I realize carbon capture may be some part of reducing total carbon in the atmosphere, but it's disproportionately brought up as a potentially effective one. It stinks to high heaven of chasing public "investment" rather than actually holding industries accountable for actually reducing emissions.
The only argument for investing in carbon capture today seems to be to allow the technology to mature. We'd probably be saying similar things about the effectiveness of solar panels if we started developing that technology now. The idea is that maybe, and that's a big maybe, by the time we get to a point where all of our power generation is low emissions, we will have matured carbon capture tech enough to make it viable.
The difference is that thermodynamic analysis of solar panels, even before building them or improving them, tells us that it is a winning bet. We can't say the same for carbon capture. It's a thermodynamically losing bet.
The humongous amount of entropy we will have to generate to offset any significant part of current emissions via carbon capture (let alone already emitted CO2) basically tells us that carbon capture can only be used in exceptional circumstances where there are no feasible methods of reducing emissions. If there are, then the winning method is to not emit in the first place.
> only argument for investing in carbon capture today seems to be to allow the technology to mature
> CDR currently removes about 3bn tonnes of CO2 from the air every year, of which almost 100% comes from land-based methods, *such as afforestation and reforestation*, the study says.
Trees have pretty well matured. They will not get the same improvements through material science that solar got. "Letting carbon capture tech mature" is hoping for a moonshot to bear fruit.
We have built our society on a lot of incentives that are bad for the planet unfortunately so we now have some conflicting requirements for tackling climate change.
1. Cut back on emissions
2. Nobody anywhere is allowed to lose money
How can this possibly work? How do you cut emissions which are a proxy for consumption/production without anybody losing out?
Fortunately #2 isn't correct – any given person is absolutely allowed to lose money, just so long as "society as a whole" is making more.
How you draw the bounds of society, that's hard; Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Russia may well hate the idea of the world turning away from oil and towards renewables, but have no power to stop it.
Fair point. I suppose I meant no Americans are allowed to lose money. I am not an expert but what springs to mind (for me) is the oil/gas industry. If the cost of fuel increases for any reason that's it- your next election will not go well. So we usually end up keeping subsidies, tax cuts, etc. but adding more incentives to something else such as green energy- or at least it seems that way. You can't take a thumb off of the scale but you can always add more thumbs. Because nobody is allowed to lose money.
Even then, Musk is allowed to bankrupt Twitter, Trump is allowed to be fined half a billion or whatever it was, and Epstein died in prison.
Big Oil was, past-tense, considered identical with national interest. Now, even though they're still useful, that value is not at anything close to the same level, and it's adapt-or-disappear time for all of them.
Those errors don't really catch up to you until your late 40s, when your health is shot, your bank account is empty, and you don't really have enough time left to dig your way out of the hole you're in.
I maybe be misremembering, but I think one of Carl Sagan’s characters in the book Contact was asked what she would want to ask extra terrestrials if given the opportunity. Her answer was along the lines of “how did you manage to survive this technological adolescence we are currently experiencing?”
Scientist knew plastic recycling was impossible. But marketing companies working for plastics producers came up with the idea of lying to the public about it to stave off a ban they were looking at.
Today, it's basically impossible to convince people that plastics are not recyclable - at least not in the same way that glass or metals are - because of that little recyclable symbol ever piece of plastic has on it.
Plastic recycling is not impossible, it's just not economical to turn plastic back to essentially oil if you can pump the stuff from the ground essentially for free (by comparison). That could be changed by taxes, but there is no political will to make plastic expensive.
In the same way, carbon capture is not impossible (plant some trees and bury charcoal), it's just that nobody wants to pay for it.
Plastics can be beneficial for global warming. They need less energy for making them and for transporting them than the alternatives. And they sequester CO2 when they are landfilled at the end of their useful life. We should be pushing them back underground through the same holes we used to dig up the carbon.
Plastics don’t sequester additional carbon. You literally have to pump oil out of the ground, where it was already sequestered naturally, to create plastics in the first place.
Yeah, but we are pumping oil anyways and there's all the money in the world against stopping it.
If we convert some of that pumped oil into a plastic that won't be burned but landfilled then we prevented some release of CO2.
If we use the plastic for packaging (instead of glass or metal) we saved energy (which translates today to CO2) and we saved fuel by transporting lighter packaging.
Plastic is pretty much the best thing that happened to humanity in relation to CO2 emissions.
