Maybe Stanford was never really what their very active reputation management facility was pushing the last few facades? The school basically rode the Silicon Valley wave.
Nah. Funding research to show your business isn't a problem is shady. Funding research to solve the problem could be a good thing, depending what the find.
Ever-growing armies of ever-better-paid administrators aren't going to magically pay for themselves. And a university won't be atop America's merciless academic pecking order for long if it's burdened with scruples about funding sources.
This comment is vague but it sounds like you're downplaying the seriousness of funding sources.
This isn't a paranoid conspiracy or dramatic judgement. Companies really do pay for particular research results that benefit them. This has been going on at least since gasoline had lead in it.
the bigger issue you overlooked is the constant growth of bureaucratic overhead sucking up the watershed of resources and leaving only a trickle for the people actually putting together the curriculum, teaching and researching.
The administrators are useful to a point but they vastly overstate their importance and erode everything they touch overtime like a malignant cancer in a lot of organizations.
I think you might be misunderstanding the amount of distrust placed in the root comment. He's claiming the more prestigious a University is, the more likely they are to take unethical funding because increased funding leads to more prestige. It's an attack on the integrity of modern science as practiced by academia, not on a subset of studies.
I kind of think the status of US schools is not very well known, or at least not consistently known:
To summarize the situation. US education institutes are laying off hundreds of teachers, cancelling courses, cutting services, etc. across the board. If a teacher is hired, it is most likely for part-time, on lower wages, with fewer benefits. If a teacher is guaranteed tenure after x many years, chances are they will be laid off, and their programs cancelled before this happens. At the primary level, schools are being aggressively merged, and sometimes even closed, to save money for the school district.
At the same time administrators in said schools are ballooning, more administrators are being hired, and their pay keeps going up (while other staff pay is stagnant). If there is money being allocated to the schools, it most likely goes into administration, not education. Administration has also become a political gig. Administrators move between school systems, get higher and higher positions, fill out their resumes, and gain prestige (all the while being payed more and more). What they actually do, is anybodies guess, most of the time they are simply in the way of teacher making actual changes which would benefit students. A typical scenario is a new higher administrator comes in, wants to look important and decides to create more administrator position and hire a security contractor to impose a security theater on campus.
I guess this this what your grand-parent was talking about. And how it comes to no-ones surprise when funding for this ballooning administration costs come from the same industry which is killing us all and our climate.
> US education institutes are laying off hundreds of teachers, cancelling courses, cutting services, etc
This also does not make much sense when one sees this humongous growth in new courses, departments, degrees and academic positions in first place over last few decades. So many universities did not become 5 star resorts by just keeping strictly educational services.
I’m sure there is data to be found, and I’m actually curious about it my self. I don’t know where to begin looking for it though. But I’m open to be proven wrong.
To be clear, I’m talking about the education system as a whole, not just prestige universities, but also community collages as well high schools and primary schools. Prestige universities like Stanford will always find funding to do what they want (e.g. from fossil fuel companies) this includes ballooning administrators playing the CV game, as well as keeping existing courses open while even opening new courses. Community collages and poorer school districts cannot afford to do all, and—it is my experience—they are way more likely to pick funding their administrators at the cost of education.
I get your point. The way I see this growth of admins is side effect of giving what people wanted which is "world-class amenities, world class education, more nutrition options, more security, more healthcare, more activities, more courses, more entertainment options, more electives, more everything" . Individually every single item looks eminently reasonable and in aggregate it can give reasonable cover to universities to have admins to support all of this.
I don’t know if you have any experience in this, but in community collages in my area students and faculty alike are raising protests and threatening strikes because they are precisely not getting what they want, which is for their courses to stay open and for their teachers to remain on staff. It is my guess that the only people getting what they want with the ballooning admins are the bosses (i.e. admins them selves; and stakeholders in the educational industry who get to sell their stuff to schools, e.g. security firms).
As cynical as we can count on these people to be - they're also smart enough to recognize that continually whoring themselves out to the highest bidder can, apart from undermining Stanford's integrity (which they obviously don't care about), also be detrimental to their bottom line in the longer run.
In fact this seems to be the only way they eventually learn:
In response, more than 800 people affiliated with the university have signed a letter calling for a funding ban, and some alumni say they won’t donate to their alma mater until it happens.
I find the notion donating to your alma mater kind of odd.
You don't donate money to the local McDonald's that made a burger for you do you?
I mean, you could but that's not something that's regularly done.
The service was provided and paid for and now there's some expectation to give more money after the fact?
I don’t know how representative this is, but when I talked to one of my school’s donation people, it sounded like most people don’t donate to the unrestricted fund, which the school can do whatever with it’s usually earmarked/restricted for a specific use, like a building, a specific department, whatever. The school really really wants unrestricted funds.
Personally, I donate to my old dorm’s social/making stuff fund, the students get way more out of those dollars a lot further than I do, and I always appreciated that we had that budget.
The mission of the university, from the university's perspective, is to advance the world's fundamental knowledge first and teach students second. (Some may see this as 1a and 1b, mind you, and smaller liberal arts colleges and colleges that do not award doctoral degrees will reduce the fundamental knowledge mission.)
The students, in large part, pay for the educational piece (alongside funding) but significant funding is needed for advancing the world's knowledge.
I'm not sure how mad to be about this. Honestly, at the moment I kinda think it's a good thing on balance.
I believe climate change is a huge, urgent concern. And I think it would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our risk mitigation portfolio. If fossil fuel companies, out of self-interest, want to support a legitimate research institution doing that, I'm not sure I should complain.
If Stanford starts spouting propaganda that we can procrastinate on getting off of fossil fuels because their carbon removal technology will solve everything, I will definitely condemn them mercilessly. I assume the fossil fuel companies are already spouting such propaganda or funding someone to do so, since they've been spouting anti-climate risk mitigation propaganda for decades, and I am already condemning them mercilessly for that anyway.
I actually think carbon removal could spur renewables development because in theory it's a flexible sink for spare power. Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few square miles of solar panels, and run it when the sun shines. We could get a lot of demand for solar panels out of this, and that will encourage the further development of commercial scaling up. And the more renewables scale up, the more I think fossil fuels will be squeezed out of existence because they won't be able to compete on price.
EDIT: I am open to the possibility that this is completely unrealistic and is just another distraction from the fossil fuel industry. But the arguments need to be made on technical grounds by knowledgeable people. Here is an interview by an expert making that argument: https://www.protocol.com/climate/carbon-dioxide-removal-cost...
> Yet ambition and momentum may not be enough to reach that milestone, according to Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer with MIT’s Energy Initiative. He’s been studying carbon capture for over 30 years (even writing a book about it in 2018) and is more skeptical given the capital costs to build CDR plants and the enormous amount of energy they need to run. He sat down with Protocol to talk about why he thinks $100 per ton is “pure fantasy.”
By the way, I really liked this quote, and I wish all the "we just need to"-ers would read it:
> When people think things are too easy, they won’t address the hard decisions, even though those hard decisions may end up with a better solution. At this point, I don’t know if liming the ocean is a great idea or not, but it has a lot of potential, and we have to look at things like that if we want to get to net zero. And people say capturing carbon dioxide from the air for $100 per ton will get us to net zero. But if it’s a fantasy, it’s not going to get us there.
"It would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our climate change portfolio"
Planting trees and establishing more forests is a already working technology with lots of other nice side effects, while I see the "artificial carbon removal" tech often just used as a excuse to not do anything now at all and wait for the magic game changer.
"Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few square miles of solar panels, and run it when the sun shines."
And I totally like anything related to this, but as long as we build new coal plants, building this would be just symbolic.
So first I would use the desert solar power for actually powering the grid, removing the need for coal.
Regarding the trees, I hope they research that claim!
Regarding the concept that it's a distraction, I think that's folk behavioral psychology with an unhealthy dash of moralism. It needs to be substantiated with evidence before I take it seriously. We are talking about a real carbon mitigation research avenue that could have real benefits.
I want evidence that there are people who wave away climate change because of proposed future CO2 removal tech, who would not wave away climate change if we stopped all research on CO2 removal tech.
I'm not trying to impose an impossible standard here. If you can show examples of something like this happening in contexts other than climate change, I'm open to that. What I don't accept is mere folk behavioral psychology speculation driving what an entire civilization does to mitigate a massive risk.
You really have not heard those people? Lucky you. Anecdotically there are plenty of them, and official sources (like politicians) are of course more careful in their wording, but the sentiment is exactly this.
"No real need to change the gasoline cars, as we will have CO2 removal."
I can probably dig up some ugly quotes, if you like. But those are not really my circles so I have nothing at hand.
(I should probably add, that I am from germany and loud cars and the making of them are important here. But I heard the same from US politicians)
"What I don't accept is mere folk behavioral psychology speculation driving what an entire civilization does to mitigate a massive risk. "
Well, how exactly could technical CO2 removal ever work?
We burn stuff for energy and then need even more energy to recapture the side products?
How would this be powered?
By the sun?
Solar panels still needs to be manufactured and deployed.
So if we would have all energy generation by regenerative sources AND we have overcapacity - then we could also extract some of the old released CO2, true, but have you done some calculations, how much area you would need, to power a significant amount of CO2 removal?
Lot's of it.
Forests on the other hand grow and expand by themself, once established and undisturbed, that's the beauty of them.
They also help stabilizing local climate. And the real problem of climate change for lots of people will be desertification. So more Forests reduce CO2 AND provide actual better living conditions for the people affected. A lone symbolic CO2 removal on the other hand is really limited in its usefulness, while the coal plants are burning happily.
All I'm saying is that the technical debate between these different methodologies is what matters. If we agree on that, I have no dispute with you. I don't know what carbon capture method is best or how big of an impact carbon capture can have. I would like to see the research, which is what the article is about.
"I would like to see the research, which is what the article is about."
The article is about how big oil changed Standford's research focus. And their interest is simply to leave everything as it is and stall any further oil limitations, so they can profit, like they used to, without having to fundamentally change.
But yes, they are totally free to fund research that is in their interest and if they happen to find a magic solution acceptable to society, I am thrilled. I am just very sceptical that this is what will happen. I rather suspect it will be symbolism used by willing populistic politicians, to block uncomforthable legislation or stall it completely.
I just see no technical ground for this to really work, other than wishful thinking. And if the latter is the base, then it won't work, no matter how millions you spend on it.
Different areas have different power availability from different sources at different times of the year. We have limited capacity to move and store that energy.
If the price of re-extracting released carbon is baked into into burning fossil fuels, then carbon capture will only be viable in places where energy is cheap, such as places with good conditions for solar, wind or hydro.
The economic viability of carbon capture is thus entirely dependent on the quality of the regulatory framework around carbon emissions. If we don't have that, then any advances in carbon capture technology won't matter. If we do have that, then giving the carbon capture industry a bit of a headstart with research will make the necessary overall emissions targets we need easier to reach.
So while carbon capture is indeed touted as an excuse to avoid those regulations by opportunistic politicians, those politicians would find some other excuse to oppose those regulations. So don't let them lead you think that carbon capture isn't an important part of the solution that is being developed by people who care deeply and climate change.
