5 Billion Cubic Meters of Oil are produced Annually by humanity.
30Bn Tons of CO2 generated.
60% is un-sequesterable because it is small and/or mobile.
40% is sequestrable and large scale/stationary.
12 Billion Cubic Meters of CO2 are thus sequestrable.
You must liquefy CO2 before putting it into the ground.
50% -70% efficiency in converting it to a liquid that we can shove into the ground.
6 to 8.4 Billion Cubic Meters of Liquefied CO2 are thus Sequestrable.
Shoving 6 to 8.4 billion cubic meters of liquefied CO2 into ground is no small matter.
Think about it this way, humanity built an entire industry focused on an annual extraction of 5Bn Cubic Meters of Oil over a time span of 100+ years with refineries and complex processes spanning multiple countries, geographies, regulations, wars, and land rights.
Also, who’s going to buy sequestered carbon?
The reality is that something like this will require spinning up an entire Trillion dollar market.
Don't forget that the permafrost is thawing and it's starting to release massive amounts of CO2, much more than previously thought. The thawing is releasing massive amounts of Methane, and Nitrous Oxide which are far more impactful than CO2.
Due to warming temperatures more ice is melting and it's raising the temperature of the oceans and it's causing them to be more acidic, both of which is bad for phytoplankton populations, which have already declined steeply. Phytoplankton is the basis for the entire marine ecosystem.
Like most collapses, a declines happen gradually then suddenly it crashes, my fear is that the phytoplankton population will crash soon, and when it does we're in deep trouble. 20% of the atmosphere's oxygen comes from phytoplankton, more than all the world's rain forests combined.
The ocean is responsible for somewhere between 50-80% of the atmosphere's oxygen, there is no telling what happens when the phytoplankton population crashes. We could see a huge drop in oxygen levels in the atmosphere very quickly.
30% of the world's population relies on the oceans for their primary source of protein, and about the same number of people rely on the marine ecosystem for their livelihood, when the phytoplankton population crashes, those people will be in serious, serious trouble.
Reducing our carbon output isn't enough, slowing an increase still means we are increasing concentration levels, we need to be removing more than we are releasing, and I don't see any possible way to achieve that with any known technology.
I don't think we can stop, or even slow what we've started. The earth is now seeking it's new equilibrium state, it's hard to say if we are part of that equilibrium state.
Is there a difference between a drop in oxygen levels and a rise in CO2 levels?
My understanding of the oxygen cycle is that O2 gets removed from the atmosphere by being bound to carbon in CO2. Further, since most of the oxygen is O2, while most of the carbon is currently biomass; any notable drop in O2 levels would be a disasterous rise in CO2 levels.
Specifically, O2 is about 200,000 ppm, while CO2 is about 400ppm.
As I understand it, a 1% drop in O2 levels would put us at about 2,400 ppm of CO2; at which point we are looking at significant cognitive decline; and I don't even know how to speculate on the grean house effect.
On the other hand, climbing to the top of the eifel tower (1000 ft) corresponds to a drop of about 4% in the partial pressure of oxygen.
There are still countries around the world which subsidise fossil fuels. Not indirect subsidies like exporation writeoffs for corporations, but actual incentives for consumers to consume in the form of below-market pricing.
While this is true, there is a reason why so many poor countries have to subsidize fossil fuels.
In those countries, if you are middle class or below, without those subsidies, you might not be able to heat your house, go to work, or fuel your tractor.
So unless you want revolts, it's not going to be possible to remove those subsidies unless massive investment at a world-wide scale in nuclear, hydro, and other types of renewables, as well as a serious ramp up of cheap (3000-9000$) EV production, actually makes it possible for the average Joe there to survive without fossil fuel subsidies.
There are also other countries that are richer in which this doesn't apply, for which there is no excuse.
What you described can be the path to fast action on climate change. Only a few more steps are required:
* Cover every rooftop, every parking lot, every desert with solar panels as much as we can. Cover every windy plain with wind turbines. Take all the excess power and instead of building expensive batteries, use it to power this CO2 -> synthetic liquid fuel process.
* Carbon tax on any "fossil" fuel sources (anything from the ground). Make it expensive so the synthetic fuel is competitive. There's other ways too (like requiring X% mix of carbon neutral synthetic fuel, just like they do now with ethanol). Slowly increase the percent over time.
* All the old infrastructure (existing cars, gas power plants, ships, trains, buses, airplanes, etc.) becomes more and more carbon neutral as the fuel becomes more synthetic.
Even with the most optimistic EV car adoption projections, there will still be millions of gas cars out there. Other old carbon fuel based infrastructure (such as power plants) are hard to replace because solar/wind are not steady sources of power.
This path addressees the weaknesses of solar/wind (how to store excess energy) and how to quickly transition existing infrastructure to carbon neutral.
> Cover every rooftop, every parking lot, every desert with solar panels as much as we can. Cover every windy plain with wind turbines
You'd extract quite a significant amount of energy from the weather system, assuming we'd globally and optimally achieve this. What could be the consequences? Winds could locally diminish, thermal convection could be reduced, lots of effects could happen we don't understand yet.
In which way would this interact with local climate? Would this cause local temperatures to rise?
Just pointing out potential unintended consequences this could have without offering a solution. My takeaway from past good ideas (automobile, chemistry, electricity, globalization, ...) is that there is at least one _big_ unintended consequence of action.
I'd rather try to reduce our environmental and thermal footprint altogether by reducing our energy consumption, trying to keep up the standard of living people are used to. Just my opinion, but the uprising of populist parties suggests we should not overdo good intentions.
Also, if a radical approach like the proposed one would fail, populist parties would exploit that failure to the fullest amount possible.
This is pretty much what Al Gore et al. proposed 20+ years ago. The historical lessons are more interesting than the technical ones, and everyone should be aware of those so they understand the fight they are fighting.
>Cover every rooftop, every parking lot, every desert with solar panels as much as we can. Cover every windy plain with wind turbines. Take all the excess power and instead of building expensive batteries, use it to power this CO2 -> synthetic liquid fuel process.
This makes our current infrastructure carbon-neutral, yes. But that doesn't solve global warming? Atmospheric CO2 levels are already too high. We're at 413ppm, and we need to go back to 350ppm. Doing that requires carbon sequestration, which by definition makes no useful product.
The scale of the problem is thus: every kilogram of coal that has ever been dug up needs to be unburnt and buried, and every barrel of oil ever pumped out of the ground needs to be put back. That's the only way you can get to 350 ppm.
Instead of destroying all of our deserts and creating a transmission problem, we could probably just swap in a few dozens nukes to backstop renewables. That addresses the shortcomings of wind and solar and provides plenty of overprovisioning for carbon capture without the poor land use.
'renewables' are not a viable option for the energy requirements of large scale carbon capture. It's a massive rollout of nuclear (ideally fusion but fission is good enough), or nothing. The political unwillingness of western nations to roll out nuclear power is one of the biggest obstacles to realistically tackling climate change on timelines where it matters.
People will buy sequestered carbon if there is a market for it. Some kind of cap-and-trade system for emissions would make it profitable to do carbon capture once cheaper methods of reducing emissions have been exhausted.
>climate doesn't have buying power
though I agree with the conclusion thats a bad argument, people do have buying power and they do care IF theymake the connection. that said even if it does not makes financial sense we should still do it because 1) survival of biosphere should trump survival of economic system. 2) people are ignoring the potential to create new market here and the possibility of creating an entirely new industry is quite enticing.
The free market doesn't apply in that sense, but it is clearly the way forward in the sense that Carbon Taxation/Pricing and other schemes are clearly going to be more effectively than government intervention.
I think research still needs to be poured into carbon sequestration, but I agree with your overall analysis.
Carbon sequestration is like ocean desalination. Sure, it can be done, but it's a lot easier and a lot more efficient to start with a non-salty body of water.
Stopping carbon emissions is a lot more important in the short term.
Long term, I can see carbon capture being used as an alternative to push for a carbon neutral or negative economy. We'll likely need captured carbon for shipping, airplane travel, and plastics.
A positive of carbon capture is that you can pretty much set it up anywhere. You may be able to setup a capture facility at major fuel hubs to cut down on transport costs.
So, in eons past, carbon was sequestered naturally via calcium carbonate (CaCO3) if I'm following your math we'd need 4B tons of Ca / yr to sequester that yes? Of course, that's vastly more than we produce a year, but it is the 5th most abundant element. Could we scale up CaCO3 production to sequester carbon?
And... spinning up that trillion dollar market would likely be worth every penny if it prevents continued warming, prevents further significant sea level rise, prevents migration crises due to flooding/droughts/etc, and prevents further ocean acidification.
A better rule of thumb is 1 gallon of gasoline is ~20 lbs of C02. That puts things on a more personal level.
Another one is 1 lb of C02 per kwh of electricity. That one is subject to obfuscation or confusion because it is dependent on the source of electricity.
I did some napkin math at one point and I believe the limiting factor is energy. You need more energy than can be generated using contemporary sources.
Sounds like a good scheme for global redistribution of wealth. Get the richest countries to put an annual trillion dollar budget together for buying carbon, divided up by country based on their GDP. Obviously, no one with the power to do so will really want that redistribution to happen though.
Humans are selfish and just don't care. Once mother nature kills off most of our population, carbon will slow sequester itself and the earth will heal but it will take centuries. The earth just can't sustain food and energy for 8B people. My guess it is more like 2B max.
There are challenges with tree planting as well. Tree plantations tend to be monocultures which crowd out native species. Also the carbon stored in trees is typically only stable for 40-50 years due to fire, tree death and decomposition.
It’s a question of scale, if you want to actually make a difference you need to cut them down and store the wood underground, then grow new trees and repeat. Doing that takes real effort which then needs to be paid for.
We don’t have nearly enough land area for that, and even if we did, we’d need to cut and bury these trees underground, if we want the sequestration to be more than temporary. Seems silly to do that while digging up coal at the same time.
I don't even know why this is a question. So, people burn hydrocarbons for energy. How do you expect to capture the carbon piece into a stable compound that can be buried without expending more energy? Please draw this chemical reaction out, along with energy balances and how endothermic it is.
The idea that you could do this belies total ignorance of chemistry, fossil fuel genesis and the laws of thermodynamics. Life actually does a pretty good job of turning CO2 into dirt which gets buried -encouraging that rather than building some preposterous contraption involving mineshafts seems a little more sensible.
The point of carbon capture isn’t to be energy neutral. The point is to be able to take clean energy (say nuclear energy in the United States) and capture carbon from dirty uses (say construction in India).
Carbon capture will have to work because there will be no way to address climate change otherwise. Countries like India and everyone on the continent of Africa will industrialize, they will build vast structures out of concrete and they’ll use cheaper gas power cars and whatever energy they can get their hands on. My home country of Bangladesh will add a 80-100 million people and it’s GDP will increase by a factor of 5 by 2050. The idea that Bangladesh will jeopardize a single percentage point of GDP growth to make that growth carbon neutral as it rushes to bring middle income standards of living to its people is utterly absurd. The country’s CO2 emissions per capita has increased by a factor of five since I was born and it can increase by another factor of 10 before getting to the level of an efficient developed country like France. To compensate for massive CO2 output in those countries, developed countries will have to go carbon negative and capture that CO2.
It’s so obvious I’m not sure how so many people overlook it.
Surely the people of Africa or Bangladesh are not so stupid as to not learn lessons from the US. We have better technology now, so they will use that in a lot of cases.
Don't get me wrong, there are cases where the old way is better because it is cheaper and so they will use that. However they won't use gas cars since we are developing battery cars, solar panels, and the like. Within a few years electric cars will be better for them as well.
If it is absurd to think that Bangladesh would jeopardize their growth in interest of lowering emissions, how is it not absurd to think that developed countries should neglect their own economic interests in favor of going carbon negative to compensate for countries such as Bangladesh?
I agree with almost everything you say. But, if any developing country might sacrifice in the name of carbon neutrality, maybe it could be Bangladesh? Bangladesh & neighboring Myanmar are the 4th and 1st non-island nations most vulnerable to climate change.
That doesn't mean it's by any means guaranteed. But facing climate change is in their interest.
> The idea that you could do this belies total ignorance of chemistry, fossil fuel genesis and the laws of thermodynamics. Life actually does a pretty good job of turning CO2 into dirt which gets buried
Coal: about 350m years ago we didn't have trees because lignin had not evolved. Then we got lignin, and trees, and when trees died and fell they just stayed there because we didn't have fungus that could decompose them. Then (about 50m years later) fungus evolved that could decompose trees. All coal exists in that 300m to 350m old seam.
Life takes CO2, turns it into carbon, which is then released when those plants die and decompose.
I agree with your general comment, but since forests can be used for construction materials they come out a little better than merely being a buffer since the wood gets used in housing or manufacturing in places where steel or concrete would need to step in, both of which are much worse for the environment. If built with longevity in mind, wood framed houses can last around five hundred years, which is more than enough time for technological advancement to allow us to deal with excess carbon by then. Even if they're only designed as typical buildings are, it's still a good fifty years of buffer as wood in a house in addition to the buffer as they were growing as trees.
If I was a fiction writer, I'd be writing a book about how humanity used gene drives to wipe out the ability to decompose lignin. Perhaps the original plan was to release the gene into the wild again after CO2 levels normalized, but somehow the gene was lost, and atmospheric CO2 is reaching dangerously low levels...
With current CCS you're taking high concentration stream of CO2 from combustion and injecting it into deep subsurface waters that you know will remain isolated. (I'm a geologist - we're good at identifying those.) It's highly soluble in water at those conditions. Ideally it reacts with there and precipitates into other minerals, but it doesn't have to. It's safe in solution as well.
> How do you expect to capture the carbon piece into a stable compound that can be buried without expending more energy?
This is a bit of a strawman. No one is claiming that it will be somehow energy neutral or break thermodynamics. It will obviously require significantly more energy input, not to mention the money. But that doesn't make it impossible or even a bad idea, if the energy fueling the process is nuclear or renewable.
Well, you almost need to be claiming that. If you claim otherwise the energy requirements are truly stupendous. That doesn't event mention that the energy must be green by necessity.
Another commenters on this site (can't find the link) put it like this:
You'd have to drive every mile ever ridden on fossil fuels in reverse. Every single ICE in boats and planes too. All gas, coal and oil plants too. The energy requirements are incomprehensible, truly. We're having trouble going carbon neutral already, but this scheme requires we go neutral and _then some_.
The reaction between carbon dioxide and alkaline earth silicates is thermodynamically spontaneous in the presence of water, but kinetically hindered. It's a reaction with slow diffusion of reactants through the product layer, limited by surface area. So crush rocks rich in alkaline earth silicates and distribute them in near-shore environments. It's an artificially accelerated version of the geological carbon cycle. It still requires vast-in-absolute-terms amounts of energy to crush billions of tons of rock, but it's not running uphill against thermodynamics.
We already have catalytic convertors on cars, can we add co2 capture to them as well? Add a little box with powdered olivine and some extra chemical bits to capture a higher % of co2 than absolute 0?
Catalytic convertors already use finely coated incredibly expensive platinum to break down complex molecules, and it is certainly easier to capture co2 near the source than when dissipated in the atmosphere
I think the misconception stems from thinking that we could be net-positive energywise. We cannot.
We can (and currently sort of have to) extract energy from fossil sources because our economy runs on hydrocarbons but we will need to expend more energy later to put the extra carbon back where it belongs. The energy we will expend for this in the future has to be renewable.
We are basically borrowing from our future selves and will have to pay back the debt one day.
This is a good summary - and it might just work out. There is a trend in our energy sources being more powerful and more efficient over time. More efficient solar panels, biger and more flexible wind turbines, bigger and safer nuclear reactors. So paying the "energy dept" in the future might be much easier than going without the fosil energy sources right now.
From a purely thermodynamic standpoint, you actually _can_ be net-energy-positive.
You're gaining a lot of energy going from CH4/etc + O2 to H2O + CO2.
You're then directly sequestering CO2 (usually in solution in a deep brine), rather than C. You need to expend energy to concentrate the CO2, but it's less than you gain from combustion.
In practice, it's more difficult to come out energy positive overall if we're capturing CO2 at atmospheric concentrations rather than from flue gases/etc at the time of combustion. Regardless, though, "driving roads in reverse" is not a good analogy. We don't need to expend anywhere remotely as much energy as was generated from the original combustion.
> but we will need to expend more energy later to put the extra carbon back where it belongs
Is this actually a given? I mean trying to make gasoline from the atmosphere would certainly require more energy than you get by burning it, a lot more.
But I thought sensible capture proposals ran on different chemistry, possibly relying on a wet/dry cycle under which the affinity for carbon is different in the two halves. And letting evaporation (i.e. solar energy) move you from wet to dry. It's not obvious that these must use more energy than you got by burning the coal in the first place.
> So, people burn hydrocarbons for energy. How do you expect to capture the carbon piece into a stable compound that can be buried without expending more energy? Please draw this chemical reaction out, along with energy balances and how endothermic it is.
If you read the article, you'd see:
> Nowadays, Industrial production accounts for one-quarter of CO2 emissions from energy and industrial processes. With the demand for cement, steel and chemicals remaining strong to support a growing and increasingly urbanised global population, the future production of these materials will have to be more efficient and emit much less CO2 if governments want to meet their climate goals.
In other words, this technology is not targeted at capturing carbon that is burned for energy.
Well the images of power plants as well as statements like
> Carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) refers to a chain of different technologies aimed at capturing waste carbon dioxide (CO2), usually from large point sources of pollution like power plants
or
> Another drawback of carbon capture, usage and storage, is the considerable amount of extra power it requires, which would increase the cost of electricity
Do give the distinct impression that they're talking about the production of energy (since 'increasing the cost of electricity' would be a weird way to phrase a pure increase in demand). If it was purely talking about processes that also happen to release CO2 then it doesn't make sense to solely talk about carbon capture vs. renewable energy like this article does as that's not an alternative.
Now carbon capture might still be necessary in a fossil fuel free world, but the article puts no real arguments forward why that would be the case.
gspr's answer is the primary answer, but a secondary answer is that carbon capture can use a clean cheap power like solar to clean up after power that isn't clean but has other attributes that solar doesn't, like being portable and/or not bursty.
There are predictions that within a decade the price of solar will have dropped so much that it's going to be cheaper to create hydrocarbons by synthesizing them using atmospheric CO2 than it will be to pull them from the ground.
Assuming that we WILL expend more energy to capture the carbon, the path to make carbon capture viable is clear: A source of energy that does not add more carbon to the atmosphere.
And existing technologies such as nuclear fission already offers us abundance of energy to do this. The problem is one of scale (how widespread?), acceptability (where can we do this?), cost (who pays?) and time (how soon?).
The process need not be as efficient as nature; if it ‘only’ is both a net win and deployable at a scale that’s larger than we can do by planting trees/stopping cutting down trees, it could be a good idea, even if we get the energy needed for capturing CO2 from burning even more oil.
And no, it need not belie the laws of thermodynamics. The idea isn’t to convert CO2 back to oil or do so without putting in more energy than burning oil gave us. In fact, some capture approaches keep the CO2 as CO2, for example by pumping it into empty oil fields (that makes me think “what could possibly go wrong?”, but hey, what do I know?)
(I have trouble envisioning carbon capture to be a net win and feasible at scale, but I’m not an expert; it might work, just as burning forests to prevent forest fires from spreading has its uses)
This argument basically relies on the assumption that it is at least as energy intensive to convert CO2 into something more solid than the energy you get from burning hydrocarbons to produce that CO2, but I think that assumption isn’t true.
I can’t recall where I saw it and I’m not a chemistry expert but conservation of energy is a thing and there is more potential energy in hydrocarbons than in some simple inert solid molecules containing carbon (which have slightly more potential energy than the CO2 and water produced by combustion). If you can be reasonably efficient then it is possible to extract energy from hydrocarbons without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. That said, I don’t think there are any sufficiently efficient industrial scale processes to do this.
You're worrying about the wrong part of the equation, the main problem is going to be what you're going to do with the oxygen. There's a reason why so many things tend to react violently with pure oxygen, to the point that we have an entire vocabulary dedicated just to that one class of reactions.
I've been thinking lately a bit about the scale of the problem we face. We essentially need to create enough carbon sinks that balance out all the oil and coal burned since the industrial revolution. Hopefully we do something with it all like build a giant coal brick pyramid.
It's really handy the sun shines light on us for free. I sort of have this crazy idea of turning large parts of the center of Australia into rain forest by using solar power desalinization plants to pump fresh sea water inland. But alas. Australia has carry over credits from Kyoto. She'll be right.
I'm going to reread all the Dune books in the holidays.
Yes, it will take a lot more energy. Burning carbon today is effectively civilizational credit card debt. We are prosperous but have a big compounding headache on the horizon.
It may well be impossible to extract excess co2 from the atmosphere at scale. But if it is we are in very very serious trouble.
> The idea that you could do this belies total ignorance of chemistry, fossil fuel genesis and the laws of thermodynamics.
This was many people's reaction to hearing about carbon capture. And one that TFA does nothing to dispel. But I'm not sure that's the final word, it sounds like there may be reversible chemical reactions which can actually capture carbon in an energy-efficient way. One source:
Since overproduction is a good way of dealing with variability of solar + wind and because carbon capture uses quite a lot of energy this might be a good use of over produced energy (those periods when energy prices go negative).
Hear hear. Right now, sadly - crypto is the only thing that allows you to directly convert excess energy into money, without a surrounding infrastructure.
I've been trying to figure out what the best way to become a "net zero carbon human". Although there's a clear consensus that reducing emissions is great, but what's next?
