Anyone who isn't aware of this is either
- Lying.
- Paid by the oil industry.
- Tricked by the oil industry.
All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.
We continue to see companies and politicians claiming it's feasible and will help us become "green". We should call them out on their shit. If we had the renewable power budget to use proper carbon capture on a large scale, we would already have a fully green grid.
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Well... There are other methods than reversing c02 back into carbon chains.
Capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas form in underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better keep that pressure chamber leakproof for 1000 years with likely upkeep. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free)
Ideas to shove c02 air bubbles in concrete are promising but barely enough to offset the c02 generated from creating the concrete itself.
One promising approach is to grow plants and turn them into charcoal. Charcoal is great for keeping fertilizer in the soil so that we can spread it over crop fields for a small increase in yield. Napkin maths on that makes it just require about Australia of farmland (if I remember) to offset the world's CO2 emissions. Almost feasible. (bamboo, algae, and sunflowers seem to be the highest biomass generators, but perhaps a slower crop that can handle worse climate is preferable)
But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid.
We’re going to lose economic growth because of climate change, “Staying under the 2C threshold could limit average regional income loss to 20 percent compared to 60 percent" [1]. Whether it will be significant amount, or a devastating amount is still to be determined. US GDP is $20T, and the difference between low warming and high warming is 40% loss! This means we could spend up to $8T a year to address climate change and it would still make economic sense.
The Inflation Reduction Act authorized $370B of spending over 10 years on climate and energy [2]. This is about 0.1% of annual GDP and about 0.4% of what we could be investing to address this. If we spent even a fraction more, we could rapidly convert housing and transportation to electric, make electrical grids renewable, and decarbonization manufacturing, we have the technology to do this. We can do this, the most important thing is to tell others we can, and particularly people with power and influence.
As much as I'm in favor of moving towards renewables, we are still destroying our biosphere, and the resources needed for renewables are not renewable ...
> Energy transition aspirations are similar. The goal is powering modernity, not addressing the sixth mass extinction. Sure, it could mitigate the CO2 threat (to modernity), but why does the fox care when its decline ultimately traces primarily to things like deforestation, habitat fragmentation, agricultural runoff, pollution, pesticides, mining, manufacturing, or in short: modernity. Pursuit of a giant energy infrastructure replacement requires tremendous material extraction—directly driving many of these ills—only to then provide the energetic means to keep doing all these same things that abundant evidence warns is a prescription for termination of the community of life.
Humanity needs to let go of the fantasy of endless growth, which permeates through our cultures, economies and politics. Life on this earth is a co-op, you can't win by being the last species alive, or at least your wining will look very sad and be short lived. If you think endless growth is a viable strategy, go and ask your neighborhood slime mold in a petri dish what it thinks.
Do you mean that "Before [economic] growth became a thing, [life] was a zero sum game?". I'm genuinely unsure what you mean by that. By any measure, the history of life on earth has seen many ups and downs in biodiversity. So the flourishing of one species often coincided with the flourishing of many other related species. A well-known example would be various pollinating insects and birds and the flowers they pollinated in the early cretaceous.
If you mean "eat or get eaten", then there's a few early red flags that the pursuit of growth and decarbonisation concurrently may well lead us back to that idea. There's a strong correlation in politics worldwide of extreme xenophobia with climate change denial, and growth-focus with "others pollute more than us".
If you think "carbon budget" then it's compelling to grow yours at the expense of others.
We are not confined to Earth. Currently something like 99.9999999% of the energy radiated by the sun is emitted into empty space, where it is completely wasted. That can all be harvested.
To put that into perspective, our civilization could use 20 trillion times more energy than it does now if it harvested the sun's entire output.
A couple of humans can go to space in that they can go up for short stints. The rest of us are confined to earth for the foreseeable future. Even if we weren’t, I’d like the place kept nice.
I respectfully disagree. There are vast opportunities, even on Earth, to expand energy generation without overloading the environment — such as utilizing arid lands for large-scale solar farms and expanding nuclear power, among other solutions.
That said, I believe a robust space economy is imminent, not some distant uncertainty. Starship has already had partially successful test launches, and if it follows the same trajectory as the reusable Falcon 9, we will soon have a fully reusable vehicle capable of delivering 150 tons to low-Earth orbit per launch.
If Musk follows through on his ambition to develop a fleet large enough to transport the materials needed for a self-sustaining Martian civilization, we could see an explosion in lift capacity within the next decade or two, radically transforming the scale of human expansion into space.
Even a post-ww3 nuclear wasteland Earth with climate catastrophe is orderS of more habitable than anything else in the Solar system.
Musk is a scammer and is dumb as a rock on any technological question.
Also, energy is useless if it's not where you actually want to use it, and transporting it is expensive/lossy.
The cheapest energy is one which doesn't have to be used up to begin with, and we could optimize the existing workflow much more, over some child-dream Martian scam.
That is simply not true. A post-World War III nuclear wasteland would be subject to attack and pillaging by roving human bands, whereas a deep space colony would not be. And energy transportation being lossy is not a deal breaker when you can generate massive amounts of energy out in space. Even if you lose 90% of it, 10% of an enormous number is still an enormous number.
It will get more affordable as the amount of infrastructure that is outside of Earth's gravity well — and any other steep gravity well — increases. The thing with the Starship is it allows us to expand that infrastructure rapidly, so we can soon have a sizable industrial base that can access low-gravity resources like asteroids and moon regolith.
Anywhere we can get to at the scale necessary to make significant power, there's not much stopping humans, or at least automated robots, from also going there to attack and pillage.
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The most habitable place in the solar system, outside of Earth, is Mars.
Mars has 50% of the sunlight that Earth. Owing to the lower sunlight level, it is colder than Antarctica.
The atmosphere is equivalent to taking ours, then systematically deleting every molecule that isn't carbon dioxide without replacing it with anything else.
Owing to the combination of low partial pressure and low temperature, half the atmosphere condenses into the polar caps each Martian winter.
The ground is more toxic than an actual, literal, superfund cleanup site.
It is drier than the actual, literal Sahara.
The lack of oxygen in the atmosphere means there's no ozone layer.
The lack of ozone layer, the thin remaining atmosphere, and the lack of magnetosphere, means it's a high-radiation environment.
PV there also gets regularly covered in dust.
Our moon is even less hospitable, owing to no atmosphere at all and being tidally locked with Earth.
Venus has an atmosphere so dense that it has gone beyond the critical point where gas and liquid cease to be distinguishable, so you could reasonably also describe it as an ocean. An ocean of 465°C supercritical CO2 in which lead occasionally condenses onto mountaintops.
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There's three currently achievable ways to transport power through space at scale. Optical, microwave, or kinetic.
Optical is either a bunch of mirrors or a laser on the sending side, with a normal PV system on the receiving side. Usual caveats apply, Earth spins so it has a relative night, doesn't work through clouds, maximum power density before PV systems overheat etc.
All EM systems, microwave and optical, share a constraint about focussing: minimal size of target depends on the size of the antenna and the wavelength used. Because microwaves are so much longer (no much freedom to choose a different wavelength as there's a limited atmospheric window), the normal suggestion for ground stations is a 10 km diameter receiving rectenna — that's contiguous, you don't get PV's advantage of being able to split it up.
Kinetic currently means an RFG — launch it e.g. electromagnetically towards a similar coil on the ground that decelerates it to extract the energy. This is theoretically possible and would totally work, but to be clear: it's shooting a bullet into the barrel of another gun, and this is not something we have a lot of experience doing, certainly not at scale or for the purposes of power generation.
There's little advantage in raiding a colony six months away if you then have to spend another six months returning with the stolen goods before you can even use them.
Defending a settlement where the nearest potential aggressor is 50,000,000 km away is also a much easier task than defending one where the closest adversary is 1,000 km away.
With respect to space-based solar power and EM power transmission: my first thought is that a 10-kilometre diameter receiving antenna is totally doable, especially considering how much energy can be sent from space to this one rectenna. Such a rectenna can also double as a PV station.
> There's little advantage in raiding a colony six months away if you then have to spend another six months returning with the stolen goods before you can even use them.
First: If it otherwise takes a year to build them, no difference.
Second: If they're useful for you in-situ, they're useful for anyone else in-situ. Don't need to move an object to take control of it, for exactly the same reasons that the British didn't want to physically relocate the Suez Canal during the Suez crisis.
> Defending a settlement where the nearest potential aggressor is 50,000,000 km away is also a much easier task than defending one where the closest adversary is 1,000 km away.
False. Whether attacker or defender has advantage is not distance dependent, it's tech-dependent. Absolute stealth in space is only becomes impossible when you've already got something around a K1.5 civilisation in the vicinity, before that you can fairly easily hide passive IR signatures, deflect/absorb/otherwise minimise active EM scans, and the defender doesn't have the resources to saturate volume with gravity sensors to spot attacker's mass. Even with Starship, the current state of the art passive and active scanning of the entire planet Earth still has trouble — most recent news-worthy item is 2024 YR₄ which we know so little about that it could be anywhere from 40 to 90 metres. Even just painting that rock black would have meant it never got spotted because nobody wants to waste effort on active radar — and even if we did all start using active radar that too could be fairly easily defeated until it was too late, using even just the relatively primitive cross-section stealth reduction tech of the 1980s, because the scale of space itself makes radar less effective (radar bounces have a double inverse square).
On the ground, you absolutely can saturate with CCTV even now, sufficient for banditry; military-quality stealth is much harder to defeat at scale. Close-in surveillance still available in space, but then you're back to a few kilometres, no distance advantage. Actually it's worse than that, because outside an atmosphere you can do a hard-gee deceleration in the last few seconds, but also you can just let go of some plastic ball bearings before decelerating and have your approach preceded by a deadly shower of hypervelocity radar-invisible shrapnel hitting whatever bits you didn't want to keep, e.g. the existing defence systems. Heck, if it's a military action, they can perform the attack years in advance and with almost total plausible deniability.
> With respect to space-based solar power and EM power transmission: my first thought is that a 10-kilometre diameter receiving antenna is totally doable, especially considering how much energy can be sent from space to this one rectenna. Such a rectenna can also double as a PV station.
Contiguous. And that's per ground station, not total, you'd need in the order of 250 for the default proposal just to reach current Terran electrical power usage levels, or 2000 if you add in non-electrical power usage levels. Name an existing artificial 10 km diameter contiguous surface. Closest I can think of is "an entire city", but even those are not usually contiguous. Well, touching, but not fully filled in, not fully wired up. Not even the concrete and tarmac, let alone the plumbing or wiring.
If you're building stuff at this scale, the resources requirements for the ground stations alone, let alone the space elements, are enough to seriously consider a low-resistance high-current DC global planetary grid as an alternative, and then you just put PV plants in antipodal deserts and get 24/7 PV from ground mounted PV without storage. And the political problems which prevent that being built starting today and over the next five years, are trivial in comparison to the political issues from any significant space based beamed power system, even one which is sincerely and openly designed in a peaceful fashion (which is hard to prove).
The overall power density isn't even much different than PV for a bunch of reasons, including safety, it just gives the possibility of getting powered in what is to our eyes darkness. If you could see RF, it would be like a time-averaged equivalent of a slightly cloudy day, 24/7 — lower peak, higher average, than PV in the same place.
Consider the converse: if you were to design a system that is capable of having an arbitrarily high power density, it's no longer just a power source, it's a death ray. Other governments take a dim view of such things, and will likely cause aforementioned years-in-advance attacks with almost total plausible deniability.
But even then, this is the wrong usage. Use power locally in space for things, don't beam it.
If/when humanity gets to a full K2, suborning that much power generation capacity and pointing it at Earth doesn't look like a grape in a microwave, it looks like Alderaan every 14 days or so.
We're not even politically ready for this kind of change, in much the same way and for many of the same reasons as ancient Athens would not have been politically ready for the sudden availability of Tsar Bomba during one of their fights with Sparta — but that only makes it fortunate that Starship is orders of magnitude too small to cause such an industrial change.
For all the reasons I gave in the previous comment, if you consider Apollo to be analogous to a Kon-Tiki raft, Starship is a carrack, an orbital ring is a highway network, and even if we had one of those we're still orders of magnitude short of K1.
>First: If it otherwise takes a year to build them, no difference.
This overlooks a couple factors. First, a raid requires building and launching a fleet of vehicles — a massive investment in logistics and capital. Second, most materials targeted for raiding take less than a year to produce. Spending enormous resources to steal something that can be manufactured more cheaply on Earth or in situ is economically unsound. In nearly all practical scenarios, the costs and risks associated with long-distance raids vastly outweigh any marginal benefits. So yes, and colony on Mars would be safer from raids than one on Earth.
>Second: If they're useful for you in-situ, they're useful for anyone else in-situ.
This is totally different than the Suez Canal, because it would require the raiding party to want to completely relocate for those resources to be useful. There's no meaningful trade between Mars and Earth due to logistics, so they cannot economically utilize those resources of Mars on Earth.
> False. Whether attacker or defender has advantage is not distance dependent, it's tech-dependent. Absolute stealth in space only becomes impossible when you've already got something around a K1.5 civilization in the vicinity, before that you can fairly easily hide passive IR signatures, deflect/absorb/otherwise minimize active EM scans, and the defender doesn't have the resources to saturate volume with gravity sensors to spot attacker's mass.
Irrespective of the level of technology available, distance imposes inherent logistical constraints. A nearby attacker can maintain sustained pressure, rapid resupply, and repeated engagements at lower cost, while a distant force must overcome long transit times and a vulnerable supply chain.
As for stealth, sven assuming near-future stealth and tracking advancements, proximity still affords defenders longer reaction times and more thorough surveillance.
>Contiguous. And that's per ground station, not total, you'd need in the order of 250 for the default proposal just to reach current Terran electrical power usage levels, or 2000 if you add in non-electrical power usage levels. Name an existing artificial 10 km diameter contiguous surface.
2,000 city-sized rectennas to power all of Earth seems like a great deal.
This 2002 study models a 5 GW SBSP system with a 12-km rectenna that is transparent enough to allow vegetation to grow underneath. This mitigates land-use concerns while allowing high efficiency for power collection:
Starship is only a breakthrough compared to the status quo; compared to the scale needed to unlock even a full K1 power consumption it's about as close as the 25m swimming certificate I got as a kid is to swimming across the Atlantic from Lisbon to Miami… 276,400 times.
K2 is 10 orders of magnitude harder than K1.
Using rockets at all for K2 is a terrible idea, as you are forced to start treating oxygen as a mineral to be extracted from rocks, because there isn't enough in Earth's atmosphere… by 8 orders of magnitude.
It's clearly a stepping stone. If we can transport 15,000 tons of mass to low earth orbit per day, we can set up an extraterrestrial industrial infrastructure for harvesting and refining building materials, so that we don't need to overcome Earth's gravity well to acquire material for space-based construction.
A stepping stone in the way that the Pesse canoe was the stepping stone to the creation of the modern USA.
Actually, not even that.
15,000 tons of mass to low earth orbit per day isn't nothing, but at the same time, rockets cannot ever scale to K2. Can barely scale to K1, but only if you don't mind catastrophic climate change from burning order-of one percent of Earth's atmospheric oxygen.
K2 requires a VN replicator. If you have one of those, you only need one successful rocket launch. Not one per day, one total. Just so long as the rocket is big enough to fit the replicator, that's it.
Hmm. 15000 tons, so 100 Block 2 Starship+Booster, per day. Accounting for fuel-rich engines and methane's greenhouse factor, launching that with rockets is ~150 million tons of CO₂-equivalent per year.
Seems small, but even all by itself that's 3x the maximum sustainable level of emissions — even if absolutely everything else, everywhere in the planet, was completely and perfectly greenhouse-neutral, it's too much.
Shame, really. Mars missions only work if SpaceX gets a Sabatier plant that fits in a Starship, masses less than 150 tons including power systems (or 200 tons on Block 3), and can produce 330 tons (for Block 2) in two years while on Mars, yet no talk from them about work on this because Musk is too busy Muntzing his government.
Your argument is short-sighted. It assumes that success must be measured by immediate scalability to a K2 civilization. The Pesse canoe wasn’t the final product — it was an early, rudimentary tool that eventually enabled modern seafaring and global commerce. Similarly, Starship and current rocketry aren’t expected to instantly create a K2 civilization; they are necessary stepping stones that lay the foundation for future, transformative technologies.
Even if rockets can barely scale to a K1 civilization without severe environmental consequences, that doesn’t diminish their value. Affordable, frequent access to space is exactly what we need to build the infrastructure for later breakthroughs — such as Von Neumann replicators — which could then accelerate the expansion of space-based industry exponentially. Without the ability to reliably launch materials into orbit, we wouldn’t even get close to the point where self-replication becomes feasible.
Regarding environmental concerns, while launching 15,000 tons per day might sound like a lot, the estimated 150 million tons of CO2-equivalent per year is only about 0.3% of current global emissions. Moreover, if we shift industry into space, Earth’s overall emissions could eventually drop, making the trade-off much more acceptable. And that's completely putting aside the potential to synthesize rocket fuel using carbon sequestration, which would make the launches carbon neutral.
And on Mars: criticizing SpaceX for not yet having a Sabatier plant misses the point. SpaceX is trying to solve the biggest pain point of Mars colonization: the immense cost of launching mass to orbit. They can solve the other pain points later or leave it to others to do that.
I think they'd be very helpful for anything involving an airless body, e.g the moon. At least as a bootstrap — when we get going, we might want to do megastructure-scale electromagnets so humans can survive the gee-forces.
(We can't do megastructure-scale electromagnets right now: while they would work and China has a big enough industrial base, nobody on Earth is in the mood for anyone talking about building a 1000km diameter electromagnet significantly stronger than Earth's magnetic field).
Yes, and also there is a limit to what we accelerate within Earth's atmosphere, as it tends to burn up from friction.
So yes, the simpler machines on Earth are mainly useful at first as a bootstrap, and after that it would rather be from the Moon or Mars as a hub, with huge electromagnetic railguns.
Between Earth and low orbit, maybe some version of a space elevator could finally see the light?
If we follow this kind of blueprints, prioritizing electromagnetic tech instead of fossil fuels, we can successfully bootstrap some amount of space-based industry without trashing too much Earth's liveability.
1) "Opportunities on earth" will always be more efficient in many aspects. Cost, waste, energy demand, reliability, throughput to provide for the 99% remaining on earth, the ones we actually try to solve problems for. You are ignoring cost-benefit analysis, scaling factors and side effects.
2) You are betting on space industries to compete and replace earth bound processes but only give launch capabilities as an argument. I think there are vast uncertainties and unknowns to overcome. Even if it plays out as you imagine, it will probably neither happen in your lifetime nor in next generations. All the while we continue to damage your foundation because we chase a pie in the sky.
3) Shooting for mars is idiotic. Going for the moon yields similar results and is much "easier". From there the rest of the solar system gets closer to us but please keep in mind, I am still not talking about self sustaining colonies or industries. Given that our earth still provides plenty, shooting for space in general is idiotic imo. If I had to bet on a technical long shot solution, I would go for nuclear fusion instead of bezos/musk, who I suspect to be equally delusional.
Please read closely. Id like to tell you something about population dynamics.
Maybe you have heard about the malthusian point of crisis, where food demand overshoots supply and a population starts to decline/collapse. This picture is incomplete.
Every species faces 3 categories of destabilizing threats: resources/nutriment, waste products and selective factors (a general term for internal/external stressors like predators, war, diseases, catastrophes, etc). All of our man made problems fit into one of these categories! In the long run, every species has to solve these problems!