We've waited far to long already and simply can't afford to ignore any part of the solution that can help reduce total emissions faster.
"We've waited far to long already and simply can't afford to ignore any part of the solution that can help reduce total emissions faster. "
Totally agree. No dogmatic framework is helpful, that opposes solutions out of principle.
It is just, that ressources are limited.
Any solar, wind or water plant, that connects to the grid is helping. Likely also every nuclear reactor.
But the carbon capture solution I see not really helping, as long as coal plants are being build and are proposed by the exact kind of people, who said before that it is all not so bad and economy growth is always more important.
" So don't let them lead you think that carbon capture isn't an important part of the solution that is being developed by people who care deeply and climate change."
With what I know, I sadly really don't see it as part of the solution, but part of the distraction, part of the problem.
In germany the car lobby recently achieved, that the ban on new ICE cars in 2035 was in effect negated, because cars with E-Fuels should obviously excempt. Except that cars that can run with E-Fuels can also run with normal fuels and E-Fuels make no sense economically, so they already demanded for massive state subventioning of the concept. Spend lots of energy to generate a bit of fuel to continue the big roar of their loud engines. So all just fake. And those are the exact same people who lobby for the concept of carbon capture. Lot's of politicial "activism" to effectivly change nothing, except on paper.
So to repeat myself, I am not against carbon sequestering by principle.
I just think focussing on it now is just distracting from the real solutions needed now.
Once we stopped the last coal plant - then we can talk about spending surplus energy to capture existing CO2. Not before. And it is still a long way to get there.
>If the price of re-extracting released carbon is baked into into burning fossil fuels, then carbon capture will only be viable in places where energy is cheap, such as places with good conditions for solar, wind or hydro.
The same math could be used to determine those would be the only places it would be viable to burn fossil fuels to begin with.
Planting trees is not really viable to deal with CO2 emissions on any significant scale.
Assuming a tree absorbs around 20kg of CO2/year, you'd need to plant 250 trees per year (!!) for every single passenger vehicle (~5tons of CO2/year).
And the problem does not stop there-- these numbers only work for the first 20 or so years of tree growth, and afterwards you have to seal you trees (under high pressure to turn them into hydrocarbons? :P) or plant even more trees to compensate for older trees decomposing (releasing CO2).
Kind of sounds amazing if we could pull it off (of course we can't) but imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one.
"imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one."
That's how the world looked like, before humans chopped or burned them down and let cattle, goats and sheep prevented new forests from growing again.
Reforesting at least parts of that back, would capture significant amounts of CO2. No matter that a old tree composes at some point, because at the same time another tree growing where the old one stood, will compensate that.
I'm highly sceptical regarding ALL CO2 removal schemes that don't operate directly at a CO2 source, because I see absolutely NO WAY how they could ever be made cost effective:
CO2 concentration in air is less than 1g/m^3, meaning that you would have to pump like 10000 m^3 of air through your apparatus just to remove the CO2 from a single car travelling ~100km.
And this assumes 100% extraction efficiency which is not realistic at all.
So any climate plan that relies on large-scale CO2 removal from atmospheric air is probably a complete SCAM.
Also compare the cost difference between reducing emissions at the source by electrifying a vehicle with the effort required of extracting the CO2 from the air-- it is COMPLETELY obvious to me that even spending a dollar on CO2 removal is absolute LUNACY until all the cheap and easy options of reducing emissions have been exhausted.
Sure, but the amount of CO2 absorbed by a tree is measured in grams per day, which isn't really enough to even realistically offset the devices own carbon footprint, let alone start tackling other co2 sources.
Look, I think direct air capture (DAC) is as much “not the solution” as the next guy, but this kind of black-and-white thinking has no place in climate change mitigation.
Right now, DAC costs about $250-500/ton. The average passenger vehicle in the US emits 4.6 tons of CO2/year. You say it’s not cost-effective but you could literally charge every passenger vehicle user in the US $1-2000/year and use it for capture and eliminate the single largest source. That is the same order of magnitude as vehicle registration fees (though of course you’d want to make such a tax progressive, etc.), at least in California.
More importantly, DAC provides a major price signal for the cost of carbon emissions: if it costs $250/ton to get CO2 out of the atmosphere, it starts to make more sense to charge emitters $250/ton in advance to remove it — and if we implemented such a system, the market would likely respond very quickly with rapid reductions in carbon emissions. Oil and gas companies think it’s the solution? Great, they can pay $250/ton for it.
Instead we’re selling everyone individual shame about what are really societal decisions, telling them not to drive as much, be too cold/hot at home, and eat less beef — while letting producers largely off the hook. That’s the real lunacy here.
No one thinks infeasible miracle cures are the solution, so he's doing much more than "pointing that out": he's making an argument about the infeasibility of carbon capture.
In particular, he's saying it's impossible to capture enough carbon at scale in a cost-effective manner, so therefore we should not even be looking at this option until we've exhausted the alternatives. But he's wrong: it's not impossible, it's merely expensive, and anyway we should be pursuing all possible remedies in parallel, not dismissing something as infeasible because someone's armchair analysis makes it look like a scam to them.
What we need are people trying both likely and unlikely solutions, not knee-jerk gatekeeping from randoms on the internet.
There will be better physical, chemical, environmental, cost, and overall economic advantages resulting from efforts at source reduction than air capture.
This will always be what matters when resources need to be deployed most efficiently for abatement.
When you do the math, unless resources become unlimited, source capture is the better use of limited infrastructure.
It's really kinda-sorta completely impossible to fool Mother Nature on things like this.
The problem is not enough effort is going into source removal since the responsible source would be the only one that would be facing the added cost above what they are doing now.
With remote air capture the much less efficient and costly process can be spread among huge numbers of different but smaller payers whether they know it or not.
If that makes significant progress occur sooner that should make DAC be good to go forward with in the short term, but eventually people will be able to do the math at scale and most will say WTF were we spinning our wheels so long for?
> you could literally charge every passenger vehicle user in the US $1-2000/year
Politically (and practically) infeasible. Most likely it would be done as a fuel tax, but it would need to be in the ballpark of $3/gallon which would be suicide for the politicans who impose it and unaffordable to many of the people who would be paying for it. A tax that can't be paid can't fund anything.
Of course a literal tax is politically infeasible, not least because we're not at all serious about actually internalizing the currently-external cost of carbon.
But it's a mistake to consider a tax as something we can't afford because we are already incurring this tax bill by emitting the carbon in the first place. Whether we pay now to reduce the carbon or later to reduce the carbon and mitigate impacts, we will all be paying.
And I agree: imposing this tax today as a flat "usage" tax would be political suicide, but we have many levers that are far more equitable -- tax-and-dividend programs in particular have a lot of history.
From a purely rich western perspective it seems likely to me that OTHER people are going to pay much more than "the west" is going to: Wealth provides buffer against food shortages, lethal outdoor temperatures and sea level rise alike, and the regions that are going to suffer the most are also probably gonna be more like Bangladesh than Central Europe...
If your voters in general are not willing to pay the price for the damage they cause, what is a democracy supposed to do? Sad state of affairs.
You could literally buy people electric cars at that pricepoint instead.
Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly in favor of taxing CO2 emission, but the problem IMO is that people in general would rather ruin the planet than pay a fair price for the damage that their emissions cause, purely because they are USED to pollute and consume for cheap.
If there was the necessary political will to pay, then I believe that carbon capture would basically not be used at all, because it is MUCH cheaper to just not emit the carbon in the first place...
Yes, gas cars would disappear very quickly at that rate of carbon taxation.
"People in general" would absolutely use non-planet-ruining versions of basically anything, the problem is getting there -- most people do not even think about the polluting effects of every item they buy, and could not even if they wanted to given supply chain complexity.
Unfortunately these decisions are made for them, largely by the realities of economics and policy: when you have the option to pay to internalize the external cost of travel yourself, most people don't -- why would they? No one wants to act alone to hold that bag, that's literally one of the main reasons for policy: to engage in group action for group advantage where individual action is a competitive disadvantage.
Redistributive taxes on carbon emissions are likely something many people would support -- were it not for concerted efforts to the contrary by individuals and industries that stand to lose stature as a result. But on carbon capture: there will absolutely continue to be near- and medium-term use cases where burning petroleum products and then capturing the CO2 later is the most cost-effective approach. (Or vice versa, via synfuels.) There will still be a carbon cycle, and we will still want to have many levers on it.
> So any climate plan that relies on large-scale CO2 removal from atmospheric air is probably a complete SCAM.
The "scam" language is interesting to me.
I often run into people who seem to think that advocates of carbon capture technology are somehow being intellectually dishonest and are not serious about climate change.
In fact I think there are a lot of people who are interested in carbon capture tech who just keep an open mind about it. Not all scientific advances are obvious early on.
I think we should avoid assuming that people who are promoting carbon capture research are speaking in bad faith. There are lots of people who genuinely believe the tech may mature to a point it is useful to the fight against climate change.
Just because the fossil fuel industry promotes it doesnt mean that everyone who promotes it is a shill for the fossil fuel industry.
I'd not go so far and blame everyone involved in carbon capture tech; more specifically I thank that it CAN make sense if you're able to capture at the source (much higher concentration => less efficiency problems).
But I absolutely blame journalists and spokespersons that peddle this as some kind of viable technology when it's ABSOLUTELY not; this is similar to fusion tech, where people (sometimes deliberately!) create the impression that the technology could "solve" climate change and is just around the corner.
But in both cases no instance I've seen so far passes even a rudimentary smell test. If you have a novel method to catch CO2 from the air or are able to run your tokamak for 90s longer than that is awesome and interesting, but DONT run around and pretend to be heralding a scientific revolution in mainstream media (where both average reader and writer have an understanding of the subject and economics behind that is comparable with a average housecat).
I ABSOLUTELY blame people for doing that, and I consider it quite harmful because it creates the impression that there are some kinds of tech-based avenues out of climate change that never really existed at all, and this can even negatively impact decisions from policymakers.
It has been demonstrated repeatedly that the source of funding does implicitly bias research results.
But the bigger effect is the appearance of working on the solution is often used to prevent real mitigation efforts that are here and now, such as higher costs for CO2 emissions, reforming the carbon trading scheme, and investing in moving to more use of green electricity.
We spend on the order of $900B a year on the military. Imagine if $100B a year, every year, was spent instead on beefing up the power grid, investing in efficient long-haul power distribution, investing even more in solar/wind/nukes. With less need to strong arm the world to ensure access to oil, it could pay for itself in less military intervention. Obviously, there are many political reasons why even $1 reduction in the military budget is difficult to accomplish, but that is only an indication of how much the government is beholden to the military/industrial complex.
We don’t need to strong arm the world to access oil, we are a net exporter of oil. There’s lots of bad things to say about our foreign policy, but the idea that it’s about oil should have died with the Iraq War (where we spent trillions of dollars but didn’t get any oil).