What do you do with the emissions you inevitably produce? As an amateur, it's super confusing:
- offsetting is criticised as "paying of your guilt without fixing the problem"
- carbon capture is next to impossible as an individual because there are so few projects to sponsor, besides planting trees which has questionable returns in the long run since who can guarantee these trees will not be burned 50 years from now?
A short list of things which are fairly easy to do. Don't have children. Switch to a vegetarian or vegan diet. Use public transport or bikes / walking rather than petrol cars. Use solar panels to offset your electricity consumption. Improve the thermal efficiency of your home to reduce energy usage. Switch to "green" energy suppliers. Lobby the companies you use to become more environmentally friendly. Ask your pension provider whether they have a low/no carbon plan - if so, switch your investments to it. Plant a small garden that you can take care of. Encourage others to do the same.
Those are all things I've done. Some may be easier or not depending where in the world you are, and your financial means.
I don't know why you are downvoted, those are exactly the main steps to reduce one's emissions.
I have heard somewhere that emissions can be divided roughly in 4 categories:
- Transport. To reduce this category, you need to travel less and if you need to travel, go by foot, bike or public transports.
- Food. To reduce this category you need to reduce you meat consumption, 2 or 3 times a week is enough, buy less transformed goods, ie cook more, and buy local grown food.
- Consumption. To reduce this category, follow the 5 R: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle.
- Public emissions. This one is tied to all the public services we get. It can only be reduced by reaching agreements as a society.
As for the children, obviously if we all stop having children, this is all of no use. In developed countries we already have stabilized our demographic growth, so I don't think there is a need for limiting oneself.
Reducing personal emissions is a red herring. The vast majority of emissions are not coming from individuals, but from industry. And contrary to popular beliefs, there is no way to dismantle an industry by changing your personal behavior - we need massive political and economic overhauls to have any measurable impact.
And telling people that a sustainable world requires them to be vegetarian or vegan is wrong and counter-productive. We do need to significantly reduce consumption of animal products, but there is no need to eliminate them from our diets completely.
I think you are being too conservative here. Just kill yourself, thus sparing the rest of humanity from the CO2 you will inevitably produce over the course of your life.
You can also sell your organs and donate revenue and your whole estate to some reputable organization that fights with global warming.
Although nice, a single person won’t make a difference. We need to change as a whole of society, and that means legislation. 2020 showed society can shift when faced with dire consequences.
The first few are little better than buying carbon offsets, IMHO.
> don't have children
This still leaves the rest of humanity! We need to change the system so that human existence is more sustainable. While having fewer humans on earth might seem to make the challenge slightly smaller, if we have a huge generation of people in retirement and a tiny fraction of working age folks who are both supporting the older generation and rebuilding all our industry, that actually makes the problem harder!
> vegetarian diet
Looking at the bigger picture, if you discard of your vegetarian foods scraps in the trash, they get converted to methane, having emissions on the same order of magnitude as cattle emissions. And we need ruminants to provide the fertilizer to soil to make it into a positive carbon sink.
We must instead look at soil, and using soil as a carbon sink. Modern industrial farming causes huge amounts of carbon release from soil, and that includes organic farming on the industrial scale, like what one could buy in Whole Foods. We instead need to shift agriculture to modes (e.g. no-till) that regenerate soil rather than depleting it. And that will include some animals. Preventing a burn of a gallon of gas has clear and definable implications, and if we stopped all gas burning tomorrow, that would be fantastic. However cutting out all beef tomorrow would leave us in a tough spot for our food system, everything is far far more complex when it comes to out agricultural web. We must come up with a food system that is carbon neutral, and preferably carbon negative. That means composting, no landfills, and some degree of animals. Fixing the food system requires systems change, just like fixing industrial processes does, and personal action can not cross that gap.
As far as personal things one can do, I would add a few more:
1. Replace natural gas furnaces and water heaters with heat pumps. These are a carbon win even if tour grid is burning a lot of natural gas, because heat pumps move 3+ units of heat doe every unit of energy consumed. If you can't do that now insulate the hell out of your home (a good idea anyway)
2. Get involved in local politics, to force local policies to encourage systemic change. A local government with a policy of only financing construction with carbon-neutral steel and cement has a chance of forcing market change, where personal action has no chance.
I do a lot of your list, because I want to do something, but I think we need to realize that it's not really close to enough. We need to change all of society, and personal responsibility will not get us there.
If you don't have children, why should you care for the future generations? There could be some abstract argument about the unborn being as human as currently living people, but it cuts both ways.
Go to school and become an engineer. Help develop a battery that's 1% better. Get a job and invest the money you make from it in a company that produces a solar cell that's 1% more efficient.
You're in a position to help on the credit side of the ledger way more then you'll ever be able to do on the debit side.
The Carbon Majors Report of 2017 (summarized by Guardian [1], original PDF here [2]) found 71% of greenhouse emissions caused by 100 companies, the top dozen(s) being fossil fuel producers. I think there's much more needed to be done than a single individual, hermit-style approach.
I think there's much more needed to be done than a single individual, hermit-style approach
You don't have to become a hermit to lower your emissions. It is entirely possible to have a good social life whilst lowering your emissions. In fact I would argue that many of the changes you can make will improve your quality of life.
Unless you're in the tropics, where soil has a hard time hanging on to nutrients, you can probably skip the biochar step. Just bury the wood in hugelkultur.
Zoom out. You are a tree. You need to see the forest. If you can get you & twenty of your friends to cut emissions 10%, that's far better than becoming a net zero human, and if you can get a thousand to cut 5% that's better still.
This is a collective action problem. You need to do better to lead by example, but spend most of your brain cycles on influencing others.
>In the IEA's "Clean Technology Scenario", more than 28 GtCO2 could be captured from industrial facilities between now and 2060.
We emit about 35-40 GtCO2 per year. So in 40 years, we might expect carbon capture to remove less than one year of emissions.
Not useless, but close, considering the investment which could be used instead to more rapidly reduce emissions by installing/improving solar, wind, geothermal, etc.
We do need to remove emissions, but we're likely past the point where that will be enough. We've already triggered too many feedback loops. We have to do all the above and more.
TBH I'm starting to come around more to the climate adaptation arguments and drifting away from talks around mitigation and reversal which I'm starting to suspect will remain behind the curve past the timeframe where they could make an appreciable impact.
Which is not to say I'm fatalistic to the point of leaning into continued emissions and taking no action on a personal level - I think all the information needed to make individual change is already known but we're facing the seven stages of grief with regards to the lifestyle sacrifices necessary to make them.
Would the increase in investment have a better chance to facilitate research and development? As with more research comes the possibility of a better capture rate down the road
No order of magnitude estimation and no time-scale. Carbon capture is irrelevant. This problem has to be solved at the root -- the energy demand. https://withouthotair.com/
This book is great, but now more than a decade old and the author is sadly deceased. It would be great to get an updated version which includes advances in renewable and battery technology. It is also focussed almost exclusively on the UK. Would be nice to have a version to cover feasibilities for all countries.
Edit: if memory serves, it also doesn't really cover carbon capture?
Virtually nothing's changed, save PV is now at or below fossil-fueled or nuclear thermal generation costs, and will continue to fall at a predictable rate for the foreseeable future, likely several decades.
MacCay's principle unit of analysis is energy per unit area, available or used. This is fundamentally insensitive to cost (which annoys economists) and only moderately responsive to technology --- efficiency limits are real (which annoys technologists), meaning the real questions become what new sources can be deployed (as they become economical --- economists are not entirely useless), and how much can demand-side be reduced (ditto technologists).
