
Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands - simonpure
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-020-2448-9
======
sveme
80 - 180 US$ for the removal of a ton of CO2 is far more than the cost of
adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere (in Germany, currently around 10€/ton, I
believe).

In principle, removing a ton of CO2 needs to be cheaper than the cost of
adding a ton of CO2.

~~~
Klathmon
Then let's raise the cost of adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere.

We have been encouraging pollution since it's cheaper to just dump it than to
reduce their production significantly or invest in capturing it.

If the cost to remove it is $80-$100 USD, then that should be the cost of
adding it. We should start demanding they either pay the costs associated with
someone else having to deal with it, or reduce how much they dump into the air
in the first place.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
>Then let's raise the cost of adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere.

>If the cost to remove it is $80-$100 USD, then that should be the cost of
adding it. We should start demanding they either pay the costs associated with
someone else having to deal with it, or reduce how much they dump into the air
in the first place.

This works until all the people who have enough trouble achieving a decent
standard of living vote you out of office or revolt (depending on the system
of government of the country in-question). Few things universally piss people
off quite as well as standards of living going backwards.

The cost of removing CO2 needs to be cheaper. The cost of emitting less CO2
for a given standard of living needs to be cheaper. Carbon taxes that reflect
the current price of removing carbon from the atmosphere are socially and
politically unsustainable.

~~~
GVIrish
Correctly pricing in the negative externalities of burning fossil fuels is
what will help us shift away from fossil fuels.

And if people are gonna be upset about a decrease in standard of living
because they can't buy gas guzzling cars anymore or air travel is more
expensive, they're _really_ not going to like the drop in standard of living
from climate change. Coastal flooding and storm surge is already destroying
billions of dollars in real estate value. Houston has seen three 500-year
floods in less than 5 years. We've seen the devastation from large scale
wildfires in Australia and California. Subsistence fishermen in some parts of
the world are already seeing their fisheries collapse.

If we don't get climate change under control we're not going to be talking
about temporary pain while we shift to cleaner technology. We'll be looking at
large scale climate refugee crises, collapses of industries, collapses of
governments, and wide scale human misery.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
You are missing the point.

The fact that we are headed toward refugee crisis and Miami being underwater
doesn't change the incentives and game theory aspect of it. If emissions are
expensive to remove and there is no way to globally ensure that nearly
everybody pays for their emissions then nobody is going to pay for any of
their emissions and will just invest in mitigating the problems locally even
if that's not the globally optimal solution. Any country that tries to make
its people pay the actual cost of their emissions without the rest of the
world doing the same will quickly see regime change because people aren't
gonna waste a bunch of resources pissing in the wind like that.

If emission are cheap to remove then it's going to be easier to get everyone
to pay and the fact that some "emissions havens" won't pay will be a non issue
because picking up the slack will be cheap enough. In order to tax emissions
at what it costs to dispose of them the cost of disposing of them needs to be
cheaper.

(Of course both of us are making the assumption that taxing emissions at the
cost of disposing of them will solve the problem which isn't guaranteed
because nations will be tempted to use that money on other things but I think
we can continue using that assumption for the time being.)

~~~
givinguflac
I disagree and feel that it is you who are missing the point. While I agree
removal of CO2 needs to be less expensive, we simply don't have an option
right now. We do have an option to make it more expensive to pollute until we
figure that out. Why do you directly relate carbon taxes to a reduction in
living standards??

~~~
throwaway0a5e
>We do have an option to make it more expensive to pollute until we figure
that out

I'm saying that option only exists on paper because invoking it in any
capacity that actually imposes enough cost to make people reduce polluting by
a meaningful amount is going to met with too big a backlash to be sustainable.

>Why do you directly relate carbon taxes to a reduction in living standards??

Because anything that raises cost across all goods and at every step of every
supply chain reduces living standards because people will simply be able to
afford less goods and services at their new prices. That people will have to
do things like turn down the A/C and eat out less in order to make ends meet.
Individually those aren't big deals but they have follow on effects, the HVAC
guy and the restaurant get less business. Those apply through the entire
economy compounding the problem. There are also a lot of people who are going
to be pushed over standard of living "cliffs" so to speak. The increased cost
will be the difference between living in an air conditioned apartment or not.
You apply the former type of changes across the entire economy you'll piss
everyone off. You sprinkle in the latter and you've got a regime change on
your hands. The only way an across the board standard of living decrease like
that is tolerated is when it is overwhelmingly consensual (see WW2
mobilization).