I didn’t back in 2003 when I was in the anti-war minority. But seeing how many of those same people just became democrats in the last 20 years, and are now talking about how we need to stay in Afghanistan or intervene in Ukraine, I was wrong. We never got any oil from Iraq because it was never about the oil. It was about remaking the world in America’s image. We were in Iraq for the same reason ISIS was in Syria. We are trying to establish our version of the Caliphate, except with liberal democracy and capitalism instead of Islam.
That could flip at any moment based on the price of imported oil vs the cost of domestic production. The US is still very much "investing" in the military to ensure a stable source of energy (as well as other national interests).
"Helped shape" != "Dictated". It makes perfect sense to have industry members be a part of discussions about regulations and problems related to their industry. Industry members shouldn't be able to dictate the outcomes of those discussions, but they should certainly be able to participate in them.
Opposing nuclear was the first catastrophic mistake environmentalists made, causing them to be a net negative overall in terms of climate change. Opposing carbon capture will be the next (and possibly last) one.
If you think climate change is a serious problem, then you need to put aside your moral beliefs and think like an engineer about solutions. There is no math that allows you to conserve/renewables your way to 2C while accommodating the expected growth in living standards in India, China, and Africa. And any strategy that doesn’t allow people in the developing world to dramatically increase their standard of living is a non-starter that will create billions of enemies for the environmental movement. India recently committed to go carbon neutral by 2070: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/developing-countries-.... That’s too late, and they won’t meet that anyway. The developed world needs to go carbon negative as fast as possible.
There was a recent pro-nuclear article posted here on HN which was authored by a fossil fuel lobbyist (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35658318). I know you are fishing for the opposite response, but it seems very likely at this point that the fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear propaganda.
I wouldn't put it past them that they want to increase the wedge between nuclear and renewables as much as possible. For them it's easy to be pro nuclear, as it's expensive and slow to build thanks to heavy regulatilon. While we argue nuclear vs. solar and wind, they can sit back and keep profiting from fossile fuels.
Edit: just read the article a bit. It's just as I thought. "Only nuclear can save us" bullshit, whereas a genuine writer would have written "Only a combination of green energy sources can save us". FF industry doing their thing..
The dog has been dirtying the kitchen floor for long enough already that we're also going to need that toothpick.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 fact sheet on carbon dioxide removal:
"Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) refers to technologies, practices, and approaches that remove and durably store carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. CDR is required to achieve global and national targets of net zero CO2 and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. CDR cannot substitute for immediate and deep emissions reductions, but it is part of all modelled scenarios that limit global warming to 2° or lower by 2100."
>The dog has been dirtying the kitchen floor for long enough already that we're also going to need that toothpick.
And the dogs (pollution sources) are standing by to provide as many toothpicks as it takes to discourage anyone from bringing in a shovel any time soon.
Especially if the toothpicks cost so much it ends up with shovels remaining out-of-reach.
This is the most reasonable take. For some reason people in the West tend to ignore that 80% of the world is on the lower part of the exponential slope of progress, income, and demand for fossil fuel derived goods - and they are running up that slope at breakneck speed as a result of technological innovation.
Is the other 20% going to look down from our place of wealth and abundance - built on fossil fuels and countless externalities - and tell them that they have to achieve wealth and abundance through other means? It's ridiculous.
Sorry Sub-Saharan African, we have found that meat consumption is bad and therefore you can't do what we did, even though increased demand is a natural tendency as incomes rise.
All that cheap and dirty energy we used to make our infrastructure and grow GDP? You can't do it that way either. We made a big oopsie and have decided you have to do it through renewables and sustainable practices only.
By the way, are you interested in financing for this solar array? It's ok if you don't have the cash on hand, we'll just hold your highest quality farm-land as collateral.
We have to find ways to sequester. And we have to find ways to live in a warmer climate. It's the most probable outcome.
And who exactly are going to be paying for these ruinously expensive nuclear power stations for the poorer countries? Is it you and rayiner? Or perhaps you want your government to fund it through increased taxes on you?
I'm sure you wouldn't want the poor countries to pay for it themselves.
The point is that if everyone in the developed world had built more nuclear in the 1960s like France did, we wouldn’t be in such a dire situation now.
France’s CO2 emissions per capita are right around the world average. That means the rest of the developed world had done the same way as France half a century ago, we would have room to bring the whole developing world up to the same level as France while still being at the same overall CO2 output as today. And we wouldn’t have had all that extra CO2 for 60 years, giving us much more runway for the developed world to go to net zero while the developing world continues to develop.
Both mine and rayiner's commentary wasn't focused only on nuclear, but rather the harebrained and unrealistic doomscape narrative coming out of the West. When did it become so unpopular to point out what is most likely to happen? Because if we're placing bets, I'm gonna put my money on the developing nations not giving a flying F about emissions. Therefore, we need to think like realists and instead of idealists.
If you want to be realistic, the more realistic option is for rich nations to fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries. It is much easier and cheaper and likelier to succeed than every nation with a GDP lower than Connecticut developing a nuclear program on their own, or for carbon sequestration to become viable.
And alas, climate relief fund—or rather a loss and damage fund—is already a thing. Approved in the last COP and already ratified by the EU. (I know, it is much weaker than real climate relief, but proves it is possible). with some European countries already with some programs in place for paying climate relief in foreign countries.
If you want to be a realist, you should commit to it, and apply it equally.
> If you want to be realistic, the more realistic option is for rich nations to fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries.
It's not realistic at all for developed countries to bankroll green infrastructure in the developed world at a scale that allows those developing countries to continue 6-8% GDP growth annually.
> ruinously expensive
You just disqualified yourself from any argument there. Nuclear power is the cheapest and most efficient form that we have ever found. Yes, the upfront cost may be huge but loans can help with that
You really have no idea of costs. Nuclear is by far the most expensive. Well, ok, gas became equally expensive with the Ukraine war but it had to quadruple in price to get there.
China builds it because they are putting government money towards it, rather than allowing private companies to build infrastructure that can make themselves a profit.
Now, I do understand why China works that way, and I also get why Western companies can use this to funnel taxpayer money to their friends, but I don't get why someone like you would support either of these ideas?
Whenever this line of reasoning is brought up, i ask one question - what is the cost of climate change? Who will bear that cost and who will deal with the effects?
A poor country deriving energy from a nuclear power plant means that carbon isn’t being emitted for energy production over the lifetime of that nuclear plant.
Despite all the hype, no renewable technology has been able to supply a growing electrical demand anywhere in the world. Every example is small, isolated or limited in time. Renewables will eventually get there but there are countless other things we must solve before that day comes.
Meanwhile, the argument of cost is trotted out without ever considering the full impacts of climate change on the flip side.
IF we don't choose to build the expensive ones we'll never learn how to make cheaper ones, it is the cycle of every technology. Nuke development in the West has been stymied for generations by pearl clutchers.
I don’t know if all you wrote about is going to be a problem in the way you see it. The developing world has jumped/skipped some of the development the west/rich nations experienced and just adapted the latest technology.
A good example of this is communication technology. In wealthy nations, there was all of this wired infrastructure put in place since the advent of the telegraph. In developing nations, they just skipped all of that and most people have cellphones. Maybe not iphones or even smartphones, but the banks they used developed robust texting protocols, from what I’ve read and heard about, where people could do banking transactions from something like those old nokia dumbphones.
A lot of these developing countries rely on China, maybe to the wests collective chagrin, and China has invested heavily in rail infrastructure in a lot of these countries, and, Chinese auto manufacturers are already producing tons of electric vehicles. Guess whose car companies are building auto factories in a lot of the developing world? And though they may not meet the safety and quality standards of wealthy countries, people in developing countries are just happy to get places quicker than by foot. I may not have listed everything that emits greenhouse gases and a suitable replacement but normalizing mass transit (I forgot to mention the electric buses I’ve read these developing countries are either ordering from china or building at home in Chinese factories), but these two… industries make up a significant chunk of problematic emissions.
What I think we may see in the west is active resistance to adapting new energy and normalizing greener behavior because of things like American exceptionalism. Also, these technologies are expensive to buy for many people even in the west (right, not most people here on hackernews), and its going to be prohibitively expensive for people in old housing stock to upgrade their property and municipalities to upgrade infrastructure. Tax rebates on $35,000 electric cars and heat pumps aren’t going to mean much to people relying on older family members for a roof over their head and can’t find jobs, especially if this whole ai thing takes off. There’s also significant and continual pushback from an people who seem determined to trash electric cars and such, and thats exacerbated by corporations acting bad faith to maximize profit (high efficiency appliances that barely make it through their standard warranty terms and subscription based car features come to mind.
So yeah, I think the developing world might be fine but its the wealthy nations who are going to screw themselves (and because of the US’ voracious consumption if everything), and maybe the rest of the world regardless of what steps the developing world takes.
Worth looking at in this context is how the USA robbed us of the Kyoto protocol, which very much had the potential to at the very least give us longer time to roll out the needed changes. USA’s excuse back in 1997 was that it was unfair that developing nations were exempt. Looking back on it, I believe this was only an excuse forwarded by government from the fossil fuel industry. If not for US exceptionalism, they would have found another excuse and destroyed our climate anyway.
You can’t really give many more examples than wireless. There is no way to make concrete that uses much less energy. No way to make steel. No way to heat or cool your home without using a lot of energy. No way to move yourself around to more than bicycle distance without expending vast amounts of energy on building infrastructure, vehicles (cars or trains), and powering them.
If the poor billions are to have any chance to live in any kind of comfort resembling what wealthy westerners or Asians do, they need to massively increase their energy consumption. There is no wireless way around it.
> We have to find ways to sequester. And we have to find ways to live in a warmer climate. It's the most probable outcome.
This is not the only conclusion from your excellent observation. Another conclusion could be that rich nations fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries without asking anything in return. I believe this is what the climate relief fund is about—as approved (albeit in a much too small scale) in last COP.
So far however rich nations are not only reluctant to fund infrastructure projects in other countries without anything in return—let alone green infrastructure projects—they are also reluctant to fund green infrastructure projects domestically (see e.g. Green New Deal in the US). The technology for mass carbon sequestration does not exist yet, and if it existed I bet it would follow the same prospects as current prospects of tackling the climate crisis. In short, they will not be built at the scale needed for any meaningful results.
This is often the case when you offer a technical solution to a societal or a political problem.
Has been done multiple times over. Successful examples include global ban on ozone depleting chemicals, multiple standards for international trade, just run of the mill law and policy, human rights, etc.
It is in human nature not to destroy our climate, it took extremely wealthy and persistent class of polluters concentrated effort for the past few decades to prevent climate actions from various governments. Human populations—most of which residing in democracies—would have loved for governments to ratify the various treaties that would have saved our climate. As it is in our nature to do so. Only inhumane action has doomed our climate.
Climate inaction requires tremendous sacrifice in all of our standards of living. So does taxes. It is a very human behavior to give away a little you have in order for other people to enjoy better lives. We do it all the time.
People in the developing world will not make any sacrifice to their standard of living, which is already low. To the contrary, they will insist on increasing their standard of living. For the developed world to bankroll the green infrastructure of the developing world--at a scale that allows the developing world to continue improving its standard of living, and while continuing their own green energy investment--will require people in the developing world to give away far more than "a little."
