"leading to a natural equilibrium" is the rub. Easy to say but it doesn't seem to be the actual case, since CO2 levels in the atmosphere continue to rise.
What even is a natural equilibrium? One meteor strike or megavolcano and things will be boned for years to come.
A lot of things we consider normal has only been averages for recorded human history, which has also seen plenty of climate outliers, and is only a small fraction of the total history of earth and life on it.
Why do we always have to end up with this false dichotomy?
Why is it so hard to accept that
a) yes the climate throughout the history of our planet (at geological time scales) had a lot of variation and humans didn't live during an average climate
b) it's reasonable to worry that the climate deviates quickly and strongly from what it was throughout the history of humankind?
Why do these two points need to be opposed to each other? The timescales are so utterly incompatible. Is it because people struggle to understand what a million years is? Let alone a hundred million years.
CO2 is mixed in the atmosphere on a timescale short compared to the timescale for its natural removal. Also, there is net transport of CO2 upwards, since most release is near the surface.
Leading to a new equilibrium. That equilibrium will not necessarily be one favorable to human life. In the same way that eating an extra 5 donuts a day might lead to a new equilibrium of your weight, but that doesn't necessarily imply one is healthy.
The global greening does show that from the perspective of a healthy, fully greened planet, the CO2 concentrations are actually too low still. Plants favor a CO2 concentration of at least 1000 ppm. That's why in agriculture, extra CO2 is used to stimulate plant growth.
I think this should be noted, since the slogan by alarmists is usually "save the planet".
Average temperatures in the Jurassic were only about +2.5C over current averages.
We're shooting north of the Carboniferous (+3C) and headed towards the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse period, where average temps were +5C to +8C over where they are now.
Probably not survivable for humanity as we know it now.
We're already seeing wet bulb temperatures over the survivable maximum in some parts of the world, imagine stacking another 3-5C on top of that. Large parts of equatorial land would be fatally warm to humanity, and the temperate band for growing crops would shift at least a thousand miles north.
Thank you for that paper. It shows that the proposed negative effects of CO2 do not exist.
Let's take the study by Rodeheffer. Even 15,000 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere did not change the results of a thorough 90-minute test. If this is not indicative of the benignancy of CO2, I don't know what is.
Let's take the another study by Allen that showed "SMS performance was 15%
lower for 945 ppm and 50% lower for 1,400 ppm relative to 550 ppm"
This was not a controlled study, but just an association study in different buildings. All the studies that use a good setup do not report marked lowering of cognitive function.
Then you can look at the paper by Herczeg and the mental performance is not really much different between 600 and 4000 ppm - merely 5% difference in errors found in the test. With only few participants, this is not significant. Since this is a short-term study, adaption to higher CO2 levels needs to be considered.
Thank you for your patience. I looked at the Rodeheffer study which does indeed conclude that CO2 has no effect on cognitive function (among submariners). I have updated my beliefs accordingly.
The nature paper does suggest that it's concerning so I have not ruled out the option of high CO2 exposure negatively affecting humans. I'll have to look into this more at some point.
Your comments have suggested you are, so I'm assuming with low confidence you are biased towards these things being positive, or much less negative than the scientific community thinks.
> The experiments that showed this were confusing correlation with causation. High CO2 in rooms is a marker of reduced O2, and a lack of fresh air.
Not to a significant degree. Oxygen is normally around 20.9%, if you raise CO2 levels by 1000 ppm, that goes down to… 20.8%. There's a bigger change to how much O2 you breathe just from the change in air pressure from going up 10 meters.
O2 turning into CO2 becomes lethal at 4%; if O2 concentrations go down in step with that (e.g your breathing causes it) you'll only be drowsy and nauseous from the latter while the former is killing you.
This distinction is also why diving rebreathers work: they remove the CO2, which is toxic much sooner than the mere lack of oxygen.
Also:
Fresh air contains less CO2. In Bohr's day, fresh air meant something like 280 ppm, today that means 440 ppm. If some future atmosphere contains 1000 ppm, that's what "fresh" means in that case.
I'm at least marginally confident you're just misreading the Bohr effect.
You are correct that there will be plenty of life on the much warmer, greener planet we are heading towards.
Well, probably. There won't be many humans around to verify.
When people say "Save the planet" they generally mean "save the planet as it currently exists", since taking 100 years to make environmental changes that usually take 3000 will have negative effects that outweigh the increase in plant life from a human perspective.
The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal: existing technologies have only a miniscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon carbon dioxide removal. It has all basically been a scam to get free public money.
Not really. It's necessary to meet our climate goals. They also depend on a lot of other technology that doesn't exist yet that we'll need to develop and subsidize over the coming years.
That was also the state of the solar power industry a few decades ago, it took time and coordination (government action) to make it the dominant, economically viable form of renewable energy it is today.
Why do you think that? Absent some other primary power source like fusion, solar energy is the upstream producer of all the energy we currently use. Using it directly seems like the most obvious answer, especially when replacing e.g. all the earth's energy usage would only take, say, the size of Arizona
Saying solar is the upstream of fossil fuels is a technicality. Fossil fuels are more like a battery that’s stored millions of years of solar energy (+ the earth itself contributed a lot of energy). Solar cells are more like plants and cannot be used to replace batteries and our current battery tech can’t improve fast enough to supplant fossil fuels in the time frames needed.
Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth).
> our current battery tech can’t improve fast enough to supplant fossil fuels in the time frames needed.
I disagree. The tech itself already good enough to supplant the majority of cases, which in turn gives us more time for the things that remain (such as long-haul aircraft).
That said, I may be a little on the optimistic side about how much warming the ecosphere can take. If it's already too hot, then yes, naturally you are correct.
> Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth).
Looks to me like gas mostly replaced oil (since the late 90s); and that wind+solar is displacing nuclear (since the former became big enough to show up on a graph).
The graphs you provided show that coal and usage are still growing in absolute numbers. They're only going down in perentages. So, aside from oil (which is mostly still there), nothing was displaced.
The only significant thing we learn is that we've doubled our electricity usage since 2000. The share of low carbon electricity generation barely moved since 1985. Renewables just helped avoid it crumble due to hydro not being scalable.
If batteries were literally free today, they still wouldn't be good enough due to the cost in support electronics required to put them on the grid (which is currently about price parity with batteries per watt).
EDIT: and those electronics also degrade - a lifespan of 20 years would be reasonable at scale.
So you’re charging twice for the grid tie? Because the reason for installing batteries would be 1) to not grid-tie, or 2) to grid-tie along with a renewable energy source, which if it is a commercial site, is already grid-tied.
But that's already cheaper than building new coal or natural gas plants. The cost per watt of solar plus battery, right now, is the cheapest available form of power. I don't understand why you don't think that it's going to replace a majority of primary and secondary energy usage on the planet relatively quickly.
I'd bet a dollar that, in 50 years time, nearly all energy usage is going to be primitive biofuels or solar-PV-origin.
The sticker price of any given power source is irrelevant: the question is how much does it return on the investment.
If building a solar installation is cheaper per kW then building a gas generator, that literally doesn't matter if the only times the solar installation generates power is when power prices are negative.
Including batteries. It's a peaking plant in a can. As far as I can tell the all-in non-land costs are cheaper, full stop.
I also did the analysis for new nuclear under a relaxed regulatory regime (i.e. substantially cheaper and faster than now) and there's no way it wins. For the price of a gigawatt of nuclear, you can get 5 gigawatts of solar that's online next year, plus half a gigawatt of battery.
