
What it would take to suck more carbon dioxide out of the air than we put in - dnetesn
http://nautil.us/issue/78/atmospheres/is-net-zero-emissions-an-impossible-goal
======
ggm
The first thing is not to give up hope. The forest planting may not abate
enough to remediate but it's still worth doing for associated reasons like its
effect in microclimate and wildlife.

Biochar may not help much either but is still net beneficial and pyrolysis is
going to be one of the paths to the feedstock we need for chemicals I would
think. The absorbing concrete can be priced right and carbon taxing would
drive there.

Deep sea storage, olivine and other rock formation, all useful.

Mainly, it's not giving up hope. Because giving up would be way, way worse.

Sometimes reading these realism write-ups is not very hope inducing. Even
stoics don't always give up hope.

There is no better world. We have to try and make the best of all possible
worlds here.

~~~
adventured
> We have to try and make the best of all possible worlds here.

In this specific context, it's primarily the things outside of your control -
far outside of your borders and political influence - that make that an
impossible action for a given person.

China is currently adding nearly as much coal power output (+121 GW) as exist
in the whole of the EU combined. [1][2] Their companies are working on adding
even more output and plants than that around other parts of Asia. Domestically
China is building more new coal plants than the rest of the world combined, in
fact.

China has approximately 987 GW of coal power in operation, soon to be 1,100
GW. The EU has 149 GW. China passed the EU in coal plant GW output around the
year 2000 at 200 GW, they passed the US in 2006 at around 340 GW, and are now
closing in on 1,000 GW this year. Next year they will have 4x the coal plant
GW output of the US.

The US has reduced its coal-based power output by ~80 GW (1/4 reduction) in
about 12 years and continues to close coal plants. China has an additional 149
GW of coal power output under construction. China's actions trivially wipe out
anything the rest of the world can do to counter it.

The article properly lists the US as a mega emissions culprit, along with
China and India. Except the US isn't massively expanding its emissions, it's
reducing. The US isn't opening new coal plants, it's rapidly closing them. The
problem in the US is that it isn't moving fast enough.

How does a person from, say, Finland do anything about any of that to try to
make this the best possible of worlds? China's actions alone will wipe out any
chance of stopping (much less reversing) the accelerating climate damage. It
guarantees there can be no positive outcome. How do you force China to stop
building hundreds of new coal plants? You can't and they won't.

[1]
[https://www.ft.com/content/c1feee40-0add-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957...](https://www.ft.com/content/c1feee40-0add-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957a67)

[1a] outline version of the FT article:
[https://outline.com/dbCT6e](https://outline.com/dbCT6e)

[2] [https://fortune.com/2019/11/20/china-coal-power-plants-
pipel...](https://fortune.com/2019/11/20/china-coal-power-plants-pipeline-
climate-change/)

~~~
pjc50
Individual action is indeed of very limited effect. That's why we need
political action. It's not _just_ coal that matters, and not just in China;
all the other fossil fuels, methane emissions, and deforestation matter as
well. As do all the other countries.

~~~
ryanmercer
>That's why we need political action.

Where? Political action int he U.S. or Europe doesn't do much to China and
telling China "sorry, you can't have cheap electricity, your people don't get
to have a lifestyle like ours as a result" isn't likely to make the Chinese go
"oh, ok, we'll stop growing our middle class and go back to a basic village
lifestyle to save the rest of you".

Unless we miraculously convert to a global government then reducing emissions
just isn't likely to happen. Reduce in one place and it'll continue to
increase in a few others.

The fact of the matter is, the only realistic solution out of this is a
majority of the world's population goes "Ok we'll only drive to
work/school/the grocery, we'll never take travelling vacations unless we walk
or bicycle there, we'll stop eating all meat, we'll give up plastic packaging
and we won't replace our electronics when they wear out".

Otherwise we have to hope and pray that a fleet of alien trade ships show up
on orbit and are like "If you give us syndication rights to the galactic
hegemony for Everybody Loves Raymond and I Love Lucy we'll go ahead and
install a thousand of our zero point modules around the planet and tie them
into your local grids to solve your energy needs. If you give us the
syndication rights to The Simpsons we'll give you a few thousand of these
solid state devices that attract carbon out of the air causing it to solidify
into inert bricks that you can then fill your pit mines with".

We're seriously in that sort of state. You either outlaw electricity from
fossil fuels in every country in the world or you hope for a true miracle.

Even if someone figures out cold fusion today and can start churning out the
first power plants in January, replacing the 60,000~ power plants in the world
it would take _decades_ at best to replace them and making the concrete for
pouring the foundations alone would create an insane amount of CO2 not to
mention all of the structural steel.

Short of ET intervention, the best we can hope is that developing nations stop
building fossil fuel power plants and that people start leaving coastal cities
and building better designed, more eco-friendly, more distributed, with
equally dispersed permaculture centers, with rail lines in grids to provide
for efficient transportation of people and goods, cities far inland.

~~~
ClumsyPilot
Firstly see my comment above, China and india take climate change more
seriously than any US government ever did and invest more than anyone else in
renewables.

Secondly,you are kind of right, the IPCC already has calculated that to keep
the rise to 1.5C is only possible if we invest in negative emissions, that is
pulling carbon out of the atmosphere. This is never discussed in out brain-
dead media, as obvious it is much more expensive to pull carbon out of the air
than not to emit it in the first place.

~~~
ryanmercer
>China and india take climate change more seriously

China is adding millions of new drivers to the roads, in fossil-fuel powered
vehicles with fossil fuel (and tree) derived tires, annually.

What about the fact that China is actively constructing hundreds of coal power
plants? Or the fact their middle-class is rapidly growing which will mean more
energy demands (which will mean more fossil fuel consumption) and more
consumer goods (more plastics, from fossil fuels)?

>Since the early 2000s, China's middle class has been among the fastest
growing in the world, swelling from 29 million in 1999 (2 percent of
population) to roughly 531 million in 2013 (39 percent of population).

[https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-
class/](https://chinapower.csis.org/china-middle-class/)

China has hundreds of millions of people that will, presumably, continue to be
added to their middle class resulting in more cars, more electricity, more
gadgets, more plastics, etc.

Unless China says "no, only the people that have stuff now can have stuff"
they're going to consume more fossil fuels, construct more things with
concrete, etc.

------
Mirioron
I don't see what there is to figure out about what we should do with the
carbon we sequester from the atmosphere. It seems to me that the only thing we
can do is dump it into the ground (maybe as plastic?). That's where the carbon
we've put into the atmosphere came from, and that is exactly where we should
put it back. Planting forests, using it as fuel, using it for plastic goods,
putting it into the oceans are all temporary measures. The carbon from that
will enter the cycle again rather quickly.

Of course this will be energy intensive. We essentially need to put the energy
back into carbon that we got from burning those carbon fuels over the last two
_centuries_. That is obviously a tremendous amount of energy. There probably
is no way around this.

> _we will probably need to be removing about 10 billion tonnes of carbon
> dioxide from the air each year by 2050, and double that by 2100._

> _They’re hoping to use these gadgets to make carbonated water for soft
> drinks—or create greenhouses that have lots of carbon dioxide in the air,
> for tastier vegetables. This sounds very exciting … until you learn that
> currently their method of getting carbon dioxide costs about $500 per ton._

The numbers don't even look as bad as I thought they would. They at least seem
achievable if we really wanted it. $500 per ton for 10 billion tons comes out
at $5 trillion. The world's GDP is around $80 trillion. From a numbers
perspective it seems like this is at least possible. Whether this solution
will work politically is another matter though. My own suspicion is that
politicking and corruption will make this a much more difficult and expensive
process than it should be.

This article makes the future look less bleak to me than what I hear on the
news.

~~~
galangalalgol
Or we could spend $1B seeding the ocean with iron sulphate to create algal
blooms that reflect sunlight well. Harvest the excess salmon to balance the
ecosystem, and repeat whenever we need to dump some heat. As the co2 continues
to climb buffer the oceans with a cheap base to counter acidification. Which
will sequester that carbon as a salt.

~~~
sveme
Oh, how I love these handwaving arguments. You don't think that a huge algal
bloom in our oceans, a prime protein source for billions of people, will not
have an effect on the life in the ocean? Just one of a plethora of inadvertent
effects that would need to be thoroughly studied...