The sources are solar and wind (MacCay is addressing the UK). There is little untapped or available hydro or geothermal potential (exceptions exist elsewhere), tide and wave are effectively negligible and extraordinarily capital intensive, and biofuels are impractical (the UK cannot even feed itself, as it shall soon rediscover post-Brexit, let alone its automobiles, furnaces, and ovens).
Nuclear is the wildcard, but is as much a problem child as ever. (MacCay was a quiet proponent.)
Very interesting link, as discussions on energy are meaningless without data. My understanding is that simple back-of-the-envelope calculations show that energy demand is the fundamental issue.
That being said, I've read that "without hot air" is a bit outdated and should be updated to reflect recent progress on renewable energy and battery technologies.
They key metric here is how much it costs ($/TON of CO2 Captured and Sequestered). There are a range of methods and approaches to do this. The average cost for Air Capture across modern approaches is $250/Ton of C02 Captured and Sequestered.
There are other approaches besides Atmospheric Capture and Sequestration which hold more promise
1. High concentration C02 Emission Capture at source
2. Ocean surface capture and de-acidification
I expect this will follow a similar journey to how solar panel adoption went... once things tipped over the critical ($/KWH) where it made sense over grid electrical, people started to adopt. I imagine once one of the techniques reaches a critical $/TON Captured & Sequestered, governments or institutions will pay to build whatever machines to start. Right now things are too expensive using any method (i.e. using the best method, it would cost ~$12 Trillion dollars to capture and sequester ~49 Gigatons - the estimated carbon emitted in 1 year by humans in 2020)
The question is, what is that magical tipping point price? Unlike your solar vs grid example, isn't the alternative to capturing just doing nothing, which has essentially zero cost in our current economy?
This is the crux of the problem. There are no economic incentives for this, even if it became very cheap. We would simply have to agree, as a global society, to invest in carbon capture because it's the right thing to do.
Given our track record with this kind of thing, this does not look very likely. It's the tragedy of the commons writ large and I don't think anyone has a sane answer to it, or we would have done it already.
Thank you for running those numbers. I hope you don't mind if I quibble with them a little.
Firstly, I tried to fact check your "~49 Gigatons" figure and came up with this quote: "Emissions are currently expected to reach 42.4 gigatons annually in 2020, rise to an estimated 49.4 gigatons per year in 2030" from [0].
Your figure of "$250/Ton of C02 Captured and Sequestered" is probably correct, but it's worth comparing that to this statement: "Table 1 summarizes the projected energy and dollar costs of air capture processes that have appeared in recently published technical analyses. The projected dollar costs are in the range of $100–$200∕tCO2" from a research paper [1] which may not include sequestration costs.
To present an optimistic scenario then, suppose that by 2030 we managed to reduce annual CO2 emissions to 40 gigatons and could capture and sequester CO2 at $100 per ton. That would make the cost $4 trillion per year. For comparison, the IMF projected Gross World Product to be $90 trillion in 2020, according to [2]. We would expect GWP to grow over the course of this decade, so the annual investment starting in 2030 should be less than 4.4%, although I wouldn't like to say what sort of effect that would have on the global economy, even if there were somehow a global agreement to spend that kind of money.
In conclusion, I agree with your assessment, and only ask that you take extra care to use the letter "O" in "CO2" and not the digit "0". It's not so important on a discussion site, but your linked article looks much less convincing due to that typo appearing eight times. (For extra presentational value, you could use a subscript character, i.e. "CO₂").
The article fails to answer the question, and the whole site appears to just be a clickbait ad farm. They have an article on hyperloop which fails to denounce it, calls it "one of the greatest leaps in transportation for generations" which tells us these articles are not reflections of critical thought.
I was about to post that the article seems to consist of snippets gathered from elsewhere. The bit about using captured carbon to grow plants and carbonate fizzy drinks was the original pitch ClimeWorks AG had before they pivoted to seeking direct donations from the public. These are also uses of captured carbon that do not result in its long term sequestration and so are orthogonal to discussions about mitigating climate change. It'd be nice to have seen that noted in the article, and to see some sources cited.
One critical point that article does touch on is that CCS at the point of emission is regarded by some as an unproductive distraction and that money would be better spent elsewhere (I.e. switching away from the emitting activity). That debate is a microcosm of general analysis paralysis that crops up in discussions around reducing carbon emissions - we seem to have a propensity for getting stuck searching for 'perfect' solutions at the detriment of deploying things that at least nudge the dial in the right direction (merely 'better'). We can (I'd almost argue must) do anything we can agree as merely 'better' today and then do 'perfect' if/when that becomes possible.
Then again, green washing is a real and strongly incentivised phenomenon so agreeing even on what's truly 'better' is often not straightforward. At the very least I can say with relative confidence that quite often CCS = usually better and CCUS = usually green washing. But even then the devil is in the details - CCS might not be better once the total energy cost is understood or if those energy inputs are themselves not decarbonized or fully accounted for. Carbon use might be beneficial if the usage does result in sequestration for a significant period.
Readit News
30Bn Tons of CO2 generated.
60% is un-sequesterable because it is small and/or mobile.
40% is sequestrable and large scale/stationary.
12 Billion Cubic Meters of CO2 are thus sequestrable.
You must liquefy CO2 before putting it into the ground.
50% -70% efficiency in converting it to a liquid that we can shove into the ground.
6 to 8.4 Billion Cubic Meters of Liquefied CO2 are thus Sequestrable.
Shoving 6 to 8.4 billion cubic meters of liquefied CO2 into ground is no small matter.
Think about it this way, humanity built an entire industry focused on an annual extraction of 5Bn Cubic Meters of Oil over a time span of 100+ years with refineries and complex processes spanning multiple countries, geographies, regulations, wars, and land rights.
Also, who’s going to buy sequestered carbon?
The reality is that something like this will require spinning up an entire Trillion dollar market.
Due to warming temperatures more ice is melting and it's raising the temperature of the oceans and it's causing them to be more acidic, both of which is bad for phytoplankton populations, which have already declined steeply. Phytoplankton is the basis for the entire marine ecosystem.
Like most collapses, a declines happen gradually then suddenly it crashes, my fear is that the phytoplankton population will crash soon, and when it does we're in deep trouble. 20% of the atmosphere's oxygen comes from phytoplankton, more than all the world's rain forests combined.
The ocean is responsible for somewhere between 50-80% of the atmosphere's oxygen, there is no telling what happens when the phytoplankton population crashes. We could see a huge drop in oxygen levels in the atmosphere very quickly.
30% of the world's population relies on the oceans for their primary source of protein, and about the same number of people rely on the marine ecosystem for their livelihood, when the phytoplankton population crashes, those people will be in serious, serious trouble.
Reducing our carbon output isn't enough, slowing an increase still means we are increasing concentration levels, we need to be removing more than we are releasing, and I don't see any possible way to achieve that with any known technology.
I don't think we can stop, or even slow what we've started. The earth is now seeking it's new equilibrium state, it's hard to say if we are part of that equilibrium state.
I am definitely not advocating for the destruction of our ecosystems or cheering on their decline, just thought this was a great article.
tl;dr we do not rely on photosynthesis or any active living thing to produce the oxygen that we breath. It in fact mostly comes from decay/death.
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/amazon-f...
Also, oxygen levels would not drop rapidly. It would take millions of years: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/destructive-amazo...