I could be wrong, I'm just an armchair economist on this stuff, but I just don't see how it makes any economic sense to build anything but solar unless you're located somewhere remote and arctic (i.e. Åland or something)
But it's the half gigawatt of battery which is the problem - it's nowhere near enough. Roughly batteries scale 1:4 power-to-energy. So 0.5 GW is only about 2 GWh of actual storage. But you need that for almost 18 hours a day since solar tends to have about 6 productive hours a day. So your batteries are covering you for maybe 0.1 GW of constant draw - presuming nothing goes wrong (i.e. a week of regional cloud cover).
On top of that the solar plant capacity factor is somewhere between 10% - 30% in most locales, so the sticker plate capacity of 5 GW is going to be under 2.5 GW at best (and that would be a 50% capacity factor).
I've never been able to find a way to square an actual "no fossil fuels grid" with the supposed cheapness of solar or wind - it always feels like people are quoting selectively useful $/GW values and then not giving a full accounting of the assumptions behind them - i.e. GW type quotes originate with thermal powerplants which have capacity factors which are essentially "whatever you want if you pay us".
I'm less optimistic about the current state of affairs than the person you're conversing with, but I think more than you.
The LCOE values I've seen place batteries+PV at ~ nuclear… but nuclear is more expensive than almost anything else.
I anticipate further reductions in the price of batteries from the learning curve and demand driven by electric cars where they're already cheap enough to replace ICEs, such that the cost of batteries for electricity time-shifting will be OK fairly soon (as in: 5-10 years)but that's a forecast and not a guarantee.
There's also the possibility of a global power grid — the maths works out just fine, few hundred billion USD and a year or two of global aluminium production, we have to spend more than that on upgrading the last (hundred) miles even if we never build the global interconnects — but basically only China has both the interest and the capabilities to attempt something like that as part of a future belt-and-road initiative, everyone else will definitely not get past the "talking about it" stage.
I mean that to me seems like the obvious answer if we're doing solar: don't really do storage, just wrap the generating capacity around the Earth and have it follow the sun.
Nation-states would likely still retain strategic reserves of thermal powerplants, but they wouldn't be run, and the budgeting for them would be under national defense and interpreted through that lens (i.e. you can buy it down with strategic alliances and diplomacy).
You don't need constant draw though. My numbers are based on actual grid usage of a power plant, not the idea that all powerplants have 100% coverage 24/7. It's designed to replace the existing usage of a half gigawatt peaking plant. Zero of them run at midnight, most only run for shoulder hours in Cali/Texas. They're the majority of the new generation being planned right now, so if the drop-in costs are less, they'll be replaced with solar. As the costs further go down, more and more plants and base generation will be replaced with solar. I expect solar to get cheap enough that e.g. thermal sand storage starts to be viable, which will use essentially the same infrastructure as a nuclear plant but without the NRC approval, radiation safety controls, and backup infrastructure.
> I've never been able to find a way to square an actual "no fossil fuels grid" with the supposed cheapness of solar or wind - it always feels like people are quoting selectively useful $/GW values and then not giving a full accounting of the assumptions behind them - i.e. GW type quotes originate with thermal powerplants which have capacity factors which are essentially "whatever you want if you pay us".
I'm telling you right now that LCoE for replacing natural gas is here. Coal has been dead for a while, new hydroelectric plants have massive siting concerns, wind is already too expensive compared to solar + battery, oil has been dead this entire century for electricity. What else is left? Only marginal things like geothermal which are entirely location-based.
The comparison you're drawing though is still hyper-optimized to a specific use-case: a marginal peaking plant i.e. an infrequently used one with a very low required capacity factor (and also presumably operating right at the peak of wholesale pricing on the daily cycle).
But that's a utility being injected into a grid which already has widespread stored-fuel powerplants. I'm not contesting batteries work under some circumstances, I'm contesting whether they actually work when they are doing more then displacing load-handling at the edge. The grid runs 24/7: there's a massive difference between running batteries for 2 hours, and then recharging because you can buy power any time of the day you want, versus their being near zero dispatchable generation on the grid.
Because a gas generator is more then happy to sell you power and run a little longer to do so at any time of day. If that gas generator doesn't exist though, then once your battery is empty it's empty until the renewables pick back up. And that's the answer I'm still not seeing - the question isn't "can you optimize the grid" the question is "can you eliminate stored-fuel power plants entirely". It's fairly obvious that batteries can help in some circumstances given that gas plants have start up times in the tens of minutes, and power prices going negative is bad for them.
EDIT: Basically, are we actually displacing any fossil fuels off the grid, or just optimizing it's expansion - given that an infrequently used peaker plant can become a frequently used peaker plant quite easily, but a solar farm can't do the same.
The hardware to manage batteries and the hardware to manage solar panels is different (but sometimes can be packaged into the same box, or with one-off benefits like hybrid inverters), with batteries being considerably more complicated. You would struggle to ruin a solar panel with a bad inverter. You can completely destroy a battery by over-discharging it once.
A solar panel produces energy. A battery only stores it (and loses, round trip about 8% in the process) - which is to say, batteries are solely arbitrage instruments.
You started out loading the whole cost for a grid tie. Now you are talking about a BMS. A BMS is typically included in the cost of batteries.
Batteries are extremely functional in many installations, and even if you’re not using, only selling, arbitrage can work well. This is especially true if you get paid to accept the commodity in one time window and can get others to pay you to take it later.
"The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 122 PW·year = 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year. In 2002 (2019), this was more energy in one hour (one hour and 25 minutes) than the world used in one year."
How much coal will we need to burn in order to make all of those PV cells? How many mountain tops removed to get the raw materials?
Nobody ever provides an honest answer to those questions.
This isn't a binary versus issue. If you have to ramp up coal burning and natural habitat destruction to produce the needed PV cells then you also need to stop endless-growth profit seeking manufacturing wholesale.
Versus burning fossil fuels that need to be mined, refined, and shipped for nonrenewables? You think the materials needed to build turbines for a fossil fuel plant just magically appear? How much coal do you think is burned to facilitate a kWh of solar production versus a kWh of coal power generation?
Most of the silicon needed to produce solar cells is mined from regions with significant reserves of high-purity quartz.
The mining of quartz typically involves several methods depending on the nature and location of the deposit. Here are the common methods used:
- Open Pit Mining: This is the most common method for mining quartz. It involves the removal of large amounts of soil and rock to access the quartz deposits. This method is used when the quartz is found close to the surface. Heavy machinery such as excavators and bulldozers are used to remove the overburden (the soil and rock overlaying the quartz).
- Hard Rock Mining: In cases where quartz is found in veins within rock formations, hard rock mining methods are employed. This involves drilling and blasting to break up the rock and access the quartz veins. The material is then transported to the surface for processing.
- Underground Mining: If the quartz deposits are located deep underground, underground mining techniques are used. Miners create tunnels and shafts to reach the deposits. This method is more labor-intensive and expensive than open pit mining but is necessary for accessing deep deposits.
- Placer Mining: This method is less common for quartz but can be used in riverbeds and stream deposits where quartz particles have been eroded and deposited. It involves washing and sifting through gravel and sediment to extract the quartz.
Open pit mining and hard rock mining can cause significant land disturbance and environmental degradation, including deforestation, habitat destruction, and soil erosion. Proper environmental management practices and reclamation efforts are essential to mitigate these impacts.
We aren't talking about sand.
The production of the current global output of solar cells require from somewhere between 8-10 million metric tons of coal annually.
> The production of the current global output of solar cells require from somewhere between 8-10 million metric tons of coal annually.
