Because most sources of CO2/GHG have alternatives powered by renewable electricity that are cheaper than the old way which involves generating than capturing the CO2.
e.g. burn gas to generate electricity and capture CO2, or just use renewables.
burn gas to heat things, or just use renewables and heat pumps
Still good to capture unavoidable ones like methane from pre-existing coal mines, wells and landfills.
Coal plants aren't profitable to run if they're required to retrofit for carbon capture, not many new coal plants are going to be built in countries that care about climate change (so requiring CCS on new builds has minimal utility), and there are a lot of political obstacles to shutting existing plants down or mandating these sorts of improvements.
Given those constraints, centralized capture is at least a plausible option that doesn't involve starting big fights with entrenched interests in coal-reliant states. Is it more efficient or more likely to work than direct capture? No. It is, however, politically possible and worth exploring.
Because "we can just capture carbon from the air" is a narrative that makes it sound like we don't have to sacrifice any part of our lifestyle to accomplish the goal of mitigating climate change. It's propaganda, pure and simple.
Essentially, the people in US politics who are willing to act on climate change are an extreme minority, regardless of what americans in general want.
Go ahead and try to make a law that makes coal less profitable without Manchin's support.
If you have a problem with that, welcome to the club. Unfortunately, if you want to change the game to make it such that it's easier to do the right thing, you ALSO have to get Manchin's support. In fact, to do some things would require the other party's support as well, and their SOP is to kill anything you push for, and has been since 2012.
China implemented a nationwide high speed rail network while California debated maybe building a segment. It's possible to satisfy transit (and other) needs in a way that sustains growth and scales efficiently. Building more parking lots and highways doesn't really scale; Americans have so many domestic flights as a result.
Of course, if the goal is to profit from moving people around you get perverse rent-seeking and $15 cling wrap turkey sandwiches in a CIBO kiosk. I would argue moving people around easily and efficiently is intrinsically good the same way building a well-utilized library is.
The US has an incredibly successful geography that it has strategically not fully tapped. I'm just spitballing here but sending 70% of domestic freight via trucks is excremental. Having transit routes that run slower today than they did in the 20th century is unacceptable. Complete and utter lack of imagination or political willpower
There is really no reason there needs to be flights between the major cities in the north east. It's wild that its not easy and quick to get between major cities.
New York City and Boston are roughly 200 miles apart and it takes four hours by car and four hours by transit. Tokyo and Osaka are 365 miles apart by car and an seven hour drive, but you can get between the two cities in three hours by using transit.
> It's easy to take away other peoples needs and wants.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, but what we're seeing now is just consequences of 50 years of global inaction. You want to blame someone, blame the people who have been in charge for the past two generations, not people today.
It's basically too late to stay under 1.5 by just cutting emissions. By the time we do eliminate emissions, we're going to need air capture already scaling up.
Fortunately, it's possible for civilization to do more than one thing at a time.
Some sequences of events make sense: It is not possible to benefit from direct carbon capture cleanly before dirty energy sources are replaced. It would just add to the problem, mainly in the carbon cost of building appropriate energy sources for capture. No free lunch.
In this case doing "more than one thing at a time" amounts to trying to have one's cake while feeling good about baking it with coal-generated electricity.
Its not emissions that are the problem, its the extra carbon that we dig out and insert it into the existing capture - emissions cycle.
And since no technologies exist that can do permanent recapture to undo that at a useful scale (and probably never will because its a conservation of energy problem), its a debt we'll never be able to pay back.
It should be possible if we gain access to "almost infinite" energy right? It would be absurd to assume it but if we really get fusion energy going and then if we get serious cost reductions in space based solar.
Sure it's all (hard) science fiction but I feel like we're giving up on realistic near term solutions anyway.
As long as electricity generation is a profit making endeavor, it doesn't matter what the source is, generating companies will never build enough of it to significantly drop costs. "Energy too cheap to meter" was always a lie. Capitalism always makes it more profitable to make too little of something rather than too much.
> probably never will because its a conservation of energy problem
But we have this gravitationally contained fusion reactor in the neighbourhood literally radiating energy at us. (I'm talking about the sun, if it is not clear.)
That is the thing which powered the previous capture. How would it be impossible to do it again? (I'm not talking about "practical" or "fast" those are questions after we established that it is possible, which it seems we disagree on.)
If you're referring to planting more biomatter, I fully agree it's not impossible, I think the sticking point really is the scale, can we theoretically leverage this to capture at a rate that matters while simultaneously not giving up our current lifestyles. ( I think the main crux of these solutions imply this even if they don't deliberately state it, the solution has to not impact people's lives "negatively' to be viable).
The question is the scale. How much space do you need for plants to capture a gigaton of carbon? Does earth even have that much suitable surface? And how do you put it into the ground so it can't decay and be re-processed into carbon dioxide?