Pointing at the potential resources and space for landfills beyond earth will not free you from these constraints, it just extend your grace period and enables you to pretend to have solved anything. An actual self sustaining colony means producing _and recycling_ everything, from the vital technology stack down to every day products. If any tech billionaire ever reaches that awareness of the problem and a solution for it, then why build it in space?!
What we need is a circular, sustainable econmy, which is also a big moonshot, unfortunately. But either way, the realization of the problems we face is the first step. CO2 is just one our urgent waste products. Can you name a second one with global implications?
I agree with your points, which I could summarize as "my 1) is very difficult".
May it be more accessible with mechanical systems instead of humans working outside of Earth?
Anyway, I hope you understand and agree with my main point: to continue economic growth in our biosphere will just destroy this biosphere, quicker than we realize.
Well, its difficult to break our entire civilisation down into a binary destructive: yes/no. On the one side you have the majority not caring to actually solve problems and on the other you have small genetics research teams maybe revolutionizing our waste management.
Going fully sustainable / having recycling rates of 100% / having zero impact on our environment ... is impossible I think. But I absolutely dont need to measure against that hard goal to conclude how much we are f'ing things up. So yea, I generally agree with you, even though i wouldnt put it on economic growth alone.
I agree that Earth’s problems should always be a priority, but I think there’s a tendency — especially in today’s political climate — to be overly skeptical of space exploration, particularly when the private sector is involved. It’s worth asking whether that skepticism comes purely from a neutral assessment of the facts or if it’s influenced by a broader narrative that frames space expansion as a distraction rather than an investment in the future.
The thing is, we already have a real-world example of how a large space program benefited Earth: the Apollo program. It wasn’t just about getting to the Moon — it led to a wave of new technologies that had nothing to do with space travel but ended up shaping industries back on Earth. That’s what happens when you push engineering and science to their limits. Space missions are, by their nature, some of the most ambitious and disciplined blue sky projects we undertake. They force researchers and engineers to tackle extreme challenges, and in doing so, they produce breakthroughs that spill over into everyday life. That kind of well-funded, high-stakes R&D has historically driven progress in ways that aren’t always obvious at first but turn out to be game-changers.
Now, when people talk about space expansion as unrealistic or too difficult, what they’re often really saying is that it’s too expensive. And historically, they’ve been right — cost has always been the biggest obstacle. But that’s exactly what’s changing. Before SpaceX, launching anything into orbit cost around $15,000 per kilogram. That meant sending a single astronaut into space could cost nearly a billion dollars. At those prices, space wasn’t an option for anything beyond government-funded prestige projects.
But we’re already past that era. Falcon 9 proved that launch costs can be dramatically reduced, and we’ve seen the direct impact of that—Starlink is a perfect example of a space-based system that’s already providing real-world benefits. With Starship, the cost of going to orbit could drop by another order of magnitude. If that happens, access to space will go from being a rare, ultra-expensive event to something routine. That completely changes what’s possible.
I think it’s shortsighted to assume space won’t provide massive benefits to Earth. Just like how early computing looked niche and impractical until it took over everything, space development is on that same trajectory. The same people who dismissed reusable rockets a decade ago are now watching them land on drone ships in the ocean.
I just think it’s worth taking a step back and asking: is this skepticism really coming from a place of objective analysis? Or is it just part of the broader push to downplay space exploration, especially when it’s coming from the private sector? Because if history has shown us anything, it’s that ambitious, long-term projects often look like distractions — right up until they change the world.
> It’s worth asking whether that skepticism comes purely from a neutral assessment
My point of view comes from the other side. I am asking how species/societies fail and land on the 3 categories of failure, call it the great filter if you like. I should have pointed them out more clearly, that resources, waste products and selective factors are what we need to solve in the long term. CO2 is just one waste products of the many, that is in public awareness.
I am not downplaying the advances in space flight. I am also not ignoring, that there are limited benefits along the road for the general population. I strongly do object to the hype, framing it as a solution to societal problems though. I hope I made my self clear now.
Calling me shortsighted is the wrong word, I am pessimistic. Shortsightedness would imply that there are actual things to see. I am pessimistic about the competitiveness of orbital solar energy and about the cost-benefit of bulk deorbiting of resources – which still would be unsustainable. I am also pessimistic about upper atmospherical pollution, space debris and even more detached/delusional and politically way overrepresented billionaires on an ideological doomed mission to mars, while earth burns out.
Besides that, there are military, astronomy and telecommunication usecases (intentionally ignoring geoengineering), which I am also not downplaying, they are just irrelevant to our pressing issues. I kind of agree with one label you threw around: “distraction”.
Just pointing at
> progress in ways that aren’t always obvious at first but turn out to be game-changers.
> cost [drops] by another order of magnitude. [...]. That completely changes what’s possible.
> Just like how early computing looked niche and impractical until it took over everything, _space development is on that same trajectory_
> if history has shown us [...] ambitious projects often look like distractions — right up until they change the world.
does not impress me at all. To me, that is just vague gesturing at the sky. Except Computers, which can digitally model anything, which is why they pushed into every aspect of our lifes, space flight has limited use cases and unique constrains. That is the foundation of my pessimism.
To make myself clear: My point of view comes from the other side. I am asking how species/societies fail and from there I focus on sustainability as a key principle for any attempt of solving things. A cloud-castle as a promise of salvation and source of hope for our future does not work for me. On the contrary, space flight delusion _in a thread about the broken promises of carbon capturing_ – the lack of problem awareness generally – angers me every time. We should have sustainability departments with strong regulatory tools by now, but i think elon would disagre with me on that. I am slowly losing my hope living in this idiocracy. Thanks for questioning my objectivity.
I get that sustainability and long-term survival are critical. But space development isn’t an escapist fantasy — it’s already helping solve real problems.
Take climate science. Without satellites, we wouldn’t fully understand how CO2 moves through the atmosphere. Space tech tracks deforestation, ocean shifts, and extreme weather. Even climate models rely on it. Dismissing space as just billionaires playing with rockets ignores how much we already depend on it.
You say space-based industries — like orbital solar, asteroid mining, and colonies — won’t be competitive. But major tech shifts always start out looking impractical. Aviation was once a luxury. Early computers had "limited use cases". If people had written them off, they would have been wrong. Space is following the same trajectory.
I get the skepticism that lower launch costs alone won’t create large-scale space industries. But history shows that when costs decline, new demand emerges. Starlink already proves this. Starship is designed to push costs even lower, making things possible that never were before. That’s not hand-waving—that’s measurable progress.
Now, about closed-loop sustainability. You’re right that a space colony would need to recycle everything. But that’s exactly why we should invest in it. Perfecting closed-loop systems in space improves resource efficiency on Earth. The better we get at sustaining life in extreme conditions, the better we can solve sustainability challenges here.
Maybe space-based solar and asteroid mining won’t scale soon — maybe they will. But assuming today’s economics will never change is shortsighted. Early solar panels were inefficient and expensive, yet now they’re among the cheapest energy sources. The cost curve changed. Space industries are still young — dismissing them now is premature.
You focus on how civilizations fail, but the best way to prevent failure is through innovation. Expanding our toolkit, not restricting it, is how we solve challenges like sustainability.
I don’t think it’s unrealistic to believe space will be a major part of that.
Starship will reduce the cost to send a kilogram of mass into orbit by ten to a hundredfold, meaning the cost will come down to something in the order of $100 or even down to $20 per kilogram, from its current cost of $1,500. This is not science fiction, this is totally feasible in the foreseeable future.
And then what, you put up a cable to it able to withstand the whole atmosphere? Also, what about space debris hitting it, rotating the panels? Each one will be able to align properly or do they need a way to self-align? Do you think any of that will be able to compete with... A dumb panel here on Earth that itself continues to be cheaper each year, or more efficient production lines requiring less power to begin with?
I can see it happening, compounding growth has a way of doing that.
But, given how we keep rushing into predictable disasters, I now expect to live to experience personally, first hand, a K2-level Kessler cascade from the inside.
When people figure out the missing parts of VN replicators, that all happens over a handful of decades.
cool theory. McKinsey estimates a transition like that would cost $275 trillion and take until 2050. that's a lot of money. not only that, we all know the global south will, true to form, come calling with their hands out, demanding that we pay for their stuff too. which would essentially bankrupt America. we're already tens of trillions in the hole; we can't afford it.
just as importantly, since you're making a practical argument for why we should care, your own linked analysis suggests America will experience very little impact from global warming. impact levels run from a bit below +10 to a bit below -30 with zero as no impact; looks like our projected impact is around -10.
if you were assigning America some vaguely proportional cost, we could do so relative to emissions (giving us a $40T bill) or GDP ($72T). both of those numbers are significantly greater than the current national debt. they would bankrupt the nation, cripple the common man with inflation, and screw us out of any shot at reindustrializing.
as usual, unsaid is the massive downgrade in standard of living people expect us to somehow magically accept to build this bridge to nowhere.
You appear to be aggressively agreeing with the person you replied to with your source.
They said the US could spend 8 Trillion a year and it would still make financial sense.
Your Mackinsey report says the whole world should spend 9.2 Trillion a year to make the transition and that it makes financial sense to do so, both due to avoided costs of climate change and that many of the things needed to transition have a positive return in investmemt anyway.
Your own contribution on top of the report just seems muddled and confused given what you've cited.
Are you saying Mackinsey are wrong and it would be cheaper to do nothing? They're very clear even in the executive summary that is not the case:
> The rewards of the net-zero transition would far exceed the
mere avoidance of the substantial, and possibly catastrophic, dislocations that would result from unabated climate change,
or the considerable benefits they entail in natural capital conservation. Besides the immediate economic opportunities they
create, they open up clear possibilities to solve global challenges in both physical and governance-related terms. These
include the potential for a long-term decline in energy costs that would help solve many other resource issues and lead to a
palpably more prosperous global economy.
What do you mean "we?" China has not just indicated but incontrovertibly demonstrated that they do not care about carbon dioxide emission targets. They are massively ramping up their oxidative energy production. So as I see it there are two choices.
One: deindustrialize and let China control all industrial production while having massive carbon dioxide emissions or,
Two: reindustrialize and challenge China's industrial production advantage while having massive carbon dioxide emissions.
Low emissions aren't on the table. They're not a possibility. So at this point I'm deeply suspicious of anyone peddling that fantasy. They are, most likely, spreading Chinese misinformation, wittingly or unwittingly.
China is rapidly ramping up everything, including renewables. Biggest CO2 source in China right now is coal, and PV is much cheaper than coal, so them getting cleaner isn't even a question of them playing nice or thinking long-term, it's fully compatible with their own immediate interests.
Chinese wind project developers ordered 228.4GW of wind turbines in 2024 (2023 96.3 GW, +137%)
The average price was
onshore with tower: 1894 Yuan/kW
onshore without tower: 1513 Yuan/kW
offshore with tower: 3307 Yuan/kW
offshore without tower: 2698 Yuan/kW
In 2024, 121GW of wind turbines were connected to the grid worldwide, 80GW of which in China, 41GW worldwide outside China. In 2023, China added 77 out of 112GW
Reindustrialization isn't possible because you cannot reduce your costs to China levels, particularly if you clamp down on immigration as well. The best you can hope for is to diversify the supply by industrializing other, geographically and/or ideologically closer countries that can produce at reduced costs and are also more dependent on your economy or your military might. A suite of vassal countries, if you will.
Do humanoid robots in America have any economic benefit over the exact same robots in, say, Mexico? Or on a lights-out factory on the ocean floor in international waters? Or on the moon?
Even if they're physically in the US, are these robots driven by AI, or remote control? If the former, does this re-industrialisation create any jobs? If the latter, why hire Americans to control the robots rather than much cheaper Cubans or Vietnamese or Salvadorans?
Much sillier to think "reindustrialization" is possible. It is a problem of social metabolism, not a policy issue. Industrialization was a particular historical phenomenon that has now fully passed in the West.
China "won" before the game even began for the simple fact of them being a very late developer. Development is not even guaranteed as a consequence of industrialization anymore; see premature deindustrialization. No misinformation needed, just cold hard historical laws.
While there is a "CO2 fertilization effect" where rising atmospheric carbon dioxide can initially boost plant growth, scientists are increasingly stating that this effect is reaching its limit, meaning plants can no longer absorb as much CO2 due to factors like nutrient limitations and other environmental constraints, effectively capping the potential for further carbon uptake from the atmosphere.
It rose in the 30 years prior to your 2016 article, it's peaked and it is unlikely there will be any further benefical effects of "greening" (not the same as "nutritional") vegetation .. and this is outweighed by the downsides of increased insulation in the atmosphere trapping more of the daily solar influx energy at the land, sea, air interface.
It would be quite odd if the CO2 fertilization effect has already peaked, given that geological history shows periods with much higher CO2 concentrations, during which plant growth was significantly greater.
In the long run, humans cannot indefinitely alter atmospheric composition without risking conditions that could undermine life’s prosperity. At sufficiently high concentrations, CO2 also impairs human cognition, as our physiology is not adapted to the extreme levels that were once common in Earth’s distant past.
That said, we should remain open to the possibility that CO2 emissions have net positive effects in the short to medium term. If that is the case, CO2 mitigation strategies could be adjusted accordingly—focusing on economically efficient transitions rather than rushing to eliminate CO2 emissions at all costs. This would mean prioritizing the replacement of CO2-emitting energy sources where it is already cost-effective, while investing in R&D to lower transition costs in areas where immediate replacement would be prohibitively expensive.
> It would be quite odd if the CO2 fertilization effect has already peaked, given that geological history shows periods with much higher CO2 concentrations, during which plant growth was significantly greater.
The species of plants were at a different evolutionary stage. Further, a lot of bio matter wasn't in the form of human consumables. Algae was by and large the main CO2 absorber of prehistoric periods.
It took millions of years of growth for plants to sequester the carbon we are currently emitting. That's millions of years of adaptation to the ever changing atmosphere composition.
The optimal CO₂ concentration for plant growth in greenhouse farms typically ranges between 800 and 1,200 ppm (parts per million). Some high-intensity commercial greenhouses may use levels up to 1,500 ppm, but beyond that, the benefits diminish, and excessive CO₂ can start to have negative effects.
The current atmospheric CO₂ level is approximately 420–425 ppm as of 2024, which is significantly lower than the optimal greenhouse levels for plant growth but much higher than pre-industrial levels (~280 ppm).
--
Worth noting that at 1,000 ppm, CO2 begins to impair human cognition, and if we really want to be safe, we really shouldn't allow it to even get close to that, e.g. 700 ppm is probably already cutting it too close.
Here's what a university has to say on the matter [1]
The gist of it, CO2 supplementation can be beneficial to some plants (not all plants) IFF you also tweak all other inputs into growth. Not something that happens outside of a greenhouse.
> Plants may not show a positive response to supplemental CO2 because of other limiting factors such as nutrients, water and light. All factors need to be at optimum levels.
Well, plant growth on Earth massively increased in the 30 years up to the 2016 study. It would be quite the coincidence that it stopped right after that study.
On the other hand, higher weather variance reduces average yields to an extent that dwarfs any benefit from higher CO2. Increased yield unpredictability is a much bigger problem for the agricultural supply chain because it increases average unit costs.
Massively increases vegetation cover while reducing farm yields? I find that highly implausible.
One critical impact of higher CO2 concentrations is that drier climates see more vegetation, so you see a lot of greening in previously arid, barren places. And that also has massively positive implications for farm yields.
No, it is not and the idea that extreme weather would somehow result in more food is laughable on its face. Higher CO2 concentrations also reduce the nutrients in food.
It accelerates plant growth, reducing nutrient concentration per cubic centimeter of food, but increasing the total nutrient yield because the overall boost in biomass outweighs the dilution effect. This is why greenhouse farms pump CO2 into their environments. Your reaction though really demonstrates a close-mindedness about your belief that CO2 is harmful that is anti-science.
But an individual human eats a fixed amount of food. So that fact seems pointless, since people will get less nutrition overall- unless we should all only eat ultra-processed snacks and reserve fresh food for the wealthy?
On what basis do you claim that an individual eats a fixed amount of food?
If you're worried about how artificially elevated CO2 levels affect agricultural products, then you should start taking issue with commercial greenhouses, which regularly pump CO2 in to increase yields. This is a common practice, and only now is it being viewed as something bad or strange because it's not convenient for the climate change narrative that presents industrial emission of CO2 as the apex threat that requires government-enforced collective action to solve.
> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.
I'm of the opinion that no matter the level of cartoon villainy the oil industry is accused of - they're most likely guilty, but there's an inaccuracy here:
In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation of hydrogen.
We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in this regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas which tends to leak, but it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 to coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain - it's just hugely impractical compared to not burning them in the first place.
> In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation of hydrogen.
This I wasn't quite aware of. Thanks for the correction.
> But it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 into coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain
This would be a game-changer! Though "theoretically" is pulling a bit of weight here...
> We should get rid of coal first, as it's irredeemable in this regard and methane second, as it's a greenhouse gas which tends to leak,
I also agree with your list. Burning stuff for grid energy should stop ASAP. Liquid fuel for transport is, however, the most difficult and probably the last to be replaced. It's to the point that generating green liquid fuels (that don't use fossil sources of carbon) is still actively researched and used, as air travel or shipping may never become feasible on green energy sources.
Ever see a diesel 'rolling coal'? They are burning the hydrogen and sending carbon into the air. Terrible for the local evironment though. this is still carbon positive though since some carbon is burned - just not all.
> But it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 into coal and leave > it like that with a net energy gain
> This would be a game-changer! Though "theoretically" is pulling a bit of weight here...
In nat. gas this is possible - its called pyrolisis - as an alternative to steam reformation it is generating pure carbon and hydrogen instead of the CO2 and Hydrogen that steam reformation does.
Its main downside is that it takes more energy so you get less usable energy out of the process.
You can do it with other organic fuels as well and the simplest process is making charcoal from wood but its not as clear a way to separate out carbon there.
China has started adding battery electric container ships to it's local shipping fleets. They have also started using some battery electric cargo trains. Now if they can just get off coal for their electricity consumption they are very close to the tipping point. So in my opinion we are getting there in terms of carbon output but I also think it is to late to stop global warming and we have crossed the point of no return already.
While the US looks at China as the convenient villan here, the rest of the world sees the US as the villan and China at least aggressively attacking the problem.
And that's before we consider the impact Chinese exports of solar panels and inverters have had on renewable energy production outside of China.
One may not like the system of govt in China, or their human rights policies (personally, I don't, but each to his own), but as far as climate change goes they're getting stuff done while the US govt does nothing. Or actively fights against improvements.
Decades ago, coal was said to be in terminal decline. Years ago, coal was supposed to be economically dead due to being more expensive than renewables. Today we have yet to hit global peak-coal, China emits more CO2 than all western countries combined now, its emissions per-capita are higher than all but a handful of developed countries, and they are continuing to spike alarmingly. China is also home to some of the cheapest and most abundant renewable energy generation manufacturing in the world. Something isn't quite adding up.
It was maybe "said" ... There seems to have been quite a bit of groupthink (or propaganda) over the decades that new energy sources would supplant old and it's never been really accurate. AIUI, wider use of oil created more demand for coal, wider use of renewables creates more demand for oil and so forth, because amongst other things new energy production puts greater demand on existing sources, plus the new-lanes-on-the-highway tendency of late capitalism to put all of it to work making the rich richer etc.
Renewables aren't "new sources" by now though. They are existing sources. So if production demands more energy and renewables are the cheapest existing sources of energy, then you would build more renewable generation, not more coal generation.
I think what actually happened is that people with agendas pushed this deception to fool people into acting and voting against their own best interests.