Why are you so sure that people wouldn’t agree to that? Do you see consistent polling data across generations indicating this trend? Is the popular opinion against climate relief funds in Europe? Are people in Denmark opposed to revenue from their garbage disposal/ski-hill going to climate relief in other countries? I don’t think so. And more importantly to your point, does polling suggest people are more willing to invest in carbon sequestration technology as a climate action, rather than green infrastructure in foreign countries? Show me these polls, and show me a lasting trend, and I’ll consider your point.
As a counter I’d like to offer you that the German population was ready to suffer a deeper energy crisis for harder sanctions with Russia after the Ukraine invasion. Polling was consistent, showing a willingness to accept lower standard of living, if it meant a possibility that a war fought in a poorer country would end sooner. On an individual level participants in a prisoner dilemma studies show a consistent willing to accept a worse deal if it means more people will be better off. Neither psychology nor general polling is on your side.
No, the people will accept lower standard of living just fine. The only ones who insist on anything are governments who are consistently unwilling to sacrifice the corporate profits of the rich. And here carbon sequestration works perfectly, as it will take decades for this technology to be mature and rolled out at scale, all the while corporation can keep polluting and keep turning in record profits for their shareholders. Something that people in the ”developed word“ (ugh!) actually generally oppose.
Your argument is so painfully disingenuous it hurts. Everyone from Germany to America to Denmark has democratically elected governments, and you think that the reason they prioritize businesses is “corporate profits,” rather than the things people like that are associated with corporate profits (jobs, material goods, comfortable lifestyles)?
I’m from a third world country. My family that has moved to the developed world has pretty much universally pursued a high carbon footprint lifestyle (big house in the suburbs, SUV, etc., as soon as they could afford it.
That case you made about meat consumption is actually very relatable as found in a few reports went viral in China, including this one by . Twenty years ago most rural living Chinese can't afford beef at all. Twenty years later they are able, and there are like 1 billion rural people become urban in 40 years I guess (plz check source), and developed countries are already mad about stuff they predicted to happen.
Trust fund solution is one helpful tool for this, yet uprising tension in India/US allies and China/Russia/Middle East/Pakistan make the plan definitely dead. It will soon to be another case of WWII U.N. that is controlled by U.S. and vetoed by U.S.S.R. for a billion times a year and not producing anything remotely close to a deal, or a compromise.
Also, solar array is tremendously expensive due to regional difference, just like battery, either rare metal or lithium.
Reality is geographically, poor global south likely to bear higher brunt of climate change, while many in northern regions will be net benefitiaries. But poverty immediately sucks more than climate change, hope is that development via whatever means will uplift more than a few degrees dooms. How many people in developed north would trade their inhospitable winters in heated homes for being impoverished in more fair weathered country. None, because they learned to live with the cold.
Let me play devils advocate though. Right now nuclear provides 10% of the world’s power. Now since it was first deployed in the 70’s there have been at least 3 major accidents I can think of: Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3 mile island. So that’s one every 15 years, roughly.
The naive math behind that suggests that if we were to increase the number of power plants by a factor of 10 to supply all the world’s power, we should expect the rate of accidents to increase proportionally. So that’s a Fukushima somewhere in the world every 1.5 years or 18 months. And a bad one of those accidents could spread radiation across an entire continent.
Now do the same calculation for passenger aviation.
That's not how disasters work. They aren't independent variables, when they happen, you learn and change the way things work to prevent them from happening again.
Experiments and development in the 1950s. First commercial plant in 58.
Further growth in 60s and 70s. Including deadly accidents like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 in 1961 - protests grew in 60s and 70s too.
Three Mile Island 1979.
Chernobyl 1986.
Fukushima 2011.
That 25-year gap between Chernobyl and Fukushima - and the extraordinary circumstances causing Fukushima vs the previous incidents - suggests that safety improved A LOT over the 60-odd years between 1958 and now.
True, it has. But, the failure rate is not zero. And more plants mean they will happen more often. I’m just pointing out that it’s rational to worry about a small probability high consequence disaster.
Nuclear fission is a reaction with a positive feedback loop, making it naturally unstable, and requires some mechanism to create a negative feedback of greater magnitude to make it stable. And that requires some kind of active machinery to function properly. If that machinery fails, then the feedback loop becomes positive again. Machines can always fail, so I doubt that fission can ever be made completely safe.
3 Mile Island: No one died, nothing of any significance happened. Clickbait from an era before clickbait was a thing.
Chernobyl: Irresponsible operation of obsolete, inherently-hazardous Soviet-era design. Not something that can ever happen again if some relatively-simple lessons are followed.
Fukushima: Irresponsible maintenance of plant operating well beyond its intended lifespan, which was irresponsibly constructed in a tsunami-prone seismic zone. This type of accident can and probably will happen again, precisely because of moratoriums on new plant construction.
One risk you didn't list but probably should have is reckless military attacks waged against installations such as Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. It's hard to safeguard a nuclear plant against a barbarian invasion. It may make sense to operate such plants under UN auspices, or otherwise guarantee their safety through multinational treaties with real enforcement behind them.
fukushima plant was obsolete and built in a not great area (probably due to local political squabble), but it was in the process to slowly (backroooms deals between energy provider and gov) be modernized to current standard, thing that contained the disaster as other reactors had already moved their generators on the roof instead to keeping it at ground level. Japan is not a great example for corporate behaviour
I don't know of any environmentalists against the research. Most I've talked with are skeptical that this is viable given current technology and believe that we need to act as if this doesn't exist, but that's different than opposing the research.
If there is some sort of breakthrough, then that's fantastic!
I think there are other geoengineering techniques that environmentalists are against such as seeding with sulphur dioxide or trying to create a shade preventing sun rays from reaching earth, but the argument against carbon capture is only that it doesn't yet exist.
"Carbon capture research" has been an excuse to divert funding away from renewables for 20+ years. It's hardly made a dent in emissions and it's unlikely to change any time soon.
When someone says they're "green" but hard-core antinuclear I just stop listening after that. They have done almost zero research on the topic and have 99% likely just decided because someone told them it was bad. Nuclear is our only viable path if we plan on keeping a dependable power grid. Battery tech is not currently up to par with what we need to make wind and solar 100% solutions. We need at least a 10X increase in storage density and longevity for that. They should absolutely be part of the mix though as they're cheaper than nuclear per kW
I think nuclear, today, is a hardcore bad idea. Nuclear is showing no tangible signs of getting cheaper, and renewable and battery prices continue to fall.
By definition poor countries overtaken by fossil fuels industrialization cannot use nuclear power - the technical knowledge is not there, and even if it were the corruption would result in destruction of the facility.
Power from the sun is the ultimate end goal in the tech tree. We've just skipped over the middle part because it turns out that even the smartest nuclear builds are still stupid and incapable of accounting for natural disasters or human elements.
The article is interesting but technically weak. If we focus on the process of generating a stream of pure CO2 from the atmosphere (where CO2 is at ~420 parts per million at present), things become a bit more clear.
Note first that the global biosphere is capturing CO2 into organic molecules at about 15 times the rate that fossil fuel consumption dumps geologically stable carbon deposits into the atmosphere. However, almost all of this biological carbon is respired back into the atmosphere by microbes, fungi, insects and animals who use the material as a food source. The reason atmospheric CO2 is rising is that the biosphere doesn't have the capacity to absorb the added CO2. Keep in mind that plant growth is a quite slow process compared to industrial activity.
So let's say we generate a stream of pure CO2 from the atmosphere - but how? If we got the electricity to do this (for pumping air over CO2 filters etc.) from fossil fuels, it's a futile cycle. The energy source has to be fossil-free for this to make sense as a CO2 extraction process.
Now, the oil industry has mostly been using their CO2 streams for enhanced oilfield recovery, i.e. they pump the CO2 down into the wells and it comes back out carrying the dregs of the oil with it. When processed into fuel, the injected CO2 goes back into the atmosphere.
Another use of a pure CO2 stream is to jack greenhouse CO2 up to ~1000 ppm, which has a significant effect on plant growth rates under controlled nutrient conditions. Most of the CO2 is released back into the atmosphere as well.
In terms of storing the CO2 in some stable form, this is rather energy-intensive. The two options that make the most sense are carbon fiber materials and diamond, the latter being harder to make (but very cool and sci-fi, enter the Diamond Age). Other options like making limestone (CaCO3) are tricky (where do you get all the calcium from). These are the only long-term removal options that make sense.
Claims that pumping CO2 down wells is a good idea for long-term storage are fraudulent. Claims that coal can be burned and used for electricity while capturing all the CO2 by the above process are fraudulent. The DOE public-private programs like FutureGen that promoted this were fraudulent, to the tune of billions of dollars of fraud.
The other option for captured CO2 is to use it make methane and jet fuel, for long-distance air travel, rocketry, maybe global shipping. Here we have zero effect on atmospheric CO2 content as what comes out goes back in. This is comparable to biosphere activity, i.e. it's steady-state. Costs for this process might be 10X that for current fossil fuel production, but it's the long-term fuel solution. Given the high costs, electric vehicles form most local transportation will be far more efficient.
I think that covers all the technological bases, anyway.
There is a potentially valid criticism here since this is ultimately about what the school (with its tremendous resources) is choosing to focus its efforts on. Stanford's previous global climate and energy project was famously funded by oil companies (though I suspect this was mostly a PR thing for them in previous decades), so this is not surprising. But should their priorities be those of the school?
Also some interesting things happening behind the scenes where they are clearly keeping faculty from certain 'troublesome' departments out of the process.. but that's not really unusual in the university context.
On the flip side, I think folks are also over-estimating the importance of corporate sources of funding here. The real reason for this focus is on government funding and resources on this topic that the school will want to tap into.
reading tea-leaves -- there is a behind-the-scenes split on how to proceed, on several fronts. The EU and India proposed directly to include IPCC language about "transitioning to 100% non-fossil fuel" and the USA + friends cancelled that in committee. While lots of ordinary educated people support energy change, you can see from the rhetoric and the stalling that what that "change" is, is not agreed upon. Stanford University, with regular funding from the Oil and Gas giants, are in a position to effect the spin and secrecy around these very public changes.
For example in 2023, the long-term investment and planning to replace Soviet-era oil and gas infrastructure in the Baltics with USA led oil and gas infrastructure in the Baltics is not publicly discussed; plans for control of shipping channels in the Arctic Circle area are not publicly discussed in the USA; changes to the USA grid to accomodate plural energy sources are not publicly discussed. An oil and gas-funded institute at Stanford is in a position to affect all of those. Multiple former US State Department executive leaders are active at Stanford right now.
I think Big Oil is less Big Oil than it really is Big Energy.
Big Energy has the massive capital to deploy for green energy solutions that are viable and will provide a renewable path forward off of more polluting or non-renewable sources. Big Energy's product of choice is mainly petroleum derived currently. Due to sourcing and limitations though, this is a mostly finite resource that they would love to replace for more profit.
Profit will drive them to new sources. When you see Big Energy actually moving to these new sources at the mega-industrial scale and not PoCs, prototypes, but deploying tens of billions of dollars, is when the true revolution will happen.