Ok, but that means the question is not the energy balance. That is my whole point.
> How much space do you need for plants to capture a gigaton of carbon?
Plants are only one of the possibilities. All I am arguing is that it is not impossible on account of the principle of energy conservation. Not arguing how easy or hard it is.
> Does earth even have that much suitable surface?
Plants only capture carbon temporarily. When they die and decompose they release that carbon back into the cycle. Using plants to sequester would require either maintaining significantly more plant mass for the rest of forever, or finding a way to prevent wood from decomposing forever on an industrial scale.
We can't turn CO2 back into fuel without an input of energy, but we can store CO2 for the long term without turning it back into fuel. For example, we can pump it into deep basalt formations, where it will turn into rock.
And of course when we do want to turn CO2 into hydrocarbons we can use solar and nuclear energy sources, in which case the hydrocarbons play the role of a battery rather than primary energy source. We can also use non-fossil energy to concentrate CO2 from the air; in theory at least that takes quite a bit less energy than hydrocarbons release when burned.
If we want to stay under 3 we’d better get some real effort behind ending coal as soon as possible.
While it is possible to do more than one thing at a time, our politicians are trying to plug a leak while ignoring a giant gaping hole just around the corner. It’s like they’re incompetent morons or something.
OTOH, I used to have lots of people tell me that it would be almost impossible to stay under 5 degrees of warming. Landing at about 3 degrees of warming is substantially better than many of the scenarios laid out in the past.
I'm still optimistic we can stay below 2 degrees of warming.
We absolutely should end coal as soon as possible, along with oil and natural gas. We should also develop and scale methods for pulling CO2 back out of the atmosphere. Just ending emissions avoids the worst outcomes but still leaves us with a bad outcome. If politicians were not incompetent morons then we could have solved the problem a lot sooner without having to pull CO2 back out of the air, but here we are.
Also, there are some applications, like long-haul jets, that will be very difficult to electrify, and DAC gives us a way to make liquid hydrocarbons for them without any net emissions. Biofuel is another way in theory, but not always in practice, and it takes a lot more land area.
I agree that we need to cut back our current emissions. Even if we stopped emitting all greenhouses gasses tomorrow, the global temperature would continue to rise for decades before stabilizing, so there is still plenty of need to capture what we've already let out.
I'm fairly bearish on direct capture solving much though. It requires so much capital and energy just to replicate the carbon capture that we can already do just by growing plants. I hope that companies like Charm will also get significant funding to pursue using plants for the capture part.
The tandem component for direct capture is a clean energy source ala fusion or a solar price drop to a price point on par. So it would make sense to make continued research depending on fusion break throughs.
The most cost efficient way to do carbon capture is on the smoke stacks of coal power plants. Better than that is not burning the stuff in the first place. Both are way more efficient than these boondoggles trying to pull co2 out of the air where it exists at 400 ppm 0.04%. If we’re not doing the first two, why bother with the last?
There’s no logic in this.
I agree with you we’ll need to remove co2 eventually. But before we worry about that let’s focus editing on stopping making it worse. The payoff there is much higher!
Go tell the German "green" party which just switched off the last three remaining nuclear power plants and pushed their country back to having coal - and not just any coal but lignite, the most-polluting type of coal which they get from strip mines - as their main energy source. That is silliness.
Energy production, distribution and storage seem to be much more pressing issues. This seems like a misallocation of resources from outside. I wonder how spending money on this can be justified in the presence of the current energy mix.
Has anyone done the math to see if this technology is ever going to be feasible? It seems really hard (best plant to date does 4000 tonnes/year) and you can't cheat physics.
I'm perfectly fine with it as long as we don't count on it working or let up on the things we know will work.
Many times when I've had a difficult problem and haven't been able to gain much ground against it, the point when I started to see success was when I started to attack it from every angle I could think of. Not one after another, but all at once. Part of that is about figuring out what works, but it's also about the combined effect of everything. (And I'm sure part of it was that it was the same moment when I decided to get serious.)
If this is that, then I support it. If this is an excuse not to do the other things, then obviously I don't.
What are the things we know will work? If it hurts business or can be framed as a left vs right issue in any way, it has no chance of making any progress in the near future. US politics would need to be fixed first.
While we wait for the public to become more rational and for politicians to focus less on themselves and more on serving, we might as well throw a little money at stuff like carbon capture.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again, our best climate outcomes from the IPCC all rely on DAC; a tech still in it's infancy, deployed to a wider extent than any other technology we've ever developed. This will fail. Our world will keep getting hotter and we'll resort to stratospheric sulfide injection as a temporary stopgap, but that will have consequences.
Politicians and leaders are betting on tech solutions because no one is ready or willing to implement massive reduction in CO2 production and bear the societal consequences.
Once we get to sulfide injection we'll just factor it into acceptable levels of CO2 production, to keep things running until nothing can be done about adapting to climate change anymore.
If anything, Covid convinced me that's the kind of scenario to expect.
Of course I hope for something else but better be prepared for the worst.
Ironically enough Covid showed us how fast emissions could be curbed and how quickly nature started to reclaim space when it was given room to breathe. The canals in Venice flowed clear for the first time in decades, air quality the world over improved drastically, etc… we all saw it, and nobody gave a fuck.
Everyone is too concerned with their bottom dollar and it’s gonna be too late to change once the collapse starts.
We're on the path for stratospheric sulfide injection to be the utilitarian choice, and I wouldn't be surprised to see Effective Altruism groups discussing it as a very cost effective way to save lives in 30 years. The primary effects are relatively short lived (a few decades) and fast-acting (months). It will reduce global temperatures. Sulfide is cheap, the cost is mostly in fighting gravity. It probably won't happen until there is a stronger narrative around human life lost due to climate change. A bad summer with lots of catastrophes hitting the front page. The global political environment is setup so a non-superpower might act alone or with few allies.
While it sounds great on paper, the secondary order effects will last longer than primary and are very hard to quantify. It's clearly 10x-1000x cheaper to cut CO2 emissions now than to try to block out the sun with geoclimate engineering in a few decades.
You should be skeptical of all ideas, not just ones that comes from groups you are skeptical about.
EA's point that charities that provide malaria medication and vitamin A supplementation for pour children are very cost effective ways to save lives are very good. That might make other good points too. They are often very good at convincing people that certain charities are worthy of donation. I think it's possible that we'll see similar arguments form members of that group for extreme climate change measures.
That seems less like a principled heuristic and more like "eww, these people are icky, screw them".
As a general rule, EA groups have a tendency to latch onto ideas that are radical, ideas outside the overton window. You shouldn't assume that automatically means they're bad unless your heuristic is "we should never stray outside the overton window, ever".
I have had a good amount of interactions with EA folks, a good number of well meaning people in my social circles are into it.
I have no issue with radical ideas "outside the window" personally, but often find that EA groups tend to go right for barely workable "grand plans" and often don't listen to the people with boots on the ground, actually doing the work.
I'd give specific examples, but it would be doxing myself as many of them are extremely specific.
>the secondary order effects will last longer than primary and are very hard to quantify.
Yep, scientists already suggest it would disrupt rainfall in the 3rd world. Ironically the same nations that will be the worst hit from global warming regardless. What will India's reaction be when their monsoon rains fail because of the unilateral actions of another country? It's not a good idea to destabilize a nuclear armed nation.
This is so incredibly dump, I think I am getting an aneurysm. Producing coal energy is already more expensive than renewables, now they are burning coal and then capturing that CO2 elsewhere? And in a manor that is less efficient than simply growing trees or plants? All while cutting down trees and sacrificing more and more green space to suburbs? Am I missing anything, or is that the extent of the idiocy? Idiocracy?
Why don't we just build DAC plants in the middle of nowhere, where energy is super cheap?
Like we can use geothermal in places were no human civilization exists, or solar in otherwise barren desserts. Yes it is still going to be expensive, but DAC can be done anywhere on the globe, so why not take advantage of this and seek places with very cheap energy sources?
Yes: start with experimental systems where people are, and then at some point when the tech is mature and really optimizing for costs you get into moving it out for cheap land and power.
Direct air capture should be a Manhattan Project. We should spend a trillion dollars on it like we did with the atom bomb. Preaching climate piety is not going to work. The world is not going to conservation its way to mitigating climate change, not when there are billions of people in China, India, and Africa who dream of living like people in Texas.
> not when there are billions of people in China, India, and Africa who dream of living like people in Texas.
You've got that right, but the solution isn't to dump money into DAC. It's to convince people in Texas that they need to be living more like people in China, India, and Africa. But it's not politically feasible to tell people they have to make sacrifices.
It doesn't matter what it sounds like. It's literally the only solution. Western standards of living will, and must decline over the next several decades, either to mitigate climate change or because we've just made it so much worse.
I don't know what makes you think that's the only solution? You're not going to convince 7 billion people to live like the Amish. We're more likely to colonize another world than for that to happen.
"I'm" not going to be doing anything. The facts are, we can't consume like Americans do now, globally, on a per capita basis and expect to have a future as a species.
What would you propose? Your choices are essentially a massive, global reduction in consumption, or having many fewer people on the Earth.
You might think there's a third choice ("massive increases in energy efficiency"), but you have to show me that we can do those things in time, based on current technology, in order to convince me it's a viable option.