I agree we need to do something but what? It's a real shit situation. Doing
nothing is bad. Doing a token "something" doesn't help. Doing something that
actually helps is not sustainable. Either climate change has to get worse or
solving it has to get cheaper before we as a society can (uncontroversial)
justify the level of resource allocation that will be required to make a
meaningful difference.

~~~
abakker
Agree with you completely. A simplistic way of pointing this out is that EVERY
tax and every cost regressively effects the poor more. If you are close to
break-even, or you have negative surplus already, then additional cost is
always worse for those who are worse off.

The alternative is to levy large taxes on corporations who pollute, that come
only after payroll expense. Then, you could create a progressive deduction
where pollution taxes were zero for low income earners, while after some
threshold everyone was taxed for polluting.

It's unsatisfactory because the government hates earmarking specific income
for specific outcomes and they much prefer the slush fund approach (for not
entirely bad reasons). But, if pollution taxes specifically were spent on
buying CO2 sequestration products which were deemed effective by the NSF or
some other group, we might be able to create a non-regressive pollution tax to
increase the net cost of polluting.

------
jaybrendansmith
So. US $150 per ton, so $150B per gigaton. We must ultimately remove 1,000
gigatons of CO2, but we need to start with 10/year. Using this method will
cost the world $1.5 trillion per year. That seems completely within our
resources. What's stopping us?

~~~
ianai
I really wonder the same thing. I know I’m at a tail of the distribution, but
I could see committing 150/mo of my own funds to sequestering co2.

I’ve heard it posited that for one or another reason climate change could
create a dictatorial regime one or another way. I hope humanity figures out a
way to pull our collective heads out of the sand and start doing stuff before
anything like a dictator kicks up...

~~~
TomMarius
To the GP asking what's stopping us: 150 usd per month is a quarter of average
wage here.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
You're correct, but let's say the target is 1/10th of it, or $15/month,
therefore affordable by many. Still, there's something that prevents us, as a
society, from doing it.

~~~
ianai
Well I’ve seen at least one crowd fund project to sequester co2. It wasn’t
particularly impressive scale though iirc.

------
jose_zap
This is a project that wants to execute on this idea, but using beaches
instead of croplands [https://projectvesta.org/](https://projectvesta.org/)

~~~
mkl
Big previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403570](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20403570)

------
pfdietz
An issue with this is release of nickel. The most easily weathered silicate,
olivine, typically has several tenths of a percent nickel. I would want to
make sure the croplands are not being progressively poisoned.

I wonder if it might be possible to actively strip methane and nitrous oxide
from the atmosphere, as these are powerful greenhouse gases. I have some ideas
how this might be done.

~~~
GVIrish
Methane doesn't stay in the atmosphere very long though, so greenhouse gas
capture efforts would be better spent on co2.

~~~
pfdietz
That's first point is true, but the second point doesn't necessarily follow.
Methane is a quite powerful greenhouse gas, and it could be removed by in situ
destruction (as it naturally is) rather than capture.

~~~
GVIrish
Yes, but that's kinda my point. Trying to remove methane from the atmosphere
probably isn't a good use of resources. Methane capture at the source like
what is being done at some waste processing plants makes sense though. And
changing livestock feeds to reduce methane emissions seems like a no brainer.

~~~
pfdietz
Most methane emission is natural, so if it could be removed from the
atmosphere, the potential reduction in forcing could be quite nice, above and
beyond just reducing our own methane emission.

------
the_duke
Does anyone know of a well written review that compares potential carbon
capture methods? (with a healthy amount of references)

~~~
cmutel
Here is a series of three open access reviews covering the current literature
(1000s of papers):

1:
[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9b](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9b)

2:
[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f/...](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f/meta)

3:
[https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabff4](https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabff4)

------
perfunctory
Previous discussion
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23770718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23770718)

------
samoa42
preliminary calculations suggest this has the potential to capture about 5% of
current CO2 emissions if applied to 50% of worldwide farmland. (citation
needed)

------
mirimir
FYI:
[https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2448-9](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2448-9)

------
mrfusion
Is there any research on what the ideal co2 level is? I’m on the climate
change team of course but is there a risk we overshoot and bring co2 too low?
I’d just say we should know what we’re aiming for.

