’s still an argument that it’s better to recycle the carbon than to continue to dig it out of the ground.
You then talk about trees (which aren’t free from the laws of thermodynamics). The process of a tree for fixing carbon is not efficient, typically less than 1%. See https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency
And that’s before you get to the step of sequestering the carbon locked up in the plants.
Think of how to remove CO2 most efficiently from the air. Then scale to global while keeping it cheap.
Then get all the world citizens involved. We can have movies, concerts, video games, political campaigns, social media campaigns, support from big tech like Apple, Alphabet, Amazon.
Then when all the world citizens will come together and they will push together, this will be achievable and we will win the race against time and humanity will survive and thrive.
It is not impossible. Because impossible means i m possible.
The problem here is that we will, once again, ask developing nations to also pull the weight and pay the cost that allowed developed countries to reach their current position.
I can understand reducing the demands on them appropriately, but letting them off the hook completely does not really make sense to me.
At the end of the day, you do not want to create any totally exempted zones (carbon tax paradises?), because that is where the polluting industry will move if having the opportunity to do so.
Developed nations should pay way more than others if you want to make it right.
Such paradises would only exist if we allowed them to exist. The same goes to tax heavens, we just opt to let them exist.
Where? Good soil that supports fast growing plants is generally used for growing food. Poor soil won't do.
Not to mention the risk of habitat destruction. See: palm oil production, once considered ecological, now understood as a danger to tropical rainforests.
Ideally, you would have to do this in a non-corrupt, not very much populated, country that has warm climate, a lot of rain and a lot of good soil. IDK who exactly fulfills these criteria.
Let's think about what we're actually trying to prevent. Mainly heatwaves and natural disasters. We could use geoengineering to try to reduce the impact of such disasters, build things with resiliency, and relocate people from disaster zones as a start. The vulnerable land can be repurposed for crops. This would be by far the cheapest option.
Are stratospheric aerosols perfect? No, of course not. There's still peripheral issues associated with ocean acidification. It's also not a permanent solution, since the aerosols have to be refreshed every year. But the tech solves 90%+ of the issues with climate change instantly. It also requires no global coordination that's been the perennial issue with emissions reductions. It's cheap enough that even a mid-sized military could unilaterally undertake it.
There's absolutely zero reason that we shouldn't start a pilot program today. Start testing at small doses equivalent to 0.1 C temperature reduction, then scale up quickly over the next 10 years.
Famous last words? It's funny how armchair climatologists claim to know the solutions for problems that aren't even fully understood...
Reducing the global warming (average global temperature) isn't the same as solving climate change. The stratospheric aerosols will affect regions differently and in uncertain ways, just like global warming itself. You also still have the rest of the climate change to deal with, such as ocean acidification, and any other effects of CO2.
After decades of 'oh whoops, this new compound we created has enormous unknown consequences, how could we have known' we should just accept that technology is going to get us out of this mess? Count me out, i will fight geo-engineering tooth and nail.
It is not a viable choice, its just the choice that doesn't require any hard decisions or changes.
Every practical solution is rejected out of hand. Carbon capture? Nah. Nuclear power? Dirty. Simply doing the math and trying to be efficient in what we cut? Racist. Suggesting it might not be all bad? Straight out sacrilege.
It genuinely requires religious faith to believe that geo-engineering would be successful without significant consequences.
You position myself and others taking my position as religious zealots, but tell me: why is it so upsetting to you that i might question technology's ability to save us? And why would it upset you so much, that i might not consider humanity in its current state, to be worth saving if it meant risking the global ecosystem?
Humanism is a sick cult, and technologism even more so. Both will destroy us and the planet we live on.
QED :) Can't have a proper religion without an outgroup to hate on.
We don't need to use new compounds, and they fall out of the air and stop doing things after a while.
There is no scenario where billions of people leave the tropics and integrate conflict free into northern society. It's not even just down to cultural or racial issues, an agrarian population doesn't have many places to fit in an industrial economy and has no places to fit in a service economy.
Think of climate rise as your body's temperature rising: when you're 1°C over normal, you're sick but that's manageable. When you're at +2°C you're really sick; 4°C over normal your life is at stake.
Or think about this: 20000 years ago, Scandinavia, Canada were under 2 or 3 km of ice (like Greenland today). The oceans were 120 meters lower than today. Most of today's temperate countries (Europe, USA, China) were a cold tundra with reindeer, wholly rhinos, bison and mammoths, cave bears and cave lions. In these harsh conditions, only a few hundred thousand humans could scrape by; and the average globe temperature was only 4 to 5°C lower than in 1850 (let that sink in).
The 4°C temperature rise that brought us the neolithic revolution, agriculture and the first population explosion, was a 4000 years affair. Now we're talking of bringing a similar change over the course of 100 years, on a crowded planet of 8 billion people. The question isn't "what could go wrong?" at this point, but can we imagine ways out of a looming catastrophe?
I'm pretty sure that people of the future will consider the time between 1950-2050 century to be the golden age of our current Civilization.
There are so many basically unsolvable issues on the horizon that I see absolutely no chance that our society will survive in it's current form.
My bet would be that we'll devolve into another form of aristocracy as soon as AI/automation make a human workforce mostly redundant.
Technological progress is likely going to stagnate entirely at that point, we all know how rich people generally behave without outside forces...
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/Oil-Major-Total-S...
https://www.woodmac.com/news/opinion/big-themes-and-risks-fo...
https://thebarentsobserver.com/en/industry-and-energy/2021/0...
OTOH, there's still enough coal to kill us all:
https://www.ft.com/content/4536bc72-6eb3-457d-b9a5-a94cc2669...