If they are funding Stanford and other parts of Academia, then that is a good thing.
Can we stop the anti-sequestration movement? Let's just think about it for a second. How do we get to net zero if we account for lifetime emissions of energy sources? Even solar has lifetime emissions. You have to remove it from the atmosphere. (We'll ignore processes that can't be decarbonized, but that just adds to the problem)
So what do we know? We know that forests are hard to plant and that their early lifecycle is a carbon source. Still, we should plant trees. Ignoring this, US citizens alone would need to plant 500 trees per year to offset their current footprints[0]. That's 165 billion trees a year, and a densely packed forest has 4-6 sqft per tree. The US has just over a trillion square feet. You do the math. (even dramatic reductions in footprints don't solve this problem)
Okay, so trees aren't enough. Luckily we know land management is one of the best carbon sink techniques available. But we run into a similar problem, just with more efficiency than above. So what is the result? We have to use a variety of techniques, both natural and artificial, to scrub carbon from the air. Not to reach net negative (which should really be our goal), but just to even reach net zero! Yes, big oil is going to fund this. Why? Because when carbon taxes come in, they can keep their plants up by scrubbing a percentage of their carbon to match that tax. (They also want PR and this is cheap PR) If they somehow could scrub all the carbon (they won't), then what do we care? The goal is about carbon emissions, not source of energy. I just don't see them surviving, but of course they're going to try to hold on as long as they can instead of adapting and surviving. Their loss.
imo, as a global priority, reducing carbon seems like it should be a much lower priority compared to how hard its pushed.
incoming nuclear fusion would alleviate a ton of our carbon issues
if we use info from this wonderfully fleshed out cost-benefit analysis by bjorn lomborg i bet we could get the best of value out of our current fossil fuels while not impoverishing our children and grandchildren:
If we don’t reduce carbon emissions—heck if we don’t stop carbon emissions—there will be no future for our children and grandchildren to either prosper or impoverish in. Not reducing carbon means we are all going to die. The earth will heat 4-5 degrees. Human societies will not function as we know them today, governments will break down, wars will be fought, famines will linger. However much money fossil fuel gives us today will have no effect on that future, as we will all be dead.
the 4-5C model is a fraudulent model that's been pushed for political agendas, it mistakes the temperature changes that happen as distance from the equator increases.
Realistically, the world is going to see a 1.5-1.9C increase by 2100. These are the IPCC's current projections, which is the most well known standard.
everything you say is the dogma of alarmists, its not that i don't think you care about this, I'm certain that you do, but you're working off incorrect information and its doing more harm than good.
some of the worst implications will be a biodiversity loss in places near the equator, and there is basically not much we can do to stop it. although hopefully i'm wrong as there's a lot of ecological folk trying to remediate future problems in this area.
the worst thing we can do to ourselves as a society is panic and turn all of our attention towards climate-based dogma. europe did this and russia found it as a reason to attack ukraine. in reality, we have multiple priorities that need to be sorted. climate is on there but its not the only one. its important to keep people wealthy enough to care about the climate, because otherwise they burn fuel sources that are worse for it, ie wood and coal. and we also need global societies to develop scientifically/economically so we can achieve nuclear fusion faster for the very goal that you're concerned about.
to summarize a solid policy-based strategy, and complex-web of problems concept to solve our climate problem is that:
increase in global trade -> leads to -> increase in economic prosperity -> leads to -> increase in scientific development -> leads to -> faster development of fusion
now the economic prosperity part isn't simple because there are foreign governments that are showing themselves to be hostile towards western institutions and operations, taking advantage of their own development to act maliciously. this isn't great as it makes us divert resources away from these important problems. but if we only focus on the climate the west will be eaten up by someone who doesn't care about it at all.
> the worst thing we can do to ourselves as a society is panic and turn all of our attention towards climate-based dogma.
We’ve tried doing nothing for a decade and see where that has brought us. I say the strategy of remaining calm has failed, I say it is past time for us to panic and scream as if we are all going to die, because we are.
I know I am a climate doomer, why wouldn’t I be? I’ve been complaining about climate change since I was a teenager, waiting for the governments to stop it, only to realize they value corporate profits over, you know, our climate, and worse, my life. We are all doomed, and we are all going to die now.
Realistically we are only going to see 1.5° if we take immediate action now! This means close all fossil fuel plants, close all highways, shut down airports, close all cement factories, stop producing chemical fertilizers, etc. Realistically 4-5° is a business as usual, that is we enact no climate policies other than existing ones, where governments promise and then fail to deliver. Realistically 4-5° is the most plausible option. Realistically a realistic climate action could bring us down to 2-3°. However given how governments have acted so far, I see no reason but to panic and scream, we are all going to die in a 4-5° inferno.
> reducing carbon seems like it should be a much lower priority compared to how hard its pushed
I'm not sure what you mean. The last 50 years (and even 5) have been far more bark than bite.
> incoming nuclear fusion would alleviate a ton of our carbon issues
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I worked on nuclear in a previous career and still have friends there, including fusion (including the big labs). Being bullish, fusion net gain is still 10 years away. It'll take decades to add to the energy portfolio after that. The case for fusion is worse than the case for fission. We should work on both, but we can't hold out for future technologies (we can say the same about storage). We needed to act decades ago, pushing it off by a few more decades is not going to solve the issue, it is repeating the same mistakes.
> fleshed out cost-benefit analysis
I wouldn't trust any of these. Zero of them. You need to have a pretty good understanding of these systems (highly complex) to even understand if the analyses are good. Every single one has a bias and is highly politicized. The more politicized a topic is, the higher level of expertise you need to understand who is telling the truth (politicization adds large amounts of noise).
> Bjorn Lomborg
Who is a political scientist. He isn't a climate scientist, nor even a scientist. Here's a rather well known scientist, Stefan Rahmstorf (studies physics of oceans) discussing Bjorn[0]. You can check Bjorn's scholar page[1] to even verify that he's not doing actual science bust just writing opinions with no supporting evidence. Please stop supporting hacks.
fusion being decades away isn't a problem, we have time.
the only things in that cost benefit analysis are politicized are what people are currently pushing en masse, what he points out doesn't offer any benefit from a cost perspective. plus you contradict yourself, you say it needs a complex understanding but you dismiss it before analyzing it yourself, he's got books and scientific publications on this, go check for yourself.
all of his strongest suggestions are about preserving biodiversity, curing disease, technological improvements, trade restrictions, and contraception. Where are you getting the politicized part?
and he has a background in political science and is doing macroeconomic research, he's not claiming to have a cure for temperature increases because he works off the IPCC's data, which is the known standard for climate science. he's giving simple policy (oh look political science, its almost like this is a multifaceted conversation, are you trying to shut it down like people did with "the science" over covid?) implementations that can have massive net benefits.
he's not a "hack" (insults are at the bottom of the hierarchy of disagreement, if you want a reason to dismiss someone's opinions its that they do this). he's gone on tons of podcasts having open discussions about these things, if Stefan Rahmstorf can hold an actual discussion with him I'd love to see it.
your link doesn't work. But if all Stefan has it petty insults like calling him a "hack" then I'd guess he's not open to any kind of discussion, which is a red flag.
nuclear fusion will be achieved but nobody question if it will be economically convenient, even with global carbon tax and esg frameworks. As today we are in the realm of hundreds of billions for "sperimental" fusion facility, just comparing to fission plant cost, they have balloned exponentially from sperimental phase decades ago
If one simply gasified wood to run generators, then buried the residual charcoal to make tera preta, every kilowatt used to generate electricity would sequester a significant amount of carbon with minimal change to current infrastructure. One could use it first in disaster relief where there are a lot of downed trees anyway, then move to a fast-growing crop like hemp or bamboo. All that would be needed is more widely available wood gasifiers. Anyone want to invest in a company doing that?
The output of commercial scale wood gassification plants is not charcoal? It's ash. The whole point of wood gassification is complete combustion, so turning as much of the carbon into combustible fuel as possible.
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 216 ms ] threadThis isn't a paranoid conspiracy or dramatic judgement. Companies really do pay for particular research results that benefit them. This has been going on at least since gasoline had lead in it.
The administrators are useful to a point but they vastly overstate their importance and erode everything they touch overtime like a malignant cancer in a lot of organizations.
I imagine few of the top layers of administration work a full 40 hours a week for the benefit of their institution.
Much less overtime.
To summarize the situation. US education institutes are laying off hundreds of teachers, cancelling courses, cutting services, etc. across the board. If a teacher is hired, it is most likely for part-time, on lower wages, with fewer benefits. If a teacher is guaranteed tenure after x many years, chances are they will be laid off, and their programs cancelled before this happens. At the primary level, schools are being aggressively merged, and sometimes even closed, to save money for the school district.
At the same time administrators in said schools are ballooning, more administrators are being hired, and their pay keeps going up (while other staff pay is stagnant). If there is money being allocated to the schools, it most likely goes into administration, not education. Administration has also become a political gig. Administrators move between school systems, get higher and higher positions, fill out their resumes, and gain prestige (all the while being payed more and more). What they actually do, is anybodies guess, most of the time they are simply in the way of teacher making actual changes which would benefit students. A typical scenario is a new higher administrator comes in, wants to look important and decides to create more administrator position and hire a security contractor to impose a security theater on campus.
I guess this this what your grand-parent was talking about. And how it comes to no-ones surprise when funding for this ballooning administration costs come from the same industry which is killing us all and our climate.
This also does not make much sense when one sees this humongous growth in new courses, departments, degrees and academic positions in first place over last few decades. So many universities did not become 5 star resorts by just keeping strictly educational services.
To be clear, I’m talking about the education system as a whole, not just prestige universities, but also community collages as well high schools and primary schools. Prestige universities like Stanford will always find funding to do what they want (e.g. from fossil fuel companies) this includes ballooning administrators playing the CV game, as well as keeping existing courses open while even opening new courses. Community collages and poorer school districts cannot afford to do all, and—it is my experience—they are way more likely to pick funding their administrators at the cost of education.
In fact this seems to be the only way they eventually learn:
In response, more than 800 people affiliated with the university have signed a letter calling for a funding ban, and some alumni say they won’t donate to their alma mater until it happens.
https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/30/from-the-community-we-r...
The service was provided and paid for and now there's some expectation to give more money after the fact?
Those are reasons, whether they're good or not depends on perspective.
Personally, I donate to my old dorm’s social/making stuff fund, the students get way more out of those dollars a lot further than I do, and I always appreciated that we had that budget.
The students, in large part, pay for the educational piece (alongside funding) but significant funding is needed for advancing the world's knowledge.
https://www.insidephilanthropy.com/home/2017/1/10/joan-krocs...
I believe climate change is a huge, urgent concern. And I think it would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our risk mitigation portfolio. If fossil fuel companies, out of self-interest, want to support a legitimate research institution doing that, I'm not sure I should complain.
If Stanford starts spouting propaganda that we can procrastinate on getting off of fossil fuels because their carbon removal technology will solve everything, I will definitely condemn them mercilessly. I assume the fossil fuel companies are already spouting such propaganda or funding someone to do so, since they've been spouting anti-climate risk mitigation propaganda for decades, and I am already condemning them mercilessly for that anyway.