My understanding of the oxygen cycle is that O2 gets removed from the atmosphere by being bound to carbon in CO2. Further, since most of the oxygen is O2, while most of the carbon is currently biomass; any notable drop in O2 levels would be a disasterous rise in CO2 levels.
Specifically, O2 is about 200,000 ppm, while CO2 is about 400ppm.
As I understand it, a 1% drop in O2 levels would put us at about 2,400 ppm of CO2; at which point we are looking at significant cognitive decline; and I don't even know how to speculate on the grean house effect.
On the other hand, climbing to the top of the eifel tower (1000 ft) corresponds to a drop of about 4% in the partial pressure of oxygen.
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/value-of-foss...
And even without subsidies, petrol and diesel are undertaxed in almost every country.
Properly taxing fossil fuel is surely a more cost-effective preliminary step compared to schemes like CCS.
In those countries, if you are middle class or below, without those subsidies, you might not be able to heat your house, go to work, or fuel your tractor.
So unless you want revolts, it's not going to be possible to remove those subsidies unless massive investment at a world-wide scale in nuclear, hydro, and other types of renewables, as well as a serious ramp up of cheap (3000-9000$) EV production, actually makes it possible for the average Joe there to survive without fossil fuel subsidies.
There are also other countries that are richer in which this doesn't apply, for which there is no excuse.
* Cover every rooftop, every parking lot, every desert with solar panels as much as we can. Cover every windy plain with wind turbines. Take all the excess power and instead of building expensive batteries, use it to power this CO2 -> synthetic liquid fuel process.
* Carbon tax on any "fossil" fuel sources (anything from the ground). Make it expensive so the synthetic fuel is competitive. There's other ways too (like requiring X% mix of carbon neutral synthetic fuel, just like they do now with ethanol). Slowly increase the percent over time.
* All the old infrastructure (existing cars, gas power plants, ships, trains, buses, airplanes, etc.) becomes more and more carbon neutral as the fuel becomes more synthetic.
Even with the most optimistic EV car adoption projections, there will still be millions of gas cars out there. Other old carbon fuel based infrastructure (such as power plants) are hard to replace because solar/wind are not steady sources of power.
This path addressees the weaknesses of solar/wind (how to store excess energy) and how to quickly transition existing infrastructure to carbon neutral.
You'd extract quite a significant amount of energy from the weather system, assuming we'd globally and optimally achieve this. What could be the consequences? Winds could locally diminish, thermal convection could be reduced, lots of effects could happen we don't understand yet.
In which way would this interact with local climate? Would this cause local temperatures to rise?
Just pointing out potential unintended consequences this could have without offering a solution. My takeaway from past good ideas (automobile, chemistry, electricity, globalization, ...) is that there is at least one _big_ unintended consequence of action.
I'd rather try to reduce our environmental and thermal footprint altogether by reducing our energy consumption, trying to keep up the standard of living people are used to. Just my opinion, but the uprising of populist parties suggests we should not overdo good intentions.
Also, if a radical approach like the proposed one would fail, populist parties would exploit that failure to the fullest amount possible.
Some context:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desertec#/media/File:Fullneed....
Theoretically, only a very small area of dessert land would need to be covered with solar panels.
This makes our current infrastructure carbon-neutral, yes. But that doesn't solve global warming? Atmospheric CO2 levels are already too high. We're at 413ppm, and we need to go back to 350ppm. Doing that requires carbon sequestration, which by definition makes no useful product.
The scale of the problem is thus: every kilogram of coal that has ever been dug up needs to be unburnt and buried, and every barrel of oil ever pumped out of the ground needs to be put back. That's the only way you can get to 350 ppm.
What about the carbon we add doing this? I mean manufacturing, transport and all such indirect sources of carbon.
'renewables' are not a viable option for the energy requirements of large scale carbon capture. It's a massive rollout of nuclear (ideally fusion but fission is good enough), or nothing. The political unwillingness of western nations to roll out nuclear power is one of the biggest obstacles to realistically tackling climate change on timelines where it matters.
the free market doesn't apply here, because the climate doesn't have buying power, nor does it care. it's a political decision on a world level.
Carbon sequestration is like ocean desalination. Sure, it can be done, but it's a lot easier and a lot more efficient to start with a non-salty body of water.
Stopping carbon emissions is a lot more important in the short term.
Long term, I can see carbon capture being used as an alternative to push for a carbon neutral or negative economy. We'll likely need captured carbon for shipping, airplane travel, and plastics.
A positive of carbon capture is that you can pretty much set it up anywhere. You may be able to setup a capture facility at major fuel hubs to cut down on transport costs.
Another one is 1 lb of C02 per kwh of electricity. That one is subject to obfuscation or confusion because it is dependent on the source of electricity.
It totally can. What it can't sustain is 8B people not working together.
Also - nature seems to be doing it in the north.
https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2436/co2-is-making-earth-green...
That's half of dry land area:
that's fertile half: Insufficient.[1] https://savingnature.com/offset-your-carbon-footprint-carbon...
[2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=earth+population+*+1+h...
[3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+arable+land
I'm not bullish on the "just plant trees, it will fix everything about CO2 emissions" movement....I have my doubts.
Most countermeasures seem irrelevant as long as 1/3rd of the world relies on lignite ash and brown coal as primary energy sources.
The idea that you could do this belies total ignorance of chemistry, fossil fuel genesis and the laws of thermodynamics. Life actually does a pretty good job of turning CO2 into dirt which gets buried -encouraging that rather than building some preposterous contraption involving mineshafts seems a little more sensible.
Carbon capture will have to work because there will be no way to address climate change otherwise. Countries like India and everyone on the continent of Africa will industrialize, they will build vast structures out of concrete and they’ll use cheaper gas power cars and whatever energy they can get their hands on. My home country of Bangladesh will add a 80-100 million people and it’s GDP will increase by a factor of 5 by 2050. The idea that Bangladesh will jeopardize a single percentage point of GDP growth to make that growth carbon neutral as it rushes to bring middle income standards of living to its people is utterly absurd. The country’s CO2 emissions per capita has increased by a factor of five since I was born and it can increase by another factor of 10 before getting to the level of an efficient developed country like France. To compensate for massive CO2 output in those countries, developed countries will have to go carbon negative and capture that CO2.
It’s so obvious I’m not sure how so many people overlook it.
Don't get me wrong, there are cases where the old way is better because it is cheaper and so they will use that. However they won't use gas cars since we are developing battery cars, solar panels, and the like. Within a few years electric cars will be better for them as well.
That doesn't mean it's by any means guaranteed. But facing climate change is in their interest.
Coal: about 350m years ago we didn't have trees because lignin had not evolved. Then we got lignin, and trees, and when trees died and fell they just stayed there because we didn't have fungus that could decompose them. Then (about 50m years later) fungus evolved that could decompose trees. All coal exists in that 300m to 350m old seam.
Life takes CO2, turns it into carbon, which is then released when those plants die and decompose.
Forests are a buffer, not a sink.
Delayed fungal evolution did not cause the Paleozoic peak in coal production
https://www.pnas.org/content/113/9/2442
Forests are a real part of the solution.
With current CCS you're taking high concentration stream of CO2 from combustion and injecting it into deep subsurface waters that you know will remain isolated. (I'm a geologist - we're good at identifying those.) It's highly soluble in water at those conditions. Ideally it reacts with there and precipitates into other minerals, but it doesn't have to. It's safe in solution as well.