~~~
dr_dshiv
Studied by testing the effects, I assume? A large contingent don't want this
research done because it may point to a technological solution, reducing
political pressure of reducing emissions.

~~~
Buttons840
"Good news! We found out how to have far greater control of the environment.
This will allow us to fix the environment we already had control of and
completely ruined!"

They have a point I think.

------
mnw21cam
The main problem I have with some of the carbon sequestering methods like
dumping waste biomass at the bottom of the sea is that that biomass is a
mixture of carbon we want to sequester, and nutrients that we really want to
put back into the land. Constantly removing biomass from a land area is a
really effective method of turning that land into a totally useless area that
doesn't grow anything any more.

~~~
mixedmath
I was recently thinking about this. Farming is essentially constant repeated
removal of extreme amounts of biomass from a land area. We rely heavily on
fertilizers for industrial farming.

What is the ultimate source of most of the nutrients that are used to produce
the fertilizers? There are massive amounts of carbon, phosphorous, nitrogen,
and potassium required.

~~~
mnw21cam
Farming has been described as mining soil for a good reason.

Some of those nutrients, particularly phosphorus, are in short supply, until
they hit a high enough price to start extracting them from seawater.

------
brohoolio
I keep thinking that carbon in the air is the just the largest game of
prisoners dilemma where we likely all lose.

~~~
perfunctory
In prisoners dilemma each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of
communicating with the other. This is not the world we are in.

~~~
scotty79
It's not so much that prisoners can't talk. They just can't influence
eachothers decisions which kinda reminds current setup of sovereign nation
states.

~~~
zer0tonin
But nation states can influence each others decisions, through diplomacy,
tariffs, war...

------
hsnewman
I have been talking about this with my wife, how many trees would I have to
plant to alleviate the amount of carbon I put into the atmosphere up to now.
Since I'm retiring soon, I hope to have a hobby that will be productive.

~~~
gameswithgo
trees are only a buffer, they buy some time but don’t solve the problem

~~~
arvesv
If we cut the trees and ship them somewhere they will not decay(south pole?).
And then grow new trees and do the same thing again. That should remove carbon
from the carbon cycle. Is this doable and sensible?

~~~
OrangeMango
It's probably doable, but likely not sensible.

If you instead use the wood as lumber for durable items (such as houses and
furniture), you will drastically slow the decay rate, reduce usage of other
carbon-emitting processes, and make room for new trees to grow (which is
extremely carbon negative). It won't solve the problem on its own, but it
would certainly help.

------
dr_dshiv
If we could replace concrete and steel for pressed/processed wood in most
construction, that works out well for removing sources of carbon and
incentivizing sequestration.

------
herogreen
I am surprised they consider putting agricultural "waste" outside the loop as
a way to store CO2, because we (will) probably need it as fertilizer.

------
avmich
Here is technology which, I think, is less known than it should -
[https://sesinnovation.com/technology/carbon_capture/](https://sesinnovation.com/technology/carbon_capture/)
.

And yet I think freezing out CO2 out of air can be used even wider - re-
processing air from atmosphere, instead of going only after exhausts.

------
farss
My understanding is that one of the main hurdles is the physical limits of
actually catching the carbon to sequester it. Even though it is historically
high, it is still relatively dispersed (a few hundred parts per million).
Plants are extremely efficient at utilizing carbon, but their main limitation
to growth is catching enough of it from the atmosphere.

------
jiofih
> the time when a forest pulls down the most carbon is when it’s first growing

I believe this has been disproved long ago. Trees don’t ever stop growing, and
it takes carbon to grow. Recent studies show that large old trees still
capture a significant amount of co2 due to their massive surface area.

~~~
JDEW
Citation needed.

Literally two lines later:

> But decaying wood and organic material releases carbon back into the air. A
> climax forest is close to a steady state: The rate at which it removes
> carbon from the air is roughly equal to the rate at which it releases this
> carbon.