I actually think carbon removal could spur renewables development because in theory it's a flexible sink for spare power. Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few square miles of solar panels, and run it when the sun shines. We could get a lot of demand for solar panels out of this, and that will encourage the further development of commercial scaling up. And the more renewables scale up, the more I think fossil fuels will be squeezed out of existence because they won't be able to compete on price.
EDIT: I am open to the possibility that this is completely unrealistic and is just another distraction from the fossil fuel industry. But the arguments need to be made on technical grounds by knowledgeable people. Here is an interview by an expert making that argument: https://www.protocol.com/climate/carbon-dioxide-removal-cost...
> Yet ambition and momentum may not be enough to reach that milestone, according to Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer with MIT’s Energy Initiative. He’s been studying carbon capture for over 30 years (even writing a book about it in 2018) and is more skeptical given the capital costs to build CDR plants and the enormous amount of energy they need to run. He sat down with Protocol to talk about why he thinks $100 per ton is “pure fantasy.”
By the way, I really liked this quote, and I wish all the "we just need to"-ers would read it:
> When people think things are too easy, they won’t address the hard decisions, even though those hard decisions may end up with a better solution. At this point, I don’t know if liming the ocean is a great idea or not, but it has a lot of potential, and we have to look at things like that if we want to get to net zero. And people say capturing carbon dioxide from the air for $100 per ton will get us to net zero. But if it’s a fantasy, it’s not going to get us there.
Planting trees and establishing more forests is a already working technology with lots of other nice side effects, while I see the "artificial carbon removal" tech often just used as a excuse to not do anything now at all and wait for the magic game changer.
"Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few square miles of solar panels, and run it when the sun shines."
And I totally like anything related to this, but as long as we build new coal plants, building this would be just symbolic.
So first I would use the desert solar power for actually powering the grid, removing the need for coal.
Regarding the concept that it's a distraction, I think that's folk behavioral psychology with an unhealthy dash of moralism. It needs to be substantiated with evidence before I take it seriously. We are talking about a real carbon mitigation research avenue that could have real benefits.
I'm not trying to impose an impossible standard here. If you can show examples of something like this happening in contexts other than climate change, I'm open to that. What I don't accept is mere folk behavioral psychology speculation driving what an entire civilization does to mitigate a massive risk.
"No real need to change the gasoline cars, as we will have CO2 removal."
I can probably dig up some ugly quotes, if you like. But those are not really my circles so I have nothing at hand.
(I should probably add, that I am from germany and loud cars and the making of them are important here. But I heard the same from US politicians)
"What I don't accept is mere folk behavioral psychology speculation driving what an entire civilization does to mitigate a massive risk. "
Well, how exactly could technical CO2 removal ever work?
We burn stuff for energy and then need even more energy to recapture the side products?
How would this be powered?
By the sun?
Solar panels still needs to be manufactured and deployed.
So if we would have all energy generation by regenerative sources AND we have overcapacity - then we could also extract some of the old released CO2, true, but have you done some calculations, how much area you would need, to power a significant amount of CO2 removal?
Lot's of it.
Forests on the other hand grow and expand by themself, once established and undisturbed, that's the beauty of them. They also help stabilizing local climate. And the real problem of climate change for lots of people will be desertification. So more Forests reduce CO2 AND provide actual better living conditions for the people affected. A lone symbolic CO2 removal on the other hand is really limited in its usefulness, while the coal plants are burning happily.
The article is about how big oil changed Standford's research focus. And their interest is simply to leave everything as it is and stall any further oil limitations, so they can profit, like they used to, without having to fundamentally change.
But yes, they are totally free to fund research that is in their interest and if they happen to find a magic solution acceptable to society, I am thrilled. I am just very sceptical that this is what will happen. I rather suspect it will be symbolism used by willing populistic politicians, to block uncomforthable legislation or stall it completely.
I just see no technical ground for this to really work, other than wishful thinking. And if the latter is the base, then it won't work, no matter how millions you spend on it.
If the price of re-extracting released carbon is baked into into burning fossil fuels, then carbon capture will only be viable in places where energy is cheap, such as places with good conditions for solar, wind or hydro.
The economic viability of carbon capture is thus entirely dependent on the quality of the regulatory framework around carbon emissions. If we don't have that, then any advances in carbon capture technology won't matter. If we do have that, then giving the carbon capture industry a bit of a headstart with research will make the necessary overall emissions targets we need easier to reach.
So while carbon capture is indeed touted as an excuse to avoid those regulations by opportunistic politicians, those politicians would find some other excuse to oppose those regulations. So don't let them lead you think that carbon capture isn't an important part of the solution that is being developed by people who care deeply and climate change.
We've waited far to long already and simply can't afford to ignore any part of the solution that can help reduce total emissions faster.
Totally agree. No dogmatic framework is helpful, that opposes solutions out of principle.
It is just, that ressources are limited.
Any solar, wind or water plant, that connects to the grid is helping. Likely also every nuclear reactor.
But the carbon capture solution I see not really helping, as long as coal plants are being build and are proposed by the exact kind of people, who said before that it is all not so bad and economy growth is always more important.
" So don't let them lead you think that carbon capture isn't an important part of the solution that is being developed by people who care deeply and climate change."
With what I know, I sadly really don't see it as part of the solution, but part of the distraction, part of the problem.
In germany the car lobby recently achieved, that the ban on new ICE cars in 2035 was in effect negated, because cars with E-Fuels should obviously excempt. Except that cars that can run with E-Fuels can also run with normal fuels and E-Fuels make no sense economically, so they already demanded for massive state subventioning of the concept. Spend lots of energy to generate a bit of fuel to continue the big roar of their loud engines. So all just fake. And those are the exact same people who lobby for the concept of carbon capture. Lot's of politicial "activism" to effectivly change nothing, except on paper.
So to repeat myself, I am not against carbon sequestering by principle.
I just think focussing on it now is just distracting from the real solutions needed now.
Once we stopped the last coal plant - then we can talk about spending surplus energy to capture existing CO2. Not before. And it is still a long way to get there.
The same math could be used to determine those would be the only places it would be viable to burn fossil fuels to begin with.
Assuming a tree absorbs around 20kg of CO2/year, you'd need to plant 250 trees per year (!!) for every single passenger vehicle (~5tons of CO2/year).
And the problem does not stop there-- these numbers only work for the first 20 or so years of tree growth, and afterwards you have to seal you trees (under high pressure to turn them into hydrocarbons? :P) or plant even more trees to compensate for older trees decomposing (releasing CO2).
That's how the world looked like, before humans chopped or burned them down and let cattle, goats and sheep prevented new forests from growing again.
Reforesting at least parts of that back, would capture significant amounts of CO2. No matter that a old tree composes at some point, because at the same time another tree growing where the old one stood, will compensate that.
Except the iciest colds in the north and most arid deserts, forests used to be the norm.
edit: of course not every land was covered by forests, prairie also existed natural, but forests were a lot more common, than they are today.
CO2 concentration in air is less than 1g/m^3, meaning that you would have to pump like 10000 m^3 of air through your apparatus just to remove the CO2 from a single car travelling ~100km.
And this assumes 100% extraction efficiency which is not realistic at all.
So any climate plan that relies on large-scale CO2 removal from atmospheric air is probably a complete SCAM.
Also compare the cost difference between reducing emissions at the source by electrifying a vehicle with the effort required of extracting the CO2 from the air-- it is COMPLETELY obvious to me that even spending a dollar on CO2 removal is absolute LUNACY until all the cheap and easy options of reducing emissions have been exhausted.
Right now, DAC costs about $250-500/ton. The average passenger vehicle in the US emits 4.6 tons of CO2/year. You say it’s not cost-effective but you could literally charge every passenger vehicle user in the US $1-2000/year and use it for capture and eliminate the single largest source. That is the same order of magnitude as vehicle registration fees (though of course you’d want to make such a tax progressive, etc.), at least in California.
More importantly, DAC provides a major price signal for the cost of carbon emissions: if it costs $250/ton to get CO2 out of the atmosphere, it starts to make more sense to charge emitters $250/ton in advance to remove it — and if we implemented such a system, the market would likely respond very quickly with rapid reductions in carbon emissions. Oil and gas companies think it’s the solution? Great, they can pay $250/ton for it.
Instead we’re selling everyone individual shame about what are really societal decisions, telling them not to drive as much, be too cold/hot at home, and eat less beef — while letting producers largely off the hook. That’s the real lunacy here.
This is not black-and-white thinking. He is pointing out that infeasible miracle cures are not the solution.
We need to focus on realistic possibilities, not Elon-Musk jesustech.
In particular, he's saying it's impossible to capture enough carbon at scale in a cost-effective manner, so therefore we should not even be looking at this option until we've exhausted the alternatives. But he's wrong: it's not impossible, it's merely expensive, and anyway we should be pursuing all possible remedies in parallel, not dismissing something as infeasible because someone's armchair analysis makes it look like a scam to them.
What we need are people trying both likely and unlikely solutions, not knee-jerk gatekeeping from randoms on the internet.
This will always be what matters when resources need to be deployed most efficiently for abatement.
When you do the math, unless resources become unlimited, source capture is the better use of limited infrastructure.
It's really kinda-sorta completely impossible to fool Mother Nature on things like this.
The problem is not enough effort is going into source removal since the responsible source would be the only one that would be facing the added cost above what they are doing now.
With remote air capture the much less efficient and costly process can be spread among huge numbers of different but smaller payers whether they know it or not.
If that makes significant progress occur sooner that should make DAC be good to go forward with in the short term, but eventually people will be able to do the math at scale and most will say WTF were we spinning our wheels so long for?
Politically (and practically) infeasible. Most likely it would be done as a fuel tax, but it would need to be in the ballpark of $3/gallon which would be suicide for the politicans who impose it and unaffordable to many of the people who would be paying for it. A tax that can't be paid can't fund anything.
But it's a mistake to consider a tax as something we can't afford because we are already incurring this tax bill by emitting the carbon in the first place. Whether we pay now to reduce the carbon or later to reduce the carbon and mitigate impacts, we will all be paying.
And I agree: imposing this tax today as a flat "usage" tax would be political suicide, but we have many levers that are far more equitable -- tax-and-dividend programs in particular have a lot of history.
If your voters in general are not willing to pay the price for the damage they cause, what is a democracy supposed to do? Sad state of affairs.
Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly in favor of taxing CO2 emission, but the problem IMO is that people in general would rather ruin the planet than pay a fair price for the damage that their emissions cause, purely because they are USED to pollute and consume for cheap.
If there was the necessary political will to pay, then I believe that carbon capture would basically not be used at all, because it is MUCH cheaper to just not emit the carbon in the first place...
"People in general" would absolutely use non-planet-ruining versions of basically anything, the problem is getting there -- most people do not even think about the polluting effects of every item they buy, and could not even if they wanted to given supply chain complexity.