Totally disingenuous comparison. You don't get to use the existing energy source's coal requirements to criticize the energy usage of the replacement energy source.
"We can't replace coal power! Think how much coal we'll burn building the replacement for coal power!"
> How much coal will we need to burn in order to make all of those PV cells? How many mountain tops removed to get the raw materials?
Zero.
PV pays back it's own energy cost in a matter of months to single-digit years, even in the worst cases that's still enough to support the current exponential.
And the raw material are not found only in mountains, the main component by mass being — famously — what sand is made from.
Today, coal generates over 60% of the electricity used for global solar PV manufacturing, [...].
This is largely because PV production is concentrated in China – mainly in the provinces of Xinjiang and Jiangsu where coal accounts for more than 75% of the annual power supply and benefits from favourable government tariffs.
that said:
Continuous innovation led by China has halved the emissions intensity of solar PV manufacturing since 2011.
This is the result of more efficient use of materials and energy – and greater low-carbon electricity production.
Despite these improvements, absolute carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from solar PV manufacturing have almost quadrupled worldwide since 2011 as production in China has expanded.
and there's a bit of a bottleneck:
Based on manufacturing capacity under construction, China’s share of global polysilicon, ingot and wafer production will soon reach almost 95%.
Today, China’s Xinjiang province accounts for 40% global polysilicon manufacturing. Moreover, one out of every seven panels produced worldwide is manufactured by a single facility.
This level of concentration in any global supply chain would represent a considerable vulnerability; solar PV is no exception.
We're talking billions of tonnes of raw materials here to meet decadal global demands, and it simply isn't just sand (and remember that really good sand is a resource in demand also):
Solar PV’s demand for critical minerals will increase rapidly in a pathway to net zero emissions.
The production of many key minerals used in PV is highly concentrated, with China playing a dominant role.
Despite improvements in using materials more efficiently, the PV industry’s demand for minerals is set to expand significantly.
In the IEA’s Roadmap to Net Zero Emissions by 2050, for instance, demand for silver for solar PV manufacturing in 2030 could exceed 30% of total global silver production in 2020 – up from about 10% today.
This rapid growth, combined with long lead times for mining projects, increases the risk of supply and demand mismatches, which can lead to cost increases and supply shortages.
> coal accounts for more than 75% of the annual power supply and benefits from favourable government tariffs.
That's a choice, not a need.
The need is right by that:
> solar panels only need to operate for 4-8 months to offset their manufacturing emissions.
> We're talking billions of tonnes of raw materials here to meet decadal global demands, and it simply isn't just sand (and remember that really good sand is a resource in demand also):
1) Doing nothing leads to burning around 8 billion tons of coal per year just by itself.
PV, even when made from coal power, reduces that by a factor of 40-90.
And, as you do make and connect it, the fraction of power coming from coal constantly decreases anyway.
2) I said "main component by mass", not "just". My point stands.
3) You don't need "good quality" sand for PV. Crush some rocks if you like, silicates are everywhere.
> Who's advocating doing nothing, is that something I said?
I mixed you up with the other poster, but your comment and theirs together very much pattern-matches to such a position, yes.
> You clearly stated "Zero". That's incorrect. The energy demands of mining are not insignificant by any means.
I said zero in the context of "how much coal and how many mountain tops are needed".
This remains correct.
Zero mountains need to be levelled, zero coal needs to be used.
And what do you mean by "insignificant"? Your own citation is saying 4-8 months to repay their own energy cost, for devices which last 25-30 years. I think 1.1-2.6% of their lifetime output counts as "insignificant" in proportional terms, even though that's a big number when you multiply 2 TW by 30 years to find out what it takes to scale to the current global electricity demand.
> You've not ever mined anything or worked in geology, have you?
Have you?
Silicon is the second most abundant element in earth's crust after oxygen.
The doping agents are less common, but also you need far less of them.
Again, no mountains need apply — even for the single most important element, the scale needed is a big hill, not even a small mountain.
It's my understanding that reduction of silica to metallurgical silicon, which is done in an arc furnace using carbon as the reductant:
SiO2 + 2C --> Si + 2 CO
is best done with charcoal, not coal, due to the porous microstructure of charcoal more effectively interacting with silicon monoxide vapor. So not only is coal not needed, it's not even the best feedstock for this process.
> Despite these improvements, absolute carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from solar PV manufacturing have almost quadrupled worldwide since 2011 as production in China has expanded.
That would be bad except:
a) production has increased by more than 10x in the same time period.
b) solar panels added to the energy mix pull down the average carbon and quickly pay back their manufacture
which means it's just a sensible investment in an incredibly low carbon and cheap energy source which has gotten even more incredibly low carbon and cheap over time.
By 2045, the earth will be covered by solar panels so we will start tiling Mars.
According to projections, the Dyson Sphere should be completed by 2117. Exponential curves are a hell of a drug.
> I don't trust the exponential trends to not be secret sigmoids past that point.
The thing is that predicting the cap is as important as predicting the inflection point. 100% solar (or renewables) isn't possible without other technologies which are much less developed, consumer pattern changes which have yet to emerge and grid investments which are not priced in current PV deployment.
Batteries get developed anyway due to EVs. Replacing all 283 M motor vehicles in the US with Teslas would require enough batteries for about 40 hours of storage of the average power flow on the US grid.
That's not what I said, try reading my comment again. Also, based on the current rate of solar adoption, you're likely wrong about it never being the dominant form of energy generation.
Voyager doesn't use solar power since its incredibly faint as you get further from the Sun. It uses the heat from the decay of radioactive plutonium to generate electricity.
Uranium's energy derives from gravitational collapse, not fusion. The neutron stars whose collision produces uranium have undergone endothermic nuclear reactions; their nuclear matter (aside from its gravitational binding energy) is at a higher energy state than the initial protons and electrons.
Geothermal is most either primordial gravitational energy from the Earth's formation or energy from decay of uranium and thorium. Only decay of K-40 might be ascribed to fusion.
We can compare the fraction of the Sun's energy that has come from fusion vs. coming from gravitational collapse (that is, the release of energy as the material becomes more tightly gravitationally bound, starting from the diffuse gas cloud that formed the Sun). It's about two orders of magnitude in favor of fusion.
This is related to the historical question of the age of the Earth. Before the discovery of fusion, it was thought the Sun was powered by gravity, which put an upper limit on the age of the Sun of some tens of millions of years. This was close to Lord Kelvin's limit on the age of the Earth as modeled as a solid sphere cooling by conduction, which led him to believe both estimates were correct. As it turns out, both estimates were flawed, but for different reasons, and it was only coincidence they were similar.
Unfortunately there's zero metrics from any reputable sources that would agree with you. Solar deployment is accelerating massively (0-8% of utility scale production in just a couple decades) while all nonrenewables are decelerating.
You ignore the short daylight period during the winter, when the electricity consumption is the most important.
There is no practical why to store the energy for the nights. At the end we end up with a cheap source of energy that covers only a fraction of our needs, and we have to maintain a second source of production for the rest of the time. We pay two times to keep the two system operational.
Nuclear is also cheap and doesn't have this limitation.
Nuclear is, last I checked, the same cost as the combination of PV with a sufficient number of batteries to be the backup.
And for transport we need some kind of storage system regardless (doesn't have to be batteries, but does have to exist), the scale of which is larger than needed to do anything we want with night/clouds/etc. issues with PV.
The factories to make those batteries are being built very quickly.
During the winter, the solar panel are efficient just for a couple of hours every days. Meanwhile, this is the moment of the year where the global consumption is the highest. We've yet to see a battery system able to hold enough power to balance these months of under production.