Citations needed.
This is a bit of a strawman. No one is claiming that it will be somehow energy neutral or break thermodynamics. It will obviously require significantly more energy input, not to mention the money. But that doesn't make it impossible or even a bad idea, if the energy fueling the process is nuclear or renewable.
Another commenters on this site (can't find the link) put it like this:
You'd have to drive every mile ever ridden on fossil fuels in reverse. Every single ICE in boats and planes too. All gas, coal and oil plants too. The energy requirements are incomprehensible, truly. We're having trouble going carbon neutral already, but this scheme requires we go neutral and _then some_.
Olivine:
Mg2SiO4 + 2CO2 → 2MgCO3 + SiO2: ΔH -89 kJ mol/CO2
Serpentine:
Mg3Si2O5(OH)4 + 3 CO2 → 3MgCO3 + 2SiO2 + 2H2O: ΔH -64 kJ mol/CO2
Wollastonite:
CaSiO3 + CO2 → CaCO3 + SiO2: ΔH -90 kJ mol/CO2
https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_chapte... (Section 7.2.2 "Chemistry of mineral carbonation")
Catalytic convertors already use finely coated incredibly expensive platinum to break down complex molecules, and it is certainly easier to capture co2 near the source than when dissipated in the atmosphere
We can (and currently sort of have to) extract energy from fossil sources because our economy runs on hydrocarbons but we will need to expend more energy later to put the extra carbon back where it belongs. The energy we will expend for this in the future has to be renewable.
We are basically borrowing from our future selves and will have to pay back the debt one day.
You're gaining a lot of energy going from CH4/etc + O2 to H2O + CO2.
You're then directly sequestering CO2 (usually in solution in a deep brine), rather than C. You need to expend energy to concentrate the CO2, but it's less than you gain from combustion.
In practice, it's more difficult to come out energy positive overall if we're capturing CO2 at atmospheric concentrations rather than from flue gases/etc at the time of combustion. Regardless, though, "driving roads in reverse" is not a good analogy. We don't need to expend anywhere remotely as much energy as was generated from the original combustion.
Is this actually a given? I mean trying to make gasoline from the atmosphere would certainly require more energy than you get by burning it, a lot more.
But I thought sensible capture proposals ran on different chemistry, possibly relying on a wet/dry cycle under which the affinity for carbon is different in the two halves. And letting evaporation (i.e. solar energy) move you from wet to dry. It's not obvious that these must use more energy than you got by burning the coal in the first place.
If you read the article, you'd see:
> Nowadays, Industrial production accounts for one-quarter of CO2 emissions from energy and industrial processes. With the demand for cement, steel and chemicals remaining strong to support a growing and increasingly urbanised global population, the future production of these materials will have to be more efficient and emit much less CO2 if governments want to meet their climate goals.
In other words, this technology is not targeted at capturing carbon that is burned for energy.
> Carbon capture, usage and storage (CCUS) refers to a chain of different technologies aimed at capturing waste carbon dioxide (CO2), usually from large point sources of pollution like power plants
or
> Another drawback of carbon capture, usage and storage, is the considerable amount of extra power it requires, which would increase the cost of electricity
Do give the distinct impression that they're talking about the production of energy (since 'increasing the cost of electricity' would be a weird way to phrase a pure increase in demand). If it was purely talking about processes that also happen to release CO2 then it doesn't make sense to solely talk about carbon capture vs. renewable energy like this article does as that's not an alternative.
Now carbon capture might still be necessary in a fossil fuel free world, but the article puts no real arguments forward why that would be the case.
There are predictions that within a decade the price of solar will have dropped so much that it's going to be cheaper to create hydrocarbons by synthesizing them using atmospheric CO2 than it will be to pull them from the ground.
Nuclear energy is the closest we have to "clean and cheap".
And existing technologies such as nuclear fission already offers us abundance of energy to do this. The problem is one of scale (how widespread?), acceptability (where can we do this?), cost (who pays?) and time (how soon?).
And no, it need not belie the laws of thermodynamics. The idea isn’t to convert CO2 back to oil or do so without putting in more energy than burning oil gave us. In fact, some capture approaches keep the CO2 as CO2, for example by pumping it into empty oil fields (that makes me think “what could possibly go wrong?”, but hey, what do I know?)
(I have trouble envisioning carbon capture to be a net win and feasible at scale, but I’m not an expert; it might work, just as burning forests to prevent forest fires from spreading has its uses)
I can’t recall where I saw it and I’m not a chemistry expert but conservation of energy is a thing and there is more potential energy in hydrocarbons than in some simple inert solid molecules containing carbon (which have slightly more potential energy than the CO2 and water produced by combustion). If you can be reasonably efficient then it is possible to extract energy from hydrocarbons without releasing CO2 into the atmosphere. That said, I don’t think there are any sufficiently efficient industrial scale processes to do this.
silicates + CO2 --> silica + carbonates
is mildly exothermic. This is why most of the carbon on Earth is in rocks, not in the atmosphere.
Other noncarbon energy sources are nuclear energies (fusion or fission), and the noncarbon renewables wind, solar, tidal...).
I've been thinking lately a bit about the scale of the problem we face. We essentially need to create enough carbon sinks that balance out all the oil and coal burned since the industrial revolution. Hopefully we do something with it all like build a giant coal brick pyramid.
It's really handy the sun shines light on us for free. I sort of have this crazy idea of turning large parts of the center of Australia into rain forest by using solar power desalinization plants to pump fresh sea water inland. But alas. Australia has carry over credits from Kyoto. She'll be right.
I'm going to reread all the Dune books in the holidays.
https://phys.org/news/2020-11-australia-shift-climate-credit...
It may well be impossible to extract excess co2 from the atmosphere at scale. But if it is we are in very very serious trouble.
This was many people's reaction to hearing about carbon capture. And one that TFA does nothing to dispel. But I'm not sure that's the final word, it sounds like there may be reversible chemical reactions which can actually capture carbon in an energy-efficient way. One source:
https://manifoldlearning.com/episode-040/#transcript
Dead Comment
Better than mining Bitcoin.
Any ideas or good overviews are welcome.
Those are all things I've done. Some may be easier or not depending where in the world you are, and your financial means.
I have heard somewhere that emissions can be divided roughly in 4 categories:
- Transport. To reduce this category, you need to travel less and if you need to travel, go by foot, bike or public transports.
- Food. To reduce this category you need to reduce you meat consumption, 2 or 3 times a week is enough, buy less transformed goods, ie cook more, and buy local grown food.
- Consumption. To reduce this category, follow the 5 R: Refuse, Reduce, Reuse, Repurpose, Recycle.
- Public emissions. This one is tied to all the public services we get. It can only be reduced by reaching agreements as a society.
As for the children, obviously if we all stop having children, this is all of no use. In developed countries we already have stabilized our demographic growth, so I don't think there is a need for limiting oneself.
And telling people that a sustainable world requires them to be vegetarian or vegan is wrong and counter-productive. We do need to significantly reduce consumption of animal products, but there is no need to eliminate them from our diets completely.
I think you are being too conservative here. Just kill yourself, thus sparing the rest of humanity from the CO2 you will inevitably produce over the course of your life.
You can also sell your organs and donate revenue and your whole estate to some reputable organization that fights with global warming.
Cutting down on flying is another action you can take, I looked up emissions from taking flights and its a significant chunk of annual emissions.
