There's no reason not to plant trees in addition to everything else we'll need to do to fix this problem. The advantage of planting trees is that we know it works, it's cheap, and we can do it right now. So some people should be doing that, and others should be doing R&D on other means of carbon removal. No need to pit one against the other.
I totally agree and I'm sorry if I gave the impression that trees should not be part of a solution. Trees (and other nature based methods) should definitely not be neglected.
I merely wanted to try and raise some awareness to those who question the need for technological removal methods as there is a bit of a toxic "trees will save us" attitude when things like this get mentioned.
Yes, the "magic bullet" mentality typical of media, politicians, and dumb Americans just isn't going to cut it. BEVs + wind + solar + storage. Tree planting. Efficiency. Insulation. Nuclear power. Synthetic fuels. Carbon taxes. Sequestration. Olivine. Seeding the ocean. Vegetarianism/cultured meat/fake meat.
We don't need to wait 100 years for maturation of the wood in forests, the nice thing about wood is that you can use it for paper and construction, and that effectively sequesters the carbon.
> The advantage of planting trees is that we know it works, it's cheap, and we can do it right now
Here in Sweden it is the law that if you cut down a forest you replant it. We have been doing it for a century. All forests here is basically in a constant plant-grow-cut cycle unless the land is claimed for new buildings (farm land has been steady declining every year).
It is debatable if the practice is carbon negative or carbon neutral. Most of wood product do get burned sooner or later, or turned into bio gas which then get burned. Almost nothing remain as stable carbon sink. A planted forest is an future investment to be cut, processed and burned. The only exception is forest reservations and those are much more expensive to make than planting trees.
The advocacy behind replanting might be better invested into a political action of bringing similar replanting laws to other countries. Sweden mostly did it because it looked ugly to have wast areas cut down without regrowth, and because it hurt biodiversity. It also make sense economically in the long run.
>There's no reason not to plant trees in addition to everything else we'll need to do to fix this problem.
Yes, there is.
Trees take a up valuable real estate.
As long as people can do something even remotely profitable with land they own, this can not work.
A few other problems - 1) trees take a lot of water to grow, and 2) all the carbon they sequester can go right back into the atmosphere in a forest fire. Some very scrupulous carbon-offset companies (like YC co terraformation!) are careful to plant diverse, native species in a way that rebuilds habitat and fits local water supplies. But there are a huge number of irresponsible tree-planting orgs that plant monoculture trees in places they don’t belong. For instance, eucalyptus trees in California - an invasive species that sucks water out of the ground, then burns up like an oil rag
Trees take a lot of water to grow but they also hold water and share it through the air and ground with other plants and with other creatures in the form of transpired water vapor.
Trees rarely burn to the ground in a wildfire. Their foliage burns quickly and the bark chars, but it takes years for even trees in the hottest spots to finally fall and then, many more years to decompose back into the soil.
Also, planting trees sequesters co2 into the biosphere. That is not good enough, we need to be sequestering co2 into the geosphere if we want to remove it from the equation
I'm sure it's been mentioned elsewhere here already by someone, but I've always thought that converting felled 'sequestration stock' to bio-char and making terra preta out of it would be win-win-win, as it could then be used to improve desertified land.
As much as CO2 emissions befear me, so too does increasingly poor topsoil, globally.
- ed
I'm not even sure we'd need to wait for trees to mature either - we just need work with whatever plant absorbs the most CO2. Perhaps algae, even?
Naturally (without human influence) a combination of biosphere (decades) and geosphere (millenia) would keep CO₂ levels in check.
We (humans) have accelerated emissions (by burning, thus reversing, geosphere capture via oil) and destroyed the biosphere through deforestation. This has also been accelerated as raising temperatures thaw permafrost & destroy ocean life (among others).
We need technology, but more important is business and government. We have all the data on what is causing the problem, but we are not making value judgements, and taking action based on those judgements.
Until our technology catches up and provides net carbon-neutral energy, we have to pollute less. And that may be and doing less, and "consuming" less. And that will require force. Public pressure, social pressure, and regulation. No business will do it voluntarily, and no government will make itself unpopular voluntarily.
Long term we need green energy technology. Short term, we need technology is to help force change in our habits.
Do all the other stuff too, sure, but it seems like most of the pollution currently comes from Industry, Agriculture and transport. Things that enhance human quality of life. We need to decide which enhancements are most essential, and cut back.
It’s not just about carbon equations. Appropriately selected, well planted trees reduce local environment temperatures, regulate rainfall and soak up excess water in a positive feedback loop. The urban heat island effect will make lived experience even more challenging than it already does as the planet warms; turning cities into agro-forestry reserves would counteract this.
Actually yes, planting trees (especially the wrong trees) is not always a good thing. Darker leaves will attract more heat (imagine if it was possible to turn the polar regions into trees - this would have a very negative effect).
Also mono cultures and replacing natural vegetation with man-made forestation can actually be more limited to the amount of carbon they can capture long term.
I don’t think you should be downvoted. People really don’t like it because it is clearly not the optimal way to solve the problem, but we should take the possibility seriously instead of down voting anyone who brings it up as something that might happen.
We are letting anthropogenic global warming happen because it’s cheaper in the very near term. But climate change is a real thing and will have real, life-threatening effects especially for some geographic regions.
If we accept the reality that:
1) humans often just do what is cheapest and easiest even if the long-term consequences are bad
AND
2) global warming will start killing massive numbers of people from things like heat stroke, putting enormous political pressure on governments to do something,
…then The logical conclusion (combined with how insanely cheap SO2 is to deploy, we’re talking maybe $50 billion a year, maybe less) is that there is an extremely high probability that some nation will just unilaterally do sulfur dioxide. Think of a Nation like India, with a large population that will be vulnerable to heat stroke and a big enough budget and military to just unilaterally do something like this to stop the political unrest of hundreds of thousands of heat stroke deaths per yearz
>Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again.
The notion being that nature or even the climate is balanced/stable ?
I think the focus should be on increasing resiliency not hoping everything is going to be alright "if we just undo this one thing".
Having said that I'm all for reverting CO2 emissions, just dislike this implicit notion that nature is harmonious by default and humans fucked it up - there's speculation about weather related disasters pre industrial era, so even very recently in human context. Or the disruptions we have with relatively minor volcanic activity. So many natural thing could screw us way worse than global warming and for the first time in history we're getting technologically advanced enough to protect against it.
Can you think of anyway we could measure individuals doing this? I’m thinking reverse Bitcoin - provide a kit for people to start generating terra preta and deploying it and then give them coins for the amount of carbon they store.
A decade sounds like a pretty good start. If we could combine that with transitioning away from lawns and towards gardens / orchards (like even on highway medians!), imagine the savings in terms of shipping food.
Not a solution, but still - check "Oxytree". It's a tree "farmed" in Europe, that was created in Spain. Within 6 years it grows to 16 meters. You can cut it almost completely, and it will regrow. You cut it then every 4 years. It will regrow multiple times.
The tree as far as I know cannot re-plant itself (so its not invasive), and it absorbs up to 10 times more CO2 than regular trees.
It's still young project, but more and more countries create plantations of it (also as a way of CO2 recapture).
Yep, but reaching equilibrium once we've removed enough from the atmosphere is fine.
Of course this strategy does have to go hand-in-hand with drastic emission reductions to prevent use getting back to the same point and having nowhere else to put trees.
We already have all the pieces needed, they just need to be connected in a better way.
Forests need to be managed to optimize for sequestration; log the right parts at the right time, replant. Also need to invest more in controlling forest fires (hell, use the military if that's the only way to get the budget).
At the other end we need to reduce burning wood for fuel through other renewables and put more lumber into building.
Sounds like dramatic progress to me. It uses a technology we already have against a problem that is only getting worse by the second. The side effect of fostering sustainable natural resources would be an unquestionable good as well.
Trees do much more than remove carbon from the air. Carbon removal machine could potentially create c02 deficit regions, creating hostile environments for trees.
We can't possibly build a machine for every function a tree does.
> Carbon removal machine could potentially create c02 deficit regions, creating hostile environments for trees.
If we could remove so much CO2 from the air that it prevented plants from growing (even if the effect were highly localized, which is pretty much a certainty), then we might actually have a shot at being able to remove CO2 in a reasonable amount of time. So this definitely sounds like a good problem to have. Personally I think that's pretty unlikely though.
I think the point GP was making was that just planting trees is not enough, not that we shouldn't be doing it. If all we do is plant trees, we're still running full bore up shit creek.
As I understand it the air carrying the CO₂ is constantly moving and will not create any deficit regions?
Besides, with the large over concentration of carbon dioxide we have at the moment I think increasing temperatures have a higher chance of creating hostile environments.
>For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0].
Not even, say you could transform the Sahara to rain forest, awesome right? I mean it would be an incredible feat, but it would give you exactly 0 with reducing carbon. Contrary to popular belief the Amazon rain forest aren't the "lungs" of the planet, the Amazon rain forest is basically net 0. Why? Because the rain forest also has a tremendous amount of life/animals, those animals use the oxygen and produce carbon. The real "lungs" of the planet are in the ocean.
The Amazon rain forest is not net zero because of animals. It's net zero (actually net negative last I heard) because humans are burning it to make way for agriculture.
Trees sequester carbon. They also return that carbon to the atmosphere eventually, but as long as they're replaced by new trees, that's fine. That's not what's happening in the Amazon.
From a carbon perspective forests for timber are even better because then we keep several generations of trees worth of carbon locked up in our structures. It's also an easier sell because that has real economic value.
From a biodiversity perspective it's not as good to have monoculture crops of any kind, including trees.
Wait a minute. Are you saying that the animals in the Amazonian rain forest produce more CO2 than the plants within it consume? Do you have any data that shows this?
When people talk about adding new forests, they're mostly talking about the carbon used to make up the trees and animals. That all comes out of the air.
Soil, in prodigious quantities. We need to be making it.
Using human waste - food and faecal from our cities; Using whatever plant fixes the most CO2 in a useful form that we can turn into charcoal (quick trees? bamboo grass? something genetically modified?), releasing heat energy, and then fixing carbon in a useful matrix, for soil regeneration a la Terra Preta.
I sort of made this post elsewhere here, I just wanted to repeat and focus on the soil angle.
We have huge swathes of the globe that due to poor historical environmental conditions have poor soil, so not much can grow. Some have become desertified, perhaps some of which is our fault (eg. Mediterranean deforestation). If we add soil to these places, at least hardier plants can grow and we can expand the reach of our efforts.
Strikes me that the most important thing is that plants can grow, and for that we need soil.
Thank you for this. What's amusing to me here is that each year I collect a load of chestnuts and try and plant them about. I do it for a variety of inane personal reasons - I hadn't appreciated that there are a load of useful reasons to do so too! ( https://wiki.buildsoil.net/index.php/Why_Chestnuts%3F )
.
Just don't leave bags of chestnuts outside - apparently foxes love them and will utterly lay waste to them. Who knew?
When I posted the above last night, I sat there wondering whether I could Just Transition and somehow get a job in this field (scuse the pun) and had an idle fantasisation about the possibilities, but sadly my skillsets are uselessly-irrelevant in this domain, and I'm a bit too old and poor to make the swing.
A city such as London (where I'm at) generates about 3600 tonnes of wet mass poop a day. Thanks for making me work that out... .
Given poop isn't even a main constituent ingredient in new soil, but rather forms the 'flavouring' for the development of the biological and mineral matter otherwise, I'd suggest a well-developed bio-recycling infrastructure could be quite productive.
This isn't even factoring in food or farm waste, etc.
This sounds cool from a tech-nerd perspective, but of course it all is pretty futile if we don't get emissions under control. The video says 10 gigatons/yr by 2050. Our 2019 emissions were ~36 gigatons. I.e. even if capture is successful, it needs to be accompanied by aggressive emissions reductions for us to even get to neutral, let alone reversing damage.
I'm guessing Musk had some thought process around the expected marginal impact of funding this vs more on energy storage vs energy production. And perhaps capture/sequestration is under-explored.
But I wonder what could be achieved with $100M of funds directed at research to intentionally changing and shifting culture towards consuming stuff with smaller footprints? Tesla made some people want an electric car really badly. For some, very small houses are becoming attractive. But so far this stuff mostly arises from ad-hoc marketing efforts around particular brands, products, influencers. What if we need systematic memetic engineering, to make lower energy consumption actually feel desirable?
I think at this point emissions reductions is a matter of will, not technology. Rather than waiting for some technological magic bullet when it comes to emissions reductions, we need to take aggressive action.
But we're going to need CCS technologies to start pulling the carbon back out if we want to avoid really bad outcomes, and those technologies are much less developed.
I agree that reducing emissions is about will, but I'm frightened that we seem not especially willful. And that does seem like a matter of culture, which could be changed. We just don't have a robust framework for deliberately creating those changes. We gave a portfolio of expensive one-offs.
I think the general consensus is that where it's possible to eliminate emissions, that's much better than emitting and then capturing later, but there are huge disparities across emitters as to how easy that is to do, and there's a likely outcome where getting to net zero (or even net negative) emissions involves eliminating emissions in most industries and then using capture to deal with the laggards.