> But oil didn't displace coal, it helped us mine it more effectively and stimulated more technologies that raised energy demand overall. So coal use kept rising too – and oil use in turn kept increasing as cleaner gas, nuclear and hydro came on stream, helping power the digital age, which unlocked more advanced technologies capable of opening up harder-to-read fossil-fuel reserves.
With renewables I agree it isn't the same. What is the same is we're only going to get out of this by turning away from growth-at-all-costs mentality. For instance, this article describes how the Gulf states are making huge investments in renewables _to sell more oil and gas_ (https://www.tni.org/en/article/a-transition-to-where-the-gul...):
> The Gulf states see no contradiction between an embrace of ‘low-carbon solutions’ and pursuing the path of accelerating fossil fuel production ... With very high levels of energy consumption at home, the domestic substitution of oil and gas with alternative energy sources means that more fossil fuels can be made available for export. Indeed, such reasoning is explicitly behind Saudi Arabia’s plan to generate half of the country’s electricity from renewables by 2030 ...
China is demonized in the western countries for human rights abuses only because it is a communist country I am not saying that China is not doing bad shit but that western countries hypocrisy of only highlighting China. Where as they themselves have exploited and are still exploiting African countries resources by using corrupt African politicians that are doing many human rights on their people.
At least Europeans have started to at least call-out Israel now but they should also call out US for enabling Israel but for those abuses it's okay not to say anything to the US.
Sadly I think the only viable route to this is wealthy countries paying poor countries to dismantle these power plants (and presumably replace them with something equivalent).
This has two nice benefits. One, wealthy countries show they act in good faith. Two, this will greatly reduce wealth disparity.
Of course, there's the chance some people will threaten to emit gas to acquire disproportionate power. This is true, but still preferable to the west just roasting the planet and then blaming china. Like grow tf up.
This might be less of a problem than you would expect.
Pakistan, for example, is currently experiencing a massive solar boom. Their electricity grid has been notoriously unreliable in the past, so the moment solar panels and batteries became cheap enough just about everyone chose distributed solar. It is now the world's sixth-largest solar market, despite having the world's 42nd-largest GDP.
The goal in poor countries isn't dismantling fossil fuel plants - those never grew beyond a rounding error. The goal is to avoid building new fossil fuel plants as their economies grow, and that's a lot easier now that solar has become the cheapest source of electricity. Their old power plants will eventually close down, but it's not a priority on a global scale.
>wealthy countries paying poor countries to dismantle these power plants (and presumably replace them with something equivalent)
And what about wealthy countries, that using those power plants? I mean there aren't many of them now, but have you been communicating with Europeans recently? Not with the privileged elites in the universities, but with the working class Europeans? There are so many complaints about energy prices that I'm afraid even there democracy can't be thwarted anymore and we'll see burners all over Europe in like 10 years from now.
Why not both? We've been claiming to want to reduce carbon emissions since before I was born. It's not even a hard pitch—if we're insanely wealthy and have the capacity to discuss greening our grid and still can't or won't, why would you reasonably expect countries with basically no capacity to do this to forget about centuries of globalization, colonization, and exploitation? We burned the globe; if we want to heal this, the most reasonable approach is good-faith reconciliation and remediation.
But the way conversation is now we're headed straight towards ecofascism. A healthy globe for me but not for thee (as if this even makes much sense).
It's convenient for the US to blame "developing economies" (especially China) for the problem. Solutions like "buying off other countries" make sense. (And in itself is not a bad idea.) But it's a deflection from the bigger issue which is consumption at home.
But as long as we can make it a "them " problem, our population doesn't have to feel guilt, or understand they are the people who need to change.
Sounds good I'm theory but tough to put into practice. Regardless of the environmental consequences there is no way that voters in wealthy countries will agree to subsidize hostile regimes. And many of those countries are so deeply corrupt that the majority of funding tends to be stolen by corrupt politicians or building contractors.
> it's theoretically possible to burn hydrocarbons and turn the CO2 to coal and leave it like that with a net energy gain - it's just hugely impractical compared to not burning them in the first place.
It's also theoretically possible to have chemical reactions that bind carbon from the air into solid compounds that aren't themselves combustible without a net energy loss, but then you need a very large volume of reactants and produce a very large volume of industrial waste and it still turns out to be highly uneconomical compared to the cost of replacing fossil fuels for power generation.
> It's also theoretically possible to have chemical reactions that bind carbon from the air into solid compounds that aren't themselves combustible without a net energy loss
That's not true. The reactants must have enough stored potential energy to reduce carbon. You might get that for "free" by using accelerated weathering of rocks (the energy ultimately comes from the radioactive decay in Earth's core).
"Net energy loss" meaning you have to supply some energy in the form of heat or electricity to make the reaction go, and you don't get it back.
There are things that will react with CO2 and form something that isn't combustible. That reaction may even generate heat that you could hypothetically use for something, but in practice probably not enough of it to be worth extracting.
> There are things that will react with CO2 and form something that isn't combustible.
Sure. There are plenty of such things. For example, elemental magnesium will happily bind carbon dioxide into pretty inert magnesium carbonate. But to _get_ that elemental magnesium, you need to expend energy, because elemental magnesium can't be found in nature.
There is only one realistic option: rock weathering. Silicate rocks can react with carbon dioxide to produce calcium carbonate and (eventually) silicon dioxide.
> In hydrocarbons the majority of energy comes from the oxidation of hydrogen.
That's not quite true.
To add some numbers, the average formula for long-chain hydrocarbons is roughly CH2 (one carbon atom for two hydrogen atoms). The enthalpy of formation of water is -286kJ/mole, and for carbon dioxide it's -394kJ/mole.
Conveniently enough, one mole of long-chain hydrocarbons produces one mole of water and one mole of carbon dioxide.
It's better for pure methane, as with its formula CH4 it produces 2 moles of water for each mole of CO2. So you get 572kJ of energy from hydrogens versus the same 394kJ from carbon.
Formation is just one part of the equation. On the other side there's an additional C-C bond per segment of the hydrocarbon chain longer than methane, which you need to break during combustion.
It's already taken into the account. The CO2 enthalpy of formation has C-C bond breaking "baked in", by convention the "standard" form of an element has zero enthalpy of formation. For carbon, it's graphite with its C-C bonds.
I did neglect the C-H bond enthalpy, but it's close enough to the C-C bond energy to matter too much.
> I'm of the opinion that no matter the level of cartoon villainy the oil industry is accused of - they're most likely guilty,
Unfortunately their success over the years is showing others like the airline industry how to behave.
There's some great "support" getting cloud into the extreme left (who are anti science like the extreme right) who conveniently love talking about chem trail style nonsense... Which is a shame because if we actually made an effort to reduce these clouds we'd make a big step forward to improving things for little effort... (Notice how I'm not saying fix, we're closer to fusion at scale than battery powered commercial flights I suspect)
There's a pretty insane scheme called "underground coal gasification" which had been proposed for the Firth of Forth. It's the same process as town gas - partial oxidation of coal to hydrogen and carbon monoxide. Bus in situ. So a controlled underground coal fire.
There's a similar idea to gasify old oil and gas wells. This sounds more feasible than doing it with coal though I suppose you could have a blowout. It should be cheaper too since it uses already drilled wells.
> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.
No, we don't.
CO2 in the atmosphere is not the lowest-energy state in the system. If CO2 stopped being added to the atmosphere, it would eventually all be consumed out by chemical weathering of silicate rocks into carbonates, because that's an exothermic reaction that consumes CO2.
All the actually promising carbon capture proposals are essentially ways to speed up chemical weathering. The limiting factor here is surface area; the process is naturally very slow, and only occurs at an appreciable rate on the exposed surfaces of rocks in shallow water. None of them are cost-effective *yet* (and might never be), but there is not some one-sentence gotcha answer that prevents them from eventually being successful. They are not fighting against physics.
Um, no. The limiting factors are all still economic. If you want to try to rely on mineral weathering to reduce atmospheric CO2 any reasonable amount you now have to finance the quarrying, crushing to fine power, transport, and distribution of gigatons of stone or engineer a suitable replacement which replaces quarry and processing costs with input stock acquisition and synthesis leaving transportation and distribution untouched.
... Alternatively you do none of that and frack underwater basalt.
What makes these gotcha arguments so infuriating is that you have no clue what you are talking about, and refuse to spend even 15 minutes googling for what projects have been proposed and what is being studied. Instead you dream up an imaginary strawman to rail against. Literally no-one has ever proposed doing any of what you just talked about, because it would very clearly be economically unviable. There are many options that are not that which are being studied.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you haven't been paying any attention to ongoing pilot projects in europe studying seeding ag land with basalt fines as a possible mitigation strategy. Far from being uninformed I was merely trying to extend to you the benefit of the doubt inasmuch as I assumed nobody would credibly believe that fracking could produce meaningful amounts of surface area compared to powdered fines. Clearly I was mistaken, there are those among us that confuse make work for drill crews with actual progress. Carry on then.
>All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.
All the serious proposals for carbon capture involve use cases where it's unfeasible to swap in photovoltaics or whatever. For instance, fertilizer production, cement production, and air transport.
Air transport is one of those things that would better offset with carbon capture - maybe even by making synthetic jet fuel, then it's carbon neutral - but very expensive. But really it doesn't matter. Air transport is 2.5% of global CO2. If we solved every other problem first, we could keep pumping oil for airplanes for centuries.
Take the engineer's mindset, reach the low-hanging fruit first. Replace coal with nuclear and natural gas, then start replacing natural gas. Cars don't need to run on gasoline anymore, BEVs are a superior technology. The market is doing its work to decarbonize that all by itself. Slowly at first, and then all at once. If you're middle-aged today, you'll likely live to see the end of gasoline cars. We can speed things along by removing subsidies on fossil fuels or offsetting them with green incentives.
Or just skip the nuclear power step and go directly to renewables with storage since it is vastly cheaper and the deployment time is counted in months rather than decades.
Unfortunately, solar w/ storage isn’t cheaper. You want to look at VALCOE for LFSCOE as metrics. It doesn’t compare solar roofing with nuclear since you need more transmission, but a distributed grid seems insanely unlikely to ever happen / be practical. Moreover, storage at scale requires strip mining the ocean floor which companies are getting ready to do. That’ll be an ecological disaster which makes nuclear accidents look like peanuts.
See the recent study on Denmark which found that nuclear power needs to come down 85% in cost to be competitive with renewables when looking into total system costs for a fully decarbonized grid, due to both options requiring flexibility to meet the grid load.
Focusing on the case of Denmark, this article investigates a future fully sector-coupled energy system in a carbon-neutral society and compares the operation and costs of renewables and nuclear-based energy systems.
The study finds that investments in flexibility in the electricity supply are needed in both systems due to the constant production pattern of nuclear and the variability of renewable energy sources.
However, the scenario with high nuclear implementation is 1.2 billion EUR more expensive annually compared to a scenario only based on renewables, with all systems completely balancing supply and demand across all energy sectors in every hour.
For nuclear power to be cost competitive with renewables an investment cost of 1.55 MEUR/MW must be achieved, which is substantially below any cost projection for nuclear power.
Or the same for Australia if you went a more sunny locale finding that renewables ends up with a grid costing less than half of "best case nth of a kind nuclear power".
Denmark generates 20% of its energy from renewables which is about on par for what most countries see. Let's see how much those renewables start costing when you need to supplant the 80% of the energy grid which is still is still carbon producing. Which is my point - renewables can't scale past this threshold and trying to make them raises the costs exponentially. Compare this to France which has been >90% decarbonized in its grid since at least the 90s.
Re fossil fuel propaganda, the number 1 supporters of renewables is the fossil fuel companies. It's not because it's the future but because it prolongs to the utmost the transition off of fossil fuels while appealing to the sensibilities of people who style themselves as "environmentalists". No country that has invested in renewables has yet managed to get off fossil fuels while France invested in nuclear & nearly completely decarbonized.
How can you spread all this misinformation? Do you believe it yourself?
Yes, there has been companies trying to exploit the ocean for mining for as long as we have been traveling the seas. There has yet to be a successful attempt at it.
Then a lovely apples to oranges comparison comparing primary energy of one country to electricity mix of another.
Lets do the real comparison, the one you did not want to do because it does not show France is as a favorable light:
Primary energy mix using the substitution method[1]:
- France: 51% low carbon
- Denmark: 43% low carbon
Then we have electricity mix [2]:
- France: 92% low carbon
- Denmark: 88% low carbon
France is wholly unable to build nuclear power as evidenced by the Flamanville 3 program being 7x over budget and 13 years late on a 5 year construction schedule.
The EPR2 program is in absolute shambles due to the insane subsidies required, and now "hopefully" will reach an investment decision (i.e. the government decides on the subsidies) in 2026.
We should keep our existing fleet of nuclear power as long as it is safe, needed and economical.
But only someone with vested interest in the outcome of the nuclear industry would suggest wasting trillions of dollars on nuclear subsidies in 2025 given the state of renewables and storage.
> No country that has invested in renewables has yet managed to get off fossil fuels while France invested in nuclear & nearly completely decarbonized.
And the misinformation continues. When is France going to decarbonize the remaining 48% of their economy?
How can you believe such blatant fantasies?
90% of added peak energy generation is renewable. Do you think companies do that because it's more expensive?
We're already way overgenerating for peak generation while persistently not solving the baseload requirements which is where we need to decarbonize. Or in simpler terms, government subsidies distorting the market and solar chasing the easy 20% of the grid supply it is better suited for while ignoring the rest of the market because it's a bad fit.
"But really it doesn't matter. Air transport is 2.5% of global CO2."
Because most people still cannot afford flying. If the world gets richer, more people want the privilege of flying. And it is not like we have an excess budget of CO2. Everything we reduce helps, so a carbon tax on jet fuel might be a good start. That is a low hanging fruit.
Spreading nuclear reactors worldwide really is not. That would be a very hard fruit, with lots of potential side effects. Or do you think bangladesh will build to standards you think are safe?
The reason why nobody is replacing coal with nuclear is that the former is cheap and the latter is expensive. And at the moment, higher energy prices are a very though sell, politically, even if everyone agrees that we don't want to leave scorched earth for our kids.
While BEVs have a lot of benefits, they are still objectively inferior to ICE vehicles. They’re (in most cases substantially) more expensive, less energy dense by mass and volume, and require planning for refuelling (especially if used in areas outside of main city centres or for long driving, or if you live in an apartment without access to a charger at home). Not to mention most grids being nowhere near able to support the entire population of car drivers fast-charging their cars during rush hour. Gasoline-powered cars are objectively easier to own and use.
The real solution is public transit, and convincing people for whom public transit is impossible that switching to BEVs is worthwhile, even with their drawbacks. Telling people that BEVs are superior technology is counterproductive though, when there are still very clear problems with them.
> They’re (in most cases substantially) more expensive, less energy dense by mass and volume, and require planning for refuelling (especially if used in areas outside of main city centres or for long driving, or if you live in an apartment without access to a charger at home).
The most popular BEVs already cost less than the average new car and the price will continue to decline as long as battery prices do. Ranges of ~300 miles are common, meanwhile the average commute is 42 miles, so charging at home is sufficient for the vast majority of usage and is more convenient than buying gas. Apartments will install chargers as electric vehicles become more common.
For long trips, you begin your day having charged overnight and then add 200 miles of range at a supercharger in 15 minutes. That 500 miles is more than 8 hours of driving at 60MPH and it cost you 15 minutes. For people who make such long trips on a regular basis there will be cars with larger batteries and more range so that "overnight plus once in the middle" gets back to being just overnight.
> Not to mention most grids being nowhere near able to support the entire population of car drivers fast-charging their cars during rush hour.
This is the least interesting problem. Upgrading power grids is a known process involving only widely deployed existing technologies.
> The real solution is public transit
Public transit doesn't work in the suburbs, the majority of the population lives in suburban or rural areas and changing that would take decades of new housing construction which is currently prohibited by law.
The number of cars per hour during most of the day on a suburban street is commonly around one. If a bus runs that frequently it would have one passenger and all you've done is replace one midsized car with one large bus at significant expense. If the bus runs less frequently than that it would have zero passengers because people will buy a car and drive it themselves rather than wait that long for a bus.
This is already being somewhat generous by assuming that people would be willing to wait the balance of an hour for a bus. For mass transit to actually work you want service every five or ten minutes.
Current suburbs are quite low-density due to roads and front-yards pointlessly wasting space. It works fine with Japanese-style suburbs, but car-centric suburbs need those front yards to cut down on the sound of fast-moving cars directly outside the house (and reducing speed limits in suburbs down to 5 or 10 is utterly unthinkable for most people), and they also need a 2-car garage with another 2 car spots on the driveway and then another 3 spots on the curb, in case they need to park 7 cars at once for some reason and all their neighbours do too.
Australian housing prices are literally some of the highest in the world; we're in the middle of a housing crisis. It might "work" in that sense that with sufficient mineral exports, we haven't gone bankrupt yet, but it's horrifically inefficient. Sydney housing prices are higher than in Tokyo.
That’s totally irrelevant to whether you can implement public transit in a suburb. If you were actually talking about Australian suburbs in your first comment then you were wrong.
Charging at home is often more expensive than gas in much of California and Hawaii but yes generally cheaper to run if you ignore vehicle cost and lifespan.
I don’t - my daily cost $1400USD, I don’t think there’s an EV on the planet that will work out cheaper before its batteries fail. Ignoring that I’d prefer one that could tow at least 5k lbs (which I make use of fairly frequently on my daily), seat 6 adults, cost only ~$300/year in maintenance (including tires and brakes), and go 750km without thinking about refuelling. And ideally would be comfortable and have good ride quality, which the vast majority of modern cars simply don’t (unless you spend far too much money).
> The range is a non issue 99% of the time when you’re driving around in your city. Charging at home is both cheap and super convenient.
I don’t live in the city, and trips to the city are minimum 50km round trip. Doable with most EVs, but that’s assuming I don’t actually go anywhere in the city. I also have to account for winter temperatures going below -30 relatively frequently, so would have to divide advertised range in half to account for regular worst-case conditions. And for used cars, maybe even more, especially if trying to hit anywhere close to the price point I pay for gas cars (and having to buy a car with older batteries).
I don’t go into work frequently, but when I do, it’s over 100km round trip, assuming I make no stops. That rules out pretty much all small “city” EVs when taking into account range loss in the cold.
Charging at home would be convenient, but I live 30 seconds from two gas stations, so I doubt it would be notably more convenient than that.
> Maintenance is cheaper, the car lasts longer.
Which EVs are known to last 3-400k miles without needing new batteries or having substantial range reduction? That’s what I anticipate out of my current car with only a ($1000) transmission rebuild at ~250k miles. The engine should outlast the car. Suspension components last ~200k miles, front brakes last 75k, rears last 150k. Tires last 40-60k and cost $500 for good ones.
> I don’t know a single person who buys a BEV and goes back. I know many who go the other direction.
Offhand I know at least 4. Mostly when they realize that “hey, my range has cut in half during this cold snap and I won’t be able to make it to X” or when they do the math and realize the extra $6-20k they spent they’re not saving in gas and maintenance before they buy another new car in 3-5 years. The ones who keep buying EVs usually do it for the image, or because they’re willing to spend substantially more money and sacrifice some convenience to drive a greener car. Most of both of those types (at least in my experience) also own a new luxury truck for hauling toys and taking kids to hockey, going on camping trips and that sort of thing.
> And as adoption rises and technology improves the case will get stronger and stronger.
I agree! But they’re not there yet. I would really like them to be, so that fewer people are buying gas cars who just want “a car.” I’d be happy to buy one myself if it made sense, but unfortunately it doesn’t.
> While BEVs have a lot of benefits, they are still objectively inferior to ICE vehicles.