I guess plants like some amount of extra co2 so we’d think about that. Should
we also have some kind of buffer between a future ice age?

Don’t get me wrong, I think bring the co2 level close to zero is a viable
argument too.

~~~
GVIrish
It's not really a mystery, we could just bring co2 levels back in line what
they were at the beginning of the 20th century. Hell, even the 1950's levels
of CO2 would be great.

But right now the carbon capture discussions are simply trying to avert
disaster. None of the potential carbon capture solutions can remove so much
carbon that we'll have to worry about removing _too much_ co2.

~~~
jacobr1
> 1950's levels of CO2 would be great

In absolute terms, but we have a lot more people now. It looks like the US is
already back at 1950's levels (per-capita).

[https://eidclimate.org/u-s-per-capita-carbon-emissions-at-
lo...](https://eidclimate.org/u-s-per-capita-carbon-emissions-at-lowest-
levels-since-1950-thanks-to-natural-gas/)

~~~
aqme28
He means 1950s level of atmospheric CO2, not emissions.

------
ericvanular
There's an ongoing discussion happening around this at
[https://collective.energy/topic/91/rock-weathering-for-
remov...](https://collective.energy/topic/91/rock-weathering-for-removing-
atmospheric-co2-spreading-rock-dust-on-farmfields)

If you're into promoting discourse on climate solutions, come join us!

~~~
gpm
Am I missing something? I see two comments?

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poma88
Another silver bullet that will fail

~~~
perfunctory
Not really a silver bullet. We are at the point where this is something we
have to do _in addition_ to reducing carbon emissions. This is more like an
extra household duty.

------
jokoon
I don't like those kind of projects because they sort of try to bank on the
global warming problem with inventions and new things, except this doesn't
work, because CO2 is just too hard to eliminate.

It's the penultimate problem of industrialized capitalism: "we have a problem
and we need to MAKE something new to solve this". But the problem was always
the excess of industry in the first place. The solution is simple: slow down
consumption everywhere and optimize the use of carbon, but it's completely
against the spirit of industrial capitalism. That's why global warming can
only be solved with political solutions.

I believe that in the future, violence will occur to stop co2 emissions by
force, while the wealthy will be able to shelter themselves away from hot
places. Global warming is EXACTLY the problem of libertarian ideology. It
completely dismisses the commons. Global warming is the perfect example of
what happens when we accept "survival of the fittest" and social darwinism.
I'm worried that rich people are okay with global warming because they are
able to justify it with Malthusian arguments.

~~~
neilwilson
We solved the nitrogen problem in food production with technology. We'll solve
the CO2 emission problem with technology as well.

I'm with Captain Kirk. I don't believe in no win situations.

~~~
dvdkhlng
Comparing the nitrogen problem with the problem of CO2 emissions is apples to
oranges IMO:

\- Nitrogen is very abundant in the atmosphere and bound nitrogen (i.e.
fertilizer) has an inherent short-time value that is higher than the cost of
nitrogen fixation (i.e. fertilizer production). So this is something that the
market readily solves via technological progress.

\- On the other hand CO2 emissions result from extracting energy stored in
fossil carbon. Currently a significant part of the energy needs of the whole
planet are satisfied by extracting energy from fossil carbon (e.g. burning
coal). Removing CO2 from the atmosphere does not have any short-time value to
whomever does that. No market force working towards that. Also, removing the
CO2 probably needs (depending on technoligy much) more energy than was
extracted from the carbon in the first place. Humanity does not currently seem
to have any energy sources available to "return" the energy havested from
fossil carbon. Good luck waiting for a magical technology that can easily
satisfy the energy needs of a whole planet-wide civilization with less
negative side-effects than combustion of fossil carbon. Also the deadline for
undoing CO2 related damage may be quite close [1] so that any such
technologies would need to be available for global deployment within a few
decades.

\- Climate engineering [2] may be a way to compensate CO2 related damage
without having to remove CO2 at all. But again, no short-time benefit to
whomever does that and all available technologies would also incur immense
cost and do not evenly undo greenhouse-gas induced temperature changes over
the whole planet (plus all the other possible side-effects)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tipping_points_in_the_climate_system)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering)