Getting less abstract: there are no real technological hurdles for eliminating emissions for personal vehicles, and probably-manageable ones for other surface transport (cargo shipping, etc.). Decarbonizing the electric grid has some technological challenges to solve (mostly around intermittency and storage if we go all renewables, or cost if we go mixed renewables and nuclear), but there are reasonably clear paths forward. On the other hand, we really don't know how to do zero-carbon long haul aviation, or concrete production and curing, or aluminum smelting, or trans-oceanic shipping -- maybe portable/modular nuclear could be used for the last two, but it's still pretty pie-in-the-sky. So, maybe in the future we have electric cars but carbon capture for long-haul jets, or something.
(Aside: the recent Bill Gates climate book has a pretty thorough rundown of all the major current emitters and the levels of technological readiness for decarbonizing each.)
Carbon neutral jet fuel exists (synthetic fuels from electrolysis, and/or biofuels), and could be scaled up. The issue is not “can we do this”, it’s “can we justify doing this economically”.
Agreed. Removal and reductions are not mutually exclusive.
One huge positive I see from the creation of this prize is the publicity and interest in carbon removal. From my experience more people are learning about the requirement for carbon removal and realizing how expensive it is.
For those of us who want to leave a minimal footprint, becoming aware of how expensive it is to undo our footprint incentivizes us to reduce too.
(Credit where credit is due, Stripe, Shopify and Microsoft are also really helping this area grow too. )
> Agreed. Removal and reductions are not mutually exclusive.
Making people believe that some magic techno fix will swoop in and somehow solve the climate change problem is undesirable. People need to accept that a large reduction in emissions is necessary and this will require many people to change at least some of their habits.
Those 36 gigatons aren't largely a result of consumer behaviors, but industry (which, admittedly, increases as a function of demand)
Reducing footprints through innovation will go a ways. Changing "culture" (i.e. coerced minimalism) is a thing, but it's a band-aid solution on a leaking hoover-dam; virtue signaling for the most part.
Carbon footprints scale up with population. Everyone eats, wants gadgets, wants a home, good infrastructure. If these demands can't be met without excess encroachment of land and destruction of the environment, then there's too many people. Innovation and increased efficiency can't outrun growth. Yes, it's poised to level off in the next 100 or so years after adding an extra few billion to the total, but the interventions needed are more urgent and by extension the reduced rate should be more urgent. Though changes to the energy sector alone can make a substantial dent in emissions in the near-term, given political will.
All of this would be a moot point if the global population were halved and remained stagnant.
The rampant op-ed push for minimalism on the part of the consumer, for housing especially, seems almost like a nefarious ploy to plant the idea that commoners should now be content with less, with environmentalism as the red herring. So being unable to afford a detached home is to be thought of as a happy virtuous accident.
I actually think all people in the developed world - rich people of course most of all, but “commoners” too - do need to learn to be content with a lot less. Before the industrial era, the average person in England owned 36 objects. And that’s counting like 1) table 2) bowl 3) cup 4) knife. The way people in America and Europe have been taught to live in the last century - even the lower-middle and working class, let alone the rich - is inherently unsustainable, and can never be sustainable. “Buy less sh*t” should be the first and most powerful front in our fight against climate change, but it isn’t because we are selfish and gluttonous beasts.
The co2 producer most lagging behind in terms of reduction is transportation. This is a field where endusers have giant impacts, and it will likely not be solved by making those giant SUVs electric.
This is also where the US is pretty bad, because of a culture that aspires to urban sprawl.
More dense cities, more mixed use planning, more active transportation, less detached housing, less parking etc. are ways in which developed countries could really reduce their transportation carbon footprints (and incidentally also footprints related to AC/heating).
My personal belief is that all governments should implement carbon tax/trading schemes which are either revenue neutral or 100% of the revenue is invested into carbon capture schemes.
Indeed, getting emissions under control is key. And so are developing solutions to removing carbon from the ambient air, with fewer than 2,000 people working in the industry worldwide.
(Side note: it's CO2, carbon+(oxide×2), not C zero two)
It's not futile if we don't remove atmospheric CO2, but we would have to get to net zero warming without cheating and we would have to get there within our emission budget to stay below <insert your temperature target>.
> What if we need systematic memetic engineering, to make lower energy consumption actually feel desirable?
lol, there has been an unrelenting campaign to do so, going all the way back to the 70s - when global cooling and population control were the hot topics at Davos. Captain Planet, he's our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero...