There are multiple dimensions in which they differ. Cost, reliability, emissions, safety, convenience, driving enjoyment, etc. To compare them and say one is better overall than the other requires you to define the weight that you place on each of those factors.
Many of those weights are subjective. Some people value convenience a lot. Some people don't. Some people passionately love driving a stick shift, and some people hate driving. Some people believe climate change is the most important issue of our time, and some people don't care if the planet is trashed as long as it doesn't happen within their own lifetimes.
Since the weights are subjective, it is a logical impossibility for one of them to be objectively inferior or superior.
Agreed on public transport being the real solution, but BEVs will be much cheaper (than ICEs) in the long run - they have far fewer moving parts, and they're only near the beginning of their learning curve, unlike ICE cars which have been expensively mass-produced for over a century at this point; they're not getting much cheaper.
but BEVs will be much cheaper (than ICEs) in the long run
That presupposes leaps of improvements in battery technology and battery recycling. Right now, the maintenance cost of a BEV is roughly $1,000 per year on battery replacement costs alone, and while I'm sure those costs will go down over time, they need to drop by 90% to be cost-competitive with ICE cars. That requires new materials that aren't on the science horizon yet, FAFAIK.
You should buy more reliable vehicles, then, if you care about maintenance costs. Ignoring tires, my maintenance budget for my daily is about $200/year, and including them, averages ~$300/year. With above average mileage per year.
Life is full of trade-offs: if I did that, I'd have to carry a loan, which would in turn require a more expensive insurance policy, and then I'd be committed to a greater monthly outlay for the vehicle's financial maintenance than I typically have to expend for its physical maintenance. That kind of leverage probably makes sense for people who have a car at the center of their life, but that's not a way I'd like to live, so I accept the occasional mechanic's bill as the price of greater flexibility in my life as a whole.
For sure there are - I currently drive a '96 Toyota T100, which I bought for $5500 a few years back. It is reliable as hell, but the miles take their toll, and one must keep up with the maintenance. Timing belt, water pump, brake calipers, starter motor, etc... they wear out, and it adds up; but it still costs less overall than a newer car would.
I've done plenty of wrenching in my time, out of necessity and enjoyment alike (used to do a lot of jeeping, then motorcycling), though these days I usually prefer to employ professionals. That's why I prefer older vehicles I can afford to buy outright: I can trade time against money, depending on which I happen to have more of at the moment, instead of being locked in to the fixed monthly expense I'd have with a low-mileage car.
Timing belt is a 10 year maintenance item. ~1000 dollars mostly labor
Waterpump is replaced at the same time as the timing belt, and they rarely fail now a days. ~ 300 bucks for one as added part during the timing belt labor
I assume you are talking about brake pads as calipers rarely fail, 5-7 year maintenance interval, easy DIY job ~500 for a set of 4.
Starter motors also very rarely fail I've had the same one for 20 years in my rx8 hpde toy. Even still they are ~200 bucks and literally 2 bolts and 30 minutes of time.
We havent even hit 2000 dollars yet in critical maintenance over 10 years. If you actually knew anything about wrenching you wouldn't be saying newer cars are easier and cheaper to work on either. I dont know how you are doing 1000/ year on maintenance on an ICE but then again you presumably offroad " jeeping " which would make your experience an outlier on what commuter cars actually experience for yearly maintenance.
You asserted that ICE maintenance is cost prohibitive, but when I break down the cost its called nitpicking? New car note cheaper than maintenance. Yeah youre a wrenchlet. bye
Someone quoted a figure for electric car maintenance, as a downside to the technology. I remarked that this actually sounded pretty good, relative to my experience with ICE cars. Someone else observed that I could choose to buy cars with a lower maintenance cost. I agreed that this was true but explained why I prefer to do things the way I do. Then you came along with a chip on your shoulder and started griping, for reasons known only to yourself.
>Someone quoted a figure for electric car maintenance, as a downside to the technology.
It is a downside compared to ICE maintenance which is significantly lower.
>Life is full of trade-offs: if I did that, I'd have to carry a loan
to which I replied there are plenty of cars sub 10K which you wouldnt need a loan for and that you could easily maintain for less than 1000/year
>I remarked that this actually sounded pretty good, relative to my experience with ICE cars
When I broke down the cost of the maintenance items YOU listed as over 1000/year over 10 years I said that those items you listed dont need maintenance every year, and the cost of replacing them is far less than 1000 dollars a year. To which you replied that I was nitpicking
> Then you came along with a chip on your shoulder and started griping, for reasons known only to yourself.
Im not griping I am just telling you that you are wrong when you say that 13k/10 years is cheaper than the maintenance items you listed. Just like the other guy said.
Then again you own a jeep and you know what they say about jeep: Just Empty Every Pocket :P
>That presupposes leaps of improvements in battery technology and battery recycling.
No, it's just basic extrapolation of the learning curve of EVs compared to ICEs. Even if the battery stays the same price, the fact is that the battery is only ~$5000 in price out of a $30k vehicle. The other 5/6ths of the cost have room to drop. Not to mention, the battery cells might not be new but the battery pack (i.e. the big box that you put all the battery cylinders/rectangles into) is new.
>they need to drop by 90% to be cost-competitive with ICE cars.
lolwut
>the maintenance cost of a BEV is roughly $1,000 per year on battery replacement costs alone
Maybe do some research before proudly displaying your ignorance for everyone to see? A replacement battery for everyone's favourite yardstick costs (from [0], the first search result):
Anywhere around $13,000-$20,000 for Models S
At least $14,000 for a Model X premium SUV
At least $13,000 for a Model 3 entry-level sedan
No matter the model or manufacturer, all EV batteries last for 10-20 years
> Not to mention most grids being nowhere near able to support the entire population of car drivers fast-charging their cars during rush hour.
Feels a bit like a straw man. Most commuters aren't extending beyond the range of their vehicle for work commutes, and would charge at home or office on solar. I agree they should not be sold as though there are no trade offs, but after extensive research it feels that for a primarily commuter scenario, never having to stop for gas, charging at home, etc, would be not only practical but actually superior. I frequently have to gas up mid week and with a busy job and kids, it is an actual hassle that would be nice to be a nice upgrade.
Mass transit is fine in the tiny fraction of areas where there's sufficient population density to make it viable. The total area of major metro areas in the US is something like 110,000 sq mi, or slightly larger than Colorado. What are your proposals for the rest of the country?
Rail works just fine in the suburbs of Sydney, Australia. It's not great, but it's still cheaper than cars.
Besides, if you care about costs then suburbs/exurbs are fundamentally uneconomical in general - most of the cost of housing comes from the land, of which suburbs are fundamentally wasteful. Literally everything there is (relatively) uneconomical, and is only widespread because the alternative is literally illegal.
Most of the cost of housing absolutely does not come from land except in massively overpopulated cesspits. Proof: a 1600 sq foot single family home on an acre of land is going for approximately $350k here currently. At current land valuation $30k of that is the lot. I live 15 minutes away from one of Apple's satellite offices so we aren't talking a ghost town in Nevada either. Cities suck, as does the expectation that everyone crowd into one.
If you only include sufficiently dense areas, what percentage of the population do you get? I suspect it's still high enough to make a big difference.
And, honestly, I think some number of people would be willing to move into denser areas if there was good transit, so it's a problem that might work to solve itself in time.
ArcGIS or other geospatial program and access to quality population density polygons via r/datahoarders or other community that can point out sources for you.
(and recommend tooling - PostGIS is likely ok for this kind of thing without too much effort (fingers crossed))
It's a learning curve if you haven't done such things before, perhaps worth it if such questions interest you.
You'll also be doing some seat of the pants Fermi estimations so it's be handy to run your thoughts past others that are into that kind of thing.
It's uneconomical only where little used. The conundrum for suburbs is not to put bus lines or trams in, but to get people to switch. Once/where widely used, these services pay for themselves. But an empty bus costs more to run than one single-occupant SUV, that's true. And it can never match the "convenience".
> While BEVs have a lot of benefits, they are still objectively inferior to ICE vehicles.
This hasn't been true for a couple of years. China is an excellent example of that, its market flipped to EVs virtually overnight once the benefits of EVs became clear. Last year, 48% of all the new cars sold in China were EVs, and this year it's projected to be around 60%.
> The real solution is public transit
No, it's not. Public transit is nothing but a distilled misery concentrator. Transit is also _not_ more CO2 effective than small-to-medium EVs when the carbon footprint of their _drivers_ is taken into the account.
>You need extra energy to power the CCS, and to store the captured CO2.
>That's not practical on any airliner. One kilo of jet fuel produces about 3.5x its weight in CO2.
Carbon capture includes direct air capture, which doesn't come with any weight constraints.
>The solution to aviation is "fly less", also "don't air-ship fresh produce which can be moved by sea or road" (and if it can't, don't ship it).
Any solution that's predicated on "do it less" is going to be DOA politically. The options available voters aren't "electric planes" or "don't fly", they're "do something" or "do nothing". Telling people they're going to have to make upfront sacrifices for vague future benefits is going to be a losing proposition politically. Any solution to climate change is going to have to come from technological advances, not getting people to consume less. US emissions per capita has dropped more than 25% since 1990[1]. That's not because people ate 25% less meat or drove 25% less.
> Any solution that's predicated on "do it less" is going to be DOA politically.
I agree with your analysis. The problem here is if we're both right society is fucked, end of story. There are no convenient solutions to replacing our species primary mode of energy generation and mobility, that drives an industry that is quite literally the hub around which the entirety of the rest of the global economy revolves. Available credible solutions all require a kind of political will not seen in several generations.
What we need to do is to continue scale renewables so they become cheap enough to by merit be the energy input for the hard to decarbonize fossil energy/feedstock use cases.
See fossil fuels like todays version of the piston steam engine used in for example locomotives.
It works but is inefficient and expensive to maintain compared to ICEs or gas turbines.
Nope. We want renewables to be a solution but they're all predicated on various flavors of non-renewable unobtanium and do literally nothing to address (among other things) global agriculture's absolute dependence upon petrochemical inputs or global logistics as a concept. The actual solution would be aggressive managed degrowth in conjunction with renewables and ag-based sequestration projects. The irony here is degrowth is absolutely guaranteed at this point, the only question is does it happen in a managed and planned fashion or does society collapse. All current evidence suggests the latter.
Please do tell me which "minerals" we are lacking for the renewable transition.
Did you even read the Hydrogen Ladder?
Fertilizer sits at the top as "must be hydrogen based with no real alternatives". It is one of the hardest sectors to decarbonize since we need to get the price of renewable based fertilizer to be equivalent of todays fossil based one.
Then just typical degrowth. Maybe we should cull the top 10% of the world? Starting with you and me?
Copper, for one. Go have a look at what kind of overhaul to the global transmission grid's required to meet projected growth and get back to me with your prospectus for mining the asteroid belt. Ironically individuals in highly specialized economic niches living in high tech societies are going to have it a lot worse than more self-sufficient agrarian arrangements so odds are yeah, you and me, after the water wars have done their work globally of course.
Add the price of that on a flight ticket (which we ultimately have to anyway) and we'd be helping address the problem already, before the tech is even deployed.
And the next 35 years - to 2060 - have to be a much steeper reduction than 25%, or the 35 years after that will, one way or another, represent a _forceful_ reduction of a lot more than 25%.
Finally is that 25% on a production or consumption basis? Offshoring and deindustrialisation are not trends that are likely to continue, again more for political reasons than anything else.
>Add the price of that on a flight ticket (which we ultimately have to anyway) and we'd be helping address the problem already, before the tech is even deployed.
It's $1000/ton today, which works out to a 70% price increase for a new york to london flight. I disagree that would "address the problem already, before the tech is even deployed", because zero chance anyone would vote for it in the first place. That's where technological advancement comes in. Startups claim they can hit $250-$350/ton by 2030[1], which is a much more manageable 21% increase.
>Finally is that 25% on a production or consumption basis? Offshoring and deindustrialisation are not trends that are likely to continue, again more for political reasons than anything else.
It's around 17% on a trade basis[2], but the point stands. Americans haven't eaten 17% less meat, drove 17% less, or bought 17% less stuff.
The hard choice has been made. The world has decided to accept climate change in order to continue using fossil fuels. It's just not the choice you (or I) want.
Unfortunately Americans as a whole would rather have climate change than lifestyle change. That’s a good portion of why Trump is president now. And most countries are in the same position, or want lifestyle change in the sense of using more energy.
If technology can’t do it, more climate change is inevitable.
Then they presumably understand climate change in terms of occasional weather disasters and hot summers and not, say, twenty years of chronic and persistent inflation followed by actual food shortages.
While I think some lifestyle changes are a good idea:
There's so much we can convert to renewable and electric power without any meaningful lifestyle changes or even a particularly large amount of money relative to the size of the industries involved.
And for the rest, it would cost money to keep the same lifestyle, but GDP per capita keeps rising and if you hold lifestyle constant then that gives you lots of money to spend on big goals.
Luckily CO2 is fairly fungible. Instead of the airplane capturing its own CO2 we can just capture 3.5t CO2 on the ground for every ton of jet fuel fueled into an airplane.
> we can just capture 3.5t CO2 on the ground for every ton of jet fuel fueled into an airplane
Entropy makes one of these much easier. For planes, synthetic jet fuel is the answer.
The sign we’re taking jet emissions seriously will be when someone drops the flygskam and hydrogen shtick and passes a synthetic-fuel mandate on private jets. (Less than 3x the cost in America [1].)
If the entire world's electric supply isn't decarbonised at that point then that money would be better spent on deploying renewables somewhere without a 100% clean grid as the article says or electrifying heat or industry.
That has issues with proving the deployment actually displaces carbon but carbon capture has similar issues proving that the carbon is actually permanently removed.
That's the thing. All of these mitigations are meaningless if we still have vast industries predicated on burning fossil carbon.
And once we've eliminated the burning of fossil carbon, the mitigations are unnecessary. Nature will gradually find an equilibrium, and anything we do to speed it up (even removing carbon) is as likely to cause harm as good.
Maybe there is a future where we have so much extra renewables that we can think about trying to undo what we've done. But any effort spent on it now feels like an attempt to decrease the need to eliminate fossil fuels as fast as possible.
I don't think the idea is to have the capturing machinery on the plane itself. The idea is to have capture machinery on the ground, offsetting the carbon released by the plane.
That's right, but then you have to capture it from atmospheric concentrations (430ppm) rather than directly from a waste gas stream at a much higher concentration.
It can be done but the economics don't look good right now. Possible very cheap solar energy in desert regions can change that a bit. Australia have been trying but they didn't get very far with it yet, granted there is still room for solar to get cheaper again.
Aviation fuel has a trivial replacement in renewable biofuels, and three nontrivial replacements in liquid hydrogen combustion, liquid hydrogen fuel cells, and for short flights in battery power.
Biofuels as in from farming? Modern farming just turns oil into crops, so turning the crops back into oil is a non-solution. The only viable current biofuels work by turn leftover waste matter into fuel - in other words, recycling.
Also, any farming done for primary energy is farming not done for food.
Farming does not need to be that way. It's very amenable to electrification.
Long haul aviation needs high energy density.
You have heard critiques about farming that focus on very specific uses of corn and soybean under conventional American agribusiness, and while these are by no means the best biofuel feed stocks or the best harvesting methods, the low ROE is irrelevant if you are willing to feed in arbitrary quantities of cheap solar power to get precious liquid hydrocarbons out.
Flying contributes only 2.5% to global carbon emissions and it is one of the applications where hydrocarbons are least replaceable - bar hydrogen. It is dramatically easier to shift over anything that doesn't have to fight gravity, so flying will likely decarbonize last.
Maybe I'm just stupid but if all the planes in the world used biofuels, wouldn't that mean that flying is net-zero carbon (at least as it comes to fuel consumption)?
Like you do your flying, release CO2, but that CO2 gets captured again... I mean that doesn't sound bad, right?
It's not going to reduce the level of CO2 in the air right now, but it would stop further increases... which, mathematically, seems to be the same thing as if we kept the status quo and did something else to reduce CO2 output? What am I missing?
Fertilizer production is dominated (in energy terms) by nitrogen fertilizer, and that's made with hydrogen. Hydrogen would come from electrolysis, and driving that with PV is very likely to be feasible, especially with cheap Chinese electrolysers.
While Ammonia generation "involves just nitrogen and hydrogen", the crux is that it requires high temperature. Haber-Bosch doesn't do at ambient - something like 800°C IIRC. And the heating for such is done by burning something (coal decades ago, gas now).
For many "ordinary" chemicals, the so-called process temperature is the challenge with carbon-free. Not dissimilar from steel or aluminium making (melt the ore first before reducing it).
Haber-Bosch operates at 350-550 C. The energy needed is in compressing the gases, and (at lower pressure) refrigeration to separate ammonia. These are work inputs, and all can be provided by PV generated electricity. At pressure, the ammonia production reaction is exothermic, so ammonia production is a source of heat, not a consumer of heat.
"Generally, in the ammonia synthesis loop there is no need for an external heat source because the ammonia
synthesis reaction is exothermic. The produced heat from the reaction is a high-valued source which can be
recovered to satisfy the temperature requirements of the converter feed-stream and to generate high pressure
steam for use in other plant processes. In modern plants, the compressors of the synthesis loop (the
syngas/recycle compressors as well as the ammonia refrigeration compressor) are usually centrifugal ones
driven by steam turbines which work with the produced steam from the recovered waste heat available
within the plant (European Fertilizer Manufacturers’ Association (EFMA), 2000). Overall, electricity
consumption values of ~0.32 to ~0.64 kWh/kg-NH3 have been reported in literature for the synthesis loop,
depending on the variations in the syngas production pressure, synthesis loop pressure and compression
efficiencies (X. Liu et al., 2020)."
Note that the figure given there is an order of magnitude less than the electrical energy needed to make the necessary hydrogen by electrolysis.
This was intuitively obvious already, but there's still great value is having proper research prove this too. Anyone building an argument on "carbon capture is more costly" so far had the burden of proving this, even if it is intuitively obvious. Now they can cite existing research and move on with their point.
I feel like probably not much has changed. People, who will listen and think a little for themselves, will already be able to come to the conclusion, that it is better not to put the CO2 out in the first place. And those who are typically pretending to only not believe it because one cannot provide a research article, are very likely to just try to discredit the research. Some people are just so lost, that you cannot change their mind with facts, whatever those facts are, and whatever you do. They do not want to. They want you to spend more time and effort on them than is proportionate.
Putting CO2 out in the first place is how the global economy got to where it is today. It's better not to put CO2 out in the first place except for when it makes more economic sense. There are tradeoffs involved. To the extent renewables can replace outputting greenhouse gases, then that makes more sense. But where they still can't, then it doesn't make sense. And we likely will still need to remove some of that CO2 in the future.
Arguing with someone who starts demanding your obvious claim has the burden of proof is useless. Any proof you offer is going to contain an obvious step or assumption and they demand proof for that too.
I’m not going to argue the economics of it but the co2 is typically assumed to mineralise when injected into rocks like basalts ands peridotites which are the primary targets for co2 sequestration. It’s not stored highly pressurised under ground. It is absorbed by the rocks. This has been demonstrated in both the lab and the environment.
This is my understanding as well. And the logistics of doing this can be simplified by re-using oil and gas facilities. Regardless of your feelings and levels of skepticism about oil and gas, this seems like the most straight-forward and low-energy path forward to me.
Currently the largest global carbon capture project in practice is little more than green washing, it's a large Australasian LNG field that will pump back a tiny percentage of the CO2 released by the projects outputs.