But we may lack the necessary mineral resources for "clean" transition:
https://www.iea.org/reports/the-role-of-critical-minerals-in...
My bet is that we'll be crushed between a degraded environment, with declining agricultural yield, more pandemias, etc, and reduced energy availability (no energy == no economy == no efficient action against climate change). Don't worry, you'll live interesting times (as the Chinese curse goes).
Seneca cliff, here we come!
I really don't see europe failing before 2050, and that was the time horizon i mentioned...
Also Hansen's book Storms of My Grandchildren has several chapters on the geological history.
https://youtu.be/1BDmIis9STE?t=464
quote: "1.5°C is a disastrous world, no question. 2°C is an impossible world".
I have nothing more to reply to your complacent stupidity but that you're dangerously ignorant and denying basic science because it's inconvenient to your beliefs.
It's pretty sobering to see this toxic mindset so common in the techno-optimist crowd of HN. But this is nothing else than wishful thinking -- the science data is absolutely overwhelming.
That 1ºC over normal is the yearly average global temperature. It doesn't increase evenly over the globe (in the arctic has been over 4ºC, a region where permafrost thawing and ice melting will worsen the problem) and is causing extreme weather events all around the world. Temperature don't uniformly rise by 1ºC evenly all days, for all regions, nice and slowly, but you have weeks with over 40ºC or extreme sub zero temperatures, droughts and floods caused by big storms, hurricanes and so on.
And with more global average temperature you will have even more extreme weather. With wet bulb temperatures you can have a lot of deaths of people that won't see how "the average" will eventually bring colder days.
And it is not a sustained speed change. Positive feedback loops are triggered, adding emissions, reducing Earth's albedo, causing forest fires and so on that will speed up things even if we stop doing emissions.
And remember that are not emissions the ones that are directly rising temperature, but decades of excess of greenhouse gases that keep more heat than what we emit. And that we only stop worsening things by the time we manage to reduce what is in the atmosphere (not just what we keep adding). If somewhat things get rough and we want to drop temperature urgently, dropping by then emissions won't do the trick, we need to capture a century of emitted carbon plus what is being emitted by feedback loops.
Maybe the paper is better?
> We find that discount rates of less than about 2% would make the perceived cumulative costs of most 1.5 and 2 °C scenarios overall less costly without overshoot (see Fig. 2c for the cumulative GDP losses and Supplementary Fig. 1.1-13 for the net present value (NPV) of the carbon price). Assuming higher discount rates on the other hand would favour relatively delayed mitigation with overshoot.
Wow!!! 2% is pretty damn low in terms of discount rate assumptions. Contrary to the article, this paper would advocate against immediate action unless you hold some pretty extreme assumptions. Typical values for the discount rate are more like 3-5% in developed countries, and they can be especially high (like 7-15%) in developing countries.
(The overall merit of intervention now vs later in reality, and not just in this paper, is left as an exercise to others.)
I thought this was one of the reasons Carl Sagan stepped up in the 1980's to try and make things like this understandable to non-scientists.
The polluters make money now. I bet many are even planning how they'll make money from the damage they're causing. Later costs borne by governments of the world are a potential benefit, not any sort of disincentive at all.
So long as politicians are bought and sold, and so long as capitalism is allowed to run full speed ahead with no regulation, the whole planet will be victim to today's greediness.
Much better to make progress as fast as possible with research and scientific progress than diverting time and resources to endeavours that will only marginally slow down the pending catastrophe and have the side effect of slowing progress toward solutions that actually solve the underlying problem (dependence on fossil fuels).
The only way out is by increasing our knowledge so we can actually solve the problem. The other way is parochialism and staticity.
Because over 1.5° we will hit points of non return and feedback loops like the permafrost one. There is no coming back after that, we are talking about a food crisis. We are talking about parts of the earth which won't be possible to cultivate.
https://youtu.be/1BDmIis9STE
Reading the comments here is like being on the "don't look up" set, and it's not funny.
Google feedback loops permafrost,please.
There seems to be a lot frightening going around with regards to tipping points into positive feedback loops however if those exist and are so bad how comes that climate models don't show those and rather show that it is possible to reach equilibrium over 2°C?
The problem is average surface temperature, to which atmospheric carbon levels are only one of many drivers.
The most important driver of surface temperature is TSI. [1]. TSI can be economically moderated, as-needed, to cool the Earth. [2]
If we (as in Humans) ever decide we truly need to do such a thing, we can have all the infrastructure in place within a decade and for merely a few trillion dollars.
Perfectly reasonable for all the carbon to be left in the atmosphere when you control TSI directly through refracting a small percentage (e.g. 0.1%) of TSI by launching moon dust at L2.
People don’t want to admit it’s a relatively* easily solved technological problem, because then the social moderation aspect becomes less existential.
[1] - https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/Glory/solar_irradiance/to...
[2] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24933161
* Relative to mediating the CO2 output of every country / every human on the planet
https://www.wired.com/2008/06/ff-geoengineering/
One of the unspoken critiques in the book is that “climate activists” will shun good solutions in favor of a perfect solution, even if the perfect solution is impossible to achieve. Reading the comments here it seems this particular bit of fiction is already playing out in reality.
Can we… organize the governments of the entire world to work toward a singular goal? A goal that will cost a hundred trillion dollars? A goal that we’ve been trying to achieve for decades with virtually zero success?
Or… spend $10B per year on geoengineering. We’re approaching the supposed runaway climate temperature. Shall we act now and do what we can while we wait for technology to advance? Or shall we doom humanity to an uncertain future by refusing to adopt trivially cheap mitigation options?