Trees keep on growing, yes, but it’s the old, decaying material that releases
CO2 back in the air again, compensating tree growth.

Edit: clarity.

~~~
dr_dshiv
Old trees tend to grow faster and consume more carbon per unit of time.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/how-old-trees-help-
climate-1....](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/how-old-trees-help-
climate-1.4252888)

~~~
noselasd
And when they're old enough, those trees die, and does not consume co2
anymore.

I think the point is that a forest reaches an equilibrium at some point.

The forest has new trees growning and consuming co2, it has old trees still
growing and consuming co2, it has dead trees/branches that releases co2. It's
mostly at a steady state when it has matured.

Still, if you planted that forest at a place where there was no forest, the
co2 it has bound up in the trunks and roots is removed from the atmosphere as
long as the forest stands. Which might be tens or hundreds of thousands of
years.

~~~
jiofih
Those ideas are well refuted in the research I mentioned. You’re assuming the
researchers spending their life careers on this haven’t considered a point you
came up with in five minutes?

> the research suggests that almost 70 per cent of all the carbon stored in
> trees is accumulated in the last half of their lives

[https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080910/full/news.2008.1092....](https://www.nature.com/news/2008/080910/full/news.2008.1092.html)

[http://www.flanderstoday.eu/current-affairs/old-diverse-
fore...](http://www.flanderstoday.eu/current-affairs/old-diverse-forests-best-
capturing-co2-researchers-conclude)

------
ecoled_ame
Make less of the carbon producers (humans). You don't have to reproduce to be
happy.

------
Grue3
1\. Generate large amounts of carbon-free energy

2\. Use the excess energy to sequester CO2 out of the air.

Now if only there was a proven technology to consistently generate lots of
energy that is clean, safe and has plenty of readily available fuel...

~~~
Accujack
I noticed this too.

In addition to planting forests that we then harvest and convert to biochar at
peak rather than letting them decay and release carbon back to the cycle, we
need to use energy intensive means to capture carbon.

I have seen one proposal linked on HN that suggested direct use of a nuclear
reactor's energy to do it... something like that would have the necessary
power (pardon the expression) to make a dent in atmospheric CO2.

Essentially, we need to build machines like the ones on LV427 in the movie
"Aliens"...large structures that are essentially nuclear reactors with some
extra equipment to use all their energy to terraform.... Terra.