I'm all for abandoning conspicuous consumption and the treatment of electronics as consumable goods (sent from 2011 vintage Thinkpad), but I'm not on board with weird its-for-your-own-good social engineering/propaganda campaigns. It is a moot point anyway, as you'd be impotently counter-messaging every advertising/branding strategy that has (or will) ever exist.
Surely dissolving CO2 in the ocean acts as a buffer, not a sink? We will have to stop emitting all of that CO2 as well (and future generations will have to sequester it).
The net absorption / emission from the biosphere involves a lot of emission following from our changes to the planet. We can significantly reduce our emissions (and slowly recover some of them) with better stewardship of the environment but there is a risk to the sequestered carbon: eg. where climate change causes forests to die and release most of their stored carbon.
Wait, 36 originally × .75 from plants × .75 from oceans - 10 captured = 20¼ Gt. I think you're off by about 10 Gt?
And that's assuming the ocean and plants will infinitely capture more and more carbon, which I sincerely doubt as well, but I'll go ahead and assume you mean this as a bridging method to get us another decade or two to finalize real solutions.
Elon tweeted about making rocket fuel out of arrested carbon. This technology could, it seems, be used outside earth as well (other planets, not space).
There's a few "Plants and trees won't do" comments here, which really misses the entire point of regenerative methods. Earth is an entire complex living system. Thinking of it as a simple chemical matter of CO2 is a very reductionist take. The point is to sequester carbon but ALSO trigger other cooling dynamics and reducing certain industrial practices that themselves release CO2. Too many engineers need to study complex systems and holistic approaches. The amount of patronizing makes me think of the fatal engineering flaw of "It can't be this simple".
Nevertheless, plants and trees won't do it. They grow pretty much everywhere already where they can. Nature is better at reclaiming those areas than we are - there are an estimated three trillion trees in the world.
Then there's the problem that there's no significant process that turns trees into sequestered carbon for longer than the trees' lifespan.
The reason it's important to keep saying this is that lots of people participate in these tree planting drives. They feel all accomplished and that they did their part. But if that doesn't have any real impact on the problem, then we've done lots of work, used up people's goodwill, but not dented the problem.
> there's no significant process that turns trees into sequestered carbon for longer than the trees' lifespan.
There is of course lumber, which can sequester CO2 for decades or hundreds of years. Lumber sequestration currently only amounts to ~1% of global annual carbon emissions, but regionally it can be big (9% in Sweden) [1]. Lumber might have a bigger impact if purposefully employed for sequestration and prioritized over other carbon positive building materials.
> They feel all accomplished and that they did their part. But if that doesn't have any real impact on the problem, then we've done lots of work, used up people's goodwill, but not dented the problem.
Does the evidence support that people's goodwill get "used up"?
It seems as plausible a theory to me that, when people get involved and take direct action, it ends up driving them to take further actions. Being personally invested in the result may drive more action rather than using up the goodwill.
(To be clear, I agree that we should always encourage action with the highest impact, and if tree planting actually does nothing to help solve the problem, then we should direct people to other activities. I'm not really jumping in to defend tree-planting initiatives, but more to question the assumption that people have a fixed amount of effort that they're willing to put into a given problem)
It's true that there are "other cooling dynamics".
But most of those don't involve trees. And "reducing certain industrial practices" has nothing to do with trees.
So I don't really understand your point. It's correct that we shouldn't be too reductionist, but even if we avoid reductionism it's still correct to say that plants and trees won't do the job, and is not "missing the entire point of regenerative methods".
Trees actually can provide tremendous cooling dynamics, beyond CO2 absorption. They provide shade at ground level. If every house in the US were surrounded by trees instead of useless lawns, energy use for both heating and cooling would be lower, so you’d get emissions reductions AND carbon absorption.
Thank you, you have put it well. By no means I'm nature-knows-best person. But in this case nature does a great job in 'removing' CO2 by expending the least energy, with the least negative impact (actually a net positive) to the environment. Of course it's more nuanced than what even I stated.
A wise engineer realizes the breadth of the issues and the 'true' engineering approach IMO will necessarily involve ( but not limited) a lot of trees/plants/algae etc.
Plant and trees are definitely a very good solution. The real engineering challenge is really : 1. how to measure precisely how much carbon is in that tree and this other one here. 2. how to plant them efficiently so you can remove 1000T of co2 per year.
Most types of carbon capture technology [1] being touted are credit cards for climate change:
You burn enough fuel to generate 4MJ worth of heat...
Your internal combustion engine generates 1MJ worth of mechanical effort from this...