The required scale of carbon capture to offset our current annual consumption is huge, we extract on the order of a cubic mile of oil per annum: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Cubic_Mile_of_Oil
the buildout and the additional energy required to address that is at the scale of the existing oil industry with no profit to be had.
I think it's weird to think of carbon capture and storage as some sort of panacea for climate change. I think it can be a valuable technology that works towards that effort and when combined with reduction in carbon output through greening other technologies (e.g., shipping, airlines, converting to green energy resources, greener concrete) then it will be fine.
The problem is everyone is looking for some solution that is as cheap as burning coal and oil. Maybe there isn't any solution. Maybe if we desire to mitigate climate change that will come at a cost that changes our way of life.
My favourite solution was in the 2006 ipcc report for recommendations for carbon storage and one is liquifying it and dumping it in the Mariana Trench. Where it would stay for up to 300 years. The best part is that they plainly say it will simply be someone else’s problem so that’s a reason that could go in the pro column of deciding to do this or not haha.
This assumes that we reverse the reaction. That does not need to be the case. We can put it back into the ground. It can either stay where natgas or crude used to be or we can basically turn that into rock (don’t know details but there is a process to do that). Or it can be put in salt caverns.
Either way we still need to capture the CO and CO2 from flue gas which is costly even from point sources and way worse from DAC. Unless we do oxyburning or fosil fuels which is a hack but you need a source of cheap oxygen which we don’t have unless we dramatically scale up electrolysis.
> Anyone who isn't aware of this is either - Lying. - Paid by the oil industry. - Tricked by the oil industry.
The issue isn't whether or not it's feasible now.
Reducing usage of fossil fuels is a prisoner's dilemma problem... No country is going to do it if it hurts them in any way.
Also, even if we stopped using all fossil fuels today, cold Turkey, lots of damage is already done. Carbon capture is the only potential way to reverse this and that alone is worth investing in.
It might not be feasible today but that doesn't mean it won't be feasible in 50 years...
>All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.
That's just not true. While the conclusion may be correct (about it not being feasible), it's something that would depend on more that just this first-principles analysis. Remember, the goal is only that the output is "not atmospheric CO2". So that means it could be CO2 somewhere else, or some lower energy state of the carbon, or even a higher energy state that isn't as high as the fuel that was burned to produce it.
And while, again, those methods might not be feasible, it depends on much more than the (false) premise that the only way involves completely reversing whatever process was originally used to extract the energy.
Carbon has a few other molecules it likes to bind to, but narrowing it down to what is actually abundant limits you to basically oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. of those, two of them are what we burned, and one of them is our problem.
Someone else pointed out, though, that you can burn hydrocarbon (carbon and hydrogen chains, aka methane and oil) and turn it into coal (carbon-carbon).
And the number one problem that any method of carbon capture that involves moving things around, is that you have to add the carbon expenditure of that transportation into the mix. You wanna create charcoal and spread it over crop fields? You then have to transfer that charcoal. You want to embed CO2 in concrete and bury the concrete? You have to move the concrete. (You can use it for building, but there's additional infrastructure for transporting the CO2 to the concrete or vice-versa there as well.)
So many of the "barely break even" concepts don't even come close due to this transportation factor. Even if you use solar to generate electricity to power this transportation, we don't have excess solar yet - that's capacity that's being used for this new expense, not being used to offset existing expenses.
That said, I'm hopeful that research, refinement, and excess renewable grid capacity will eventually make it worthwhile to do this in addition to reducing our fossil fuel usage, but we just _gotta_ reduce our fossil fuel usage. It's not negotiable anymore, and heck, never was.
If you're doing the book-keeping on that stuff, though, comparing to the status quo.. that charcoal that is on the crops used to be some fertilizer that also was being transported, right?
You have to be careful not to double-count progress but if you consider things relative to status quos, then you're still looking at progress right? Like improvements are still good, right?
Like if you're dead set on building a building, you're gonna need concrete no matter what. Might as well use "good" concrete I guess? Though there's likely not much magic to where building the building _reduces_ CO2 net.
It's all in the details, not really as simple as the napkin math. The CO2 capture step obviously doesn't use ALL the energy released from burning the fuel. You're not converting the CO2 back into fuel, just capturing it and sequestering it somehow. It's a question of capital and operating expense (and risks) of the process overall.
> But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid.
This is still the best option, but even after having spent over 20 years in environmentalism in various aspects we have to admit that carbon-free is simply unattainable panacea for a myriad of reasons that go far beyond the scope of this post; but it is this form of absolutism that is the biggest hindrance from my POV--outside of the stalemates and endless impasse created by tribal/identity politics, but they often benefit from the status quo.
The truth is that methane is and remains the the biggest threat in terms of 'carbon chains,' and with a focus on market based solutions to capture and re-purpose these leaks/vents to ancillary purposes (Bitcoin mining proved the concept) and a continued expansion in plant/tree cultivation of a myriad of cultivars we would be better suited than ANYTHING that has been offered to date.
The perpetual need to try to go headlong for a one-size-fits-all approach is what has allowed us to have all the technology we need to start to reverse these systemic issues to our biosphere but be left at a constant dead-end while we wait for corporate elites and their political class cohorts to delay progress.
Sidenote: Bio-char is very useful, I worked with Biodyanimc farmers with BSc in hand on this topic in EU who were traveling to Africa to promote the use of bio-char and it's benefits to help subsistence farmers to be able to support and eventually scale their farms; while at the same time the Bitcoin community via Bit-pesa was helping with micro/small loans to said farmers that allowed for (gradual) progress.
And it is this type of seemingly diametrically opposed communities need to be bridged in order for things to actual work.
2/3 of all global investment in the energy sector is going to renewables and storage.
It is happening, but only started to truly kick off on its own in the past couple of years.
Given the lifespan of grid generation assets even a 3% increase in electricity mix per year will lead to near 100% renewable penetration when it reaches saturation.
Also, with renewable energy sources, the problem is not manufacturing energy per se but getting the energy where and when you want.
For example, you could run a gas turbine in Germany in winter at night during a spike of the consumption and run carbon capture on a desert during the day
In a sense you use atmosphere as battery/transportation system.
I am not saying that this must make sense but this is far more complex than napkin math.
My napkin math last time I did it said that if we took the current annual production of solar panels and used it to built solar farms in the world's subtropical deserts and built carbon direct air capture (DAC) plants in those deserts powered by those solar farms (using the energy requirements per kg of capture that current DAC plants achieve), and continued doing this each year, in around 200 years we'd be removing about 10% more CO2 per year than we'd be emitting assuming that the human population peaks as expected somewhere in the 10-11 billion range and the per capita CO2 emissions do not go much higher than they are now.
Using the entire current annual production of solar panels for this is clearly impractical now, but if production of solar panels continues its current growth trends for several more years we should reach a point where diverting an amount equal to current production might be practical.
All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.
In addition to the chemistry other people have mentioned -- if we burn hydrocarbons and then capture carbon we're still net positive H -> H2O, capturing carbon as carbonate rocks can be less expensive than splitting CO2 to C and O2, etc -- most serious proposals for carbon capture have involved using cheap electricity, e.g. solar power in the middle of the day.
It's quite possible that using cheap midday electricity to generate methane (which can be easily stored in large quantities) which is then burned in gas "peakers" when power is expensive would be economically profitable despite not being thermodynamically profitable.
> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.
I think you're forgetting location and energy sources are
a big factor here. Nobody is suggesting burning carbon to capture carbon. If you could somehow e.g. use nuclear power in the middle of the continent to capture carbon emitted across the world - that would be incredibly useful, even if you had to put in twice as much power as you had obtained originally.
(I am not suggesting carbon capture is a particularly good idea, just pointing out that your napkin math ignores some key factors.)
> All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.
Hmm. Actually. I don’t think this is quite “back of the napkin math,” which usually involves some figures, if just only very rough ones with lots of rounding.
This seems more like an argument from basic principle in the style of “I’ll reject any proposal of a perpetual motion machine because, however clever, it fundamentally can’t produce power.” And I don’t think your fundamental principle here really is correct actually.
Some ideas around carbon capture are basically to do a chemical process that releases some energy, and then make sure the byproducts don’t escape, and bury them underground, right? There’s no fundamental reason that this should be impossible. I mean it’s obviously possible to take a log, burn it in a very big airtight metal box (very big, so there’s enough oxygen in there to fully burn the thing), the box will heat up, and then the byproducts will all be in the box, so you just don’t open it. This is a silly contraption but there’s obviously no fundamental law of physics being violated, so it must not be physically impossible.
I’m unhappy to write this because I agree with your conclusion. Carbon capture is mostly bullshit. But it is bullshit for complicated reasons, not simple or fundamental ones, I think.
Also nitrogen fertilizer is produced using fossil fuel derived hydrogen. Making green fertilizer from the air is possible but requires a 10x increase in energy input into a process that is already one of the worlds most energy intensive industries.
I haven't run any numbers but I suspect they're referring to the energy cost of cracking water for hydrogen Vs. the energy costs of bleeding off and saving hydrogen as a side product from LNG and hydrocarben wells.
Even that makes no sense. Turning methane in electrical power is about 60% efficient in combined cycle plants. Electrolysers are at least 50% efficient. Where is this 10x coming from?
Hmm, I haven't chased that detail down myselg (busy ATM), but I strongly suspect the area intended was that of mainland Australia (or, close to equivilantly, the area of mainland lower 48 contiguous USofA).
Certainly a detail worth checking, farmland in Australia is much less than the area of Australia.
> Better keep that pressure chamber leakproof for 1000 years
It seems highly unlikely that even 100 years from now we'll be net positive on CO2 release into the atmosphere. Renewables are a thing, and we're making significant progress.
So once we're net negative, it'll be up to us to figure out how much CO2 to release, but it seems a certainty that long before 1000 years we will no longer need to store any of the captured carbon.
This is irrelevant; the total energy cycle of a green grid can be abstracted as fossil_production + green_production + carbon_capture_consumption + all_other_uses. Since fossil_production < carbon_capture_consumption it is best to simply set them both to zero
It really doesn't require math as sophisticated as the napkin kind.
Thermodynamics tell the whole story and it's so unfavorable that the actual range of achievable costs for energy input to DAC can vary wildly, and in relation to the prevailing market value of energy in general which is subject to major variation itself.
And still none of the actual dollar amounts really matter and can be effectively canceled so the moving target component can be conveniently overlooked numerically.
It simply requires the cost of the energy input to be a small fraction of the actual market value of that energy.
Whether or not fossil fuels are the primary factor which sets the market value at the time.
DAC only really works with remarkable effectiveness when the cost of the energy input approaches zero relative to its market value.
And once you've got that low cost supply of energy, then the "sustainability" of the process depends on your continued inability to directly sell your unmatched low-cost energy wholesale, and your commitment to forego dramatic multiples which dwarf the expectations of most shareholders of the oil companies themselves.
An Australia's worth of kelp farms in the deep ocean might do it too. Tricky parts are supplying the nitrogen fertilizer (upwelling might be enough), automating planting/harvesting (many drones on a wire probably) and fuel costs (offshore rig-based ideally). Sinking the kelp may keep the CO2 on the ocean floor long enough to do the trick, or sink packs of rotting kelp in kelp-plastic membranes for much longer. Bonus is this is all basically bio-fuel, so you're basically growing a renewable oil patch. Drawdown til targets are hit and then you can burn or eat the rest. Also bonus: dampens waves, so seastead potential. Recommended: attach simple motors to the anchored tethers, sinking kelp 30m down during storms or nearby ships to avoid big wave damage and the deepest hulls. Or keep it at that level for just slower growth.
Basic thermodynamics say atmospheric carbon capture will be more expensive than switching to renewables.
However, we’re already committed to carbon capture because corrupt politicians decided not to switch to renewables in the 1980’s, and will continue to block them for at least another decade (if we only want to wait another ten years to take action, we’ll need to somehow magically replace Trump with democrats tomorrow).
Storing the CO2 after it's been separated is the easy part. Already CO2 is regularly injected underground to enhance oil extraction, and the CO2 sequestered is much greater than the CO2 released by burning the oil.
wrong. many of the energy options that are claimed to be extremely cheap and that they lean on - wind and solar particularly - aren't as cheap as they're made out to be. e.g. people love to cite Lazard's LCOE projections, which undershoot actual cost, overshoot production, and undershoot wear and tear (esp. on solar).
storage numbers also often suck. frankly, hydrocarbons are probably a better option to synthesize and store than something like lithium-ion batteries. and storage becomes a much bigger concern if one considers running a grid primarily on inconsistent renewables rather than using them as auxiliary power sources. plus your magical all-green grid still needs gas peakers most likely unless you massively overbuild that storage and generation.
Lithium ion batteries have an efficiency of around 99%. They are also not the only form of energy storage system or battery technology used for ESS.
The most efficient fossil fuel power plants (combined cycle plants that burn natural gas to power a generator driven by a turbine, and then use the heat from the exhaust to generate steam in a second turbine) have an efficiency of about 60%. That doesn't even begin to address the inefficiency in "synthesizing" "hydrocarbons." Electrolysis, for example, is less than 95%.
If you have such a fundamental ignorance then you are not remotely qualified to be making comments like "wind and solar are more expensive than they're made out to be!"
You must know better than all those silly grid and solar/wind farm operators! You should ring them up and tell them how stupid they are to be using solar and wind, how they have no idea what it's actually costing them!
And no, green power is not "unreliable." Hilariously, during the massive Texas blackouts during the ice storms, wind and solar were just about the only power sources still working...
That German power system you alt-righters love to shriek about for being stupid for going green? They have one fifth the outage rate the US does. As they massively increased their green power sources, their grid reliability went up. https://e360.yale.edu/features/three-myths-about-renewable-e...
Several countries in Europe have periods where their grids are entirely powered by renewables. But suuuuure, "magical green power" is unreliable.
you are the one guilty of either fundamental misunderstandings or willful ignorance. producing enough lithium-ion storage would be insanely expensive at anything even close to current prices. and lithium-ion batteries suffer from wear, more or less depending on the chemistry, but all do.
you are wrong. green power is unreliable in the sense that it doesn’t produce constant load. i am asking you nicely to open one book and learn about the duck curve, then go analyze what storage at grid scale would actually cost.
you’re rephrasing what i said in an aggro manner: running temporarily off renewables doesn’t change the need for storage and peakers. all the countries i know of who’ve done that have much, much lower energy consumption and are much smaller than America.
not sure where you got this alt-right allegation, but please go learn some more about this topic. in the mean time, know your place and mind your manners.
I'm sorry, but it's clear from your statements that you don't know what you're talking about.
> capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas from underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better keep that pressure chamber cool and leakproof for 1000 years with yearly maintenance. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free)
CO2 is being (as in right now, yes) stored as a supercritical fluid inside saline aquifers deep under the seabed. These reservoirs are known to be leakproof, since they've already been holding pressurized fluids for millions of years. Yes, there is a maximum limit of how much you can pump down, and yes there is a need to achieve good seal on plugging and abandonment. But that's the same as with any other subsea oil & gas well, it's a solved problem.
Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place.
Now it really annoys me thay researchers are still putting out papers like this, comparing irrelevant strawman scenarios and pretending it's insightful. There is extremely broad consensus that we will need all the good solutions simultaneously. Stop beating a dead horse.
Furthermore, since we've been dragging our heels on climate change, even if we achieve extremely quick shift to 100% renewables by 2040, we will need CO2 removal from the atmosphere to achieve net negative emissions.
To make an analogy, it won't be enough to cut our spending to match our income, we then need to also pay back our old debts.
> Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place.
This is survivor bias. We only see the sites where it didn't leak too much, and extract from it. The sites that leaked, we don't hear about them (no oil to extract). In fact, a quick search shows that there are many leaking sites (both on land and under the oceans). The argument you present is a case of survivor bias, especially on the time scale of multiple millions years.
> surely you see that this line of reasoning leaves a little to be desired?
When responding to innumerate “napkin maths” and a sourceless speculation, on one hand, and a multibillion-dollar practice done by experts, on the other hand, no, not really.
I didn't make the initial post, and 'unsourced in this particular instance' doesn't mean there's no legitimate basis for OP's claims. To be clear, I'm not anti-CCS, but I have an environmental degree and based on my admittedly nonexpert opinion I agree with OP's assertion that it's not really a solution - it's a temporary measure at best.
But yeah I see your point - no multibillion dollar industry filled with experts has ever done anything ill-advised, futile, or environmentally damaging simply for profit. cough corn ethanol Can you imagine how the world would look if that were the case?
There are a number of scientific papers that are also skeptical about the long-term viability of underground CCS strategies but they're all paywalled so I didn't link them here, but you should seek them out yourself.
> Think about it - if these formations were not leakproof on geological scale, there wouldn't be any oil and gas for us to extract in the first place.
Leakproof to one substance doesn't necessarily mean leakproof to another. Heavy oil is hydrophobic and a less mobile, volatile molecule than CO2. Methane otoh is lighter.
That said, CO2 capture mostly works in scenarios where you have a highly concentrated stream AND can afford the weight and energy penalty of the capture apparatus. Good on big chemical/industrial plants, refineries and maybe gas power stations, and worth doing for that reason - industrial processes are some of the hardest to replace or avoid of the big emitters. Likely useless for vehicles and aircraft.
It's very hard to feed 8Bn people without a whole lot of Haber-Bosch though, and hard to do that without methane in, CO2 out. All the more reason to cut down on wasteful uses of both food and energy.
Supercritical CO2, which behaves rather similar to a liquid, is also hydrophobic, which is why it is one of the best solvents for extracting oils from mixtures with water, being now preferred to older, gasoline-like solvents, which were hard to eliminate after extraction (if the pressure is reduced, supercritical CO2 evaporates from mixtures).
Yeah, that's not how caprocks on geological formations work. It's not a matter of pore pressure (what porous media people call hydrophobicity). It's a matter of caprocks having zero intrisic permeability.
> CO2 is being (as in right now, yes) stored as a supercritical fluid inside saline aquifers deep under the seabed. These reservoirs are known to be leakproof since they've already been holding pressurized fluids for millions of years.
I simplified it a bit too much. CSS has been in use since the 1980s by the oil industry to push out more oil and natural gas from their wells. However, it is relatively small scale. I've seen proposals and demonstrations of saline aquifer projects, but I know of no currently operational such facility (and can not find it from light googling)
That the chambers could store methane or oil for 100k years is promising, sure, but it doesn't end there. Co2 is a smaller atom that has an easier time moving through small cracks. CO2 mixed with water is also a mild acid that can corrode different rock types.
Even if we had enough stable underground chambers, even if capturing the carbon and compressing it was free. How much could we even offset? We need a green grid first, not instead.
CO2 is not a smaller atom than CH4 or H2O, on the contrary. And CO2 injection in a saline aquifer in the Utsira formation has been ongoing since 1996, there's been hundreds of research papers on it and multiple seismic imaging studies to confirm permanent trapping.
> We need a green grid first, not instead.
We need to do all of the things at once, unfortunately. If we started investing heavily in renewables in the 1960s, maybe we would have had that luxury.
I’m also amazed people don’t talk more about reducing consumption than carbon capture.
It boggles my mind that a StarBucks coffee, drank in a few minutes involves a lined paper cup, plastic lid, plastic stopper, corrugated holder ring.
Using disposable plastic utensils in dine-in restaurants also bothers me.
All the energy spent to gather/create/transport the raw materials, produce the cup, etc, store it in a warehouse, transport to the restaurant… Seems massively inefficient for such a short use.
Yeah, a dishwasher isn’t free either but surely heating some water to clean reusable things is got to be much better than disposable trash.