Why would you store electricity produced by Nuclear energy? You can adjust the production to match the needs.
> During the winter, the solar panel are efficient just for a couple of hours every days.
Depends where you are. If, for example, you're in the most-occupied bits of Canada, your grid connects to the south side of the USA, which gets rather more hours of sun than you do.
> We've yet to see a battery system able to hold enough power to balance these months of under production.
If you're far enough south to get as many as "a couple of hours" of sun each day in midwinter, this isn't a serious issue in most cases. Why? Because adding more PV is much cheaper than adding more batteries — when you've got 2.4 hours of sun, build a 24*n hour battery and enough PV to charge that battery in 2.4 hours, where n is some factor for "in my location, there are often n-day cloudy streaks".
But also, most places already have a decent grid (exceptions exist, Hawaii is excusable, Texas is not), the grids are not fundamentally so lossy as to break the economics here, and much better grids can be made if there's sufficient political will behind it (yes, even one that worked for Hawaii).
Combatting the byproducts of the entire industrial world is a huge undertaking. We should not expect statistically significant contributions to the fight, until the most promising technologies have been scaled up massively.
This does not mean the field is just composed of scams. The opposite could be true with the same results we see.
>We should not expect statistically significant contributions to the fight, until the most promising technologies have been scaled up massively.
Just to put a finer point on it, we do not want a large scale-up until we largely stop burning fossil fuel for stationary baseload power.
Otherwise when you zoom out and look at the whole energy system, you're just "digging a hole and filling it back in again" (I mean this both thermodynamically and economically), plus adding unavoidable inefficiency losses at every step. So in reality the entire chain would be generating negative net energy for society. Such a futile energy system isn't a workable solution, obviously.
No, right not we should be researching and laying the groundwork for a future (post-combustion) scale-up, but environmentally we should not be scaling up just yet. Scaling up right now would actually generate more pollution, not less.
> Otherwise when you zoom out and look at the whole energy system, you're just "digging a hole and filling it back in again" (I mean this both thermodynamically and economically), plus adding unavoidable inefficiency losses at every step. So in reality the entire chain would be generating negative net energy for society. Such a futile energy system isn't a workable solution, obviously.
That is true in the abstract but there is yet more nuance that is important to consider.
Capturing co2 doesn't have to consume as much energy as is released when it's emitted. Although, many methods, like everything revolving around trees and biomass do have this negative net energy property. There are chemical ones that don't if I'm not mistaken[1].
There is also the unreliability of most renewable energy sources. While we haven't solved all the energy storage problems. There might still be periods where it would be somewhat sensible to use surplus renewable energy to capture carbon, while a low-wind, low-sun place is powered by fossil fuels.
We do of course want to shut all of them down ASAP, but the optimal ordering might not be as strict as you imply. I agree with your broader point though. There is a lot of potential for energy waste if carbon capture is prematurely applied aggressively.
The only solution to this problem is reducing / eliminating carbon output. And the only way to do that is to stop making plastics, stop burning fossil fuels for smelting, and reign in all global manufacturing outputs completely. All of the solutions you guys are promoting ignore that and are trying to make a profit as part of the solution of cleaning up this mess. Pipe dream. Scam artists.
Agree, net zero carbon emissions is mandatory. But it's not enough because the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere will continue to heat the planet and have to be removed.
This not carbon capture vs net zero, the goal is net zero AND carbon capture.
I don't disagree with you, but I don't think carbon capture will provide the gains needed in a realistic timeframe. I don't think its development should be abandoned, but we all have a tendency to go to sleep thinking "cool, tech will solve this for me" when in reality only public policy will.
All of our governments are owned by these corporations that are trying to either continue making money via the status quo or make money with these fly-by-night tech-will-save-us-all get rich quick schemes. Nobody is bribing the politicians to enact policy that cuts global manufacturing output.
Agreed, we have to find a way to do both. It's unlikely we will prevail. As is, the path we're on is about 4 million tons per year of removals by 2030. A new model from Rocky Mountain Institute suggests we need to be at more like 285 million tons annually of removals by 2030 to be on track. It's time to invest in scaling carbon removal.
The "good" news is that the scale of the problem to those that know explicitly precludes any of these scams being useful. They are almost tautologically insignificant.
But politically they can have a minor delaying impact, like birds killed by windmills (1/1000th the effect of skyscrapers), vids of collapsing/exploding windmills in the middle of nowhere (compared to oil transit and storagw explosions)
Perhaps in 2010 this would have been sufficient. Unfortunately decarbonization alone is no longer enough to stabilize at 2 degrees of warming. For a stable climate massive decarbonization and removal is needed.
There roughly 3 TRILLION excess tons of co2 in the atmosphere, and God knows how much is in the oceans.
I have no idea what the funny numbers alleged cost per ton for carbon removal in this report, but even if it is down to 20$/ton (100$ per ton was more realistic a few years ago) ...
Then do the math. We have a sunk cost of something like 50 trillion dollars using removal using the most optimistic of methods and assuming we stopped carbon emissions today, and it's probably more like 200 trillion in reality.
The petroleum industry would really like us to pay them to clean up their problem to the the of that amount I'm sure.
A bit late but pointing out that dollars are fiat money (i.e. numbers on spreadsheets) but CO2 in the atmosphere is very real. Climate crisis will be super-inflationary if we manage to pull through.
Carbon removal is expensive and sounds like science fiction.
Unfortunately, IPCC reports from 2018 and 2023 confirm that carbon removal is necessary to stabilize temperatures. Decarbonization alone is no longer enough. We need to get better at carbon removal...fast.
I totally agree with you. Like I always say—if things could improve, they would have improved by now. Anything that doesn't immediately change the world is usually a scam, con, or flimflam. Personally, I don't know how basic research works, or how industries get bootstrapped, and I don't care. If it's not easy to do, but someone is trying to do it anyway, I assume a crime must be taking place. The people I view as heroes? Those anonymous figures throughout the history of the world, who looked at huge problems and said: "don't bother". They were right, and you are right.
There is removal and then there is burial. The latter is a scam. If buried in a liquid state, it will geologically remerge into the air. Proper removal requires a chemical reaction.
Re: burial: wood vaults might be feasible. You dig a hole, and bury wood in an anaerobic environment. We're pretty good at digging landfills (or use an existing strip mined location) which is basically all this is. Then you grow more trees on top of the landfill, rinse and repeat.
It remains to be seen if this can actually be scaled up.
Natural gas is extracted from underground. If you don't actively drill for it, it's not coming out. If you push CO2 into natural gas reservoirs, and you plug the pipe, it will not come out. For millions of years. The only way for it to come out is for someone to actively drill and try to take it out.
> If you don't actively drill for it, it's not coming out.
Please, we know that's a lie because there are thousands of unplugged drill site holes when it comes to natural gas. This is what methane flaring is about. They're constantly burning or otherwise leaking methane into the air. This is the best that human drilling has to offer, and it's piss poor. We can expect no better in terms of quality or depth for CO2 storage.
> there are thousands of unplugged drill site holes
Nobody is seriously suggesting to pump CO2 underground and then not plug up all the holes connected to that gas. Unplugged holes thousands of miles away obviously remain irrelevant.
PS: Flaring is there when active extraction and processing going on. A tank on the surface getting several degrees hotter in the day is going to build up pressure, while even 20 feet underground the temperatures is constant year round and even across geologic timescales. Similarly, if you’re extracting oil then you might not care about small packets of gas reaching the surface beyond the safety hazard, thus flaring.