You use this to propel a 2 ton vehicle...
Carrying 1 person...
To take part in the rat race or indulge in some consumerism. [2]
The carbon dioxide sits in the atmosphere for 50 years where it heats the planet, trashes the ecosystem and likely feeds at least as many positive feedbacks as negative - amplifying the climate change effects.
To capture this carbon you (your descendants) are going to have to:
Put 4MJ of energy into the breaking the carbon-oxygen bonds...
Which will take more than 4MJ of process energy and embodied energy in the capital plant...
Once you have collected the diffuse CO2 from the atmosphere, which will not be free.
Our 'plan' for dealing with climate change is that we hand a burning planet to our descendants to deal with, if we can stagger to hand-off without crashing the system first. Future generations will have to be far more responsible than us, for centuries, and imagining what they will have to say makes me squirm.
[1] I am mildly optimistic about techniques that accelerate the weathering of (silicate?) rocks; and more trees will be nice. These technologies will be useful for the centuries of cleanup that will be needed, but cannot keep up with the huge rate of current emission.
[2] Yes, much of our current consumption delivers real benefits to people's lives; but much (most) of it doesn't. The point of my analogy is that the sheer wastefulness of the present excess will be paid for in the future at far greater cost and is being spent on such trivial or actively harmful goals.
Genuine question - if CO2 half life in the atmosphere is less than 50 years, why are we so concerned about it? Wouldn’t the problem solve itself given that we are both reaching peak consumption of fossil fuels and that they are expected to deplete with the next century?
In other words, wouldn’t the co2 concentration go down naturally within the next 100 years even if we let thing run naturally?
Because if it’s somewhat true to say that stopping CO2 emissions would rapidly pause climate change, there is no short term « reverse » (in hundreds of years) of the climate.
We are in such a situation that every +0.01°C increase in global warming is gained more or less indefinitely.
The only thing we can do is stopping net emissions and learn to live with the climate as it is when we achieve this.
We really don’t care a lot about concentrations going down in the next centuries because by the time it happens, the harm would be done already for multiple centuries.
We are really facing today, 50°C in summer and devastating events, for our generation and our kids. This precise battle is already lost but we must fight for it to not be even more dramatic.
50 years was my (over optimistic) estimate of how long the CO2 would be left in the atmosphere before being sequestered by one of the carbon removal technologies being touted. In reality it's going to take centuries for our descendants to stabilise the climate - and I'm still being optimistic.
On short time scales, the oceans take up a lot of CO2 because there's an equilibrium with the atmosphere. However, increased acidification of the oceans is bad on its own, and this buffering hurts when you try to take the CO2 out of the atmosphere since then the oceans will turn into a net contributor.
Lot's of "just do this" comments in here. If its as easy as you think it is, then winning the grand prize should be pretty easy.
Do the math, grab an investor and go get $100M.
"Just plant trees." Okay do the math on how many trees you need. Figure out how your going to build a program to get that many trees planted. What incentives, partnership, funding do you need. How will it scale to the amount needed. What will the full lifecycle look like.
"Just improve soil." Okay do the math on that. What's the timeframe for return on investment. What do the logistics look like for producing soil in huge quantities and deploying it where needed. How do we then use that soil to grow plants that sequester carbon.
90% of the comments in here are just the "middle-brow dismissal" of climate change of all things. As if we can "just do X" to solve it and everyone else is an idiot.
It's a hard problem, especially because part of the problem is determining how to actually implement and incentivize the population to do it. You can't just ignore that part, or just throw up your hands "people are stupid so we're fucked." Solving the incentive problem is actually part of the problem. Any solution that ends with "people just need to learn to do/value X" is dead in the water. You can start with "people just need to learn to do/value X" but you need to end with a plan on how you will bring about that change in mentality/incentive.
Agree with this. It's a hard problem. Have an idea for something better? Heck yeah, let's figure out how to get you working on it! If folks want help getting started, there's no place better than AirMiners: http://airminers.org
I don't mean to be a wet blanket (I imagine the prize will be a net good) but I want to talk into the void about something I've been befuddled by...
I feel like I see/hear a lot of uncritical faith in (techno|market|competition)-solutions, with little discussion of what Nth-order effects may travel with those approaches. Just some scattered thoughts:
- The best case for progress is probably technology that leads to profitable unsubsidized capture, but incremental technological progress may give the industry that springs up around it profit motives to overshoot.
- Profitable capture would, if fossil-fuel producers get in on the action themselves, shift their break-even points around somewhat.