All of transportation is only 27% of CO2 emissions. Personal SUVs and trucks can't possible be more than a few percent. Banning them will at best buy us a year or so if you can get the entire world on board.
Correction: It will buy us a year or so, if we can get the entire world on board, and immediately take all those vehicles off the road. Any policy that lets people keep driving their gas guzzlers just doesn't do enough.
Are there any valuable economic outputs of direct air capture?
Things like growing trees and soil can augment the output of existing industries. For example, plant tree > tree captures carbon > cut down tree and use wood for durable goods and structures. It captures carbon in a profitable way. Likewise, growing the soil can improve farm yields and reduce reliance on chemical inputs.
Some DAC startups (like terraformindustries.com) believe it is economically viable to produce methane / natural gas from air captured CO2. They obviously cannot take credit for CO2 reduction, but can sell the methane as carbon-neutral.
Another potentially useful product besides the two you already mentioned is plastic.
DAC makes no sense from an energy accounting perspective.
Simple argument:
DAC requires energy.
In some places, that energy is stranded. Think of the DAC plant in Iceland using geothermal. Fine. In that case, DAC makes a meaningful contribution.
If the energy used for DAC is not stranded and could instead be used to offset fossil fuels, it would be far better to offset the fossil fuel use. This is trivially proven true when you consider the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Better to prevent the entropy increase from adding CO2 to the atmosphere in the first place.
Therefore, attempting to use DAC to mitigate climate change while fossil fuels are still being burned is pointless. If you can build the energy infrastructure you will need to power DAC, you would be far better off just using it to offset and eliminate fossil fuel use.
Once you have eliminated the use of fossil fuels, sure, DAC makes sense. But the idea that DAC will save or even help us without complete decarbonization as a prerequisite is just nonsense in my opinion.
I don't think any of the realistic models have DAC providing a significant percentage of the carbon reduction. For example, 99% of the reduction from green electrification, and 1% from DAC.
DAC is still in the research phase, and is probably a decade a way from widespread use.
Solar power, wind power and electric transportation are already well into the production phase and are happening today.
The atmosphere does a pretty good job of mixing, with the CO2 concentration uniform to within +/- 1% around most of the world so if there are enough places with stranded energy just building DAC plants there could help the whole world.
If there aren't enough places with stranded energy maybe we can make more. All that takes is installing more solar in some place than there is infrastructure to transport the electricity out. That excess is stranded.
The amount of energy available for solar is insane. To illustrate how ridiculously abundant solar power if you wanted to build a solar farm whose output during the day matched the power use of the entire world you'd only need about 500 000 km^2 worth of panels.
At night the power falls to near zero, but so what? If all it is doing is running a DAC plant it doesn't need to run overnight.
I'm sure there are hundreds of places around the world with good daytime sunlight, enough room for a DAC plant and a solar farm to power it, and limited grid infrastructure.
Note that is how much is needed to produce an amount of energy equal to the current consumption of the entireworld. It is to illustrate how abundant solar energy is.
That would be enough energy with current DAC technology to remove each year about 50% of the year's CO2 emissions. That would effectively knock us back to 1970 levels of net yearly emissions.
There are 5 subtropical deserts in the world with areas greater than 500 000 km^2. There's room in those 5 deserts for about 30 of those 500 000 km^2 solar farms. That's enough energy to in 1 year bring atmospheric CO2 down to around 320 PPM, which is around 1960 levels. 2 years to get back back to 1800 levels. 6 years to get to pre-industrial levels.
Of course it is possible that at that scale energy isn't the bottleneck for DAC. It may depend on other resources that cannot scale that well.
> Therefore, attempting to use DAC to mitigate climate change while fossil fuels are still being burned is pointless.
Because no one has suggested using DAC to offset fossil fuel use without reducing fossil fuel use, this is a straw man. DAC may very well be a valid strategy when used in conjunction with the reduction of fossil fuels to better reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon in a given time frame.
Nobody seems to be doing anything to reduce emissions, either. Except for the blip due to COVID, globally, we're still on the same trend we have been forever: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
> Nobody seems to be doing anything to reduce emissions,
No one is working on carbon-free renewable energy? Solar power hasn't doubled in efficiency since development began? No one is building wind farms? ICE vehicle fuel efficiency has not been massively increased? No one is making electric vehicles? Supply chains are not getting more efficient? There are no waste reduction strategies being implemented anywhere? There are no efforts to reduce methane emissions?
That’s all well and good but you still have to account for Jevon’s Paradox, that it might not matter if consumption keeps rising. It seems really, really hard to do that in a socioeconomic system built upon continuous industrial growth and consumption.
Your link says we've stabilized over the last decade.
> We see that while emissions from fossil fuels have increased, emissions from land use change have declined slightly in recent years. Overall, this means total emissions have roughly stabilised over the past decade.