Fossil fuel companies just cannot be trusted to seal it well. They have continuously misled the public. They will collect their contracted paycheck, then the leaks will begin.
Also, when there is the slightest earthquake, the reservoir could erupt, even killing everyone in the area due to a flood of CO2.
The EPA is heavily subject to the whims of the President, lobbyists, and corrupt Supreme Court judges. The EPA is not an independent agency even if they're supposed to be. Moreover, the EPA have already failed to protect the people.
If the slightest earthquake was going to rupture the natural gas field, it wouldn’t be around for people to tap.
Again, this isn’t the kind of thing where you slap a metal end cap on a long tube and call it a day. It’s seriously disingenuous to assume people are going to be as stupid as you are implying.
Actually getting a meaningfully large stream of CO2 is by far a more difficult problem than storing it across geologic timescales.
It is not disingenuous to say that fossil fuel companies cannot be trusted, and they have continuously misled the public. Even if they were to properly bury carbon dioxide, combined with crooked politicians and lobbyists, it'll just give the companies a free pass to keep burning fossil fuels. In this way, they'll screw the people from both sides. Also, there is a limit to the volume that can be held by deep geologic reservoirs.
If planting tree's mitigation potential is "large", then they're saying nothing on this list will make a dent. The math simply doesn't work because there aren't enough acres on earth to use trees to reverse global warming.
> The math simply doesn't work because there aren't enough acres on earth to use trees to reverse global warming.
It depends. The evidence is that Earth obviously reversed global warming in the past several times with vegetation alone. But it probably isn't helpful for the timeline that we humans need it on, e.g. in the next 20 years (and in the next century, if we're being very generous)
We will be lucky if we manage to stop accelerating the rate at which we add CO2 in that 20 year time span.
Actually decreasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be the work of many generations. There's a lot of things to do, but planting trees then tossing their carbon into deep holes and starting over won't hurt.
Global CO2 emissions actually look to be peaking sometime in the next 5 years. IEA estimates 2025, but it’s dependent on several factors.
How much Coal China is using is a major one and they are adding renewables at a crazy fast pace. Even at China’s fairly abysmal capacity factors, when we are talking about 217 GW of solar in 2023 and their on pace to increase that by 35% in 2024, it adds up quickly.
I'm personally pretty optimistic about direct air capture.
Right now, we just need to stop the bleeding and get to global net ~zero emissions with the tools we have (renewables, nuclear, carbon capture, etc.). It seems like we're on track to accomplish that at least some time this century.
By the time we've gotten there, direct air capture should be a relatively mature technology, and energy should be much more abundant between continued advancement on renewables and early iterations of commercial fusion. With any luck, we'll even have highly automated and scalable AI-driven manufacturing and infrastructure deployment capabilities to make a mass rollout of DAC relatively cheap. As long as we survive long enough with no major societal upheaval, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to restore the planet to preindustrial CO2 levels by some time next century, or (very optimistically) around the turn of this century.
It's not going to solve itself overnight, and climate change will get worse before it gets better, but I think we're basically doing the right things. Maybe in the meantime someone will figure out how to process landfills into fuel and mass produce microorganisms that feed on microplastics.
Besides and beyond that, every tree has been duplicate counted about 20 times for global warming mitigation, AND they're all going to burn in fires, AND they're all going to die from beetles, AND they're all going to die from drought, AND they're all going to get cut down for wood or fuel.
Carbon removal is a combination of several different scams on the public.
This. It's crazy to me how "we're going to destroy ~all the forests" is viewed as a problem only because of its effect on global warming, and not as a huge existential environmental catastrophe (one that we must avert or perish) in its own right.
Nobody beyond the most brutal maoist futurist argues for that. Its a strawman, bit planting forrests is afailing strategy and if you take away the pure scammers and those who just know it wont work out and plant anyway, its lots of money wasted. Same money could buy a algea farm that sinks huge vertical undeewaterforrests info a abyss from whicg the oil once came.
>How many building frames are you planning to build?
A lot, lumber has all kinds of uses beyond framing as well.
"At this point, it's tempting to dismiss lumber as completely irrelevant to concerns about carbon emissions. But the authors show there are exceptions. In Canada, where timber is a major contributor to the economy, wood products end up sequestering 2.4% of its annual emissions, or over 30% of its industrial emissions. In Sweden, those numbers are 9% of the total emissions and over 70% of industrial emissions. So, when it comes to setting national emissions targets, there are countries where harvesting forests really matters." [0]
Thanks for making my point for me: this is a good thing.
>Even upping the total to 400 megatonnes, however, is not especially comforting given that our annual carbon emissions are well over 350 gigatonnes. "Even under a best-case scenario and when accounting for this gap," Johnston and Radeloff write, "the global potential of [wood products] as a carbon sink is minor and always less than 1 percent of emissions."
Less than 1 percent of yearly emissions. It's good there are countries where that percent is higher, but sadly when it comes to CO2 emissions, it's the global result that matters. We not only have to get to zero our current emissions, but we also have to bury back the historic CO2.
Yes, I know, I am the one who linked the article...
>Less than 1 percent of yearly emissions.
Indeed globally it's a small amount, but it's still a good thing as I originally stated QED. There are too many countries that strip mine their forests out and don't follow sustainable forestry.
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[ 13.0 ms ] story [ 919 ms ] threadA lot of things we consider normal has only been averages for recorded human history, which has also seen plenty of climate outliers, and is only a small fraction of the total history of earth and life on it.
Why is it so hard to accept that
a) yes the climate throughout the history of our planet (at geological time scales) had a lot of variation and humans didn't live during an average climate
b) it's reasonable to worry that the climate deviates quickly and strongly from what it was throughout the history of humankind?
Why do these two points need to be opposed to each other? The timescales are so utterly incompatible. Is it because people struggle to understand what a million years is? Let alone a hundred million years.
I think this should be noted, since the slogan by alarmists is usually "save the planet".
You're making a lot of very strong assumptions, notably
* That a healthy planet is a "fully green" one
* That a "fully green" planet is healthy to the organisms that currently live on that planet, particularly humans
The Jurassic Era, for example, was much more "green". Humans wouldn't have fared very well in the Jurassic Era.
We're shooting north of the Carboniferous (+3C) and headed towards the Cretaceous Hot Greenhouse period, where average temps were +5C to +8C over where they are now.
Probably not survivable for humanity as we know it now.
We're already seeing wet bulb temperatures over the survivable maximum in some parts of the world, imagine stacking another 3-5C on top of that. Large parts of equatorial land would be fatally warm to humanity, and the temperate band for growing crops would shift at least a thousand miles north.
1000 ppm is at the level where us apes have measurable reduction in reaction time and other cognitive impairments.
The experiments that showed this were confusing correlation with causation. High CO2 in rooms is a marker of reduced O2, and a lack of fresh air.
If you add 1000ppm CO2 to fresh air, it actually boosts cognition due to the Bohr effect.
What nonsense.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41893-019-0323-1
From the paper: "All studies measured the effects of exposure to artificially raised (pure) CO2"
Some studies showed no effects (for the given task) while others showed a reduction in performance.
Let's take the study by Rodeheffer. Even 15,000 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere did not change the results of a thorough 90-minute test. If this is not indicative of the benignancy of CO2, I don't know what is.
Let's take the another study by Allen that showed "SMS performance was 15% lower for 945 ppm and 50% lower for 1,400 ppm relative to 550 ppm"
This was not a controlled study, but just an association study in different buildings. All the studies that use a good setup do not report marked lowering of cognitive function.