Too bad we want to get rid of it because we find it unsightly, because we fail to properly sequester it at its end of life.
Unfortunately your logic is incredibly naive… it ignores the fact that (a) the money behind pumping oil is partly due to the plastics industry itself, (b) that creating plastic already burns fuels and releases emissions, and (c) that plastics are horrible for our ecosystems for reasons other than pure carbon emissions accounting.
It’s sad to see someone having been on HN for so long having such a myopic view of things.
I totally agree with (c) and believe it should be addressed. Plastics need to be collected when they become garbage and reused as building material and if not possible stored properly for next hundred or few hundred years. We need to create proper incentives for that. Reduction of plastic use should of course be encouraged but not at the cost of functionality. So peeled bananas in plastics should be banned, but juice bottles shouldn't be glass.
As for (a) plastic uses up about 6% of oil we dig up so political influence of plastic manufacturers is probably roughly proportional. That explains why we have paper straws while oil extraction and burning continues and increases completely unrestricted. Plastics are just the easiest political target.
And as for (b) making plastic takes less energy than making glass or metal for the same purpose, plastics also are lighter so produce less emissions in transport so if we magically waved away all the plastics our emissions would rise by many percent, not fall. And we can't just not use packaging because the we would waste even more food which would also cause emissions.
It's like with ethanol for cars. In theory it was supposed to save emissions. In practise it caused greater emissions due to land use change for the purpose of growing corn to make methanol.
Probably half of the things we do (my wild guess) to help the environment or emissions specifically actually increases emissions in the end.
It's sad to see that even on HN there is huge representation of mainstream simplistic views that don't recognize complexities of the world and the need for carefulness to not make things worse.
Lol you clearly have no idea what you’re talking about.
(a) The massive plastic producers are multinational oil companies, and they see it as a growing industry to capitalize on, so they are extremely influential lobbyists for maintaining plastic production.
(b) Anything that makes shipping lighter, cheaper, and generally more viable will result in much more shipping and thus much greater emissions, not less. This is always the problem with efficiency-driven arguments. (But it takes understanding the complexity of systems to understand this.)
(c) Of course the ecosystemic outcomes are devastating, and we still barely have the knowledge to understand the full impact.
(a) It's a developing market for them. They happily make investment there taking a slice of this pie. It's quite interesting that they do it despite all the media narration against plastic. I'm guessing they know that all the narration won't significantly impact actual volume of plastics sold. Maybe they already planned narration change. Maybe to something closer to reality of plastics impact on climat change?
(b) People won't reduce shipping when you make it more fuel intensive. They will just use more fuel. As long as the demand is there capitalism will mold everything to fullfill it. And the demand is already there.
(c) what could realistically be done is forcing plastic manufacturers foot the bill for cleanup. For example to be allowed to sell 1kg of plastics they should collect and recycle or landfill 1kg of plastic from the environment. To sell one kg of new plastic you need to buy 1kg of plastic waste. With full scruitany of the government paid for by special tax on plastic producers.
Thanks for the link. I'll read it even though I doubt I find anything new in there. It's basically mainstream narration at this point. Which means people with money paid for promoting it because it serves their profits. It's basically a smokescreen for the most profitable and harmful activity to peacefully continue.
And honestly, the a lot of the problems with plastics are actually a very specific and fixable problem. 90% of the plastics in the Pacific Ocean come from 2 rivers.
It's 10 rivers [1] passing through some of the largest population centers on earth. That is still a big problem. Micro-plastics is, imho, a scarier one since they're now showing up in many water supplies.
The problem is that those populations lack the infrastructure and organization so they made the rivers ad-hoc trash disposal system. And it works too well for them.
It's not the plastic that's a problem. It's poverty and lack of organization of those regions. If humanity never invented the plastic those rivers would still be the most polluted (with population waste) rivers on the globe.
The reason I am reducing my plastics use in personal life is because of all the new issues with plastics we are discovering. I'm worried about unknown dangers of plastic. First it was 10 years ago we were worried about BPA, now we are worried about microplastics and pfas. What is next.
Not only it's a small part of the effort, it's also only really effective after we stop generating that huge amount of CO2, and almost all the initiatives around are snake-oil that can't grow enough to make an impact.
Some accountability would go a long way here. Most of the stuff around carbon capture are plainly fraudulent.
People when carbon capture: This stinks of redirecting tax money. Hold accountable.
People when carbon tax: You made inflation high. Get out!
The ideal voter gets to ask for things he'll never get but complain about them if he does get them. That way he can act free of sin and simultaneously vote out people who give him that. There's always some other pretext. "I'm not voting him out for his carbon tax. I'm voting him out because X". Because the space of actions a political leader must do is large enough that nothing is perfect, the voter can always claim he is optimizing to some good.
In the West, people get what they vote for and my experience is that they're quite representative of peoples' views.
> People when carbon capture: This stinks of redirecting tax money. Hold accountable.
> People when carbon tax: You made inflation high. Get out!
This is quite a funny observation. And true. The general psychological bias is when immediate known losses are standing against unknown future gains. Also Americans in particular are allergic to the term tax.
A carbon tax would be the most hands-off way to solve the problem. Ideally phased in slowly and with a clear price structure from the get-go. All you need is:
- industry needs to know how much they will be taxed in X years, so the bean counters can put it in their projections so execs listen
- the tax needs to be tight enough so you can’t escape through tax “planning” aka move operations to unregulated countries
The rest takes care of itself. Once there’s a tangible measurable cost things will change quickly from green leaf-decorated “we care”-pamphlets to fire in the ass of the decision makers.
>People when carbon capture: This stinks of redirecting tax money. Hold accountable.
>
>People when carbon tax: You made inflation high. Get out!
It's almost like the voting population consists of people with various different opinions. Personally if I could be assured that a carbon tax would be spent mostly on low-overhead tree/algae farming, and to a lesser extent useful research, I would be ok with it. Otherwise, it's just a cash grab that impoverishes people more for no benefit.
Haha, of course. Carbon taxes can't be a cash grab if they're revenue neutral which is easy to do: just evenly split by each taxpayer+dependents and send it back as a tax credit. In fact, that's exactly how it's done right now in many places that implement it.
But no algae farms, sorry. Sort of illustrates the point perfectly hahaha.
>Carbon taxes can't be a cash grab if they're revenue neutral which is easy to do: just evenly split by each taxpayer+dependents and send it back as a tax credit. In fact, that's exactly how it's done right now in many places that implement it.
Tax credits are a scam too. I'd rather have everyone pay a reasonable low tax for this purpose than favor some people and uses over others. The market will probably sort that out if you let it.
>But no algae farms, sorry. Sort of illustrates the point perfectly hahaha.
Most of our oxygen comes from algae, so it's not crazy. But I'd prioritize other things first, probably.
I generally agree with you, but in terms of CO2 output the West is not really the problem anymore. It's developing countries, and the general argument they have is that "why should we have to suffer with slower economic output when you didn't?"
Let's look at the data [1], which should be a table of per capita emission/country, sorted by 2022 numbers. The countries at the top have to make the largest changes in their socio-economic systems in order to get close to zero emissions. While countries at the bottom have to make minimal changes. They simply have to not emit in the future by using carbon-neutral methods to attain improved human well-being.
You will note in the table [2], that at the top are the oil producing countries in the Middle East, followed by Canada, USA, and Australia. Most of the large European countries are far below. The bottom half of the table obviously contains no West countries.
China has half the per capita emissions of USA/Canada/Australia, and the same as current Europe, and it's already decreasing both its population and soon its per capita emissions.
It's precisely the people in the Middle East and USA/Canada/Australia have to make the largest changes in their systems. China+Europe have to follow the same downward trajectories.
If anything the West needs to to be a model and driver for a carbon neutral or negative lifestyle. We burned all the carbon in the first place, and developing countries will suffer the consequences disproportionately.
No country in the world is on a path compatible with the supposed 2 degree goal, and it's not mainly a problem of the West. I think the whole climate freakout is a scam in the first place. In any case, the West should not cripple itself as other countries continue business as usual. We can't survive like that, and it won't be the climate that gets us either.
Yeah, but that's not going to work because we used carbon to fuel growth and then decarbonized. Everyone else saw that China did the same thing to raise half a billion out of poverty. Everyone remaining saw that India raised more than that out of poverty burning carbon.
It's not like we're going to give developing countries nuclear power so their choice is coal, natural gas, wind, and solar. And inevitably they follow that specific chain of energy build-out as their growing economy starts cleaning up. No one has demonstrated a high-scale success that is not that.
Likewise Robin Wall Kimmerer talks about how sustainability hype in general is oriented toward sustaining consumer lifestyles, which will never really be compatible with living in a closed ecosystem.
One potential value of CC today is as a final and most flexible solution. Even with the limited and experimental technology of today, which is obviously economically insane, we have a way (with enough money) to make anything carbon neutral. The value is not that we actually do that (humanity cannot afford it, in general), but instead to give us the number to beat, the correct carbon tax, the absolute cost of failing to decarbonise.
It’s easier to justify improved efficiency when the cost of spilling carbon is a big number of dollars rather than a tiny slither of a global problem.
That said, I do agree investment should be limited, it’s obviously only going to be the “best” solution in the rare circumstance that there is no good solution.
I agree with this in principle, but only insofar as it applies to western countries. Emissions from the developing world will continue to increase (rightfully so, given we had such massive head start) and they will have little incentive to curtail emissions, even when climate-related disasters become more frequent. The only unilateral solution seems to be a technological one, therefore necessitating carbon capture.
Just like late-development countries didn't avoid getting celphones and investing in mobile internet before they could put their wired internet in place, developing countries will stop their emissions on about the same time as developed ones.
Nobody is making any bit of extra work towards cleaning the planet. And that's a really big shame for the developed countries.
> The only unilateral solution seems to be a technological one
Or a political one. Developed countries provide them a small financial incentive to build out renewables instead. Some kind of UN fund. It doesn't have to be a large incentive, it just needs to tip the financial decision over at the margin. The economic logic: it's a retroactive carbon tax, of sorts, given the extreme inequality in emissions per-capita since the industrial revolution. It's also a pragmatic solution, because it's cheaper to prevent the emissions than extract it after they've been released.
We can capture carbon before emitting it. For example if we can use carbon to make plastic that saves us energy (especially in areas where energy doesn't come from renewables) then it's a huge benefit. Especially if we don't burn the plastic afterwards, just put it under ground instead.
We can either leave the oil in the ground, or turn it into long lived products. But we can't economically suck carbon from the air and turn it into long lived products, but that's exactly what we need to do to prevent catastrophic warming. We have already emitted too much carbon dioxide.
1) However much C is stored by protecting forests / planting trees, is peanuts compared to humanity's GHG emissions.
Read: phasing out fossil fuels is the #1 task that we should focus on, as it has the biggest effect - by far. Planting trees etc helps, but it's not what will get us where we need to be.
2) Re-forestation is hard. Saplings die, growing trees takes time, and they may fall victim to drought/forest fires later on. Correspondence between [trees saved/planted] and [carbon credits] is... well, not 1:1. To put it mild.
3) Carbon capture is mostly a fantasy. Existing plants capture a minute fraction of human-emitted C at high cost, and this won't change for the foreseeable future.
Maybe CC will work at scale, some day. And for that reason, exploring the tech is worthwhile. But as it is, it's not a 'solution' in any way, shape or form. A different but similar story goes for geo-engineering.
4) We're racing past 1.5°C warming, no matter what. We'll probably run past 2°C warming, too. 2.5°? 3°? Even more? Don't rule it out! Prepare.
CO2 removal is the least-effective solution we have for mitigating climate change. Renewables have the potential to displace fossil fuel sources through market forces by eventually becoming cheaper. Demand reduction via taxes and requiring energy-efficient products can be effective for the same reasons.
But there's no way to fit CO2 removal into the economy in the same way. Nobody wants to pay for CO2 removal, and we'll be relying on government agencies to coordinate, fund, and verify the process. It's always going to be prone to corruption, fraud, and mismanagement.
So I'm not surprised that everyone is behind on CO2 removal.
> It's always going to be prone to corruption, fraud, and mismanagement.
A lot of things get done despite corruption, fraud and mismanagement. As soon as people decide to actually do something about it, it will be done. The amount of investment required is significantly less than what a world war cost, for example. A lot of people thought such a war was impossible because nobody could (or at least would) afford it but here we are.
The main question is how much pain it's going to take to push people into action, and how much additional pain will be no longer avoidable by then. Looks like it's going to be a lot but humanity will survive.
I think we should still fund it, but it's probably a huge boondoggle. The issue is more that by placing so much emphasis on carbon capture, we are ignoring things that work. So, it is similar to plastic recycling. Some plastics can be recycled, and at the very least they don't always end up in a landfill...but the whole idea of recycling lets a bunch of companies responsible for the big mess off the hook. Carbon capture, and carbon offsets all do this. That's my main issue with it.
If not, how do we mitigate those increases without CDR?
Maybe we don't, and the magical CDR unicorn isn't going to come and save us. I don't mean to speak for parent, but CDR is the "least effective way", yet many are speaking as if it's the most viable solution. And maybe it is, because $DEITY forbid that a dollar of CO2-producing profit be left on the table, but if that's the case then we are most certainly doomed.
Glad to see other comments bringing this to light. As Saul Griffith likes to point out, physics indicates that stuffing CO2 back into the ground is not an easy or cost-effective job. Stopping it from entering the atmosphere is much simpler. Also Saul mentioned that the IPCC models have a disproportionate amount of faith in CO2 removal technologies which at this point is an unproven and uneconomical option and for physics-related reasons will probably remain so.
Also, there doesn't seem to be an appreciation of the speed at which we need to stop emissions to meet 1.5C or even 2C of warming. It's at the point where if we don't replace almost every car, furnace, stove, etc with its electric counterpart and power them with clean electricity (due to the continuous emissions of those machines for their lifetime, assuming no early retirement), we can guarantee breaching the 1.5C limit. We need a World War 2 level buy-in from government, industry, and consumers. I wish this was more widely known.
I try to keep up with the latest science on climate change. From what I understand we're currently on course for ~ 3.4C of warming, no where near 1.5.
It's not all doom and gloom. China's 'dumping' of cheap solar and evs are actually a hugely good thing for the world. We're not on as dire a path as we once thought but 3+C of warming is still bad enough that I ultimately think we'll resort to geoengineering to stop it. No matter how dangerous geoengineering is, it's cheaper than completely revamping our economic system, and for whatever reason we seem to care far, far more about the 'cost' of a solution over it's risk.
Such a shame there are so few initiatives to increase the quality, speed, reliability and nr of public transport(esp trams). So much travel can be done with good pub transport while reducing car dependency and related emissions + freeing so much space (parking and roads)
Is carbon capture theoretically viable from a thermodynamic viewpoint with all externalities accounted for?
That is to say - can I burn 1 litre of oil in order to capture more than the emissions of 1 litre of oil (without cheating and boxing it at the point of emission), can I use the lifetime energy produced by a 1sqm solar panel to capture the emissions required in the process of creating a 1sqm solar panel?
Including creation and maintenance of whatever apparatus is required to capture the carbon.
It seems to me as if the arguments all focus on money when what really matters is something more akin to an energy return on energy invested calculation.
I don't know the cost of the measures that have been put in place to date to reduce CO2 emissions globally but undoubtedly it's a massive sum. On looking at this graph, it seems that whatever the sum it's had no discernible effect whatsoever on atmospheric CO2, irrespective of quoted emission reductions.
In my heart I still think we should be able to make negative carbon wood for construction and paper products. Surely this is doable, right? Trees sequester the carbon so we just have to make the supply chain clean and not re-release it back into the atmosphere via decomposition.
Those discussions are irrelevant given the population growth. UN is consistently wrong about populating growth. Earth population doubled in last 50 years.
Well, yeah, it's really hard to send money to carbon capture when it's hard for 99.99% of voters to even begin to quantify the value of a ton of carbon captured.
I'm all for carbon capture as a technology, but if a company was to take $100 from me as a service for capturing my carbon, I literally have no way of knowing what I am even getting for my money. And it sounds like the same is true even at a utility/national level.
Go back to economics 101. Rational consumers purchase at the margin. Carbon capture is still only an irrational action.
If we want to have any progress on global warming, CRD or not, we really need to start price setting the value of carbon.
It's hard to sell CO2 capture unless all governments start enforcing it, don't expect free market forces to solve it by itself. CO2 capture has to be the side-effect of other useful, incentivised and subsidised economic activity.
E.g. we build everything in concrete and glass nowadays (a huge source of CO2) while we could build with wood (an actual proven form of CO2 capture), but there are zero incentives for timber production and construction.
I will not entertain this nonsense catastrophism until these “political influencers” lead by example and first stop using all forms of “high emission” materials and manufactured goods from their own lives. No metals, no plastic, no transportation, air-conditioning, concrete, meat, fish, etc… All of the costs associated with their alarmism do nothing but further damage the middle/working classes of society.
A lot of people are intellectually devoted to this idea in the same way Ptolemaic devotees believed in geocentrism, it will be hard to get anything but emotional reactions. We know for a fact that more than 50% of science is wrong (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis), but at the same time the people who downvote you are sure as a Christian in Christ that this science about climate change is _always_ flawless. When science turns political it dies.