There is some hope that fossil fuel emissions are peaking right around now. See the recent Ember info:
Look at the graph of global emissions. US emissions essentially don't matter in the big picture. This is why massive, coordinated, global action is the only thing that will save us.
This is not a fatalistic "oh, let's not even try then" statement. It's just facts. Yes, we should try. No, we won't succeed if it's just the US reducing emissions.
You're looking at absolute numbers. CO2 usage used to be accelerating rapidly. The first step to reducing the absolute number is to change the second derivative, the acceleration. We've done that, the second derivative of that graph is significantly negative. Once the area under the curve of the second derivative is negative enough, the first derivative, the velocity, will go negative. We're about there, the year on year change is now about zero. Once the first derivative is negative the absolute number starts dropping.
So yes, more than nothing has been done to reduce emissions, but you need to look at the right numbers and graphs.
Can anyone explain, how, exactly, DAC stores more carbon than it uses?
Even if you turn the entire SW region into solar panels to power a gigantic DAC factory, the opportunity cost of not wiring that same titanic generation into the grid vastly, vastly outscales the gains you get from burying carbon.
L1 orbital mirrors, that's the ticket. Reversible, adjustable, no sloppy gas exchange problems like with the particulates.
This reminds me again that the carbon climate crisis is tangled up with democracy itself and cannot be separated.
Our best chance to do the massive changes needed requires national gov level buy-in by all the world's biggest nations. Which requires a sane party to be dominant in each of them, controlling the levers. And that means we need to ensure enough voter buy-in to put them in those seats.
As much as one would love to avoid politics its become impossible now to remain on the sidelines if you truly want to save our future. Our lives, and those of all our children and grandchildren are clearly at stake.
This is a complete waste of time and resources. There are many, many more ideas that are essentially "low hanging fruit" which could be implemented today. Government is kicking the can by throwing excessive cash at an issue because its perceived as an easier sell that wont require reforms that hurt powerful interests.
- Regulate away the ability for utilities to implement policies that discourage solar. Legislate maximum PTO approvals.
- Standardize the payback for Solar so that net credits at the end of the year are compensated in a manner that is predictable. Predictability will bring way more investment.
If climate change were going to cause sea levels to rise, Al Gore would not have bought an ocean-front house, and banks would not be giving 30+ year mortgages on ocean-front real estate.
So either climate change is not real, or it is not causing sea levels to rise.
As one of HN's resident climate doomerism skeptics, here is what's what:
1. Climate change is genuinely real. Some of it is probably human caused. That isn't likely to be a problem though as the climate has always changed, including in relatively recent history; i.e. it's not the case that the climate is stable if not for fossil fuels, and the evidence that this change is serious is of garbage quality. It's not serious and could easily go into reverse in the coming years even without any changes in human behavior. Additionally the assumption that change will continue in one direction forever is wrong, as is the assumption of exponential feedback loops.
2. Sea levels are genuinely rising. However they are rising very slowly, by tiny amounts, and this rise is so small it can be easily be offset by other factors like the land rising. This is why the Pacific islands have been growing over time instead of sinking, as we were assured for decades was a 100% dead cert outcome of climate change.
The key theme here is that whilst underlying changes may be real, the size, extent, confidence and expected duration are all exaggerated to the level that the conclusions become merely fashionable doomerism. And deep down people know it, hence why all the most vocal doomers act like they don't believe it: Al Gore buys ocean front property, climatologists fly around the world to international conferences at a greater rate than many other fields, the Pacific islanders build tourist resorts on the beaches, Greta Thunberg takes a boat across the Atlantic but the crew takes flights, etc.
You know what's really good at direct air capture of carbon? Trees. And other plants.
The cellulose structure of plants is very carbon-heavy. This carbon comes primarily from the air.
Wood used in construction lasts at least decades longer than the time it took to grow the tree. Timber framed construction can stand for centuries.
Any organic matter can also pyrolyze: the release of volatile, flammable organic compounds when exposed to heat. If pyrolysis occurs in the absence of oxygen, the carbon does not burn. The gases can be burned very cleanly. The carbon is very stable and also forms the basis of excellent soil amendments (think fertilizer). When used as a soil amendment, it is often called biochar, but it is the same thing as charcoal. It is stable for centuries to small millenia in the soil.
When used as a soil amendment, the carbon is not pulled into the growing plant life. Remember, plants get their carbon from the air.
1. Plant fast-growing stuff. Some trees are ridiculously fast, but bamboo probably wins for growth speed.
2. Create biochar (use the heat for something useful)
3. Bury biochar (actually mix with compost or some other carrier, don't just plant lumps of charcoal)
4. Plants grow faster
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadCapture elsewhere is a service. Possibly a public service.