Unfortunately these decisions are made for them, largely by the realities of economics and policy: when you have the option to pay to internalize the external cost of travel yourself, most people don't -- why would they? No one wants to act alone to hold that bag, that's literally one of the main reasons for policy: to engage in group action for group advantage where individual action is a competitive disadvantage.
Redistributive taxes on carbon emissions are likely something many people would support -- were it not for concerted efforts to the contrary by individuals and industries that stand to lose stature as a result. But on carbon capture: there will absolutely continue to be near- and medium-term use cases where burning petroleum products and then capturing the CO2 later is the most cost-effective approach. (Or vice versa, via synfuels.) There will still be a carbon cycle, and we will still want to have many levers on it.
The "scam" language is interesting to me.
I often run into people who seem to think that advocates of carbon capture technology are somehow being intellectually dishonest and are not serious about climate change.
In fact I think there are a lot of people who are interested in carbon capture tech who just keep an open mind about it. Not all scientific advances are obvious early on.
I think we should avoid assuming that people who are promoting carbon capture research are speaking in bad faith. There are lots of people who genuinely believe the tech may mature to a point it is useful to the fight against climate change.
Just because the fossil fuel industry promotes it doesnt mean that everyone who promotes it is a shill for the fossil fuel industry.
But I absolutely blame journalists and spokespersons that peddle this as some kind of viable technology when it's ABSOLUTELY not; this is similar to fusion tech, where people (sometimes deliberately!) create the impression that the technology could "solve" climate change and is just around the corner.
But in both cases no instance I've seen so far passes even a rudimentary smell test. If you have a novel method to catch CO2 from the air or are able to run your tokamak for 90s longer than that is awesome and interesting, but DONT run around and pretend to be heralding a scientific revolution in mainstream media (where both average reader and writer have an understanding of the subject and economics behind that is comparable with a average housecat).
I ABSOLUTELY blame people for doing that, and I consider it quite harmful because it creates the impression that there are some kinds of tech-based avenues out of climate change that never really existed at all, and this can even negatively impact decisions from policymakers.
But the bigger effect is the appearance of working on the solution is often used to prevent real mitigation efforts that are here and now, such as higher costs for CO2 emissions, reforming the carbon trading scheme, and investing in moving to more use of green electricity.
We spend on the order of $900B a year on the military. Imagine if $100B a year, every year, was spent instead on beefing up the power grid, investing in efficient long-haul power distribution, investing even more in solar/wind/nukes. With less need to strong arm the world to ensure access to oil, it could pay for itself in less military intervention. Obviously, there are many political reasons why even $1 reduction in the military budget is difficult to accomplish, but that is only an indication of how much the government is beholden to the military/industrial complex.
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-...
That could flip at any moment based on the price of imported oil vs the cost of domestic production. The US is still very much "investing" in the military to ensure a stable source of energy (as well as other national interests).
The oil industry would make more money than anyone else at that table and have outsized influence.
They also have a history of misleading the public and outright lying about climate change.
If you think climate change is a serious problem, then you need to put aside your moral beliefs and think like an engineer about solutions. There is no math that allows you to conserve/renewables your way to 2C while accommodating the expected growth in living standards in India, China, and Africa. And any strategy that doesn’t allow people in the developing world to dramatically increase their standard of living is a non-starter that will create billions of enemies for the environmental movement. India recently committed to go carbon neutral by 2070: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/developing-countries-.... That’s too late, and they won’t meet that anyway. The developed world needs to go carbon negative as fast as possible.
Edit: just read the article a bit. It's just as I thought. "Only nuclear can save us" bullshit, whereas a genuine writer would have written "Only a combination of green energy sources can save us". FF industry doing their thing..
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 fact sheet on carbon dioxide removal:
"Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) refers to technologies, practices, and approaches that remove and durably store carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. CDR is required to achieve global and national targets of net zero CO2 and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. CDR cannot substitute for immediate and deep emissions reductions, but it is part of all modelled scenarios that limit global warming to 2° or lower by 2100."
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/outreach/IPCC_A...
And the dogs (pollution sources) are standing by to provide as many toothpicks as it takes to discourage anyone from bringing in a shovel any time soon.
Especially if the toothpicks cost so much it ends up with shovels remaining out-of-reach.
Is the other 20% going to look down from our place of wealth and abundance - built on fossil fuels and countless externalities - and tell them that they have to achieve wealth and abundance through other means? It's ridiculous.
Sorry Sub-Saharan African, we have found that meat consumption is bad and therefore you can't do what we did, even though increased demand is a natural tendency as incomes rise.
All that cheap and dirty energy we used to make our infrastructure and grow GDP? You can't do it that way either. We made a big oopsie and have decided you have to do it through renewables and sustainable practices only.
By the way, are you interested in financing for this solar array? It's ok if you don't have the cash on hand, we'll just hold your highest quality farm-land as collateral.
We have to find ways to sequester. And we have to find ways to live in a warmer climate. It's the most probable outcome.
I'm sure you wouldn't want the poor countries to pay for it themselves.
France’s CO2 emissions per capita are right around the world average. That means the rest of the developed world had done the same way as France half a century ago, we would have room to bring the whole developing world up to the same level as France while still being at the same overall CO2 output as today. And we wouldn’t have had all that extra CO2 for 60 years, giving us much more runway for the developed world to go to net zero while the developing world continues to develop.
And alas, climate relief fund—or rather a loss and damage fund—is already a thing. Approved in the last COP and already ratified by the EU. (I know, it is much weaker than real climate relief, but proves it is possible). with some European countries already with some programs in place for paying climate relief in foreign countries.
If you want to be a realist, you should commit to it, and apply it equally.
It's not realistic at all for developed countries to bankroll green infrastructure in the developed world at a scale that allows those developing countries to continue 6-8% GDP growth annually.
Now, I do understand why China works that way, and I also get why Western companies can use this to funnel taxpayer money to their friends, but I don't get why someone like you would support either of these ideas?
A poor country deriving energy from a nuclear power plant means that carbon isn’t being emitted for energy production over the lifetime of that nuclear plant.
Despite all the hype, no renewable technology has been able to supply a growing electrical demand anywhere in the world. Every example is small, isolated or limited in time. Renewables will eventually get there but there are countless other things we must solve before that day comes.
Meanwhile, the argument of cost is trotted out without ever considering the full impacts of climate change on the flip side.
A good example of this is communication technology. In wealthy nations, there was all of this wired infrastructure put in place since the advent of the telegraph. In developing nations, they just skipped all of that and most people have cellphones. Maybe not iphones or even smartphones, but the banks they used developed robust texting protocols, from what I’ve read and heard about, where people could do banking transactions from something like those old nokia dumbphones.
A lot of these developing countries rely on China, maybe to the wests collective chagrin, and China has invested heavily in rail infrastructure in a lot of these countries, and, Chinese auto manufacturers are already producing tons of electric vehicles. Guess whose car companies are building auto factories in a lot of the developing world? And though they may not meet the safety and quality standards of wealthy countries, people in developing countries are just happy to get places quicker than by foot. I may not have listed everything that emits greenhouse gases and a suitable replacement but normalizing mass transit (I forgot to mention the electric buses I’ve read these developing countries are either ordering from china or building at home in Chinese factories), but these two… industries make up a significant chunk of problematic emissions.
What I think we may see in the west is active resistance to adapting new energy and normalizing greener behavior because of things like American exceptionalism. Also, these technologies are expensive to buy for many people even in the west (right, not most people here on hackernews), and its going to be prohibitively expensive for people in old housing stock to upgrade their property and municipalities to upgrade infrastructure. Tax rebates on $35,000 electric cars and heat pumps aren’t going to mean much to people relying on older family members for a roof over their head and can’t find jobs, especially if this whole ai thing takes off. There’s also significant and continual pushback from an people who seem determined to trash electric cars and such, and thats exacerbated by corporations acting bad faith to maximize profit (high efficiency appliances that barely make it through their standard warranty terms and subscription based car features come to mind.
So yeah, I think the developing world might be fine but its the wealthy nations who are going to screw themselves (and because of the US’ voracious consumption if everything), and maybe the rest of the world regardless of what steps the developing world takes.
If the poor billions are to have any chance to live in any kind of comfort resembling what wealthy westerners or Asians do, they need to massively increase their energy consumption. There is no wireless way around it.
This is not the only conclusion from your excellent observation. Another conclusion could be that rich nations fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries without asking anything in return. I believe this is what the climate relief fund is about—as approved (albeit in a much too small scale) in last COP.
So far however rich nations are not only reluctant to fund infrastructure projects in other countries without anything in return—let alone green infrastructure projects—they are also reluctant to fund green infrastructure projects domestically (see e.g. Green New Deal in the US). The technology for mass carbon sequestration does not exist yet, and if it existed I bet it would follow the same prospects as current prospects of tackling the climate crisis. In short, they will not be built at the scale needed for any meaningful results.
This is often the case when you offer a technical solution to a societal or a political problem.
It is in human nature not to destroy our climate, it took extremely wealthy and persistent class of polluters concentrated effort for the past few decades to prevent climate actions from various governments. Human populations—most of which residing in democracies—would have loved for governments to ratify the various treaties that would have saved our climate. As it is in our nature to do so. Only inhumane action has doomed our climate.
As a counter I’d like to offer you that the German population was ready to suffer a deeper energy crisis for harder sanctions with Russia after the Ukraine invasion. Polling was consistent, showing a willingness to accept lower standard of living, if it meant a possibility that a war fought in a poorer country would end sooner. On an individual level participants in a prisoner dilemma studies show a consistent willing to accept a worse deal if it means more people will be better off. Neither psychology nor general polling is on your side.
No, the people will accept lower standard of living just fine. The only ones who insist on anything are governments who are consistently unwilling to sacrifice the corporate profits of the rich. And here carbon sequestration works perfectly, as it will take decades for this technology to be mature and rolled out at scale, all the while corporation can keep polluting and keep turning in record profits for their shareholders. Something that people in the ”developed word“ (ugh!) actually generally oppose.
I’m from a third world country. My family that has moved to the developed world has pretty much universally pursued a high carbon footprint lifestyle (big house in the suburbs, SUV, etc., as soon as they could afford it.
If you poll Americans, you’ll see they’re willing to spend an average of $10 per month to mitigate climate change: https://apnews.com/article/8e6baa6c2d3badeb4e91b6e6d078a5c0. Maybe it’s a little higher in Europe but not much.
The naive math behind that suggests that if we were to increase the number of power plants by a factor of 10 to supply all the world’s power, we should expect the rate of accidents to increase proportionally. So that’s a Fukushima somewhere in the world every 1.5 years or 18 months. And a bad one of those accidents could spread radiation across an entire continent.
Changes the risk/reward calculation, doesn’t it?
That's not how disasters work. They aren't independent variables, when they happen, you learn and change the way things work to prevent them from happening again.
Experiments and development in the 1950s. First commercial plant in 58.
Further growth in 60s and 70s. Including deadly accidents like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 in 1961 - protests grew in 60s and 70s too.
Three Mile Island 1979.
Chernobyl 1986.
Fukushima 2011.
