The fundamental problem with carbon markets is that there is literally no supply. In a properly functioning carbon market these carbon emitters would be buying units of "tons of carbon removed from the atmosphere". Just paying the cleanup costs of the pollution they are emitting. Very simple. The problem: nobody has any large scale carbon capture projects to buy from.
What should be happening is that carbon capture projects should be selling their services on the market and these emitters should be buying them at market prices. This would create a carbon capture economy and encourage people to find more efficient ways to do it, since a more efficient solution would produce a superior product on the marketplace and capture more sales. But all current carbon capture technology is small scale and outrageously expensive so it would crush the fossil fuel industry. But without an incentive like this the carbon capture tech will develop very slowly as it has done over the past 30 years since there is little to no demand for it.
The worst part is that even if we did decide to zero out our emissions and take the massive economic hit, it would still not account for the two centuries of CO2 buildup already in the atmosphere.
> But without an incentive like this the carbon capture tech will develop very slowly
I don't think that's a big issue. If the tech was economically viable it wouldn't be hard to lobby for such regulation. The positive net effect is easy to prove and argue for.
I think what's stopping carbon capture has more to do with the expected efficacy of it. I mean, when you have ~400 ppm CO2 in the air it's a bit like reassembling a broken glass. Sure, you can improve every process with engineering, but there are also physical boundary conditions that look pretty bleak for most forms of CC.
> even if we did decide to zero out our emissions and take the massive economic hit, it would still not account for the two centuries of CO2 buildup already in the atmosphere.
Perhaps one step at a time? We are absolutely nowhere near zero emissions, we don't even have a plan. Our entire civilization runs on hydrocarbons today. Nothing against CC research per se, but it doesn't look like a basket where we should put many eggs in.
There is a bit of a chicken and egg problem with the tech that it won't become economically viable until it is out of the lab and being used at scale, but it will never get out of the lab until it is economically viable.
I'm a big believer in the power of markets to solve problems like this, but getting the market started is almost impossible because of the very high level of short and medium term pain associated with it. You might argue for a gradual or partial opening, but that gets forever bogged down in arguments/lawsuits over who should be included and who gets a pass and thus never really gets started.
Seems like a reasonable solution would be to make a market for a subset of emissions and increase it slowly over time. For example, you could require 0.1% be purchased in carbon markets in scale that number up over time as the carbon Market place grows and costs go down. It seems strictly better than a flat tax that goes into the general fund.
The fatal flaw with this line of reasoning is that carbon capture is guaranteed (by entropy) to be energy negative. We aren't in an either or of zero out emissions or carbon capture. We need to zero out emissions *and* carbon capture. Large scale carbon capture is only viable with large excess amounts of renewable power.
The fundamental problem with carbon markets is that there is literally no supply. In a properly functioning carbon market these carbon emitters would be buying units of "tons of carbon removed from the atmosphere". Just paying the cleanup costs of the pollution they are emitting. Very simple. The problem: nobody has any large scale carbon capture projects to buy from.
What should be happening is that carbon capture projects should be selling their services on the market and these emitters should be buying them at market prices. This would create a carbon capture economy and encourage people to find more efficient ways to do it, since a more efficient solution would produce a superior product on the marketplace and capture more sales. But all current carbon capture technology is small scale and outrageously expensive so it would crush the fossil fuel industry. But without an incentive like this the carbon capture tech will develop very slowly as it has done over the past 30 years since there is little to no demand for it.
The worst part is that even if we did decide to zero out our emissions and take the massive economic hit, it would still not account for the two centuries of CO2 buildup already in the atmosphere.