Heck, compared to plastic ware and coffee cups, disposable plastic grocery bags almost seem amazingly better in terms of utility vs waste. (Less material)
There's no profit motive behind reducing consumption to lower emissions, so it's not a message being pushed by companies. It's obviously the easiest way for most people to reduce their environmental impact though, but it's always been very unpopular to tell people to 'spend less, save more.'
Because for many people reducing consumption reeks of poverty.
They've grown up in a world where everything just yells more! more! at them. It's the dominant paradigm of our times - growth above everything. Conspicuous consumption as a measure of wealth.
It's become so absurd that even the mere suggestion of improving efficiency - at the consumer level - is met with the outcry of "forcing people into poverty". We are rich, so we can afford to be wasteful. Not be wasteful means poverty.
I would also be careful with the claim that it is cheaper to wash, mugs are heavy and require the same: gather/create/transport the raw materials, produce the cup, etc, store it in a warehouse, transport to the restaurant. Periodically replacement of broken cups as well.
Silverware makes good sense as it is not usually subject to being broken, only lost or stolen.
(disclaimer that I manage a climate research group)
Jacobson (first author) can be a little touchy about criticism against 100% renewables (litigious), but I think the paper presents a false dichotomy.
Regardless of the conclusion, even if all energy infrastructure in the world fully decarbonized today, we are still on a path to high warming (in fact a large chunk of climate change is due to land use change and other factors). The IPCC (and most of the community) is pretty sure large scale carbon capture will be required under any future pathway to avoid catastrophic warming.
This is a complex subject, with a lot of competing interests from parties that sometimes partially align with the science and sometimes do not. E.g. O&G companies like to push carbon capture because it plays well and potentially increases their longevity... But that doesn't mean the ideal outcome is to drop carbon capture as part of the toolkit.
I work on decarbonising cement production, and the cement producers are betting _heavily_ on carbon capture as their "get out of jail free card".
I think they're likely wrong, but - again - it's not like we can just stop making concrete: all the solar farms, wind farms, dams, and assorted infrastructure that we need to combat climate change will be made with concrete, and there is currently no viable zero carbon alternative.
The grid is the easy bit, and will happen as a result of market forces, but those hard-to-abate sectors are really fricking hard.
Cement is actually great for renewable balancing, too.
You can store high grade heat for calcination via grid load leveling (eg use curtailed solar, which sometimes the grid will pay you to take, to preheat rocks). This allows solar to scale up to a larger fraction of the grid, win win.
Yes! Likewise for grinding: offload excess power to industrial plants so they can grind rocks when it's windy. If you look at the problem in the right way, a silo full of ground rock is just a battery.
A rock grinder is a significant capital investment, who is going to want to purchase that and leave it idle for a windy day?
What workforce is going to sign up for those jobs? "We will call you when the wind starts to blow, you need to be ready to start your shift within 30 minutes of the call."
Not at any scale that counts. There are a whole bunch of companies _trying_ to make zero carbon cement, but it's all very early stuff.
The lifetime of a cement plant is 30-50 years, and they cost 100-200M Euros to build, so even if there were a process that was ready to scale today, producing a cement that passed regulatory standards, we'd still be making some Portland cement into the 2070s.
Ergo, producers would like to stick a carbon-capture plant onto their kilns.
Yes, and we are on a path with less energy. We like to talk about renewables and extrapolate from their evolution in a world that is mostly fossil-fueled. But the truth is that it's not clear at all that renewables can scale to replace the fossil fuels. Actually it seems like they can't, realistically, totally replace them.
Instead of focusing on how to do carbon capture and keep living the way we are, we should focus on preparing society for the inevitable global-warming-in-a-world-with-less-energy. Which means we have to do less with less. AI is the exact opposite, so we are clearly accelerating in the other direction.
Carbon capture is interesting research, but if feels like it assumes a world with more energy than today (because you need energy for the capture), and clean. We're most likely not going there in the timeline we are looking at (the problems have already started, we don't have 200 years to discover a new energy).
AI energy use is a possible future risk if not addressed, but a much bigger problem we have is the massive wasteful fossils use in electricity generation (used for non-IT things) and transport.
Tackling AI comes automatically from the required policy to rapidly ramp down fossils use. (For example cap-and-trade applied to electricity market transferring the emissions quota to electricity prices)
I also think it's a useful tool, but the economics of carbon capture have to sustain the cost of developing these methods. Pointing consumerism in the right direction seems like the most effective way to drop carbon emissions from both a short and long term perspective. We need to "stop the bleed" before tackling anything else.
That's the strategy of startups like Terraform [0][1] which use green energy production to synthesize carbon fuels using direct air capture, which are on track to be cheaper than fossil fuels without subsidies within the next few years (e.g., definitely this decade). This will both displace more expensive fossil fuels from the market while letting us leverage existing carbon fuel infrastructure.
The profit motive creates a self-sustaining cycle of rapid expansion and iteration, which should drastically increase the efficiency per unit as well as the horizontal scale of DAC so that eventually we'll have exponentially more DAC installed and then you can decide what to do with all the excess carbon, sequestering it in whatever ways make sense.
Pipelining is probably required, and there is no one magic solution here.
It took solar 45 years to become low cost, and carbon capture will probably be just as difficult. If we did things one step at a time, carbon capture wouldn't be economical until ~2080, which is too late.
One approach would be a revenue-neutral carbon tax on extraction of sequestered carbon. And border carbon taxes for imports from countries who don't also have an internal carbon tax.
I don’t think something like that would ever fly in the US. In fact, the opposite is more likely. The drill-baby-drill mantra is going to push everything in exactly the opposite direction.
I think any solution will have to come from industry, not government.
Carbon capture is our money being used to pay oil industry. It is for enhanced oil recovery. It is straight up theft with environmental marketing!
Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year. Thats the equivalent of 2000 EVs.
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We pay in 8+ different ways for fossil fuels:
(1) Subsidies of trillions of dollars per year
(2) Ethanol and biodiesel subsidies
(3) Pay at the pump (or electricity)
(4) Pay for carbon capture to help oil companies extract more oil
(5) Pay for the consequences of climate change (a) increase of home insurance (b) bailouts of insurance and utility providers (c) dealing with the direct costs of climate change
(6) Health costs! Pollution is directly linked to every disease (except STIs?). Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Think of all the cancers, cardiovascular, metabolic, every biological systems.
(7) We pay a cost of other pollutants. Lead (thank you oil industry!), mercury (thank you coal industry!). Fish was a source of food, the best kind of renewable food, where you do absolutely nothing other than catch it! This source is now gone, there is so much mercury in fish, that all recommendations of fish are to limit the number of servings!
(8) Every person on the planet is paying a fossil fuel tax (the 5 above), to the super super rich. It is a transfer of wealth from everyone to about ~100 people. This money is used to buy all assets (real estate), stocks and everything else, enabling the super wealthy to extract every more wealth from every sector of the economy.
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Lets talk about the smallest tax (subsidy!) we pay one of the 6 listed about, ethanol subsidies. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total).
If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh)
To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.
But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).
A ton of {coal,petroleum,natural gas} emits {2.6,2.75,3.2} tons of CO2. 8.5 billion tons of coal burnt every year. 4000 billion cubic meters of Natural gas/year (~3000 billion tons - gemini), Global oil production is 4.5 billion metric tons/year. We'll need tens of millions of DAC plants!
I forgot to add one of the biggest costs. The cost of protecting oil flow. Defense budget is to protect oil assets worldwide, any disruption/blockage to oil flow will mean economy will tank, immediately. Oil companies should be shouldering this cost.
>But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted.
What are we wasting it on? Why will we suddenly stop wasting it when we switch to solar/wind?
I would think switching completely to solar/wind would massively increase the amount of wasted energy, because solar and wind energy production is quite variable, so to meet people's needs at low production times, we need to overprovision our production.
It's wasted as heat when converting to electricity, or as heat when running an engine, or wasted in low temp heating when a heat pump could be 4x as efficient.
Most predictions are that developed nations will double the amount of electricity they produce to electrify transport and heating but this will still reduce total energy due to the reduction in waste heat.
I had no idea about this until last year, when there was an eminent domain vs nimby struggle I heard about concerning putting co2 pipelines through farms for this purpose. I always thought carbon capture by machines was an impractical, but learning that what it actually is in practice is a way for govt subsidies to pay ethanol and oil companies and enable them to extract more oil.
I wouldn't be surprised if a significant majority of govt money spent on environmental efforts has been captured by industries and is being used to accelerate environmental harm. I only know that this is the case in the areas I'm familiar with. It's sad.
(9) A whole lot of geopolitical nonsense is caused by oil related entanglements. I won’t list them all because it would become a partisan bickering match, but surely whatever anybody’s political alignment, they can find a socialist, or theocratic, or authoritarian country that’s propped up by oil funding. Or a war partially motivated by oil. What’s the cost of bad international relations? How much of our defense budget should we bill to oil companies?
> Lets talk about the smallest tax (subsidy!) we pay one of the 6 listed about, ethanol subsidies. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total).
We are deep in the hole whether you want to "pay for the fossil industry" or not. If we don't push ourselves outside of the hole, we will stay there, forever.
And anyway, the best way to destroy the fossil fuel industry is to make synthetic fuels so cheap that nobody will want to use the bloody variety. We can easily do that with a carbon tax, but if people keep insisting on stopping carbon capture research, we won't.
> To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.
How many batteries are required to make that generated electricity available at night?
Depending on the the wind/nuclear mix in the grid possibly as low as zero.
But batteries are a very important innovation for power grids regardless of renewable energy goals. 50% of the job of an energy grid is just keeping the ac power supply stable when generation does exactly match consumption. Lithium batteries help smooth out spikes in demand over milliseconds and hours to save millions of dollars
Lithium grid scale storage is awesome no matter what happens with renewables.
Napkin maths would suggest something like 20% of a normal EV battery per household, so indeed a big investment, but perfectly reasonable. The harder part is that solar power production is much lower in the winter (depending on latitude), and seasonal battery storage is still a bit out of reach.
Zero. There are batteries that come in car shape and with wheels. People pay for them and there will be tens of millions, eventually 250m. They are mostly stationery (23+ hours/day) and are used 20 mins - 1 hour/day. They form a gigantic distributed storage reservoir, can absorb excess power (and get paid for it! energy prices go negative!) and supply power back to the grid when needed (and get paid again!).
You can talk about the inefficiency of CC, but this is nonsensical. It's a woefully inefficient means to retrieve carbon in terms of cost. It only makes sense as a means, under development, to reduce prevent buildup in the atmosphere. If it does not do that very well, then as you can imagine, the yields are not great either! If it does do that well, then it's a moot point whether these companies profit; what matters is improving climate. Can't have it both ways.
Why are the super wealthy happy to kill their grandkids children. I wonder about the mental gymnastics. Very few super wealthy seem to be doing much useful.
Who's going to pay for carbon capture? Definitely not the current polluters who benefit from fossil fuel prices that don't include the cost to clean that up. This is like a fossil fuel subsidy from a debt left to someone else to pay.
>Who's going to pay for carbon capture? Definitely not the current polluters who benefit from fossil fuel prices that don't include the cost to clean that up.
Carbon emitters through carbon pricing schemes. They already cover more than 20% of worldwide emissions, with China joining a few years ago.
Should get paid? Or should clean it up? The problem is this is energy and resources that could be spent on actually solving the problem at its source instead of finding ways to maintain the status quo.
The entity who caused the pollution should be responsible for paying to clean it up. For logistical purposes it might make sense to tax at the point of production/sale rather than actual emission, eg. taxes at gas stations rather than some sort of monitoring system on every car.
> The problem is this is energy and resources that could be spent on actually solving the problem at its source instead of finding ways to maintain the status quo.
If the alternatives are actually cheaper, the market will naturally work itself out, because polluters would be incentivized to switch. Nobody uses plastic utensils in place of reusable ones, not because the government banned them, but because everyone knows the latter are so much cheaper.
You literally can't just "clean it up" it's not possible. This is there American hyper-individualistic mindset at work. The problem and solution is cut and dry, anything else is a comfortable lie.
>You literally can't just "clean it up" it's not possible.
explain? at least with carbon since it's fungible and global it's probably the easiest to clean up, compared to exxon trying to clean an oil spill or whatever.
The difference here is that it's not deposit to encourage recycling, it's just a tax, and it's not a discrete thing you're getting taxed on, it's everything. It's costing everybody more and people are being paid twice. I'm thinking especially of the companies trying to sequester carbon in the wells they empty - they end up making money both ways.
>The difference here is that it's not deposit to encourage recycling, it's just a tax,
It's a tax to encourage the alternatives. If an electric car costs more than an ICE car, then taxing ICE cars through a carbon tax will make the electric car more attractive, at least on the margins.
> It's costing everybody more and people are being paid twice. I'm thinking especially of the companies trying to sequester carbon in the wells they empty - they end up making money both ways.
Similar logic to the above applies. Oil companies might be able to charge more for a barrel of oil, but it's not like that barrel of oil is suddenly more useful. That's bad for oil companies because it makes the economics of their product worse. They have to do more "stuff" to sell a given barrel of oil, but their competitors (solar panels or whatever) don't.
> I'm thinking especially of the companies trying to sequester carbon in the wells they empty - they end up making money both ways.
Sure, but the reason solar panels are popular is because they're (mostly) the cheapest way to generate power. By adding an additional tax to petroleum products based on say sequestering costs (as opposed to some made-up I won't chop down a forest offset) it encourages non-petroleum products to be used.
I think everyone should pay for their own externalities. Put gas in your car, and you are generating the externality, so expect to pay some company a gas tax to remove that carbon.
Buy electricity from coal and the power plant is the emitter, who should pay for capture. However, if you are a electricity customer, expect that cost to be passed on to you on your bill.
Or a way to take money from green investment funds: you're never finished, but you're always only two years away. Both directly from governments and from mandates on the oil companies to do green investments.
That's comparing apples to oranges though. Renewables are to stop emitting CO2, carbon capture to try and recover the one we've been emitting in the past decades. We need both, the latter possibly in the shape of organic capture since it's way more efficient and cheap.
My understanding is that it's not so much about undoing past decades, but being able to even reach zero additional warming in the first place. Cows won't stop farting (that sounds like they're the butt of a joke but it's not actually, even if some feed additives reduce it), so we need to compensate for the methane. Or air travel for relevant distances (where a train won't do), we don't have the battery tech to make it zero emission but we can totally capture the carbon. (It's not super economical but it's cleaning up after oneself, it's either that or accepting further warming and much greater costs later.) Or compensating whatever emissions occur as part of making those batteries and stuff we need to capture and use that zero-emission solar/wind/water energy
You two are right. It's about been net zero additional anthropic warming, because, as you said there is some emission we can't cut.
Zero additional anthropic warming result in progressive global decarbonizing thanks to carbon sink. (If the carbon sinks still exist when we reach 0 net emission and the permafrost hasn't thawed yet)
Engineering/inventing ways to emit less CO2 is fixing the root cause of the problem.
Spending energy that likely came from fossil fuel burning to "capture" CO2 is like saying you've found a perpetual motion machine. The engineering is simpler for this in some ways, but it's still not really a "good" solution.
I agree organic capture is a good idea, and CHEAPEST thing we could do to have an impact dump iron into the open ocean to spawn a phytoplankton bloom, but there is no money to be made doing that.
There is a lot of R&D predating mass cheap solar where proposals do things like have it captured at the production site or arbitrage cheap off peak energy to store it since the grid capacity is there anyway.
Modern solar definitely makes this idea more attractive but you’re still emitting more carbon to build the solar in the hopes you’ll store more than you produced in X years. It is not a great value proposition versus making the grid more efficient or just emitting less by using that solar for the grid instead of sequestration.
Yeah going net zero by just stopping emissions isn't just not going to help our situation that much, we've already emitted enough to fuck ourselves properly, it's also not even possible.
There's no such thing as a net zero society with our current technology, period. Anyone seen an electric tractor lately? Combine harvester EVs? Electric aircraft? Zero emission concrete? Electric container ships? Cheap plastics without oil? Electric orbital launch vehicles!? Lots of fantasy tech that ranges from being cost ineffective to borderline infeasible and we can't (or won't, anyway) run our civilization without these and dozens more that have no real replacement on the horizon. Covid has made that point really sharply clear, we just can't stop ourselves. Piston engined planes still today run on leaded gas despite knowing that it's literal poison for fucks sake, it's fuckin hopeless to convince anyone about anything when there's a chance someone might lose money.
Carbon capture might help in the long run, but the bulk of it will have to be on geoengineering to even give us a century of time to remove megatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere and oceans. And maybe a fish or two will even survive.
> There's no such thing as a net zero society with our current technology, period.
That's not quite true. All the technology is here, just not yet deployed.
> Anyone seen an electric tractor lately?
Biofuels exists. Even now, we have enough biomass to produce replacement fuel for agriculture, long-distance trucking, and rail transport. We just waste it on mostly useless ethanol.
> Electric aircraft?
Aircraft will switch to SAF (synthetic fuel). Right now, manufacturers are working on adapting and certifying engines to use 100% SAF and the work is expected to be completed around 2030.
Unless it's the same price or cheaper as regular concrete, it will be used by literally nobody. No nation has the balls to mandate something like that when there's a billion real estate lobbyists telling them otherwise either.
> the work is expected to be completed around 2030
Great, we might actually see some of these planes in active service by 2120 then!
Shipping uses the lowest quality, cheapest possible fuels that are borderline impossible to compete with, ships are large investments that last 30 years and nobody wants to spend money retrofitting them with a new powertrain. Note how solar in general was basically a rounding error in terms of usage until it became cheap enough to actually displace existing alternatives.
All of these technologies have 50 years of dev time to practical scale and cost competitive effectiveness in them at best, so they can almost be considered a fantasy along with net energy gain fusion for any kind of notable impact beyond pilot projects.
> At 2-3x the price. Ask an average farmer what their profit margins are. Oftentimes, roughly zero already.
Fuel is about 3% of the farm expenses ( https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2024/2023_... ), even tripling it will not make produce significantly more expensive for consumers. But individual farmers can't switch because it will make their individual farm uncompetitive. That's where the regulation should come in to force _everyone_ to switch, negating the competitive advantages.
> Shipping uses the lowest quality, cheapest possible fuels that are borderline impossible to compete with
Shipping had largerly switched to low-sulfur fuel by 2020, resulting in an additional increase in temperature, as fewer particulates are emitted.
> All of these technologies have 50 years of dev time to practical scale and cost competitive effectiveness in them at best, so they can almost be considered a fantasy along with net energy gain fusion for any kind of notable impact beyond pilot projects.
Not really. Most of the technologies required for low-CO2 economy exist right now, and just need to be deployed. It just needs political will to force its adoption.
> resulting in an additional increase in temperature, as fewer particulates are emitted
Yeah that has been a blunder of epic proportions, certainly helped a lot to bring last year up to 1.5 C.
Well I hope you're right, but frankly I think political will is too focused on pointless infighting and corruption to get anything done even if they wanted to. Most people aren't even demanding anything from their representatives, they just want cheap food, cheap gas and no taxes. The Paris Agreement has become a complete joke by now, nobody's even trying to abide by it anymore.
Point capture and atmospheric capture are vastly different processes, economics for point capture are great, economics for atmospheric capture are terrible due to the thermodynamic high energy input inherently required for separating out a low concentration (400 parts per million) substance.
But this article puts both processes in the same category, which perfectly sets up a low-information, divisive debate. Why they would want to do that - well, some people stand to gain a lot from renewable energy program investment, let's put it that way.
> the people producing and selling solar panels don’t give a fuck about the environment
They sure as hell are incentivized to at least make others do. An increased awareness for environmental issues is profitable. I would go further and think that genuine interest in the future of humanity is more plausible than the required cognitive dissonance.
