I wonder how expensive the damages from climate change will be.
across the US. Big companies including Microsoft and Amazon are also paying startups to capture some of their pollution. And the fossil fuel industry has embraced the technology, even using it to market supposedly more sustainable oil. Apparently, that still isn’t enough.
“More sustainable oil”. Sure dude. Just keep doing the same thing you’ve always done that cause this problem in the first place. But wait…
There are so many limitations to the most studied CDR techniques — including tree plantingand** machines that capture CO2 **— that Romm says the money would be better spent researching other ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Oh, so do nothing while things keep getting worse? We need to hemm and haw over the things we haven’t thought of that will also be too expensive?
But why put a Band-Aid on the problem if we aren’t stopping the bleeding?
Well, because it’s not a perfect solution we should do nothing is the gist I’m getting from this whole thing. Other than what we’re already doing - attempting to lower emissions.
Lowering emissions doesn’t increase shareholder value. Try again, and this time think of the shareholders.
/s (obviously)
Algae does it for free on a massive scale.
We’ll put a stop to that!
Are you being sarcastic? I think this defeatist attitude is shit, and people need to focus on real practical cheap solutions rather than doomerism. Algae is the best solution we have, it already does most of the job for us.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/10/231025185159.htm
The key to bringing global net-zero goals into reach may be algae, say researchers. Studies show impressive success of certain microalgae varieties to remove CO2 from the atmosphere then break it down into useful materials.
Are you being sarcastic?
You think?
Dollar for dollar, planting trees works better then current CO2 connectors. Algae could be industrialized as a source of carbon neutral fossil fuel alternative.
Indeed, and using algae based fuels would make it carbon negative because it would in turn store the carbon it releases cyclically. Algae can be dehydrated, compacted, and stored for extremely dense carbon storage. Planting trees is good as well, also for ecological reasons.
I’ve always thought it’d be useful to pursue just as a backstop: you set a carbon tax to whatever the cost of sucking the co2 back out is, and then you have net zero.
I guess it’d have to be introduced slowly to 1. Give them time to develop lower costs before bankrupting literally everyone and 2. Reduce the shock of painfully high carbon tax, and give everyone time to jump for cheaper alternatives. But it feels like the closest to a proper solution that I can imagine.
The taxes levied against CO2 production will never be able to sustain the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Expensive is the wrong word here, most of these calculations are not about money, but energy, they are about doing stupid things like using power from burning coal to collect CO2 emitted from it…at a net waste of energy. It literally emits more CO2 than doing nothing (unless all your energy and factories producing solar panels and wind turbines and cars and infrastructure already run on green energy). It is only good for greenwashing in the near to medium future.
It’s a net loss, until you consider: You can pump that CO2 into oil wells to get more oil. That’s what most CO2 collection is used for. The collection part is typically stopped when the oil runs out.
It makes much more sense when you realize the point was never to reduce atmospheric CO2.
What are we trying to cheap out here m
The point isn’t to fight climate change, it’s to have us chasing hope while they keep cashing in the petrobux.
If you want to return the climate to preindustrial levels you have to return the co2 level in the atmosphere to pre industrial levels. Your gonna need to figure out carbon capture at some point but seems like it’s second on the list after we stop generating new carbon.
There are enough people working this problem that we can realistically aim for both and capitalize on incremental improvements in each area along the way.
I agree. Too many cooks in the kitchen and all that. There’s enough of us that we can diversify our efforts. A set of large teams working on eliminating carbon production, and a set of large teams working on carbon capture.
We don’t really need to pick and choose. There’s literally billions of people on earth.
Its Not that hard to understand. Since the industrial revolution we’ve taken energy out of a system that, as a pollutant, generated CO2.
If you want to remove the excess CO2 we generated we’ll have to put back at least the same amount of energy to reverse that process. Adding in typical losses like heat, you can triple or quadruple that.
So let’s say we need four time the energy that humanity had generated since the industrial revolution to get co2 back to pre industrial levels. Great. ALL this energy must come from non CO2 sources like solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, because of not you’re just spending 100 units of CO2 to capture 30…
This already means that currently, carbon capture is a bad idea. Any energy spent on that is energy that generated more CO2 than it will capture and even if it is renewable, or nuclear, it would be better spent on something else and that something else would still spend 100 units CO2 for the 30 you capture.