The financial math is different.
e.g. burn gas to generate electricity and capture CO2, or just use renewables.
burn gas to heat things, or just use renewables and heat pumps
Still good to capture unavoidable ones like methane from pre-existing coal mines, wells and landfills.
Given those constraints, centralized capture is at least a plausible option that doesn't involve starting big fights with entrenched interests in coal-reliant states. Is it more efficient or more likely to work than direct capture? No. It is, however, politically possible and worth exploring.
Go ahead and try to make a law that makes coal less profitable without Manchin's support.
If you have a problem with that, welcome to the club. Unfortunately, if you want to change the game to make it such that it's easier to do the right thing, you ALSO have to get Manchin's support. In fact, to do some things would require the other party's support as well, and their SOP is to kill anything you push for, and has been since 2012.
This is just silliness.
Of course, if the goal is to profit from moving people around you get perverse rent-seeking and $15 cling wrap turkey sandwiches in a CIBO kiosk. I would argue moving people around easily and efficiently is intrinsically good the same way building a well-utilized library is.
The US has an incredibly successful geography that it has strategically not fully tapped. I'm just spitballing here but sending 70% of domestic freight via trucks is excremental. Having transit routes that run slower today than they did in the 20th century is unacceptable. Complete and utter lack of imagination or political willpower
New York City and Boston are roughly 200 miles apart and it takes four hours by car and four hours by transit. Tokyo and Osaka are 365 miles apart by car and an seven hour drive, but you can get between the two cities in three hours by using transit.
That would be a good step to take.
> It's easy to take away other peoples needs and wants.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, but what we're seeing now is just consequences of 50 years of global inaction. You want to blame someone, blame the people who have been in charge for the past two generations, not people today.
Fortunately, it's possible for civilization to do more than one thing at a time.
In this case doing "more than one thing at a time" amounts to trying to have one's cake while feeling good about baking it with coal-generated electricity.
And since no technologies exist that can do permanent recapture to undo that at a useful scale (and probably never will because its a conservation of energy problem), its a debt we'll never be able to pay back.
Sure it's all (hard) science fiction but I feel like we're giving up on realistic near term solutions anyway.
But we have this gravitationally contained fusion reactor in the neighbourhood literally radiating energy at us. (I'm talking about the sun, if it is not clear.)
That is the thing which powered the previous capture. How would it be impossible to do it again? (I'm not talking about "practical" or "fast" those are questions after we established that it is possible, which it seems we disagree on.)
Ok, but that means the question is not the energy balance. That is my whole point.
> How much space do you need for plants to capture a gigaton of carbon?
Plants are only one of the possibilities. All I am arguing is that it is not impossible on account of the principle of energy conservation. Not arguing how easy or hard it is.
> Does earth even have that much suitable surface?
Of course. It happened once.
You probably don't.
> human technology is energy intensive, wasteful
I agree.
> and won't save us
In that case we better lay down in the sun and die peacefully. Because human technology is the only thing which can save us. What else there is?
We do technology, and we obviously can't.
> What else there is?
Plants.
And of course when we do want to turn CO2 into hydrocarbons we can use solar and nuclear energy sources, in which case the hydrocarbons play the role of a battery rather than primary energy source. We can also use non-fossil energy to concentrate CO2 from the air; in theory at least that takes quite a bit less energy than hydrocarbons release when burned.
If we want to stay under 3 we’d better get some real effort behind ending coal as soon as possible.
While it is possible to do more than one thing at a time, our politicians are trying to plug a leak while ignoring a giant gaping hole just around the corner. It’s like they’re incompetent morons or something.
I'm still optimistic we can stay below 2 degrees of warming.
Also, there are some applications, like long-haul jets, that will be very difficult to electrify, and DAC gives us a way to make liquid hydrocarbons for them without any net emissions. Biofuel is another way in theory, but not always in practice, and it takes a lot more land area.
I'm fairly bearish on direct capture solving much though. It requires so much capital and energy just to replicate the carbon capture that we can already do just by growing plants. I hope that companies like Charm will also get significant funding to pursue using plants for the capture part.
There’s no logic in this.
I agree with you we’ll need to remove co2 eventually. But before we worry about that let’s focus editing on stopping making it worse. The payoff there is much higher!
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/atomic-angst-over-germa...
You should stop smelling it once the facility is online.
By the way, let’s talk payment plans…
It would be interesting to see the global lifecycle analysis though; I'm interested to know if it even breaks even
[0]: https://www.iea.org/reports/direct-air-capture
Many times when I've had a difficult problem and haven't been able to gain much ground against it, the point when I started to see success was when I started to attack it from every angle I could think of. Not one after another, but all at once. Part of that is about figuring out what works, but it's also about the combined effect of everything. (And I'm sure part of it was that it was the same moment when I decided to get serious.)