Why on earth are solar panels seen as righteous? You’re so indoctrinated that it borders on worship. Go look into who makes them and how.
Producing solar, batteries, wind farms EMITS carbon and has large environmental impact. The energy sector will sell you whatever…
> > Neither do you.
> Completely needless accusation.
99% of environmentalists are just posturing. I guess it’s possible you’re different, but just remember you probably emit more carbon than almost every person who’s ever lived.
The environmental impacts of these technologies are well documented and reported. However the emissions are negligible compared to the running emissions of fossil fuels which you don't seem to actively dislike. Assuming that the world's power usage does not dramatically shrink in the future, especially solar farms will have to be built on a massive scale because we simply can't emit as much carbon as would be required for fossil power plants. Again, you can check the numbers for yourself.
> you probably emit more carbon than almost every person who’s ever lived.
That seems exaggerated. I live a vegetarian diet and do not own a car, my home electricity is 100% local renewables and I am very mindful of the carbon impact of any products I buy. While the Western industrial lifestyle is still unsustainable, I do think these small-scale changes are beneficial. Of course the ambient societal carbon emissions are incomparable to pre-Industrial timeframes, but that is widely known.
Thanks for the response! I am not anti-solar, and the technology absolutely has it's niche. It's just not suitable for base-load power generation.
> However the emissions are negligible compared to the running emissions of fossil fuels
This is untrue but for the record, I'm referencing climate impact, not just emissions.
Solar has great emissions compared to FF in VERY SPECIFIC CONDITIONS. Its obvious that solar only works intermittently, and only provides efficient power in places where we have lots of sun next to large demand (think population centers).
Most of the worlds solar panels are produced in China, where they burn coal for the bulk of their industrial energy. Burning coal to produce panels, and placing them in non-sunny regions creates extra emissions, not less...frequently not even breaking even on the carbon cost of the initial production/distribution during the lifespan of the panel.
> fossil fuels which you don't seem to actively dislike
Of course I don't actively dislike inanimate substance. This is what freaks me out about the cult-like support for solar. Without fossil fuels, we would lose access to food, shelter, medicine, infrastructure, etc. The way some people talk, I'm starting to think the renewable crowd believes it's "worth it."
> Assuming that the world's power usage does not dramatically shrink in the future, especially solar farms will have to be built on a massive scale
1. We could use other forms of power generation...solar is not the only game in town.
2. The materials required for solar production are finite. It's unsustainable to extract/process all the materials required for such a feat, barring some sort of physics breakthrough in hyperconductivity. We literally do not have the materials OR the technology.
> That seems exaggerated. I live a vegetarian diet and do not own a car, my home electricity is 100% local renewables and I am very mindful of the carbon impact of any products I buy.
That's all well and good, but once you start taking flights, using infrastructure , electronics, ML workloads, developing software, etc, you've already beaten most others today and historically.
How many african peasants worth of emissions do you think your lifestyle produces? How do you think the food you consume is produced and distributed? Why aren't you considering the emissions required to pour concrete and produce steel?
European home heating using wood pellets is an environmental disaster. Cut down trees in North America, grind them into pellets, pack them in shipping containers, ship them to Europe, and burn them in low efficiency furnaces with zero carbon capture and high particulate and sulfur dioxide emissions. It's probably even worse than home heating using unprocessed wood, due to the massive amount of energy consumed in processing and transportation.
If we can't at least point capture stacks at the individual home level, then forget atmospheric capture.
I came in to drop a “glad the obvious is being confirmed!”, but after skimming the actual study I’m sadly a little dubious of its reasoning. It didn’t examine the two approaches (technically three: renewables, natural carbon capture, and synthetic carbon capture) on their engineering or economic merits, but rather just compiled historical data on jurisdictions that mainly promoted one of the three and compared the outcomes. I think the noisy nature of such an analysis is obvious, not to mention the bias against synthetic approaches from analyzing outdated tech. I’m a huge believer in renewables being the only path forward, but this study isn’t very convincing IMHO!
Also would’ve loved to see “degrowth”/reduce usage as an option, since that’s the last big one people advocate for IME.
P.S. does anyone know if the current US regime’s “any university that works on federal grants is forbidden from promoting DEI” policy is intended to apply to climate change as well? Seems likely, but I don’t recall seeing anything explicit in any of the EOs I’ve read. This study isn’t very out of Stanford, which would clearly be impacted — thus it piqued my interest.
The study on which the article is based seems somewhat speculative.
The assumption for the full renewable scenario are the existence of the hydrogen economy. I'm quite positive about the potential of hydrogen but there are quite a few unsolved problems at the moment and it seems the hydrogen part of the energy transition has slowed down a bit.
Certainly the total cost of such a system is not well known at this time. So the cost calculation for the renewable scenario is quite uncertain - other energy storage tech might be more expensive.
The carbon capture calculation is based on the assumption that there is no other renewables and we go 100% capture.
This is not really that interesting an scenario, what matters more is the marginal costs of each technology at different points in the future.
In general a healthy dose of scepticism is warented when it comes to long term projections or cost of technologies, though or course policy does require we take a stab at it.
The study is considering extremes, but that's not realistic.
Completely switching to renewables will be more expensive than planting some trees for instance. If we want the most cost effective methods, it will be a mix of both, maybe more on the "burning less fossil fuels" side than on carbon capture, but neither extreme make sense.
And it may turn out that a complete switch to renewables may not be enough anyways. We may need carbon capture too, and maybe some geoengineering.
"This is orders of magnitude larger than the largest
nuclear explosion ever detonated, so this is not to be taken lightly."
I quickly read through and may have missed it but I do not see any mention of the timescale over which this would work just that it could sequester ~30 years worth of CO2 output.
I'm not convinced about their hand-waved explanation of radiation safety here:
> The long-term effects of global radiation will impact humans and will cause loss of life, but this increased global radiation is “just a drop in the bucket”. Every year, we emit more radiation from coal power plants and we have
already detonated over 2000 nuclear devices. Adding one more bomb should have minimal impact on the world.
I don't think "eh, what's one more detonation?" is persuasive when you're talking about a device more than 10x the size of all previous ones put together, being set off in direct contact with the seabed. Most of the fallout from nuclear testing came from the handful of ground burst tests that weren't fully confined, so I'm skeptical that "try to make it a clean fusion design" would actually be enough here. It would be cool if that were solvable though.
> "try to make it a clean fusion design" would actually be enough here
Most of fallout in a "regular" nuclear weapon comes from uranium fission by products and from neutrons activating the surrounding materials. In addition, most thermonuclear (fusion) bombs use natural uranium tamper to contain the fusing hydrogen. This tamper soaks up fusion neutrons and fissions, and that actually produces a significant part of the overall yield.
But that's not the only option. It's possible to use a lead tamper instead, so it won't produce any fission byproducts. The Soviet Tsar Bomba did that, and it resulted in the cleanest nuclear explosion on a per-kiloton-basis.
It's also possible to add a boron neutron absorber around the fusion stage to further limit the amount of fusion neutrons that can create dangerous activated materials.
Of course, even a relatively clean weapon is still going to produce plenty of pollution.
Wouldn't the "surrounding materials" we're worried about here be the rock itself? The Tsar Bomba was proportionately the cleanest nuke ever, but I thought that also relied on it being an air burst. The Sedan test (creating the Sedan crater using a 70%+ clean fusion warhead) released more fallout than any other US test & I thought that was because it was done in the ground at a depth where reaction products could escape. But you're saying with a clean design & boron based neutron absorbing buffer layer, we could limit neutron activation of the surrounding rock? That does sound plausible, although I don't know what it would actually take & I'm doubtful their estimated $10B budget would hold.
> But you're saying with a clean design & boron based neutron absorbing buffer layer, we could limit neutron activation of the surrounding rock?
Yes, but if the bomb is surrounded by a blanket of boron, it will absorb most of the fusion neutrons. Not _all_, but a significant part of them.
The budget is actually not unreasonable. Fusion warhead scaling is easy, especially if you are not worried about practicalities for combat applications. You just keep on adding bigger stages.
And a boron blanket is literally a boron blanket. You can't do any real engineering for it, it's going to become a highly ionized plasma within the first moments of the explosion, held together only by inertia.
You'd get the irradiated rocks either way. The difference is that you avoid some fraction of fission products of the bomb itself if it's fusion fraction is higher.
Annual CO2 emissions are around 37 Gt, so making 81 Gt of conventional explosives would be an absurdly large undertaking & somewhat counterproductive due to associated GHG emissions.
Yeah, they do seem to skip over the details a bit. Also I'm a bit skeptical of the $10bn price tag.
I think in practice going straight to a huge megabomb straight off would not be wise but maybe we could try one of our existing spare nukes as a prototype test? Then you'd get more data on how it would work.
And there is not much military, it's more about scientists here than military people (about one hundred permanent people, space/climate scientists and biologist). The island is full of basalt yes, like most of the island, and the island is BIG. But if you are gonna nuck a french island, you should ask the French.
And it's the more important French island of the French Southern and Antarctic Lands (after Adélie Land if you count it as an island).
See, stuff like that is why I don't watch Sabine. She seems to just be shooting for controversy to get her name in front of people. Like when she waded into trans rights debate -- I mean she's a theoretical physicist.
This is kind of a silly analysis. Solar power is already the cheapest source of electricity ever created by man per kwh. The problem is geography, storage capacity, and load planning.
If we're talking purely about future hypotheticals, who's to know if carbon scrubbers are less cost effective than city-sized lithium storage facilities.
> Richard Schmalensee, Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management Emeritus, Professor of Economics Emeritus, and Dean Emeritus of the MIT Sloan School of Management
An economics and b-school professor is not equipped to evaluate a multi-decade transition, and he apparently hasn't even taken into account how batteries are falling in cost like solar and wind are.
Those who do cost-optimal grid planning find that wind, solar, storage, our existing nuclear result in a grid that is cheaper than our current grid. However the problem is that we don't do grid planning based on what costs the least, we do small incremental changes from utilities that are using cost estimates that are years out of date, and we don't think about making large scale changes that result in big cost changes.
And one other thing about looking about predictions from the past with grid modeling, everybody always underestimated the rate of how fast solar and wind prices fall. They are doing the same for batteries now.
I'm not a huge fan of Jacobson's behavior, and he has made some mistakes, but he's also been very very right on a lot of things.
And while a single paper is a lot more reliable than a single person writing an editorial on an MIT site, it is still a single paper and must be taken as a pointer towards the truth, rather than truth revealed.
>Would switching entirely to these clean energy sources raise the price of electricity? Yes—at least if you don’t count the cost of the environmental damage caused by fossil fuels, says Richard Schmalensee, MIT’s Howard W. Johnson Professor of Management Emeritus, Professor of Economics Emeritus, and Dean Emeritus of the MIT Sloan School of Management..
The electricity bill will be more expensive, but that's only because the damages to the environment caused by carbon are externalized costs.
Presumably, if those externalized costs did show up in the electricity bill today, then it would get cheaper if we switched to renewable.
>“If you take into account the total cost of running a system that puts CO2 into the air, [then renewables] will be cheaper,” Schmalensee says
- Even if CO₂ production ends today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for at least many centuries. The only way to get back to normal levels is some form of carbon capture.
- Anyone can do carbon capture anywhere. You don't need to make the whole planet agree to and implement some treaty. Just put up some solar cells and pump the captured CO₂ underground. The costs need to go down a few orders of magnitude, but I see no fundamental reason why that would be impossible
The scale of carbon capture required to make a meaningful difference implies vast industrial infrastructure and natural resource extraction that currently doesn’t exist. The carbon footprint of developing that would be enormous and require many decades to construct at a minimum.
There is a good argument that the ROI and environmental destruction is not worth it.
We would do the carbon capture after nearly all of the fossil fuels have been replaced. Like putting carbon capture on power plant doesn't make sense, running carbon capture with fossil fuels doesn't make sense. Which means we have a few decades before need to do it, but it is worth researching now.
It will take thousands of years for the elevated CO2 to return to normal. Once we stop producing CO2, the temperature will keep rising for decades. We need to do carbon capture to keep it stable. The projections for 2C include carbon capture.
People truly do not appreciate the industrial scale required to sequester the 100 gigatons per year required to start materially reducing atmospheric CO2. Entirely unprecedented, humans have never built anything like it.
When I put on my very dusty chemical engineering hat, it would take decades just to build adequate supply chains for such an endeavor, assuming we waived all environmental review, never mind actually building the thing.
Most people are not familiar with industrial processes. They have no idea how unfathomably large the scale being proposed is. In computer science terms, it is like saying “we are going to scale Postgres to a zettabyte sized tables with a billion concurrent transactions”. It might be possible in some kind of in theory sense but no one knows how to reduce that idea to a real system.
The projections include a lot less carbon capture than 100 GT/yr. The 2C projections include 1000 GT for whole century. There is research that 600 GT is the most feasible. It would be infeasible to capture all of emissions, but would be feasible to replace emissions, and then use green energy to capture some of it.
BTW, I like rock weathering as option for carbon capture. Crush olivine rock and dump it in the sea. That would be huge scale, but we know how to do mining, crushing, and shipping on large scale.
New emissions are on the scale of several tens of gigatons per year and we have a century of accumulation at those kinds of rates to remove. I am not sanguine about the timelines.
The term “large scale” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. We are talking about something qualitatively higher scale than the largest “large scale” projects. We don’t have orders of magnitude of extra capacity anywhere in our existing supply chains, never mind across all of it that would be necessary for such an endeavor. This would all have to be built, and building that has its own supply chains that need to scale to an extreme. It will create severe resource pressures very far removed from the actual carbon capture. It is a “for want of a nail” kind of situation.
This is also economically non-productive. We can’t divert enough expertise, manpower, and minerals from the normal economy to make it plausible. We are a very long way from having the kind of automation that would let us work around this issue.
I am interested in viable solutions but the impossibility of scaling this particular solution is kind of basic industrial engineering. It is hard to explain where the resources will come from.
> Comparing two extremes
Jacobson and co-authors compared the annual energy costs, emissions, public health impacts, and social costs associated with implementing either of two extremes across all sectors in 149 countries over the next 25 years.
> One extreme would see a complete switch to using heat and electricity generated by wind, solar, geothermal, and hydropower for all energy needs (...)
> The other extreme would see countries maintain their current reliance on fossil fuels with some renewables, nuclear, and biomass (...)
The study might be well intentioned, but since none of the two scenarios has a probability that is different from 0, its use for policy makers, investors, and voters might be very little. In reality, it will always be a mix of both approaches, not because I'm "the truth lies in the middle" kind of guy, but simply because there might be local optimizations found along the way that favor one or the other approach (or both at the same time) based on local and temporal considerations with regard to the financial, technological, political, social, ecological, and cultural conditions.
Would love to have someone knowledgeable share why carbon capture is more viable than planting trees. I always thought the idea we need technology to capture carbon is silly, but never bothered enough to research more on it
The way to look at it is: there are two carbon cycles. A long cycle (proto-plankton dies, gets carbonized over millions of years, is pumped up, burned, and ends up in the atmosphere), and a short cycle (tree dies, is burned / rots, and ends up in the atmosphere).
If all we do is burn trees, there is no problem. We're not adding CO2 to the atmosphere that wasn't there before. The problem is that the stuff we pump up was not there before.
So capturing in trees is at best a temporary solution. In 20 / 30 years that tree dies and is burnt or rots, and so the CO2 is released again. At best it may buy us some time while we learn to do with less oil. But it's crazy talk to do a weekend in Thailand and then "offset it with trees". That's like saying "I was broke, but I found $100 on the street, now life can continue as before".
I won't even mention the fact that large parts of the "offset economy" are essentially fraud. People that own a swath of forrest declaring "I was going to cut these 10 km2 of forrest and prevent any new tree on it, but now I won't" just so that they can get carbon credits. Even if it is painfully obvious that they never intended to do that.
Trees need to be cut and stored to actually capture the carbon otherwise there is a risk they burn or die and release the carbon they captured back into the atmosphere
That's only true under certain circumstances. Sometimes the biomass accumulation is permanent.
My house was built in the 60's. The basement recently started flooding. While digging a drain to fix the problem I uncovered evidence that ground level used to be 18 inches lower than it is now. 60 years of deciduous tree action created enough new soil to change how the water flows... Instead of going around my house now it goes through.
Trees are not seen as a solution because they don't represent a market opportunity. You can make millions selling EV's, how are you going to make money with trees?
If we actually wanted to fix this, rather than using it as marketing spin, I figure we'd be working on ways to replace deserts with forests and then on ways to ensure that whatever soil accumulation trick my tree is doing is also happening in those forests. (And golly I wish we would, I've been taking biology classes in this direction and recent political events have me thinking that the I've got some significant headwinds here).
>Trees are not seen as a solution because they don't represent a market opportunity. You can make millions selling EV's, how are you going to make money with trees?
Given that carbon is emitted continuously, and forests only offset a fixed amount of emissions (they stop sequestering carbon once they're fully grown and reach steady-state), you basically constantly need to be planting trees. That creates an obvious market for tree planting companies.
This guy argues that mature forest ecosystems are better carbon sequesters than immature ones or monoculture forests, due to biodiversity, leaf litter, fungi, soil etc:
You can plant trees (or any plant really as long as they grow fast) and then bury it so that the carbon won't get released or at least very slowly. There's an older thread discussing this idea [1].
CCS would dispose the CO2 deep underground, like where natural gas is usually stored or extracted from. Given the cost of developing natural gas storage facilities, my hunch is that CCS is more of way of not having to deal with carbon emissions today.
100%, I was talking specifically about just tree planting. Trees are great capture tech, but horrible storage tech, so tree planting alone is not a good carbon capture solution. Biomass burial is (imo) a great and relatively simple solution at the moment because we have a bunch of empty mines to use. There is also research being done on putting biomass in a chemical bath that turns it's CO2 into some form of storable liquid and then storing that, but I can't find a link for it at the moment.
If there are more trees in 10 years than there are now, and we keep that number relatively steady, won't that mean less CO2 in the atmosphere? Individual trees may die and decompose, but they can be replaced.
As you add more trees (and the globe continues to get hotter), the risk of forest fires increases. In theory you are correct that we could just keep increasing tree amount, but in practice that will be difficult in a lot of the world as it gets hotter. Trees (and algae) are great capture tech, but horrible long term storage tech. There are currently interesting proposals on how to long term store wood and other biomass for sequestration but I'm unsure if any company is doing them at scale yet. Off the top of my head there is burying the biomass in mines, and putting biomass in a chemical bath that turns it's CO2 into some form of storable liquid and then storing that. I can only find a link for one of the two after quick googling.
but as it is, the global net change in terms of forrest is negative. Hell, the amazon is losing 10.000 acres a day. And aside from direct human intervention, there's desertification that's not getting any better.
Interesting, didn’t know it. Did you read the page in question?
“
As of 2023, the Great Green Wall was reported as "facing the risk of collapse" due to terrorist threats, absence of political leadership, and insufficient funding. “The Sahel countries have not allocated any spending in their budgets for this project. They are only waiting on funding from abroad, whether from the European Union, the African Union, or others.” said Issa Garba, an environmental activist from Niger, who also described the 2030 guideline as an unattainable goal. Amid the existing stagnation, a growing number of voices have called for scrapping the project.
“
When trees die, they’re consumed by fungi, and the carbon is sequestered in humus (soil). That’s totally fine, and in fact is an important reason to ensure that planted forests have a fungal culture so this decomposition process occurs properly.