> don't have children
This still leaves the rest of humanity! We need to change the system so that human existence is more sustainable. While having fewer humans on earth might seem to make the challenge slightly smaller, if we have a huge generation of people in retirement and a tiny fraction of working age folks who are both supporting the older generation and rebuilding all our industry, that actually makes the problem harder!
> vegetarian diet
Looking at the bigger picture, if you discard of your vegetarian foods scraps in the trash, they get converted to methane, having emissions on the same order of magnitude as cattle emissions. And we need ruminants to provide the fertilizer to soil to make it into a positive carbon sink.
We must instead look at soil, and using soil as a carbon sink. Modern industrial farming causes huge amounts of carbon release from soil, and that includes organic farming on the industrial scale, like what one could buy in Whole Foods. We instead need to shift agriculture to modes (e.g. no-till) that regenerate soil rather than depleting it. And that will include some animals. Preventing a burn of a gallon of gas has clear and definable implications, and if we stopped all gas burning tomorrow, that would be fantastic. However cutting out all beef tomorrow would leave us in a tough spot for our food system, everything is far far more complex when it comes to out agricultural web. We must come up with a food system that is carbon neutral, and preferably carbon negative. That means composting, no landfills, and some degree of animals. Fixing the food system requires systems change, just like fixing industrial processes does, and personal action can not cross that gap.
As far as personal things one can do, I would add a few more:
1. Replace natural gas furnaces and water heaters with heat pumps. These are a carbon win even if tour grid is burning a lot of natural gas, because heat pumps move 3+ units of heat doe every unit of energy consumed. If you can't do that now insulate the hell out of your home (a good idea anyway)
2. Get involved in local politics, to force local policies to encourage systemic change. A local government with a policy of only financing construction with carbon-neutral steel and cement has a chance of forcing market change, where personal action has no chance.
I do a lot of your list, because I want to do something, but I think we need to realize that it's not really close to enough. We need to change all of society, and personal responsibility will not get us there.
Dead Comment
You're in a position to help on the credit side of the ledger way more then you'll ever be able to do on the debit side.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10...
[2] https://b8f65cb373b1b7b15feb-c70d8ead6ced550b4d987d7c03fcdd1...
You don't have to become a hermit to lower your emissions. It is entirely possible to have a good social life whilst lowering your emissions. In fact I would argue that many of the changes you can make will improve your quality of life.
This is a collective action problem. You need to do better to lead by example, but spend most of your brain cycles on influencing others.
We have one time and subscription negative emissions from multiple methods.
Happy to answer questions and receive any feature suggestions
We emit about 35-40 GtCO2 per year. So in 40 years, we might expect carbon capture to remove less than one year of emissions.
Not useless, but close, considering the investment which could be used instead to more rapidly reduce emissions by installing/improving solar, wind, geothermal, etc.
https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2020-11/sr-cce110520...
Which is not to say I'm fatalistic to the point of leaning into continued emissions and taking no action on a personal level - I think all the information needed to make individual change is already known but we're facing the seven stages of grief with regards to the lifestyle sacrifices necessary to make them.
Edit: if memory serves, it also doesn't really cover carbon capture?
MacCay's principle unit of analysis is energy per unit area, available or used. This is fundamentally insensitive to cost (which annoys economists) and only moderately responsive to technology --- efficiency limits are real (which annoys technologists), meaning the real questions become what new sources can be deployed (as they become economical --- economists are not entirely useless), and how much can demand-side be reduced (ditto technologists).
The sources are solar and wind (MacCay is addressing the UK). There is little untapped or available hydro or geothermal potential (exceptions exist elsewhere), tide and wave are effectively negligible and extraordinarily capital intensive, and biofuels are impractical (the UK cannot even feed itself, as it shall soon rediscover post-Brexit, let alone its automobiles, furnaces, and ovens).
Nuclear is the wildcard, but is as much a problem child as ever. (MacCay was a quiet proponent.)
That being said, I've read that "without hot air" is a bit outdated and should be updated to reflect recent progress on renewable energy and battery technologies.
There are other approaches besides Atmospheric Capture and Sequestration which hold more promise 1. High concentration C02 Emission Capture at source 2. Ocean surface capture and de-acidification
Wrote a quick article describing all of them linking to specific research papers and their results here https://www.projectcelsius.com/2017/05/29/capture-methods/
I expect this will follow a similar journey to how solar panel adoption went... once things tipped over the critical ($/KWH) where it made sense over grid electrical, people started to adopt. I imagine once one of the techniques reaches a critical $/TON Captured & Sequestered, governments or institutions will pay to build whatever machines to start. Right now things are too expensive using any method (i.e. using the best method, it would cost ~$12 Trillion dollars to capture and sequester ~49 Gigatons - the estimated carbon emitted in 1 year by humans in 2020)
Given our track record with this kind of thing, this does not look very likely. It's the tragedy of the commons writ large and I don't think anyone has a sane answer to it, or we would have done it already.
Firstly, I tried to fact check your "~49 Gigatons" figure and came up with this quote: "Emissions are currently expected to reach 42.4 gigatons annually in 2020, rise to an estimated 49.4 gigatons per year in 2030" from [0].
Your figure of "$250/Ton of C02 Captured and Sequestered" is probably correct, but it's worth comparing that to this statement: "Table 1 summarizes the projected energy and dollar costs of air capture processes that have appeared in recently published technical analyses. The projected dollar costs are in the range of $100–$200∕tCO2" from a research paper [1] which may not include sequestration costs.
To present an optimistic scenario then, suppose that by 2030 we managed to reduce annual CO2 emissions to 40 gigatons and could capture and sequester CO2 at $100 per ton. That would make the cost $4 trillion per year. For comparison, the IMF projected Gross World Product to be $90 trillion in 2020, according to [2]. We would expect GWP to grow over the course of this decade, so the annual investment starting in 2030 should be less than 4.4%, although I wouldn't like to say what sort of effect that would have on the global economy, even if there were somehow a global agreement to spend that kind of money.
In conclusion, I agree with your assessment, and only ask that you take extra care to use the letter "O" in "CO2" and not the digit "0". It's not so important on a discussion site, but your linked article looks much less convincing due to that typo appearing eight times. (For extra presentational value, you could use a subscript character, i.e. "CO₂").
[0] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/what-does-a-carbon-...
[1] https://sequestration.mit.edu/pdf/1012253108full.pdf
[2] http://statisticstimes.com/economy/gross-world-product.php
One critical point that article does touch on is that CCS at the point of emission is regarded by some as an unproductive distraction and that money would be better spent elsewhere (I.e. switching away from the emitting activity). That debate is a microcosm of general analysis paralysis that crops up in discussions around reducing carbon emissions - we seem to have a propensity for getting stuck searching for 'perfect' solutions at the detriment of deploying things that at least nudge the dial in the right direction (merely 'better'). We can (I'd almost argue must) do anything we can agree as merely 'better' today and then do 'perfect' if/when that becomes possible.
Then again, green washing is a real and strongly incentivised phenomenon so agreeing even on what's truly 'better' is often not straightforward. At the very least I can say with relative confidence that quite often CCS = usually better and CCUS = usually green washing. But even then the devil is in the details - CCS might not be better once the total energy cost is understood or if those energy inputs are themselves not decarbonized or fully accounted for. Carbon use might be beneficial if the usage does result in sequestration for a significant period.