That 25-year gap between Chernobyl and Fukushima - and the extraordinary circumstances causing Fukushima vs the previous incidents - suggests that safety improved A LOT over the 60-odd years between 1958 and now.
Nuclear fission is a reaction with a positive feedback loop, making it naturally unstable, and requires some mechanism to create a negative feedback of greater magnitude to make it stable. And that requires some kind of active machinery to function properly. If that machinery fails, then the feedback loop becomes positive again. Machines can always fail, so I doubt that fission can ever be made completely safe.
Chernobyl: Irresponsible operation of obsolete, inherently-hazardous Soviet-era design. Not something that can ever happen again if some relatively-simple lessons are followed.
Fukushima: Irresponsible maintenance of plant operating well beyond its intended lifespan, which was irresponsibly constructed in a tsunami-prone seismic zone. This type of accident can and probably will happen again, precisely because of moratoriums on new plant construction.
One risk you didn't list but probably should have is reckless military attacks waged against installations such as Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. It's hard to safeguard a nuclear plant against a barbarian invasion. It may make sense to operate such plants under UN auspices, or otherwise guarantee their safety through multinational treaties with real enforcement behind them.
If there is some sort of breakthrough, then that's fantastic!
I think there are other geoengineering techniques that environmentalists are against such as seeding with sulphur dioxide or trying to create a shade preventing sun rays from reaching earth, but the argument against carbon capture is only that it doesn't yet exist.
Power from the sun is the ultimate end goal in the tech tree. We've just skipped over the middle part because it turns out that even the smartest nuclear builds are still stupid and incapable of accounting for natural disasters or human elements.
Note first that the global biosphere is capturing CO2 into organic molecules at about 15 times the rate that fossil fuel consumption dumps geologically stable carbon deposits into the atmosphere. However, almost all of this biological carbon is respired back into the atmosphere by microbes, fungi, insects and animals who use the material as a food source. The reason atmospheric CO2 is rising is that the biosphere doesn't have the capacity to absorb the added CO2. Keep in mind that plant growth is a quite slow process compared to industrial activity.
So let's say we generate a stream of pure CO2 from the atmosphere - but how? If we got the electricity to do this (for pumping air over CO2 filters etc.) from fossil fuels, it's a futile cycle. The energy source has to be fossil-free for this to make sense as a CO2 extraction process.
Now, the oil industry has mostly been using their CO2 streams for enhanced oilfield recovery, i.e. they pump the CO2 down into the wells and it comes back out carrying the dregs of the oil with it. When processed into fuel, the injected CO2 goes back into the atmosphere.
Another use of a pure CO2 stream is to jack greenhouse CO2 up to ~1000 ppm, which has a significant effect on plant growth rates under controlled nutrient conditions. Most of the CO2 is released back into the atmosphere as well.
In terms of storing the CO2 in some stable form, this is rather energy-intensive. The two options that make the most sense are carbon fiber materials and diamond, the latter being harder to make (but very cool and sci-fi, enter the Diamond Age). Other options like making limestone (CaCO3) are tricky (where do you get all the calcium from). These are the only long-term removal options that make sense.
Claims that pumping CO2 down wells is a good idea for long-term storage are fraudulent. Claims that coal can be burned and used for electricity while capturing all the CO2 by the above process are fraudulent. The DOE public-private programs like FutureGen that promoted this were fraudulent, to the tune of billions of dollars of fraud.
The other option for captured CO2 is to use it make methane and jet fuel, for long-distance air travel, rocketry, maybe global shipping. Here we have zero effect on atmospheric CO2 content as what comes out goes back in. This is comparable to biosphere activity, i.e. it's steady-state. Costs for this process might be 10X that for current fossil fuel production, but it's the long-term fuel solution. Given the high costs, electric vehicles form most local transportation will be far more efficient.
I think that covers all the technological bases, anyway.
Also some interesting things happening behind the scenes where they are clearly keeping faculty from certain 'troublesome' departments out of the process.. but that's not really unusual in the university context.
On the flip side, I think folks are also over-estimating the importance of corporate sources of funding here. The real reason for this focus is on government funding and resources on this topic that the school will want to tap into.
For example in 2023, the long-term investment and planning to replace Soviet-era oil and gas infrastructure in the Baltics with USA led oil and gas infrastructure in the Baltics is not publicly discussed; plans for control of shipping channels in the Arctic Circle area are not publicly discussed in the USA; changes to the USA grid to accomodate plural energy sources are not publicly discussed. An oil and gas-funded institute at Stanford is in a position to affect all of those. Multiple former US State Department executive leaders are active at Stanford right now.
Big Energy has the massive capital to deploy for green energy solutions that are viable and will provide a renewable path forward off of more polluting or non-renewable sources. Big Energy's product of choice is mainly petroleum derived currently. Due to sourcing and limitations though, this is a mostly finite resource that they would love to replace for more profit.
Profit will drive them to new sources. When you see Big Energy actually moving to these new sources at the mega-industrial scale and not PoCs, prototypes, but deploying tens of billions of dollars, is when the true revolution will happen.
If they are funding Stanford and other parts of Academia, then that is a good thing.
So what do we know? We know that forests are hard to plant and that their early lifecycle is a carbon source. Still, we should plant trees. Ignoring this, US citizens alone would need to plant 500 trees per year to offset their current footprints[0]. That's 165 billion trees a year, and a densely packed forest has 4-6 sqft per tree. The US has just over a trillion square feet. You do the math. (even dramatic reductions in footprints don't solve this problem)
Okay, so trees aren't enough. Luckily we know land management is one of the best carbon sink techniques available. But we run into a similar problem, just with more efficiency than above. So what is the result? We have to use a variety of techniques, both natural and artificial, to scrub carbon from the air. Not to reach net negative (which should really be our goal), but just to even reach net zero! Yes, big oil is going to fund this. Why? Because when carbon taxes come in, they can keep their plants up by scrubbing a percentage of their carbon to match that tax. (They also want PR and this is cheap PR) If they somehow could scrub all the carbon (they won't), then what do we care? The goal is about carbon emissions, not source of energy. I just don't see them surviving, but of course they're going to try to hold on as long as they can instead of adapting and surviving. Their loss.
[0] https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/reduce-co2-...
incoming nuclear fusion would alleviate a ton of our carbon issues
if we use info from this wonderfully fleshed out cost-benefit analysis by bjorn lomborg i bet we could get the best of value out of our current fossil fuels while not impoverishing our children and grandchildren:
https://i.imgur.com/1vklbRo.png
Realistically, the world is going to see a 1.5-1.9C increase by 2100. These are the IPCC's current projections, which is the most well known standard.
everything you say is the dogma of alarmists, its not that i don't think you care about this, I'm certain that you do, but you're working off incorrect information and its doing more harm than good.
some of the worst implications will be a biodiversity loss in places near the equator, and there is basically not much we can do to stop it. although hopefully i'm wrong as there's a lot of ecological folk trying to remediate future problems in this area.
the worst thing we can do to ourselves as a society is panic and turn all of our attention towards climate-based dogma. europe did this and russia found it as a reason to attack ukraine. in reality, we have multiple priorities that need to be sorted. climate is on there but its not the only one. its important to keep people wealthy enough to care about the climate, because otherwise they burn fuel sources that are worse for it, ie wood and coal. and we also need global societies to develop scientifically/economically so we can achieve nuclear fusion faster for the very goal that you're concerned about.
to summarize a solid policy-based strategy, and complex-web of problems concept to solve our climate problem is that:
increase in global trade -> leads to -> increase in economic prosperity -> leads to -> increase in scientific development -> leads to -> faster development of fusion
now the economic prosperity part isn't simple because there are foreign governments that are showing themselves to be hostile towards western institutions and operations, taking advantage of their own development to act maliciously. this isn't great as it makes us divert resources away from these important problems. but if we only focus on the climate the west will be eaten up by someone who doesn't care about it at all.
We’ve tried doing nothing for a decade and see where that has brought us. I say the strategy of remaining calm has failed, I say it is past time for us to panic and scream as if we are all going to die, because we are.
I know I am a climate doomer, why wouldn’t I be? I’ve been complaining about climate change since I was a teenager, waiting for the governments to stop it, only to realize they value corporate profits over, you know, our climate, and worse, my life. We are all doomed, and we are all going to die now.
Realistically we are only going to see 1.5° if we take immediate action now! This means close all fossil fuel plants, close all highways, shut down airports, close all cement factories, stop producing chemical fertilizers, etc. Realistically 4-5° is a business as usual, that is we enact no climate policies other than existing ones, where governments promise and then fail to deliver. Realistically 4-5° is the most plausible option. Realistically a realistic climate action could bring us down to 2-3°. However given how governments have acted so far, I see no reason but to panic and scream, we are all going to die in a 4-5° inferno.
I'm not sure what you mean. The last 50 years (and even 5) have been far more bark than bite.
> incoming nuclear fusion would alleviate a ton of our carbon issues
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I worked on nuclear in a previous career and still have friends there, including fusion (including the big labs). Being bullish, fusion net gain is still 10 years away. It'll take decades to add to the energy portfolio after that. The case for fusion is worse than the case for fission. We should work on both, but we can't hold out for future technologies (we can say the same about storage). We needed to act decades ago, pushing it off by a few more decades is not going to solve the issue, it is repeating the same mistakes.
> fleshed out cost-benefit analysis
I wouldn't trust any of these. Zero of them. You need to have a pretty good understanding of these systems (highly complex) to even understand if the analyses are good. Every single one has a bias and is highly politicized. The more politicized a topic is, the higher level of expertise you need to understand who is telling the truth (politicization adds large amounts of noise).
> Bjorn Lomborg
Who is a political scientist. He isn't a climate scientist, nor even a scientist. Here's a rather well known scientist, Stefan Rahmstorf (studies physics of oceans) discussing Bjorn[0]. You can check Bjorn's scholar page[1] to even verify that he's not doing actual science bust just writing opinions with no supporting evidence. Please stop supporting hacks.
[0] https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/08/bjorn...
[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=HUMF5c0AAAAJ
the only things in that cost benefit analysis are politicized are what people are currently pushing en masse, what he points out doesn't offer any benefit from a cost perspective. plus you contradict yourself, you say it needs a complex understanding but you dismiss it before analyzing it yourself, he's got books and scientific publications on this, go check for yourself.
all of his strongest suggestions are about preserving biodiversity, curing disease, technological improvements, trade restrictions, and contraception. Where are you getting the politicized part?
and he has a background in political science and is doing macroeconomic research, he's not claiming to have a cure for temperature increases because he works off the IPCC's data, which is the known standard for climate science. he's giving simple policy (oh look political science, its almost like this is a multifaceted conversation, are you trying to shut it down like people did with "the science" over covid?) implementations that can have massive net benefits.
he's not a "hack" (insults are at the bottom of the hierarchy of disagreement, if you want a reason to dismiss someone's opinions its that they do this). he's gone on tons of podcasts having open discussions about these things, if Stefan Rahmstorf can hold an actual discussion with him I'd love to see it.
your link doesn't work. But if all Stefan has it petty insults like calling him a "hack" then I'd guess he's not open to any kind of discussion, which is a red flag.