You’re right about fire releasing carbon. But even after devastating fires, forests don’t burn completely and plenty of plant matter remains. Even ash and soot is still sequestered carbon, not to mention charred wood even if the tree doesn’t survive.
Someone else pointed it out in a different way. Forrest only captures carbon as it grows. A fully grown forest is carbon neutral. Specific type of march land and oceans are the only ecosystems that properly capture and store carbon continuously.
So we need to chop the trees down again and plant new ones. Which is more feasible than technological carbon capture, but still a drop in the bucket of what is needed.
This guy argues that mature forest ecosystems are better carbon sequesters than immature ones or monoculture forests, due to biodiversity, leaf litter, fungi, soil etc:
There's a ton of carbon sequestered in soil, that is released when the ground is torn up (e.g. when clearing an area for replanting) and then only recovers over centuries (which is essentially permanent loss, in the current context)
If you cut down an entire forest to bury it (with hypothetical carbon-neutral machinery), then replant the entire forest, you can still end up emitting more carbon than you store.
Serious advocates consider it to be a research area, not a mature primary climate strategy. Someone in the 1930s would have been equally skeptical of “smog capture”, but it turns out modern catalytic converters are so good that we don’t have to choose between enjoying clear skies and driving around mobile smog machines.
Monocelular algae is on the order of 1% efficient at converting light into biomass. Land crops are a few times less efficient than them, and trees are 1 order of magnitude or 2 less efficient than crops.
I’m no expert, but on a theoretical level: trees—and, more importantly, algae—capture carbon on accident as part of their respiration, which even with risky genetic modification enhancements has a natural limit on volume/biomass-level efficiency.
OTOH, with the right chemical process running at scale (“synthetic carbon capture”, apparently), the sky’s the limit! We might not have the right tech at the moment, but AFAIK there are multiple plausible systems that would work much better than what we have now.
Even without net metering the solar panels cover a lot of the electricity spent and I assume they would pay for themselves eventually.
If you do the math, a single 10W light bulb consumes 0.24kWh per day if you let it on all the time. A single solar panel is rated for 2kWh per day. Many appliances are also under 2kWh per use.
Any electricity you spend during the day will be saved by the solar panel automatically. If you live alone and leave during daylight hours that might not be worth it, but for a lot of family households it's free electricity.
Yeah, the big variables are utility electricity price ($0.10/kWh utility pricing makes solar less effective than $0.50/kWh), price for the panels + installation, and ~capacity factor. If the panels last long enough, and they usually will, as long as the installation is appropriately sized it likely eventually pays for itself. It's just usually longer than two years.
If you wonder whether you could at least capture CO2 directly from the combustion process (instead of out of thin air), well yes that's cheaper but still too expensive.
The current CCS projects use highly concentrated CO2 sources, while the usual combustion process will generate air with only a few percent of CO2. There was an article last year about the Hammerfest LNG plant. They have a CCS project nearby, but found it cheaper to electrify the plant: https://industrydecarbonization.com/news/is-carbon-capture-a...
I think it's useful to think of the atmosphere as a battery, when we burn fossil fuels we discharge it gradually by taking O2 from the air and converting it to CO2 via the 'fuel'. You can extend this to an idea of there being a little parallel capacitor with the living biomass cycle on it, but it's okay to ignore for discussion.
We can't go on discharging it arbitrarily and leaving it there because that state is toxic to us.
This battery is insanely useful because it's all around us. Because most of the work is in the ambient O2 the 'fuel' we need use use this battery is incredibly dense. The miraculous density of it is because there is two parts to it, the density when you consider both is unimpressive (as anyone who has tried to operate a chainsaw inside a fire knows all too well, or run a ic motor underground), but because we can usually disregard the air side it is truly amazing.
It's so useful the all the higher life on earth also uses it, which is part of why discharging to much it is toxic to us.
Because it's so useful we're unlikely to completely stop using it unless we leave the planet. But that means we need to recharge it. The natural recharging mechanisms are only sufficient for surface biomass buffer, not the depths of the planets' oil and coal reserves which were changed over millennia using mechnisms that no longer exist (e.g. biomass trapped before microbes knew how to digest cellulose).
Unfortunately recharging it is probably going to take all the energy we got out of it and then somewhat more. It can only take less than that to the extent that we can find less enthalpic places to stash it that are as geophysically durable as the original forms. But that isn't so bad-- no one expects any battery to be 100% efficient, and one as useful as this one is worth some cost to use it.
But this also means that the proper price for long term fossil fuels is, shockingly, not the price that maximizes oil Barron incomes-- it's the price that covers the cost run run the recharging mechanism.
We don't have to make capture cheap, we just need it to be cheap enough that oil can be correctly priced.
I recently saw a video by Sabine on this paper https://arxiv.org/html/2501.06623v1 that basically proposes blowing up a gigantic nuclear bomb in deep sea basalt deposit and basalt would capture the carbon.
In the paper they did some math on the bomb size needed to reverse 30 years of carbon emissions, and it's huge (orders of magnitude larger than what we tested so far), although I don't understand why it needs to be one huge bomb. I'm sure you could try it with one military head and test the impact.
...Detonating a 81 Gt nuclear device... That's multiple orders of magnitude larger than anything tested during the cold war. It's more than all nuclear explosions and tests combined
Nope. You need to understand that an oil reservoir is 100% rock, but a rock that is porous on the microlevel. Stuff that gets pumped down needs to be a proper fluid, not just a slurry, or it will just clog the pores in half an hour.
A lot of energy from renewables are being wasted due to mismatch with the demand. Building storage for it is quite expensive. I wonder if it makes sense to set up carbon capture near the places which don't have the storage. For example here in the UK we're wasting between 13% and 25% of all wind electricity generated depending on the weather/time of the year.
> If scenarios with different mixes of CC/DAC and WWS were performed, it would not be possible to conclude whether one is an opportunity cost. Instead, using a mixture requires assuming that both CC/DAC and WWS should be used before determining whether one has any benefit relative to the other.
Seems stupid - they are both being used, so even the business-as-usual scenario is a mixture. If indeed the 100% WWS + 0% CC/DAC scenario is better than than the 95% WWS + 5% CC/DAC scenario, then it is logical to conclude that CC/DAC is useless, but according to the tables and figures, they didn't even look at whether a 50/50 WWS + CC/DAC split would be better or worse. Yet their conclusion is still "policies promoting CC and SDACC should be abandoned". They have these really complex models but at the end of the day it is garbage in, garbage out.
Planting trees is also a form of carbon capture. They literally capture carbon from the environment and release oxygen. It's as if they natural evolved to counterbalance animals.
Sadly, when people talk about "carbon capture" techniques, they're never talking about planting trees.
A tree normally is carbon-neutral. Is captures carbon when it grows then releases it when it dies and rots.
Unless you have an ecosystem that prevents rotting (e.g. an anaerobic swamp) in which case you have steady accumulation of carbon (e.g. in a form of peat, which is a fire hazard btw). When people speak of planting trees to capture carbon they rarely mean creating swamps.
Trees are good but are largely a temporary store. Most of the carbon they capture ends up be re-released upon decay. Of course some does get more permanently sequestered in the ground, but a relatively small amount, and is a very slow process. I'm all for planting more trees, but I'm afraid the problem can't be entirely solved by merely planting more trees. It's also a rate problem - it may not be possible to plant enough trees to completely offset the rates we're adding carbon to the atmosphere.
It's not a long list, and among them is pumping sulfur in the stratosphere. It stops sounding so absurd compared to what's viable, nevermind politically.
This obviously is not viable for X, Y, etc. reasons but I would like to know them. We select some fast growing woody plant that thrives on terrain useless for agriculture, we grow it at industrial scale and convert it to charcoal (using the energy generated for the process itself or the grid), we grind the charcoal and mix it with sea water and pump the slurry into some mine.
Creating charcoal and taking out of the cycle isn't actually net negative? We don't have enough space for growing or in mineshafts? I'm making Centralia 2.0? It's obviously non economic, but everything carbon capture is like that.
Every bit of opposition to climate change mitigation comes from the oil industry. How incredibly evil and vile they are for being willing to damage the world and our environment just to make a buck.
There’s certainly some of this, and there are also a lot of people living in difficult geographies that rely on oil. Take away global reliance on oil and these people either have to move somewhere else (and many of them aren’t exactly welcome in their neighboring countries) or else they die, starving, and in the dark. I’m not really as sympathetic to this issue as I sound, but I don’t think the characterization of 100% greed and evil is totally fair, either.
We should ban private swimming pools, tennis courts, etc.. and restrict the size of villas, ban mowing the lawn, in order to maximize the space for trees and wild plants
ALL you have to do to increase space for wild plants is remove height/density limits in cities. That's it. Then let people make choices about how much housing they build, and let people make choices about where they live.
You would be shocked how many people will choose to live in density, no matter what they say they want, if we weren't restricting the supply of dense housing so much it's become unaffordable.
The suburbs would simply stop growing in their tracks.
You'd be surprised how much a wild green garden makes you much happier compared to a concrete garden with a plastic swimming pool you can use 2 months a year
I would like to post this respectfully, just for posterity. The anti science insular concepts being assumed as fact, the discredited overpopulation theories, the sky is falling parts of climate change.
I can't credibly participate because from my perspective what is being discussed is a popular sci-fi series that I haven't read. The dogmas and rituals are alien to me.
Energy companies are reporting that the cost situation for renewables is terrible. The thin margins continue to get thinner. They cannot justify pursuing new green projects to shareholders. We will hear a lot more about carbon capture in the years to come. It's the only way they can meet their climate obligations — which are also being "adjusted" these days.
Jacobson is anti-nuclear in a way that is somewhere on a spectrum between pessimistic and dishonest. His prior belief is that 100% wind/solar is the only way to go and all of his research aims to advance that worldview.
Carbon capture is certainly more expensive than renewables but this headline presents a false dichotomy. The question isn't if we capture carbon instead of switching to renewables - that ship sailed long ago - the question is if we need carbon capture in addition to switching to renewables.
I don't see how this would necessarily apply to every scenario. Transmission is expensive and storage is still not ideal.
Briefly reading the article it seems like the author is assuming there is like a 1:1 global marketplace where any energy produced in one area can replace energy demand in another. That's just not the case.
For electricity, it seems like a no-brainer, but that's not the only emitter. I wonder what cost for carbon capture they used (unfortunately the article is paywalled).
It seems to me like the obvious solution to the problem would be a CO2 tax equal to the estimated cost of carbon capture. It should not be higher - that would be yet another example of moralism that plagues so many environmental policies. Introduce that, properly monitor emissions (especially things like methane leaks), and the problem will quickly solve itself. Anything that remains is the edge cases where it is more economical to do carbon capture - so use the tax to do just that.
That also covers cases where it makes sense to do the change more slowly. No need to decide or argue back and forth whether someone can or cannot do it faster. You emit, you pay, you don't want to pay, you don't emit. Changing quickly is too costly? That's fine, you pay. Oh, it's not that costly when compared to the tax? Guess you change, then. Also fine. Want to generate electricity from lignite? I'm not going to argue, I'm just going to watch you go bankrupt... and if you don't, there probably was some good reason for doing that and forcing the opposite would have had some unintended side effects.
It's actually way cheaper as long as you imagine that some magic technology gets invented in the next few years that makes it cheaper. Then you just have to hold of until that is created and if it isn't, it won't cost you anything! Even more savings!
This has been obvious since day 0, for the same reason that doing elaborate industry-funded R&D to develop piss-extraction technology to filter and sequester piss from your swimming pool will never be more efficient than simply not pissing in your pool
Is it dearer than storage though? my understanding was always that carbon capture if worth doing at all is for situations where the wind isn't blowing and the sun is dim (this nearly led to blackouts in uk recently)
The new paper regarding using a nuke to accelerate co2 sequestering in the sea from MIT....is man made water sequestration using minerals to bind the co2 from the water count as carbon capture?
It would be carbon capture... but it feels like such a needlessly destructive method. It's up there with atmosphere manipulation in "bad ideas that we should only even consider if we're desperatre"
It’s kind of trivially true right? The problem is we are on a path to have a shitload of carbon in the atmosphere so we better figure out how to get it out starting now
They apply a "model" which is not described to justify an artificially low price for solar power delivered to retail customers.
In reality solar is more expensive than natural gas when reliably delivered. Batteries, over provisioning, fly wheels, and finally backup idle gas power plants are not surprisingly very expensive.
unfortunately, the only way this is relevant is if we actually price carbon emissions at the rate it costs to capture them. as long as you can emit for free, then switching to renewables is more expensive.
Could someone please explain how could carbon capture ever work? To me it looks as if it is a mathematically impossible thing: if you produce energy by releasing carbon, you would need to expend even more energy to capture the same carbon back, so it is impossible — there’s no way to produce required energy to do so. And if you had such an huge and cheap energy source for carbon capture, you wouldn’t burn carbon in the first place — you’d use that energy source instead.
What am I missing? Am I stupid, or the people who talk about carbon capture are ridiculously dishonest?
For example, when solar plus direct air capture can remove a ton of CO2 for cheaper than it costs a container ship not to emit that CO2 then it's reduced cost for the same CO2 outcome even though it's using more total energy.
Regardless of whether it actually makes sense to capture carbon, you'll see a lot of sky-is-falling fanatics and vested interests dismissing it because it caps the price of carbon credits and limits economic damage estimates. You can't price CO2 at $500/ton to necessitate change when it only costs $200/ton to capture it - without quickly going bankrupt that is.
This is why the IPCC not even attempting to evaluate mechanical capture shows they aren't serious about solving the problem. They seemingly exist to push a fear narrative, and having an upper bound on the impact of CO2 limits their ability to do so.
The carbon dioxide is captured and stored, the actual carbon isn't returned to whatever form it was before burning. So theoretically it _can_ work (but, as it turns out, it still doesn't make sense).
I've always thought of carbon capture as something you do later in the timeline, after burning carbon to get you to a society that can make the transition to green energy.
this might be the case for example if you need a certain amount of innovation and that requires a certain critical mass of brains thinking over the problem.
or maybe if you're an accelerationista, you want AI to solve it for you and burning carbon now to train it might make sense.
but I don't think the idea is to ever burn carbon to capture carbon.
As you point out, it probably doesn’t ever make sense to use carbon capture to “offset” energy-related emissions. Probably the only way it would make sense would be as a way to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere after we’re no longer burning previously sequestered carbon.
The more you look into it, the more you realize we are already doing this, kind of. Then you realize that the real low hanging fruit is sort of in other areas, sulfur dioxide, methane capture, particulate, and especially home heating. European wood pellet and home wood burning stove users, I'm looking at you.
Not surprising. Carbon capture methods are so out there and so bogus sounding with very little evidence that they will work, really seems just custom made to soak up government money with little promise of benefit and certainly not efficient.
"don't worry, don't worry, once the environment gets unliveable we'll just pull the carbon out of the air. We don't need sustainable resources"
Is a lie on par with:
"I don't need to go to rehab, I can stop at any time" except the oil companies are the drug dealer and you are the deluded addict who will suffer the brunt of the consequence.
I guess I don’t see how any of this is really relevant today. Can someone help explain? My thought process is telling me that by far the worst environmental offender (China) is on the front end of a population collapse that will pretty much serve to self-correct them from an environmental standpoint. That could take 30 years at most?
I’m not sure there’s any sort of program we could implement in that time frame that really moves the needle, and when it happens most of the world’s capacity to build things like solar cells and wind farms will need to be re-built, because we won’t be getting a lot of those components we need from China anymore.
And who knows? By then maybe we look up at a smaller global population that’s largely de-globalized and decide nothing needs doing.
In the short term it’s a shame because IMO the #1 (by far, not close) contributor to global pollution doesn’t even make it to the table in these sorts of discussions.
China is not the worst offender. You are disregarding per capita, historical cumulative emissions and outsourced emissions. I am willing to bet that they have the resources, will and execution speed to decarbonise fast though, largely due to surplus solar and lots of batteries but also significant investments in wind and Nuclear.
I am not sure why a lot of Americans do not talk about efficiency in their own backyard or are even unwilling to consider a smaller footprint (it is like almost in the DNA of the country)
A narrow idea of what constitutes freedom ("an F-650 with a full gun rack", but not "guaranteed healthcare for everyone that needs it", or "freedom from having to deal with braindead morons with F-650s and rifles", or "public goods and walkable cities").
And you're spot on as regards China, and India as well. We've had a century or two to get rich off burning this stuff, they have not.
China is #1 in annual emissions and is increasing every year and plans to continue increasing until at least 2030, is a larger annual emitter than all of Europe combined, and is #2 in total emissions since 1750. In fact, has released more than all of Europe combined since 1750.
Per capita is irrelevant. The thermodynamic system doesn't give a shit about how many people there are, all that matters is the amount of CO2. If you want to make some kind of moral argument you can't avoid asking the question of whether it's moral to have a kid at all. Unless you are prepared to consign your children to being a hunter gatherer until they die, they will add CO2 to the atmosphere.
Consider me and my neighbor, I am single and emit 1000 tons of carbon per year, he and his wife emit 3000 tons of carbon per year. They have triplets and increase their emissions by 500 tons per year. But somehow they are better than me now because on a per capita basis their house is only 700 tons per year per person while I'm still at 1000 tons per year? Sorry, I'm not reducing my lifestyle because they like to fuck.
If you want to measure a country or population by some metric other than total emissions, you should measure something like tons per quality of life or human development or something that demonstrates that the emissions are being used efficiently to increase overall human flourishing.
Per-capita is relevant because as individuals, we find it easier to get a mental grasp on the lifestyles of other individuals than the actions of a nation state. Contrasting more/less efficient lifestyles is a way to understand our contribution to this problem.
Do we need to put a leash on our corporations and governments so that they stop making policies that will kill our children? Absolutely, let's do that. Do we need to be more thoughtful about population growth? Certainly.
But when it comes down to crafting policies that will be effective, it has to make sense on the both micro and macro scales. Holding per-capita measures as irrelevant hides the details that we're going to need to fix this.
The rest of east Asia is currently developing at a faster pace (e.g. Vietnam), with increasing demand for goods and services. China provides, therefore their output is increasing.
Perhaps, and also we already know in 40 years many more of their infrastructure projects will lie empty and unused than already do. They’re literally burning their way to their doom, and they may take globalization with them.
They can’t do any such doubling down without a population to sustain it. And solar can’t supply the world with reliable power unless both battery and transmission tech see some unforeseen advances.
All you need is napkin maths. We gain energy by turning carbon into carbon dioxide. Now, we need the same energy to reverse it, but with a loss factor.
We continue to see companies and politicians claiming it's feasible and will help us become "green". We should call them out on their shit. If we had the renewable power budget to use proper carbon capture on a large scale, we would already have a fully green grid.
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Well... There are other methods than reversing c02 back into carbon chains.
Capture of CO2 and storage as CO2, mostly in compressed gas form in underground, has been proposed by a lot of companies. This is a logistical nightmare that has to be kept up for forever. Better keep that pressure chamber leakproof for 1000 years with likely upkeep. (setting aside how inefficiently that actually stores the carbon even if grabbing it from the air was free)
Ideas to shove c02 air bubbles in concrete are promising but barely enough to offset the c02 generated from creating the concrete itself.
One promising approach is to grow plants and turn them into charcoal. Charcoal is great for keeping fertilizer in the soil so that we can spread it over crop fields for a small increase in yield. Napkin maths on that makes it just require about Australia of farmland (if I remember) to offset the world's CO2 emissions. Almost feasible. (bamboo, algae, and sunflowers seem to be the highest biomass generators, but perhaps a slower crop that can handle worse climate is preferable)
But these are still worse plans than just building a green grid.