Taking CO2 out of the air would be an absurdly expensive way to fight climate change
Taking CO2 out of the air would be an absurdly expensive way to fight climate change
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.
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.
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.
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.
Redwoods live thousands of years. I'm cool with punting this problem 3000 years into the future.
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.
Trees do it.
Plant more trees.
I'm all for more trees but they eventually decompose and release their captured CO2. Combine it with BECCS and it could actually net in reduced CO2 over the course of centuries. We'll need a myriad of solutions, unfortunately a lot of capture methods are greenwashing bs.
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
The taxes levied against CO2 production will never be able to sustain the cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
Any discussion of rehabilitating from climate change should include rewilding and the restoration of lost wetlands, a major carbon sink for our planet.
We could grow more hemp too, more efficient at carbon removal than trees
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.
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
the problem isn't that it's expensive it's that it requires us to deal with more volume than every other industry combined through history to even start to think about making a difference.
and you'll notice it talks about the US hitting it's climate goals ... rich nations will need to do a lot of heavy lifting for the rest of the world for it to be worthwhile not just hit their own targets then say "Well, Somalia isn't pulling it's weight so we're all just going to die I guess but at least we did our small part"
This is also related to the ultimate bullshit about any kind of carbon credits.
The only way it makes sense to sell a carbon credit, at least in a world paradigm (such as it is under Paris) where all nations need to get to zero, is to price those credits backwards from the last ton of CO2 you are going to remove. Because all the tons need to be removed. In the most honest, true, legitimate scenario, selling a credit is taking a loan out against yourself which will HAVE to be paid back eventually.
So the cost of a carbon credit, assuming it actually represents the thing it claims to represent (hint: they don't), should be as expensive as it is per ton of DAC, since DAC is certainly the most expensive way to mitigate emissions.
That means they should be going at something like $500/ton or more in developed nations. Plus the interest on the loan.
In poorer nations, it's possible that those last tons will be cheaper to remove by nature of their lower costs. Maybe that DAC facility built in Indonesia will have lower operational costs than the one you build in Norway. But in that case, selling the credits from Indonesia to Norway makes even LESS sense because now Indonesia is effectively going to have to pay for that last ton to be removed from Norway... where it's WAY more expensive.
If we are to actually believe that carbon credits are what they purport to be, they are usury. They are colonialism. I guess we should be glad they're just regular scams and not that, eh?
The point isn't to fight climate change, it's to have us chasing hope while they keep cashing in the petrobux.
So how do we fight climate change?
Not that I can really do anything, I'm just curious on how exactly we should do after killing all the rich people and using their wealth
In the US? The IRA is a very good model. Hard to overstate what a good piece of legislation it is. Doesn't go far enough, but it makes some serious strides.
Promote electrification. Renewable energy generation is already cheaper than fossil fuel, so with minimal additional incentives the market is going to wipe out grid fossil energy production over time. Calibrate your incentives and penalties to make it happen as fast as possible -- we aren't there yet, but we've taken major strides.
You'll need to do a LOT of grid enhancement in the process. As more electrification occurs, you'll need better transmission of that electricity. A lot of the utilities have vastly miscalibrated incentive structures right now, which favor building major capital projects over doing repair and maintenance. Better regulation can fix this, though some of them are so incompetent and corrupt that they long-term probably just need to be nationalized (looking at you Central Maine Power/Versant). Re-conductoring is a good place to start for this because it's cheap and can increase current grid capacity by something like 2-3x. Large grids with a good mix of wind/solar and dynamic pricing should be largely resistant to any intermittency issues of renewables, by some energy storage sugar on top will take care of that.
Side note: the main thing pumping the breaks on more renewable energy generation facilities is not actually a lack of demand, it's interconnection queues.
Another prong is urbanization. You massively reduce emissions by reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Good urbanism reduces VMT, creates more financially sustainable towns, and also more pleasant, safe, and healthy environments for the average person to live in. Strong Towns has a lot to say about how you can start pushing for better urbanism right now. There's little more you can do for total emissions as an individual than helping your city avoid expensive and dehumanizing sprawl; show up to your MPC/city council meetings and advocate for good urban policy.
We can further cut back on emissions by reducing the reliance on interstate trucking for freight. Trains can (and should) be electrically-powered and are FAR cheaper for a society. Delivery "last miles" can be done by various EVs pretty easily. For the US, this pretty much requires nationalization of the right of way/track (and then, ideally, deregulation of the freight operators). That is, make the train network function a lot more like the current highway network. Bonus points: 80% of microplastics in our water are just tire dust. Let's do less of that.
Industrial heat is another major pillar. Places like steel and concrete plants need to switch to heat batteries powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels. This tech is ancient and reliable, but still not at scale, but at least some promising pilots are already happening. And the minute any of them work at all, they'll take over fast. Because renewables + heat batteries ought to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than furnaces + fossil fuels once operating at scale. And the facilities will also be able to make use of aforementioned renewable intermittency to save even more money (e.g., charging their heat battles at nadir hours where energy prices go to near 0 or even negative).
We'll also need to do some stuff that is politically sketchier. Reducing certain kinds of consumption (industrial beef, fast fashion, tariff-loophole import goods, etc). But those are higher-hanging fruit and it's ok to procrastinate on them a bit if they're too politically difficult right now.
Well the first step is to reduce or at least drastically eliminate the amount of CO2 that is being released in the first place. Removal of carbon from the air is necessarily going to have to be a down the road plan. It literally cannot happen to any scale if we are still relying on fossil fuels in the first place.
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.
Yeah but venture capitalists can't make money off of it if they don't! Think of the share holders!
What are we trying to cheap out here m
hey, kill the planet more because it's too expensive not too. Sound logic....
It's not just expensive, it also doesnt work unlesss almost all energy used world wide is carbon neutral. This is because carbon removal is the reverse of a reaction used to gain energy, so it needs higher input energy than was gained by the power plant.
It would be really great if we had fusion.
But for now, excess solar energy is interesting to dump into carbon capture, since we currently have no way to store it.
So it's a way?
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.
And, besides everything mentioned, it would create several mountains and hills (from all that solid state carbon).
If only there were a Kingdom whom we could engage, one that naturally and enthusiastically removes carbon dioxide from the air. There must be an answer, maybe if we plant a seed, metaphorically speaking, a long standing solution will grow to fruition.
That sounds like a lot of work though
That's the nifty part, members of the Plant Kingdom do all the heavy lifting on this. We just need to assist a bit.
The article briefly addresses this: