
What if carbon removal becomes the new Big Oil? - known
https://www.economist.com/the-world-if/2020/07/04/what-if-carbon-removal-becomes-the-new-big-oil
======
jackfoxy
Stopping and even reversing deforestation is the single most efficient form of
CO2 reduction/capture we have available.

Deforestation rivals fossil fossil fuels for greenhouse gas emissions (up to
30% of anthropic emissions) yet it rarely gets talked about. Could it be
because there is no money to be made in halting deforestation?

[https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/deforestation-and-
greenhous...](https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/deforestation-and-greenhouse-
gas-emissions)
[https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo671](https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo671)

On the fossil fuel side what we need is a large scale industrial use of CO2
that is not hopelessly energy inefficient. If such a breakthrough happens we
could build gas turbine farms at gas fields and pipe the CO2 to industrial
centers. Modern gas turbines are the most efficient form of electricity
generation. The emissions consist almost entirely of H2O and CO2, some
collateral NO2, and trace amounts of other stuff from combusted impurities.

~~~
topher515
My understanding is that reforestation, while being wonderful and helpful,
simply doesn’t address the scale of the problem.

All forests today contain ~200 gigatons of carbon. Humans release ~25 gigatons
of carbon per year. So DOUBLING the size of forests on Earth would just absorb
8 years of greenhouse gas emissions.

This made no intuitive sense to me until I began to think of the fossil fuels
we’ve got underground as representing millions of years of forests
“compressed” into oil / gas.

~~~
tunesmith
There's this pattern of:

\- We should do "X"

\- But doing "X" won't solve "Y"

\- But "X" will help

\- But "X" won't solve

\- But "X" is necessary

\- But "X" isn't sufficient

And I think the unstated conclusions are whether we should actually do "X" or
not. I think the answer is usually Yes, we should do X (in this case, plant as
many damn trees as we can), but I also think that's me arguing from an
individual perspective and not a group psychology perspective.

Like, when people argue "but focusing on trees could distract us from
addressing the entire problem", I used to just be dismissive of that, but I'm
starting to feel like those objections should be taken more seriously -
particularly having gone through this COVID debate where people focused so
much on "flattening the curve" \- which was necessary, not sufficient - that
too many people signed on to gradual reopening just as the (high-amplitude)
curve started flattening. If we had socialized a different benchmark, maybe it
would have been more effective in the long run.

(But still, even if only in parentheses, plant trees.)

~~~
notabee
I think that we should cast the widest net for possible solutions, but there
does come a point where they need to be winnowed down to which solutions will
have the greatest effect (without bad side effects) with the least time and
material resources. It'll still have to be multiple solutions on multiple
fronts, though. Planting trees should be an easy win where the ecology
currently supports growing them without too much maintenance work, but some
areas would require massive effort to revitalize. Nuance like that is
important, and so I encourage everyone to take things a step further mentally
each time you engage with these topics. Do some napkin math, read some
studies, etc. The more people that do that, the more we can create working
knowledge and solutions instead of just taking pot shots at various proposals.

~~~
waheoo
No. There are nearly 8 billion people on this planet. Figure it out.

This is a complex problem. Almost all solutions are worth trying. Most of them
are going to be required. There does not need to be a winnowing of solutions.
We just need to fucking start rolling them out.

I'm so over the argument that something won't be good enough.

No fucking shit.

Nothing is going to be good enough, nothing is going to be potent enough to
solve how monumentally we screwed the environment up.

~~~
mycall
> There are nearly 8 billion people on this planet.

It is not a complex problem, this is the root cause.

~~~
beenBoutIT
If that number was rolled back to 4 billion (ethically, somehow) wouldn't that
be sufficient to reverse climate change?

~~~
Johnjonjoan
I don't think it's a given we can reverse or even stop climate change. There
are many positive feedback loops going on right now.

AFAIK neither the Paris accords or any climate management proposals entertain
the idea of stopping climate change.

Edit: positive feedback loops are things like the melting ice caps. Less
sunlight is reflected back to space by the white ice which means more is
absorbed by the dark sea. This causes the earth to warm and more of the ice
caps to melt....

In climate science there is something called the tipping point. This is when
mechanisms like positive feedback will make drastic climate change inevitable
(with current technology).

When the tipping point will happen is up for debate. IMO the idea that we have
already passed the tipping point is also up for debate.

------
alex_young
Carbon tax paired with a tax refund to every person would both save us from
the worst consequences of global warming and stimulate the economy. It's hard
to find a rational excuse for not doing it.

Planet Money did a great episode on this idea over 7 years ago:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/12/201502003/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/07/12/201502003/episode-472-the-
one-page-plan-to-fix-global-warming)

They did a followup 5 years later:
[https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/epis...](https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/07/18/630267782/episode-472-the-
one-page-plan-to-fix-global-warming-revisited)

It seems like there are too many entrenched players to make this a reality
unfortunately.

------
cwhiz
I don’t think there is a single viable climate model that doesn’t rely on
massive carbon capture. Carbon capture is one of many things we will have to
do to avoid mass extinction.

~~~
ghthor
I dont agree with you, and there is a body of scientific evidence that is
building that doesn't agree with you[1]. This evidence points to the most
likely cause of mass extinction being changes to the sun and the environment
of the solar system. In my opinion based on my research, if we are to avoid
mass extinction, we need to be acknowledging the sun as the main driver of
climate change on earth now and in the near future, not the emissions of our
activity on earth.

[1] [https://otf.selz.com/item/pre-order-weathermans-guide-to-
the...](https://otf.selz.com/item/pre-order-weathermans-guide-to-the-sun-
third-edition)

~~~
mdorazio
You're pointing to a book "authored" by a person who runs a pseudoscience
YouTube channel and has no scientific training whatsoever. Please, start
looking for information in less biased and more mainstream places - your
worldview will be improved as a result.

~~~
ghthor
Please go back in time and tell that to anyone whi changed the paradigm
science. I'm sure Galileo would appreciate your viewpoint.

Ben Davidson is not a pseudo scientist and has plenty of training in the
scientific method.

I'll start listening to you if can predict earthquakes as good as the
community developed by Ben over at quakeqatch.net

~~~
doodlebugging
You fat-fingered the URL.

Should be quakewatch.net

NOTE: I am not affiliated in any way, shape, form or fashion with that website
and have no idea what they are peddling. I simply tried to visit the site and
found the error in the URL.

I am a geophysicist though who watches the USGS mapview of recent quakes every
day.

Going in now...

If I'm not back in a couple of days tell my family they're some of my favorite
people.

~~~
doodlebugging
Alright. I'm back after a brief dive into the site.

My initial impression is that this proves the old adage that even a blind
squirrel gets a nut once in a while.

Their maps with the color-coded target areas are spread around the known
regions of the globe where one would reasonably expect to be able to keep
updating a prediction and eventually have it come true. (Stock market
newsletter predictions are probably as accurate.)

I didn't watch videos yet nor did I read any of the papers that might have
been linked since it was not obvious how to access any of that. The whole site
is geared for believers in that you have to make an account as a predictor to
be able to see any of the predictions that have been made and thus it is
impossible for an outsider to gauge the accuracy of any of their claims.

If this is not true please correct me.

~~~
doodlebugging
Took another dive and found that the main site showing what they are looking
at and what they think they found is suspicios0bservations.org and if you
visit that site you will find links to several other sites that have content
related to their efforts.

I'll dive into some of this as time permits but for now I did watch a video
from 2016 that outlined the data they are using and potential links they have
found and papers published as a result.

I'll suit up, grab some coffee and dive into that later. Looks interesting so
maybe not fair to compare it to stock market shysters at this point though the
blind squirrel analogy will always be valid.

------
tuatoru
"What if carbon removal becomes the new Big Oil?"

What if rainbow-horned unicorns become the new automobiles?

What if my wife finally succeeds in inventing dehydrated water?

What if zero point energy becomes the new electricity?

What if ... meh.

Someone once pointed out that if you wait six months to read it, the Economist
magazine reads like pure comedy.

But this ... this is just Kubler-Ross denial. Very sad.

------
GekkePrutser
I wonder if carbon capture actually makes sense, not from an economic
perspective but from an energy perspective.

One way or another you're spending a lot of energy doing it. Using fossil fuel
would not make sense as it would add to the problem you're trying to solve.
Considering there's not enough renewable energy for all our current uses,
wouldn't it be simpler to just reduce, and convert more things to renewable as
they come available, which we'll need to do anyway?

Once we have a big surplus of renewable in the future we could look at this
again.

It sounds to me like a pipe dream, a promise of a 'quick fix' for a problem
that has no quick fixes.

And to be honest in order to actually reverse global warming and prevent some
of the future effects we're already locked in to, we'll have to extract so
much carbon that I don't see this happening in the next hundreds of years.

~~~
mmarvick
I am by no means an expert here, but a couple thoughts back from my limited
knowledge:

1) I don't think all carbon capture necessarily requires a lot of energy
input. Planting trees is a more obvious example of this - of course, the trees
rely on the sun's energy so it's not "low energy" in that sense, but we
weren't going to harvest that energy any other way anyways. It's possible
there are other solutions that are like that.

2) If we have an abundance of zero or low-carbon energy in the future that
doesn't exist now, it might not matter that taking carbon out of the
atmosphere uses more energy than the energy we got from putting carbon into
the atmosphere to begin with.

To be clear, I really wish we'd just spend the money and take the sacrifice to
use a lot less carbon right now. It certainly seems like a much easier problem
to solve than trying to suck it back out later, and relying on it to work
seems like a dumb risk. Even if we're confident that we'll inevitably need
some amount of carbon capture and that the R&D will happen to develop it at
scale, there's a good chance that it'd be easier and cheaper to put less
carbon in the air now than to do more capture later.

~~~
bobthepanda
I don't even think you need "a lot of sacrifice" to stop emitting so much
carbon. The EPA estimates that energy efficiency could cut emissions by up to
20%.

The trick is that most energy inefficient buildings and appliances are used by
poor people who can't afford to upgrade or maintain to the latest and greatest
standards, and massive funding for poor people is a giant lightning rod at
least in the US. I know that in a previous house my utility was literally
paying me to replace my fridge and air conditioner to reduce peak power
demand, but I have no idea how widespread such programs are.

~~~
quadrangle
The problem with efficiency is that it's usually not tied to reduction. We
need people to have more efficient buildings _and_ to heat and cool them less.
We need LED lighting with no _more_ lighting. So,
[https://www.treehugger.com/energy-efficiency/are-we-using-
le...](https://www.treehugger.com/energy-efficiency/are-we-using-less-energy-
because-led-lighting-or-more.html)

Put simply: INDUCED DEMAND

Just like roads or computer hardware (every improvement in hardware can get
eaten up by people no longer caring about optimizing software efficiency or
modest file sizes: nobody needs their cute family videos to be 4k HD etc)… we
can easily use up ALL the gains if we are let to just do that.

We use more efficient building technology to support homes being larger and
more luxurious than we need. Defeats the whole purpose.

We need to internalize the costs. Heavy taxes on the _source_ of pollution
rather than subsidizing the clean-up or the use.

If energy gets MUCH MUCH more expensive, people WILL upgrade to efficient tech
_and_ keep minimizing their use of it.

------
orwin
I've read three articles talking about it on HN, but the science and models
especially are shacky at best. Great models that will probably never work as
intended.

Oxydes are really, really stable, and CO2 is one. Destroying an oxyde will
cost at least as much energy as creating one, but in reality it's about 3 time
the expense for C02.

The chemical/mechanical solution i've seen on HN[0] with olivine and tidal
energy is quite interesting (that how ocean keep themselves from turning too
acidic with CO2 capture), but while i'm pretty sure the chemestry bit is true,
their paper is not peer-reviewed and i'm a bit skeptic about how fast the
carbon will be absorbed.

It feel like it's nearly as much a silver bullet as fusion and ambiant
temperature supra-conductor. So not big oil.

[0][https://projectvesta.org/](https://projectvesta.org/)

~~~
gridlockd
It will of course be cheaper to pump hydrocarbons out of the ground for a long
time to come, but we have recognized that there's a problem with that.

"Energy use" is the wrong way to look at it, because energy costs vary
massively. A lot of renewable energy effectively goes to waste because there
is no economical way to capture and store it.

------
jtlienwis
Back of the envelope calculation says that one gallon of gasoline makes 20 lbs
of CO2 when burned. One hundred gallons of gas per ton of CO2. I have seen
sequestration costs of $200-$500 a ton for current CO2 sequestration or
conversion to fuel hydrocarbons. This would work out to a $2 to $5 dollar tax
for gallon of gas. So this would take us to $4 to $7 per gallon gas to create
a sustainable CO2/hydrocarbon economy. For a lot of people, this would be
better than spending an extra $20K+ for an EV. Twenty thousand dollars buy a
LOT of gas. Ten to 15 years worth for a typical computer driving 10k a year
even with the added taxes. Plus, this might make some places like New York,
more politically open to oil/gas pipelines and fracking etc to increase
supplies because gas/oil would now be green.

~~~
kapuasuite
Turning 8(?) pounds of gasoline into 20 pounds of CO2 makes absolutely zero
sense.

~~~
slavik81
2 C8H18 + 25 O2 = 16 CO2 + 18 H2O

Don't forget the weight of the oxygen that goes into the reaction.

------
perfunctory
I can't see how CCS (carbon capture and storage) can ever be viable
economically. It's pure expense. Why would anyone agree to pay for it. And if
we mandate it wouldn't it make fossil products way too expensive and therefore
uncompetitive? They are already losing to renewables in some regions.

edit: I just don't see the logic in shitting around and then paying somebody
to clean up the shit. It's much easier to just stop shitting.

~~~
grej
I’ve wondered if we’d get less ire about taxes if govts allow people to
directly choose how a portion of their taxes (5%?) gets allocated when they
file. They could send it nonprofits for causes they care about. Given the
choice of sending it into something they choose or the large centralized
government black hole, more people would pick to allocate to something they
care about. Carbon capture could be just one of these choices, and a lot of
people care about it.

~~~
ta1234567890
With today's technology, there's really no excuse for keeping
governmental/political decision power away from people.

Most budget/spending and political decisions by the government should be
subject to approval by the people. Everybody should have a government login
and could vote through a website or app. I wouldn't mind voting once or twice
per day or even more, as it would be more productive and fulfilling than
social media.

~~~
foepys
What happens when people sell their website access and entities vote in the
name of thousands of people? Do you think you could detect that?

~~~
zo1
I'd say that's a feature if you let individuals do that, but a bug/fraud
otherwise.

A while back I heard someone propose the idea of "delegating" your vote to an
arbitrary person and they'd vote on individual vote items on your behalf, or
consequently "delegate" it yet again to someone above. Essentially creating a
giant hierarchy of representation.

~~~
ta1234567890
Which is already the way things work. All our decision power is delegated to
politicians, and we don't get paid and we cant revoke it either, we can only
transfer it to some other politician at the end of the term of the current
one.

------
dredmorbius
Anynindustrial process would have to compete with biological sequestration,
with tropical, shallow seas (as with past petrogenisis), and forests being
prime contenders.

The likelihood of industrial operations at this scale proving cost effective
seems low.

~~~
hedora
The entire capacity of existing biological reservoirs only turns the clock
back a year or so.

Also, the oceans are already over capacity as a carbon sink, so we need to
sequester that CO2 somehow as well. If we don’t, the oceans will die, and
we’ll eventually have an even bigger terraforming problem to solve.

~~~
dredmorbius
Wetlands included?

Keep in mind that thse are natural capture-and-bury systems many times more
effective than forests by unit area.

Shallow seasdon't function by dissolving CO2 but by growing byomaass (plankton
or plants typically) which dies and sinks. This is thought to have been a
major past mechanism and explains virtually all petroleum and natural gas
fields.

Yes, CO2 saturation (carbonic acid and bicarbonate IIRC) of seawater is both
finite and a major risk itself via acidification.

~~~
notabee
I'm guessing you're talking about Azolla[1]. That process was still on the
scale of thousands or millions of years. The real problem that humanity is
facing here is the rate of increase. Even during what was probably the worst
extinction event during the Permian-Triassic boundary, where the ppm of CO2
was eventually in the thousands, it still happened orders of magnitude slower
than what we are doing artificially releasing the masses of geologically
stored carbon. So, Azolla or other natural carbon sinks may simply not work
fast enough to counter the rate of increase, let alone the existing extra
carbon backlog in the atmosphere. Even if we manage to break even and stop the
increase, the planet will continue warming because we've already exceeded the
equalibrium that was in place for at least the entire length of existence of
our species previously. There would still be ecosystem disruption and ice loss
and flooding, but hopefully on a manageable timescale. The sheer quantities
here are daunting.

1\. [https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-the-fern-
that...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-the-fern-that-cooled-
the-planet-do-it-again/)

~~~
dredmorbius
Yes, I was thinking of azolla, and yes, I'm aware its previous mechanism was
slow and over far longer timescales. The (faint) ray of hope is that in a
world with rising seas there might well be more wetlands, offering a potential
negative feedback for some of the very worst runaway carbon emissions
scenarios.

Another concern is that wetland tend to be methane emitters (the first
association of the which was as "swamp gas" or "marsh gas"), itself an
exceedingly potent though shorter-lived greenhouse gas.

I need to re-read on global carbon sinks, but overall point was that wetlands
are underappreciated for both extent and per-hectare fixing potential.

------
blisterpeanuts
Reforestation and preservation/restoration of natural environments, including
the oceans, will accomplish the same results.

~~~
jellicle
Can you explain how we could preserve or restore natural environments in a
world with ever-increasing CO2 concentrations?

~~~
blisterpeanuts
Ocean algae, or more properly phytoplankton, produce 80% of the world's
oxygen.[1] We are experiencing a slight decline in phytoplankton[2], which if
it accelerates could become catastrophic for life on Earth. It's not clear
why, but some theories exist suggesting that climactic change is resulting in
the release of acidic substances sequestered in the oceans. As acidity of the
oceans rise, they become less hospitable to phytoplankton.

How are humans contributing to the decline of the oceans? Over-fishing,
whaling, plastics pollution, acidic rain... these are all directly caused by
humans, and they all damage the ecosystem. Plastics are breaking down into
microparticles floating in the oceans that cannot be cleaned up, and we are
only beginning to understand what and how much damage it may be causing.
Studies suggest that plankton eat plastic particles, with deadly results.[3]

The second largest producer of oxygen is the Amazon forests and jungles of
South America. This vast region is shrinking by thousands of acres a year, as
loggers and farmers develop the land. Unfortunately, this is reducing carbon
sequestration as well, though farming does counteract that trend to some
extent.

Also, destruction of the Amazon rain forests is reducing biodiversity, with
unknown but likely significant effects on the continent, and on the world.

Humans have grown so numerous that we are literally destabilizing the planet,
and we need to rein in our excessive industrial processes before we reach a
point of no return that will take the planet millions of years to recover
from.

1\. [https://eos.org/research-spotlights/worlds-biggest-oxygen-
pr...](https://eos.org/research-spotlights/worlds-biggest-oxygen-producers-
living-in-swirling-ocean-waters)

2\. [https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-shows-
oceani...](https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/nasa-study-shows-oceanic-
phytoplankton-declines-in-northern-hemisphere)

3\.
[https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00456...](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0045653518310270)

~~~
unloco
I agree with you. My question then is, Why would we not want to jump on this
NOW, when we know that we are not stopping deforestation and ocean
destabilization within the next 10-20 years? We can't guard the ocean or rain
forests, yet. Why not put a small amount of money at something we CAN do while
we figure out the logistics of protecting things other countries don't want to
(or cant help) protect.

------
tosser0001
I wonder about future generations who will see their then-average temperatures
as the new normal. There will be people complaining: “do you really want
colder Winters?”

~~~
Dumblydorr
The problem is their summers will be much longer and more brutally hot. By
2100, we could have 20-30% of the current populace living in actually
uninhabitable locales because they'll be at 120F average in the summer. Who's
going to care about mild winters when you can't go outside or breathe in
summer?

~~~
PeterisP
Thing is, the expected consequences of global warming are very much not
uniform. Some regions will become much less habitable, but others will have
their agricultural capacity increased. So it really matters _which_ 20%-30% of
the populace will be affected and how that relates to the global power
balance.

Many of the currently wealthy regions could still say "why would you want
colder winters?" because _they_ can still breathe in summer (and would not
want colder summers) and the locales becoming uninhabitable are somewhere else
inhabited by someone else they don't care about.

------
dan-robertson
One thing that I think is overlooked in this thread (though I didn’t read it
all) is that carbon capture/sequestration is not incompatible with burning
fossil fuels. You get the energy by breaking bonds of (somewhat) complex
hydrocarbons, but it takes less energy than is released to capture/sequester
the resulting carbon (at least theoretically/for some methods). Therefore
there is a possible future where energy could come from fossil fuels without
CO2 release.

There are other reasons one may not want energy from fossil fuels, however.

------
pfdietz
There's an interesting electrochemical hydrogen technology from Greg Rau and
coworkers.

[https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180625192825.h...](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/06/180625192825.htm)

[http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0038955.html](http://www.freepatentsonline.com/y2009/0038955.html)

As I understand it, it exploits the separation of acid and base in membrane
electrolysis cells, and neutralizes the acid with various minerals. This ends
up producing an output stream that can add CO2-absorbing capacity to the
ocean. At the stated CO2 absorption capacity, producing the world's current H2
production using this would allow the oceans to absorb an addition 3 Gt of CO2
per year.

Rau has a company, Planetary Hydrogen, that looks like it's trying to
commercialize this.

------
neonate
[https://archive.is/Q9b6b](https://archive.is/Q9b6b)

------
wcerfgba
Archive link to bypass paywall:
[https://archive.is/buUjn](https://archive.is/buUjn)

------
renewiltord
Sure. Similar to how so much of Tesla's revenue is in offset emissions. But
unless you carbon tax everyone you're not going to b get it. And let's be
honest: most middle and lower class Americans and Europeans are burning the
planet alive.

Btw, it doesn't even cost that much. I'm under $1k a year in carbon offsets to
be negative.

~~~
agf
Unfortunately both parts of your comment are incorrect.

Upper class Americans and Europeans generate _more_ emissions per capita than
lower / middle class people. They consume more, so they emit more.

I don't know your specific situation, but in general the carbon offsets you
buy aren't actually priced to the real cost of reduction, and your estimate of
your carbon footprint is likely low. So the real price would likely be
significantly higher. If you're living in a large (and so heat / cooling
efficient) building in the bay area where those costs are minimized anyway,
and don't have a car, then you're an outlier, and you can't extrapolate
accurately from your situation.

~~~
renewiltord
Sure, they generate more, but the lower/middle class Westerners can't afford
what they generate but the rich guys can.

The price of the offset doesn't matter because for climate change locality
effects are not big on this scale. I double the estimate from Terrapass so I'm
pretty certain it's good.

------
LatteLazy
Likely the greatest threat to our species is that the new big oil, is big oil.

------
anonymousiam
As soon as we figure out how to make money or create value by removing carbon,
then it will have a chance of actually becoming a business.

------
OneGuy123
One funny thing could come out of this: too much of it could be removed.

Once a company is working on this they might accidentaly or through greed
start to see "TOO MUCH CARBON" everywhere.

~~~
elric
I've seen people make this comment before, and I usually just dismiss it
because it seems so absurdly unlikely. But is there any grounds to that fear?

~~~
Nasrudith
Technically if it expands and runs in a carbon dioxide surplus for long enough
and they maintained it for as long as thr process was viable. But it is
currently a facepalm worthy seriously bad extrapolation. Like looking at
carbon nanotube production assuming extrapolating exponential growth rates
indefinitely and concluding that there will be a serious carbon shortage when
production rises so high that every year mass equivalent to entire world's
biomass is produced.

------
coronadisaster
make diamonds out of this carbon and maybe you got something that will take
care of the problem forever

------
SEJeff
Non-paywall version: [https://outline.com/FeJyEM](https://outline.com/FeJyEM)

This is a good hypothetical.

------
unixhero
Mongstad! Mongstad! Mongstad!

------
hurxnid
Prediction: The will blacken the skies with nanoparticles to cool the Earth.

~~~
fsloth
Isn't 'Nanoparticles' in this case just a fancier word for 'soot'?

~~~
tpnCC
The relationship between soot aerosol and warming is complex. Black Soot may
dim the sunlight,but may increase the warming by warming the snow.

"A new study found that emissions of soot, or black carbon, alters the way
sunlight reflects off snow and may be responsible for as much as 25 percent of
observed global warming over the past century."

[https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/Black_Soot....](https://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/Black_Soot.html)

Ash from the volcanoes on the other hand,can cause cooling depending on,among
other factors,their composition.

[https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/183/](https://climate.nasa.gov/blog/183/)

For example, the cooling observed due to Mount Pinatubo is due to Sulphuric
Acid aerosol particles.

[https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-
effects...](https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/1510/global-effects-of-
mount-pinatubo)

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lazyjones
If it does, we’re screwed. Below 140ppm most life on Earth will die.

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inspector-g
Do you have a source for this?

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hedora
I’d guess photosynthesis shuts down if CO2 falls far enough. At 180ppm, we’d
be looking at an ice age:

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_in_Earth%27s_atmosphere)

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macspoofing
Is carbon removal even capable of making a dent? Is it even worth discussing?
CO2 is a tiny component of air, meaning that we would have to move vast
quantities air through some sort of a filter to get tiny amounts of carbon out
(i.e. 1 million particles of air, to filter out 400 of CO2).

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hedora
With current technology, it costs between $30-90 per ton to remove CO2 from
the atmosphere.

A gallon of gas produces 20 pounds of CO2 (most of the weight is from O2 from
the atmosphere).

A ton is 2000 pounds, so 100 gallons of gas produces a ton of CO2.

A $1/gallon (25-33%) carbon recapture tax on gasoline would be enough to make
cars carbon negative.

Global warming is a political, not technical, problem.

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hedora
I also wish there was an easy way to buy and shut down oil producers. There
are 8.3 million millionaires in the US, so they control 8.3T.

Chevron is worth 180B. If the millionaires banded together to control 50.1% of
Chevron, they could oust the board, permanently destroy all of its oil
production and distribution capabilities, and convert its oil fields into a
permanently undrillable status.

Then, they could sell off the remaining assets (except the mineral rights),
and only lose most of their money. Heck, the resulting shuttered corporation
would probably be eligible for carbon credits.

Even better, instead of buying the oil reserves, they could buy out the
corporations that own patents and factories for things like fracking equipment
and critical car components.

Anti-trust would probably get in the way, but the global airbag industry has
revenue in the single-digit billions. A band of 100,000 millionaires could
easily acquire them all and charge $80,000 extra (per car) for bags headed to
gas powered vehicles.

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Synaesthesia
Millionaires/billionaires wouldn’t act against their own interest or class
interests. There is one way to achieve what you are dreaming of: democratic
control of industry.

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hedora
8.3M is the top 2-3% of the population. It’s a very diverse group of people. I
imagine many would chip in 10-100K if it meant crashing global CO2 emissions.

Also, on its own, the money it would save in flood or fire insurance would
make it a rational investment for a big chunk of them.