------
lm28469
If you have an open fire in your living room do you put it out or do you bring
a machine to purify the air ?

~~~
nothrabannosir
That depends; am I a single brain with control over my actions as one
conscious being and one single, holistic incentive? Or am I a Balkanised
agglomeration of independent agents with incompatible short-term incentives?

The carbon problem is a social one, not a technical one. This analogy focusses
on the wrong aspect.

------
spodek
Any business person should see the most important action immediately. If you
want to make a company profitable, lowering costs is almost always essential
and more effective than raising revenues. Do both, of course, but keep costs
down.

If you want to lower greenhouse gas concentrations, do everything, but
lowering emissions is essential. The article barely mentioned it, but the most
effective emissions reductions limit concentrations more than all capturing
technologies combined.

The number one technologies to combat environmental problems such as climate
change (but also all others -- extinctions, resource depletion, plastic,
mercury, etc) are the pill, IUDs, vasectomies, condoms, and the like, combined
with educating everyone on family planning. People knee-jerk respond with
concerns about China's policy or eugenics, but many nations have reduced birth
rates non-coercively, increasing prosperity -- Thailand, Costa Rica, Iran, and
more.

A few generations of a global 1.5 children per woman average brings human
population to sustainable levels with a reasonable level of material
abundance, around 2 billion people -- for reference, the population before the
Haber-Bosch process allowed us to turn oil into food. Any population more than
sustainable only forestalls collapse. I'd like to say otherwise, and achieving
on a global scale what a few nations did on a national scale is hard, but
nature doesn't make allowances for something being hard. And we've known this
for generations.

At the same time, probably everyone reading these words emits beyond the IPCC
recommendations per person. Combining personal action by those willing to lead
and set examples with education and legislation can reduce emissions per
person. As ineffective as personal action is alone, it is a necessary first
step to create role models and show that living sustainably is joyful and
creates community and connection, not the burden and sacrifice people
erroneously fear when they think of flying less or eating less meat. On the
contrary, stewardship and taking responsibility for how our behavior affects
others, especially those helpless to defend themselves, such as those
breathing our jet fuel exhaust, creates some of the most joy, meaning, value,
and purpose, as any parent will tell you.

We'll have to change our values to a steady-state economy based on increasing
gross happiness and community from a growth economy based on increasing GDP.
There are many examples of steady-state economies working for longer than our
growth economy producing prosperous, stable communities, and one huge example
of a growth economy wrecking the entire planet's biosphere, making it clear to
all except economists that we have to stop growth or nature will do it for us.

Bottom line: 1) Reducing emissions is by far the most effective means to avert
the worst disasters, even if some are inevitable. We can do a lot more and
once we start we'll love it. 2) Personal action is not enough, but it's a
necessary first step. It's also called leadership. Most don't want to lead,
but those willing to will be the Mandelas, MLK's, Rosa Parks, etc of the
environment.

------
aazaa
I find it disturbing how popular science articles on climate change seem to
find it unimportant to convince the reader that human CO2 emissions are
causing most of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in recent
years.

Here's a challenge to illustrate my point. Where can I find the best popular
science treatment of the specific question:

How do we know with certainty that human-produced CO2 is responsible for most
(or all) of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in the last
100 years?

I have looked for such a treatment and found... nothing compelling. This is
especially worrisome given that nebulous ideas of what caused previous ice
ages and numerous interglacial periods within them.

If the source of previous events that grew an ice sheet 1 mile thick over New
York and then melted it completely 12,000 years ago isn't understood, then how
can anyone expect smart non-experts to jump onboard the notion that we know
what's causing warming in the last 100 years?

This question relates directly to the article in the sense that we as a
species are very good at causing unintended consequences. Sulfa and penicillin
were seen as wonder drugs and started to be used everywhere prophylactically
and misused. We now face the specter of planet-wide extinction events based on
antibiotic resistance.

Pulling vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere could lead to unintended
consequences on an even larger scale without a solid understanding of the
system we're dealing with.

~~~
Someone1234
> How do we know with certainty that human-produced CO2 is responsible for
> most (or all) of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in the
> last 100 years?

Measurements. See:

[https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-
climate/...](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-
climate/climate-change-atmospheric-carbon-dioxide)

[https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/](https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/)

If you want to know facts, the science (inc. raw data) is out there in open
access journals. If you don't want to believe the science ("nothing
compelling"), then nothing I can link will change your mind.

~~~
lazyjones
> Measurements. See: [https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-
> climate/...](https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-
> climate/..).

This just documents increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1970 and theories about
what effects it might have. It completely leaves out the temperature changes
in the 20th century and how there were warming and cooling periods despite
steady increase in CO2, which quite obviously means there are stronger
mechanisms involved (if there was cooling despite CO2 increase in the
60s/70s).

~~~
Someone1234
The section "Why carbon dioxide matters" directly discusses that (the link in
your quote is broken fyi).

> It completely leaves out the temperature changes in the 20th century and how
> there were warming and cooling periods despite steady increase in CO2, which
> quite obviously means there are stronger mechanisms involved (if there was
> cooling despite CO2 increase in the 60s/70s).

The second graph shows that the warming/cooling is seasonal and that the
overall trend has been up, in-line with CO2 levels. I don't understand what
you don't understand about the second graph (your question is confusing, aside
from explaining how seasons work on earth).

~~~
lazyjones
> The second graph shows that the warming/cooling is seasonal

The second graph shows no temperatures at all, it's CO2 ppm / year.

> _the overall trend has been up, in-line with CO2 levels._

That's simply not true. If you have more than a decade of cooling with steady
increase of CO2 and recently more than a decade of steady temperatures with
sharp increase of CO2, it's obvious that there are other factors involved.

> _I don 't understand what you don't understand about the second graph_

You should take a closer look at it.