- Even if this operates at a loss and depends on public funding, if the work is done by private industry and not the public sector, a few decades of capture may avert/blunt the crisis but leave us with yet another powerful lobby. It'll likely be flush with good-will and hard to regulate, let alone wind down once it has served its use.
- As @knodi123 puts it: "I can not-pump 100M of oil in my own back yard. And you wouldn't believe the rate I can not pump it at!" If all of the operators depend on subsidy, there will be a decent incentive towards graft/corruption/fraud. There'll have to be some amount of administrative overhead going to verifying what is captured, that it isn't double-counted, that it actually gets sequestered, and so on. A deepening crisis could mean more of this money sloshing around and less will to build the compliance mechanisms that ensure it accomplishes the goal. Rampant graft could be enough to sink the program.
With the exception of the last item, these are all problems I would love to have considering our current situation. Graft and administrative burden is a real concern, though, although I don't think it should stop us from trying.
For sure. I don't see these as comprehensive, nor as reasons not to try (nor even think it'd be possible to stop others from trying them).
But I worry that this path is already the one we're disposed to fail/default into, and that a rose-tinted view of it will only make it easier for other opportunities slip through our fingers while gobs of smart people focus on the technological half of the moon-shot.
Put another way, the degree of optimism I hear on these approaches smells like the kind of hubris that causes people to lose races they think they've won.
This comment makes me think you may reading me differently than I intend, though I'm not sure which bit you're responding to. Perhaps my use of the word "operators"?
In any case, I do not intend to suggest any subsidy to fossil fuel producers, here. When I say operators, I mean the operators of capture operations. The only context in which I intentionally point to producers is around the possibility that they might also become capture operators if it was profitable.
Interesting. The grand prize timeline is 4 years from now. That seems VERY fast. However, I like the aggressiveness- if this can produce viable demonstrations of the technology at anywhere near what the aformentioned Prometheus Fuels ($36/ton) claims, then that produces a huge line in the sand for policy makers on carbon pricing and mitigation.
$36/ton would raise the price of gasoline about 36 cents. The cost to capture ALL 6.5B tons of US emissions would be about $236B per year, or 1.1% of GDP. I think even getting it down to a $100/ton would change the discussion.
These are real, manageable numbers that should undermine opposition to mitigating climate change and get something resembling a carbon tax based on a feasible number. Policies like "A 39 cent/gallon tax on gasoline" is much more understandable and politically feasible then "you'll have to change everything you do." And then, once in place, we'll see the economic effects of taxing carbon accelerate movement away from carbon emitting solutions, which are already becoming non-competitive in many scenarios.
None of this means we shouldn't do things SOONER, espicially since DACC might never get that cheap, but I like the way this XPrize has the potential to change people's political calculus.
The elephant in the room is that most of the proposed process chemistry does not have the necessary scale. If I need a billion tons of mined mineral per year to make a dent -- the reality for many of these proposals -- and current global production is a few thousand tons, you have a serious practicality problem. Not only would you need to develop those mines and the corresponding power generation facilities to manufacture the chemicals (which is energy intensive), we may not have the necessary mineral reserves. Addressing these all require massive amounts of capital investment that are not included in the cost per ton of the process at current scales. Buying a liter of water has completely different economics than buying a trillion liters of the same water, and the cost is always calculated as if it was the former case.
While recycling of reactant chemicals is always a part of these proposals, they are typically only ~90% efficient as designed (each marginal increase in recycling efficiency tends to be exponentially more expensive). At the scales involved, that requires billions of tons of reactants being produced that don't exist today. It would be the largest mining and chemical manufacturing endeavor ever undertaken on the planet, starting from zero.
Readit News
For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0].
Not only that but it would still take a century for the trees to reach maturity.
Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again.
[0] https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6463/eaaz0388.ful...
I merely wanted to try and raise some awareness to those who question the need for technological removal methods as there is a bit of a toxic "trees will save us" attitude when things like this get mentioned.
We don't need to wait 100 years for maturation of the wood in forests, the nice thing about wood is that you can use it for paper and construction, and that effectively sequesters the carbon.
Here in Sweden it is the law that if you cut down a forest you replant it. We have been doing it for a century. All forests here is basically in a constant plant-grow-cut cycle unless the land is claimed for new buildings (farm land has been steady declining every year).
It is debatable if the practice is carbon negative or carbon neutral. Most of wood product do get burned sooner or later, or turned into bio gas which then get burned. Almost nothing remain as stable carbon sink. A planted forest is an future investment to be cut, processed and burned. The only exception is forest reservations and those are much more expensive to make than planting trees.