If this is that, then I support it. If this is an excuse not to do the other things, then obviously I don't.
While we wait for the public to become more rational and for politicians to focus less on themselves and more on serving, we might as well throw a little money at stuff like carbon capture.
Once we get to sulfide injection we'll just factor it into acceptable levels of CO2 production, to keep things running until nothing can be done about adapting to climate change anymore.
If anything, Covid convinced me that's the kind of scenario to expect.
Of course I hope for something else but better be prepared for the worst.
Everyone is too concerned with their bottom dollar and it’s gonna be too late to change once the collapse starts.
While it sounds great on paper, the secondary order effects will last longer than primary and are very hard to quantify. It's clearly 10x-1000x cheaper to cut CO2 emissions now than to try to block out the sun with geoclimate engineering in a few decades.
EA's point that charities that provide malaria medication and vitamin A supplementation for pour children are very cost effective ways to save lives are very good. That might make other good points too. They are often very good at convincing people that certain charities are worthy of donation. I think it's possible that we'll see similar arguments form members of that group for extreme climate change measures.
As a general rule, EA groups have a tendency to latch onto ideas that are radical, ideas outside the overton window. You shouldn't assume that automatically means they're bad unless your heuristic is "we should never stray outside the overton window, ever".
I have no issue with radical ideas "outside the window" personally, but often find that EA groups tend to go right for barely workable "grand plans" and often don't listen to the people with boots on the ground, actually doing the work.
I'd give specific examples, but it would be doxing myself as many of them are extremely specific.
Yep, scientists already suggest it would disrupt rainfall in the 3rd world. Ironically the same nations that will be the worst hit from global warming regardless. What will India's reaction be when their monsoon rains fail because of the unilateral actions of another country? It's not a good idea to destabilize a nuclear armed nation.
Changes in temperature affect the risk of abdominal aortic aneurysm rupture
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25350929/
Like we can use geothermal in places were no human civilization exists, or solar in otherwise barren desserts. Yes it is still going to be expensive, but DAC can be done anywhere on the globe, so why not take advantage of this and seek places with very cheap energy sources?
You've got that right, but the solution isn't to dump money into DAC. It's to convince people in Texas that they need to be living more like people in China, India, and Africa. But it's not politically feasible to tell people they have to make sacrifices.
What would you propose? Your choices are essentially a massive, global reduction in consumption, or having many fewer people on the Earth.
You might think there's a third choice ("massive increases in energy efficiency"), but you have to show me that we can do those things in time, based on current technology, in order to convince me it's a viable option.
This is absolutely not a fact. We can't consume carbon at the per-capita rate we do now.
But no, let's build magic air capture BS
Things like growing trees and soil can augment the output of existing industries. For example, plant tree > tree captures carbon > cut down tree and use wood for durable goods and structures. It captures carbon in a profitable way. Likewise, growing the soil can improve farm yields and reduce reliance on chemical inputs.
Another potentially useful product besides the two you already mentioned is plastic.
in this case, CO2 -> gas would be most useful.
That gas will turn to CO2 again, but the benefit is we don't have to drill for it, which will introduce more carbon into the atmosphere.
Simple argument: DAC requires energy.
In some places, that energy is stranded. Think of the DAC plant in Iceland using geothermal. Fine. In that case, DAC makes a meaningful contribution.
If the energy used for DAC is not stranded and could instead be used to offset fossil fuels, it would be far better to offset the fossil fuel use. This is trivially proven true when you consider the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Better to prevent the entropy increase from adding CO2 to the atmosphere in the first place.
Therefore, attempting to use DAC to mitigate climate change while fossil fuels are still being burned is pointless. If you can build the energy infrastructure you will need to power DAC, you would be far better off just using it to offset and eliminate fossil fuel use.
Once you have eliminated the use of fossil fuels, sure, DAC makes sense. But the idea that DAC will save or even help us without complete decarbonization as a prerequisite is just nonsense in my opinion.
DAC is still in the research phase, and is probably a decade a way from widespread use.
Solar power, wind power and electric transportation are already well into the production phase and are happening today.
If there aren't enough places with stranded energy maybe we can make more. All that takes is installing more solar in some place than there is infrastructure to transport the electricity out. That excess is stranded.
The amount of energy available for solar is insane. To illustrate how ridiculously abundant solar power if you wanted to build a solar farm whose output during the day matched the power use of the entire world you'd only need about 500 000 km^2 worth of panels.
At night the power falls to near zero, but so what? If all it is doing is running a DAC plant it doesn't need to run overnight.
I'm sure there are hundreds of places around the world with good daytime sunlight, enough room for a DAC plant and a solar farm to power it, and limited grid infrastructure.