Then you can look at the paper by Herczeg and the mental performance is not really much different between 600 and 4000 ppm - merely 5% difference in errors found in the test. With only few participants, this is not significant. Since this is a short-term study, adaption to higher CO2 levels needs to be considered.
The nature paper does suggest that it's concerning so I have not ruled out the option of high CO2 exposure negatively affecting humans. I'll have to look into this more at some point.
Your comments have suggested you are, so I'm assuming with low confidence you are biased towards these things being positive, or much less negative than the scientific community thinks.
Not to a significant degree. Oxygen is normally around 20.9%, if you raise CO2 levels by 1000 ppm, that goes down to… 20.8%. There's a bigger change to how much O2 you breathe just from the change in air pressure from going up 10 meters.
O2 turning into CO2 becomes lethal at 4%; if O2 concentrations go down in step with that (e.g your breathing causes it) you'll only be drowsy and nauseous from the latter while the former is killing you.
This distinction is also why diving rebreathers work: they remove the CO2, which is toxic much sooner than the mere lack of oxygen.
Also:
Fresh air contains less CO2. In Bohr's day, fresh air meant something like 280 ppm, today that means 440 ppm. If some future atmosphere contains 1000 ppm, that's what "fresh" means in that case.
I'm at least marginally confident you're just misreading the Bohr effect.
Well, probably. There won't be many humans around to verify.
When people say "Save the planet" they generally mean "save the planet as it currently exists", since taking 100 years to make environmental changes that usually take 3000 will have negative effects that outweigh the increase in plant life from a human perspective.
Why do you think that? Absent some other primary power source like fusion, solar energy is the upstream producer of all the energy we currently use. Using it directly seems like the most obvious answer, especially when replacing e.g. all the earth's energy usage would only take, say, the size of Arizona
Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth).
I disagree. The tech itself already good enough to supplant the majority of cases, which in turn gives us more time for the things that remain (such as long-haul aircraft).
That said, I may be a little on the optimistic side about how much warming the ecosphere can take. If it's already too hot, then yes, naturally you are correct.
> Interesting that you mention fusion though considering fission is available today and provides a substantial amount of power (not to mention actually reduces the amount of fossil fuels whereas solar has a negligible impact on fossil fuels and at best is only absorbing energy growth).
That's not what the graphs show: https://ourworldindata.org/electricity-mix
• Coal: down since 2012
• Gas: close enough to steady since 2012
• Nuclear: down since early 2000s
• Wind and solar: up
Looks to me like gas mostly replaced oil (since the late 90s); and that wind+solar is displacing nuclear (since the former became big enough to show up on a graph).
The graphs you provided show that coal and usage are still growing in absolute numbers. They're only going down in perentages. So, aside from oil (which is mostly still there), nothing was displaced.
The only significant thing we learn is that we've doubled our electricity usage since 2000. The share of low carbon electricity generation barely moved since 1985. Renewables just helped avoid it crumble due to hydro not being scalable.
EDIT: and those electronics also degrade - a lifespan of 20 years would be reasonable at scale.
You can't run "bare" LiFePO4: you're either forming a grid, or you're connecting to one. Both involve BMSes and inverters.
I'd bet a dollar that, in 50 years time, nearly all energy usage is going to be primitive biofuels or solar-PV-origin.
If building a solar installation is cheaper per kW then building a gas generator, that literally doesn't matter if the only times the solar installation generates power is when power prices are negative.
I also did the analysis for new nuclear under a relaxed regulatory regime (i.e. substantially cheaper and faster than now) and there's no way it wins. For the price of a gigawatt of nuclear, you can get 5 gigawatts of solar that's online next year, plus half a gigawatt of battery.
I could be wrong, I'm just an armchair economist on this stuff, but I just don't see how it makes any economic sense to build anything but solar unless you're located somewhere remote and arctic (i.e. Åland or something)
On top of that the solar plant capacity factor is somewhere between 10% - 30% in most locales, so the sticker plate capacity of 5 GW is going to be under 2.5 GW at best (and that would be a 50% capacity factor).
I've never been able to find a way to square an actual "no fossil fuels grid" with the supposed cheapness of solar or wind - it always feels like people are quoting selectively useful $/GW values and then not giving a full accounting of the assumptions behind them - i.e. GW type quotes originate with thermal powerplants which have capacity factors which are essentially "whatever you want if you pay us".
The LCOE values I've seen place batteries+PV at ~ nuclear… but nuclear is more expensive than almost anything else.
I anticipate further reductions in the price of batteries from the learning curve and demand driven by electric cars where they're already cheap enough to replace ICEs, such that the cost of batteries for electricity time-shifting will be OK fairly soon (as in: 5-10 years)but that's a forecast and not a guarantee.
There's also the possibility of a global power grid — the maths works out just fine, few hundred billion USD and a year or two of global aluminium production, we have to spend more than that on upgrading the last (hundred) miles even if we never build the global interconnects — but basically only China has both the interest and the capabilities to attempt something like that as part of a future belt-and-road initiative, everyone else will definitely not get past the "talking about it" stage.
Nation-states would likely still retain strategic reserves of thermal powerplants, but they wouldn't be run, and the budgeting for them would be under national defense and interpreted through that lens (i.e. you can buy it down with strategic alliances and diplomacy).
> I've never been able to find a way to square an actual "no fossil fuels grid" with the supposed cheapness of solar or wind - it always feels like people are quoting selectively useful $/GW values and then not giving a full accounting of the assumptions behind them - i.e. GW type quotes originate with thermal powerplants which have capacity factors which are essentially "whatever you want if you pay us".
I'm telling you right now that LCoE for replacing natural gas is here. Coal has been dead for a while, new hydroelectric plants have massive siting concerns, wind is already too expensive compared to solar + battery, oil has been dead this entire century for electricity. What else is left? Only marginal things like geothermal which are entirely location-based.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61424#
The grid will be solar. Very soon, in fact. Within 20 years, which is lightning fast in grid terms.
But that's a utility being injected into a grid which already has widespread stored-fuel powerplants. I'm not contesting batteries work under some circumstances, I'm contesting whether they actually work when they are doing more then displacing load-handling at the edge. The grid runs 24/7: there's a massive difference between running batteries for 2 hours, and then recharging because you can buy power any time of the day you want, versus their being near zero dispatchable generation on the grid.
Because a gas generator is more then happy to sell you power and run a little longer to do so at any time of day. If that gas generator doesn't exist though, then once your battery is empty it's empty until the renewables pick back up. And that's the answer I'm still not seeing - the question isn't "can you optimize the grid" the question is "can you eliminate stored-fuel power plants entirely". It's fairly obvious that batteries can help in some circumstances given that gas plants have start up times in the tens of minutes, and power prices going negative is bad for them.
EDIT: Basically, are we actually displacing any fossil fuels off the grid, or just optimizing it's expansion - given that an infrequently used peaker plant can become a frequently used peaker plant quite easily, but a solar farm can't do the same.
A solar panel produces energy. A battery only stores it (and loses, round trip about 8% in the process) - which is to say, batteries are solely arbitrage instruments.
Batteries are extremely functional in many installations, and even if you’re not using, only selling, arbitrage can work well. This is especially true if you get paid to accept the commodity in one time window and can get others to pay you to take it later.
"The total solar energy absorbed by Earth's atmosphere, oceans and land masses is approximately 122 PW·year = 3,850,000 exajoules (EJ) per year. In 2002 (2019), this was more energy in one hour (one hour and 25 minutes) than the world used in one year."
I don't trust the exponential trends to not be secret sigmoids past that point.
Nobody ever provides an honest answer to those questions.
This isn't a binary versus issue. If you have to ramp up coal burning and natural habitat destruction to produce the needed PV cells then you also need to stop endless-growth profit seeking manufacturing wholesale.
The mining of quartz typically involves several methods depending on the nature and location of the deposit. Here are the common methods used:
- Open Pit Mining: This is the most common method for mining quartz. It involves the removal of large amounts of soil and rock to access the quartz deposits. This method is used when the quartz is found close to the surface. Heavy machinery such as excavators and bulldozers are used to remove the overburden (the soil and rock overlaying the quartz).
- Hard Rock Mining: In cases where quartz is found in veins within rock formations, hard rock mining methods are employed. This involves drilling and blasting to break up the rock and access the quartz veins. The material is then transported to the surface for processing.
- Underground Mining: If the quartz deposits are located deep underground, underground mining techniques are used. Miners create tunnels and shafts to reach the deposits. This method is more labor-intensive and expensive than open pit mining but is necessary for accessing deep deposits.
- Placer Mining: This method is less common for quartz but can be used in riverbeds and stream deposits where quartz particles have been eroded and deposited. It involves washing and sifting through gravel and sediment to extract the quartz.
Open pit mining and hard rock mining can cause significant land disturbance and environmental degradation, including deforestation, habitat destruction, and soil erosion. Proper environmental management practices and reclamation efforts are essential to mitigate these impacts.
We aren't talking about sand.
The production of the current global output of solar cells require from somewhere between 8-10 million metric tons of coal annually.
Totally disingenuous comparison. You don't get to use the existing energy source's coal requirements to criticize the energy usage of the replacement energy source.
"We can't replace coal power! Think how much coal we'll burn building the replacement for coal power!"
Moreover, there's nothing about it that requires particularly pure quartz, since impurities are removed when trichlorosilane is distilled.
Zero.
PV pays back it's own energy cost in a matter of months to single-digit years, even in the worst cases that's still enough to support the current exponential.
And the raw material are not found only in mountains, the main component by mass being — famously — what sand is made from.
That's a choice, not a need.
The need is right by that:
> solar panels only need to operate for 4-8 months to offset their manufacturing emissions.
> We're talking billions of tonnes of raw materials here to meet decadal global demands, and it simply isn't just sand (and remember that really good sand is a resource in demand also):
1) Doing nothing leads to burning around 8 billion tons of coal per year just by itself.
PV, even when made from coal power, reduces that by a factor of 40-90.
And, as you do make and connect it, the fraction of power coming from coal constantly decreases anyway.
2) I said "main component by mass", not "just". My point stands.
3) You don't need "good quality" sand for PV. Crush some rocks if you like, silicates are everywhere.
Who's advocating doing nothing, is that something I said?
2) I said "main component by mass", not "just". My point stands.
You clearly stated "Zero". That's incorrect. The energy demands of mining are not insignificant by any means.
There are large amounts of material being mined, both sand, and silver, and others to support PV
3) You don't need "good quality" sand for PV. Crush some rocks if you like, silicates are everywhere.
You've not ever mined anything or worked in geology, have you?
I mixed you up with the other poster, but your comment and theirs together very much pattern-matches to such a position, yes.
> You clearly stated "Zero". That's incorrect. The energy demands of mining are not insignificant by any means.
I said zero in the context of "how much coal and how many mountain tops are needed".
This remains correct.
Zero mountains need to be levelled, zero coal needs to be used.
And what do you mean by "insignificant"? Your own citation is saying 4-8 months to repay their own energy cost, for devices which last 25-30 years. I think 1.1-2.6% of their lifetime output counts as "insignificant" in proportional terms, even though that's a big number when you multiply 2 TW by 30 years to find out what it takes to scale to the current global electricity demand.
> You've not ever mined anything or worked in geology, have you?
Have you?
Silicon is the second most abundant element in earth's crust after oxygen.
The doping agents are less common, but also you need far less of them.
Again, no mountains need apply — even for the single most important element, the scale needed is a big hill, not even a small mountain.
SiO2 + 2C --> Si + 2 CO
is best done with charcoal, not coal, due to the porous microstructure of charcoal more effectively interacting with silicon monoxide vapor. So not only is coal not needed, it's not even the best feedstock for this process.
That would be bad except:
a) production has increased by more than 10x in the same time period.
b) solar panels added to the energy mix pull down the average carbon and quickly pay back their manufacture
which means it's just a sensible investment in an incredibly low carbon and cheap energy source which has gotten even more incredibly low carbon and cheap over time.
By 2045, the earth will be covered by solar panels so we will start tiling Mars.
According to projections, the Dyson Sphere should be completed by 2117. Exponential curves are a hell of a drug.
> I don't trust the exponential trends to not be secret sigmoids past that point.
The thing is that predicting the cap is as important as predicting the inflection point. 100% solar (or renewables) isn't possible without other technologies which are much less developed, consumer pattern changes which have yet to emerge and grid investments which are not priced in current PV deployment.
Sure, but the factories to make batteries are also being rolled out pretty quickly.
> and grid investments which are not priced in current PV deployment.
Which are necessary even without renewables, because of their age in the west and increased demand everywhere else.
If you think I'm being silly, well... I'm not the one using the word "never"
Geothermal is most either primordial gravitational energy from the Earth's formation or energy from decay of uranium and thorium. Only decay of K-40 might be ascribed to fusion.
Tidal is derived from gravitational energy.
This is related to the historical question of the age of the Earth. Before the discovery of fusion, it was thought the Sun was powered by gravity, which put an upper limit on the age of the Sun of some tens of millions of years. This was close to Lord Kelvin's limit on the age of the Earth as modeled as a solid sphere cooling by conduction, which led him to believe both estimates were correct. As it turns out, both estimates were flawed, but for different reasons, and it was only coincidence they were similar.
2023 is the year we burned the most coal, the most gas, the most oil, etc... So far.
Here’s hoping!
Nuclear is also cheap and doesn't have this limitation.
And for transport we need some kind of storage system regardless (doesn't have to be batteries, but does have to exist), the scale of which is larger than needed to do anything we want with night/clouds/etc. issues with PV.
The factories to make those batteries are being built very quickly.
Why would you store electricity produced by Nuclear energy? You can adjust the production to match the needs.
Depends where you are. If, for example, you're in the most-occupied bits of Canada, your grid connects to the south side of the USA, which gets rather more hours of sun than you do.
> We've yet to see a battery system able to hold enough power to balance these months of under production.
If you're far enough south to get as many as "a couple of hours" of sun each day in midwinter, this isn't a serious issue in most cases. Why? Because adding more PV is much cheaper than adding more batteries — when you've got 2.4 hours of sun, build a 24*n hour battery and enough PV to charge that battery in 2.4 hours, where n is some factor for "in my location, there are often n-day cloudy streaks".
But also, most places already have a decent grid (exceptions exist, Hawaii is excusable, Texas is not), the grids are not fundamentally so lossy as to break the economics here, and much better grids can be made if there's sufficient political will behind it (yes, even one that worked for Hawaii).
This does not mean the field is just composed of scams. The opposite could be true with the same results we see.
Otherwise when you zoom out and look at the whole energy system, you're just "digging a hole and filling it back in again" (I mean this both thermodynamically and economically), plus adding unavoidable inefficiency losses at every step. So in reality the entire chain would be generating negative net energy for society. Such a futile energy system isn't a workable solution, obviously.