So this means that step one, before really starting to capture CO2, is getting ALL of your energy generation where possible (airplanes, for example, cannot go electrical). We’re not even at step 0.1, honestly.
We need to get rid of all fossil fuel cars, trucks and power plants before we can even start thinking about fixing this and we’re literally a sliver in that direction, currently.
So can we please PLEASE start with this damn conversion already?
There actually is a much easier way with enhanced weathering. Igneous rocks naturally carbonate as they weather, and pull CO2 out of the atmosphere to make carbonates. This is why when you have a mountain building event it causes global cooling. So what you need to do is expose more igneous rock surface area to the atmosphere by grinding it up and spreading it out. This also costs energy but not nearly as much as carbon capture, and it’s also slower. But we know it works, and there are several pilot studies trying it.
The problem is capitalism. There’s no room for a zero-profit process in the economic system that everyone accepts as necessary. It has to somehow enrich the investor class.
Interesting idea, haven’t heard that one yet, but it does sound like something that a) would require literally mountains of energy and b) would take a way WAY long time, much more than we have available.
Also, just blaming it all on capitalism as a blanket excuse is a but too simple, not?
Aaaaaand here’s Singapore, not complaining about cost: https://www.mayerbrown.com/en/insights/blogs/2024/04/seas-the-future-singapores-visionary-leap-into-oceanic-carbon-capture
If only there was a way to turn CO2 back into a solid form of carbon, release O2, and it could all be powered by the sun, for free.
What a world that would be.
Trees end up releasing a lot of carbon down the road
We’re releasing a lot of carbon right now.
The neat thing is when a tree dies and starts releasing it again, the trees around it absorb it, and here’s the best part: They plant new trees all on their own.
Doesn’t help through forest fires
But the tree angle is mostly used by polluters to say they are carbon neutral because they planted some trees somewhere so they can continue polluting
Not saying you are one of them, just to not put so much stock in it when we should be aiming for elimination
I mean I’ll agree 100% that carbon credits or whatever they’re called now is bollocks.
But more trees can’t hurt. And they’re nicer than endless fields of corn.
Redwoods live thousands of years. I’m cool with punting this problem 3000 years into the future.
While trees are great and you have a point, we can’t just put trees everywhere without consideration of native species. Much of the U.S. for example is prairie/grasslands that doesn’t have a high tree density and the carbon is cycled much faster. Also of concern (not my concern but somebody’s) is the property value of land used for trees instead of profit.
A acre of hemp regrown every year and a biochar retort could sequester far more carbon than an acre of forest over a given period and can be done on “wastelands”. Biochar IMHO is the only carbon sequestration method that actually makes sense.
The article addresses this:
Tree planting has been the most popular nature-based tactic so far — to little success. A growing body of research and investigations has found that offsetting emissions with forestry projects has largely failed. The trees often don’t survive long enough to make a meaningful dent in atmospheric CO2, for example, and then there’s double counting when more than one group claims the carbon credits.
Nobody makes grotesque amounts of money from that, so we’re not allowed to do that one
I am weak in science. Is this sarcasm or does a method really exist? I am extremely curious. Please enlighten me.
😂🙏🏽
Trees. He’s talking about trees.
I feel extremely dumb now. I am gonna take my leave.
You missed an opportunity to say ‘gonna take my leaf’ … but alas
And grass, and bushes, and all things green that grow. The phytoplankton in the ocean actually process more CO2 than anything else on the planet. That’s one reason why ocean warming is so concerning.
The problem is trees are short-term (even the long-lived ones) and only a part of the solution because they are a part of the carbon cycle. We need to remove carbon from the carbon cycle.
Another part of the solution is pyrolysis of industrial plant waste into biochar/charcoal. This stable form of carbon can last thousands of years underground and does not need any fancy technology or equipment.
And, besides everything mentioned, it would create several mountains and hills.
It’s like addressing a wound by mopping up all the blood and injecting it back into your body. Good luck.
It’s… It’s nothing like that. Literally not like that at all.
Pulling carbon out of the air instead of addressing pollution at the source is not like continuously mopping up blood instead of treating the wound? To me the parallels are almost exact.
It also doesn’t work.
Yeh, but then the Oligarchy can get the public off it’s back, regardless of the effectiveness. I am sure in a few years when things keep getting worse, they will come up with another “solution” which does not address the root cause.