That would be enough energy with current DAC technology to remove each year about 50% of the year's CO2 emissions. That would effectively knock us back to 1970 levels of net yearly emissions.
There are 5 subtropical deserts in the world with areas greater than 500 000 km^2. There's room in those 5 deserts for about 30 of those 500 000 km^2 solar farms. That's enough energy to in 1 year bring atmospheric CO2 down to around 320 PPM, which is around 1960 levels. 2 years to get back back to 1800 levels. 6 years to get to pre-industrial levels.
Of course it is possible that at that scale energy isn't the bottleneck for DAC. It may depend on other resources that cannot scale that well.
Because no one has suggested using DAC to offset fossil fuel use without reducing fossil fuel use, this is a straw man. DAC may very well be a valid strategy when used in conjunction with the reduction of fossil fuels to better reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon in a given time frame.
No one is working on carbon-free renewable energy? Solar power hasn't doubled in efficiency since development began? No one is building wind farms? ICE vehicle fuel efficiency has not been massively increased? No one is making electric vehicles? Supply chains are not getting more efficient? There are no waste reduction strategies being implemented anywhere? There are no efforts to reduce methane emissions?
> We see that while emissions from fossil fuels have increased, emissions from land use change have declined slightly in recent years. Overall, this means total emissions have roughly stabilised over the past decade.
There is some hope that fossil fuel emissions are peaking right around now. See the recent Ember info:
https://ember-climate.org/insights/research/global-electrici...
This is not a fatalistic "oh, let's not even try then" statement. It's just facts. Yes, we should try. No, we won't succeed if it's just the US reducing emissions.
So yes, more than nothing has been done to reduce emissions, but you need to look at the right numbers and graphs.
Even if you turn the entire SW region into solar panels to power a gigantic DAC factory, the opportunity cost of not wiring that same titanic generation into the grid vastly, vastly outscales the gains you get from burying carbon.
L1 orbital mirrors, that's the ticket. Reversible, adjustable, no sloppy gas exchange problems like with the particulates.
Our best chance to do the massive changes needed requires national gov level buy-in by all the world's biggest nations. Which requires a sane party to be dominant in each of them, controlling the levers. And that means we need to ensure enough voter buy-in to put them in those seats.
As much as one would love to avoid politics its become impossible now to remain on the sidelines if you truly want to save our future. Our lives, and those of all our children and grandchildren are clearly at stake.
- Regulate away the ability for utilities to implement policies that discourage solar. Legislate maximum PTO approvals.
- Standardize the payback for Solar so that net credits at the end of the year are compensated in a manner that is predictable. Predictability will bring way more investment.
So either climate change is not real, or it is not causing sea levels to rise.
1. Climate change is genuinely real. Some of it is probably human caused. That isn't likely to be a problem though as the climate has always changed, including in relatively recent history; i.e. it's not the case that the climate is stable if not for fossil fuels, and the evidence that this change is serious is of garbage quality. It's not serious and could easily go into reverse in the coming years even without any changes in human behavior. Additionally the assumption that change will continue in one direction forever is wrong, as is the assumption of exponential feedback loops.
2. Sea levels are genuinely rising. However they are rising very slowly, by tiny amounts, and this rise is so small it can be easily be offset by other factors like the land rising. This is why the Pacific islands have been growing over time instead of sinking, as we were assured for decades was a 100% dead cert outcome of climate change.
The key theme here is that whilst underlying changes may be real, the size, extent, confidence and expected duration are all exaggerated to the level that the conclusions become merely fashionable doomerism. And deep down people know it, hence why all the most vocal doomers act like they don't believe it: Al Gore buys ocean front property, climatologists fly around the world to international conferences at a greater rate than many other fields, the Pacific islanders build tourist resorts on the beaches, Greta Thunberg takes a boat across the Atlantic but the crew takes flights, etc.
The cellulose structure of plants is very carbon-heavy. This carbon comes primarily from the air.
Wood used in construction lasts at least decades longer than the time it took to grow the tree. Timber framed construction can stand for centuries.
Any organic matter can also pyrolyze: the release of volatile, flammable organic compounds when exposed to heat. If pyrolysis occurs in the absence of oxygen, the carbon does not burn. The gases can be burned very cleanly. The carbon is very stable and also forms the basis of excellent soil amendments (think fertilizer). When used as a soil amendment, it is often called biochar, but it is the same thing as charcoal. It is stable for centuries to small millenia in the soil.
When used as a soil amendment, the carbon is not pulled into the growing plant life. Remember, plants get their carbon from the air.
1. Plant fast-growing stuff. Some trees are ridiculously fast, but bamboo probably wins for growth speed. 2. Create biochar (use the heat for something useful) 3. Bury biochar (actually mix with compost or some other carrier, don't just plant lumps of charcoal) 4. Plants grow faster