No, right not we should be researching and laying the groundwork for a future (post-combustion) scale-up, but environmentally we should not be scaling up just yet. Scaling up right now would actually generate more pollution, not less.
> Otherwise when you zoom out and look at the whole energy system, you're just "digging a hole and filling it back in again" (I mean this both thermodynamically and economically), plus adding unavoidable inefficiency losses at every step. So in reality the entire chain would be generating negative net energy for society. Such a futile energy system isn't a workable solution, obviously.
That is true in the abstract but there is yet more nuance that is important to consider.
Capturing co2 doesn't have to consume as much energy as is released when it's emitted. Although, many methods, like everything revolving around trees and biomass do have this negative net energy property. There are chemical ones that don't if I'm not mistaken[1].
There is also the unreliability of most renewable energy sources. While we haven't solved all the energy storage problems. There might still be periods where it would be somewhat sensible to use surplus renewable energy to capture carbon, while a low-wind, low-sun place is powered by fossil fuels.
We do of course want to shut all of them down ASAP, but the optimal ordering might not be as strict as you imply. I agree with your broader point though. There is a lot of potential for energy waste if carbon capture is prematurely applied aggressively.
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/how-ic...
This not carbon capture vs net zero, the goal is net zero AND carbon capture.
All of our governments are owned by these corporations that are trying to either continue making money via the status quo or make money with these fly-by-night tech-will-save-us-all get rich quick schemes. Nobody is bribing the politicians to enact policy that cuts global manufacturing output.
But politically they can have a minor delaying impact, like birds killed by windmills (1/1000th the effect of skyscrapers), vids of collapsing/exploding windmills in the middle of nowhere (compared to oil transit and storagw explosions)
I have no idea what the funny numbers alleged cost per ton for carbon removal in this report, but even if it is down to 20$/ton (100$ per ton was more realistic a few years ago) ...
Then do the math. We have a sunk cost of something like 50 trillion dollars using removal using the most optimistic of methods and assuming we stopped carbon emissions today, and it's probably more like 200 trillion in reality.
The petroleum industry would really like us to pay them to clean up their problem to the the of that amount I'm sure.
Unfortunately, IPCC reports from 2018 and 2023 confirm that carbon removal is necessary to stabilize temperatures. Decarbonization alone is no longer enough. We need to get better at carbon removal...fast.
It is also possible (nay, probable) that this dilemma will get resolved by just... humanity not getting the thing we "need."
But chemically binding is of course the cleaner solution.
It remains to be seen if this can actually be scaled up.
https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s13021...
Please, we know that's a lie because there are thousands of unplugged drill site holes when it comes to natural gas. This is what methane flaring is about. They're constantly burning or otherwise leaking methane into the air. This is the best that human drilling has to offer, and it's piss poor. We can expect no better in terms of quality or depth for CO2 storage.
Nobody is seriously suggesting to pump CO2 underground and then not plug up all the holes connected to that gas. Unplugged holes thousands of miles away obviously remain irrelevant.
PS: Flaring is there when active extraction and processing going on. A tank on the surface getting several degrees hotter in the day is going to build up pressure, while even 20 feet underground the temperatures is constant year round and even across geologic timescales. Similarly, if you’re extracting oil then you might not care about small packets of gas reaching the surface beyond the safety hazard, thus flaring.
Also, when there is the slightest earthquake, the reservoir could erupt, even killing everyone in the area due to a flood of CO2.
Again, this isn’t the kind of thing where you slap a metal end cap on a long tube and call it a day. It’s seriously disingenuous to assume people are going to be as stupid as you are implying.
Actually getting a meaningfully large stream of CO2 is by far a more difficult problem than storing it across geologic timescales.
It’s really 3rd parties like Climeworks who are mostly likely to try and make use of this technology. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climeworks
And without massive government subsidies it’s going to operate at such a tiny scale as to be irrelevant.
It depends. The evidence is that Earth obviously reversed global warming in the past several times with vegetation alone. But it probably isn't helpful for the timeline that we humans need it on, e.g. in the next 20 years (and in the next century, if we're being very generous)
Actually decreasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere will be the work of many generations. There's a lot of things to do, but planting trees then tossing their carbon into deep holes and starting over won't hurt.
For reference, https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/during-year-of-extremes-ca...
How much Coal China is using is a major one and they are adding renewables at a crazy fast pace. Even at China’s fairly abysmal capacity factors, when we are talking about 217 GW of solar in 2023 and their on pace to increase that by 35% in 2024, it adds up quickly.
If you combine that with looking at progress in the last decades or so, it allows for some optimism.
Right now, we just need to stop the bleeding and get to global net ~zero emissions with the tools we have (renewables, nuclear, carbon capture, etc.). It seems like we're on track to accomplish that at least some time this century.
By the time we've gotten there, direct air capture should be a relatively mature technology, and energy should be much more abundant between continued advancement on renewables and early iterations of commercial fusion. With any luck, we'll even have highly automated and scalable AI-driven manufacturing and infrastructure deployment capabilities to make a mass rollout of DAC relatively cheap. As long as we survive long enough with no major societal upheaval, I don't see why we shouldn't be able to restore the planet to preindustrial CO2 levels by some time next century, or (very optimistically) around the turn of this century.
It's not going to solve itself overnight, and climate change will get worse before it gets better, but I think we're basically doing the right things. Maybe in the meantime someone will figure out how to process landfills into fuel and mass produce microorganisms that feed on microplastics.
Carbon removal is a combination of several different scams on the public.
That is actually a good thing. Cut trees that turn into lumber sequester carbon dioxide in the form of building frames.
No one claimed this but you.
>Lots of carbon storage happens between them, not to mention how important they are for biodiversity.
Yes we know, it's almost like this subject deserves its own field of study [0][1].
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Forest_manageme...
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/wjsf20
Total CO2, from 1850 to 2019: 2400 gigatons (2.4×10^12 tons, ≈ 2.2 × total living biomass on Earth, ≈ 69 × total dry biomass on Earth (wolframalpha))
How many building frames are you planning to build?
A lot, lumber has all kinds of uses beyond framing as well.
"At this point, it's tempting to dismiss lumber as completely irrelevant to concerns about carbon emissions. But the authors show there are exceptions. In Canada, where timber is a major contributor to the economy, wood products end up sequestering 2.4% of its annual emissions, or over 30% of its industrial emissions. In Sweden, those numbers are 9% of the total emissions and over 70% of industrial emissions. So, when it comes to setting national emissions targets, there are countries where harvesting forests really matters." [0]
Thanks for making my point for me: this is a good thing.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/07/how-much-carbon-does...
>Even upping the total to 400 megatonnes, however, is not especially comforting given that our annual carbon emissions are well over 350 gigatonnes. "Even under a best-case scenario and when accounting for this gap," Johnston and Radeloff write, "the global potential of [wood products] as a carbon sink is minor and always less than 1 percent of emissions."
Less than 1 percent of yearly emissions. It's good there are countries where that percent is higher, but sadly when it comes to CO2 emissions, it's the global result that matters. We not only have to get to zero our current emissions, but we also have to bury back the historic CO2.
Yes, I know, I am the one who linked the article...
>Less than 1 percent of yearly emissions.
Indeed globally it's a small amount, but it's still a good thing as I originally stated QED. There are too many countries that strip mine their forests out and don't follow sustainable forestry.
Perhaps it's getting overlooked because it's too obvious or sounds too easy to work?
Solar and wind is for people who hate nuclear plants, but love natural gas.
I'm fresh out of pedantic soliloquies and engaging talking points today, it's just come down to this. Cheating the children.