The advocacy behind replanting might be better invested into a political action of bringing similar replanting laws to other countries. Sweden mostly did it because it looked ugly to have wast areas cut down without regrowth, and because it hurt biodiversity. It also make sense economically in the long run.
Deleted Comment
Yes, there is. Trees take a up valuable real estate. As long as people can do something even remotely profitable with land they own, this can not work.
As much as CO2 emissions befear me, so too does increasingly poor topsoil, globally.
- ed
I'm not even sure we'd need to wait for trees to mature either - we just need work with whatever plant absorbs the most CO2. Perhaps algae, even?
We (humans) have accelerated emissions (by burning, thus reversing, geosphere capture via oil) and destroyed the biosphere through deforestation. This has also been accelerated as raising temperatures thaw permafrost & destroy ocean life (among others).
Anything we can do to reverse this is beneficial.
Until our technology catches up and provides net carbon-neutral energy, we have to pollute less. And that may be and doing less, and "consuming" less. And that will require force. Public pressure, social pressure, and regulation. No business will do it voluntarily, and no government will make itself unpopular voluntarily.
Long term we need green energy technology. Short term, we need technology is to help force change in our habits.
Do all the other stuff too, sure, but it seems like most of the pollution currently comes from Industry, Agriculture and transport. Things that enhance human quality of life. We need to decide which enhancements are most essential, and cut back.
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss...
Empress seems to be the ideal candidate.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-02/we-alread...
Also mono cultures and replacing natural vegetation with man-made forestation can actually be more limited to the amount of carbon they can capture long term.
Source: https://spiral.imperial.ac.uk:8443/bitstream/10044/1/80271/6...
It'll probably start a war, but once natural resources start getting scarce I fully expect the affected nation to deploy SO2.
We are letting anthropogenic global warming happen because it’s cheaper in the very near term. But climate change is a real thing and will have real, life-threatening effects especially for some geographic regions.
If we accept the reality that: 1) humans often just do what is cheapest and easiest even if the long-term consequences are bad AND 2) global warming will start killing massive numbers of people from things like heat stroke, putting enormous political pressure on governments to do something,
…then The logical conclusion (combined with how insanely cheap SO2 is to deploy, we’re talking maybe $50 billion a year, maybe less) is that there is an extremely high probability that some nation will just unilaterally do sulfur dioxide. Think of a Nation like India, with a large population that will be vulnerable to heat stroke and a big enough budget and military to just unilaterally do something like this to stop the political unrest of hundreds of thousands of heat stroke deaths per yearz
The notion being that nature or even the climate is balanced/stable ?
I think the focus should be on increasing resiliency not hoping everything is going to be alright "if we just undo this one thing".
Having said that I'm all for reverting CO2 emissions, just dislike this implicit notion that nature is harmonious by default and humans fucked it up - there's speculation about weather related disasters pre industrial era, so even very recently in human context. Or the disruptions we have with relatively minor volcanic activity. So many natural thing could screw us way worse than global warming and for the first time in history we're getting technologically advanced enough to protect against it.
Hybrid poplars mature within a decade, and a biochar reactor is a net-energy producing reaction that produces soil improving char as a byproduct.
It won't save the world on it's own, but trees can be leveraged in powerful ways.
Great for replacing fossil fuels, but not a carbon sequestration technique.
Of course this strategy does have to go hand-in-hand with drastic emission reductions to prevent use getting back to the same point and having nowhere else to put trees.
In the 2070s things will be very different.
Forests need to be managed to optimize for sequestration; log the right parts at the right time, replant. Also need to invest more in controlling forest fires (hell, use the military if that's the only way to get the budget).
At the other end we need to reduce burning wood for fuel through other renewables and put more lumber into building.
Sounds like dramatic progress to me. It uses a technology we already have against a problem that is only getting worse by the second. The side effect of fostering sustainable natural resources would be an unquestionable good as well.
We can't possibly build a machine for every function a tree does.
If we could remove so much CO2 from the air that it prevented plants from growing (even if the effect were highly localized, which is pretty much a certainty), then we might actually have a shot at being able to remove CO2 in a reasonable amount of time. So this definitely sounds like a good problem to have. Personally I think that's pretty unlikely though.
As I understand it the air carrying the CO₂ is constantly moving and will not create any deficit regions?
Besides, with the large over concentration of carbon dioxide we have at the moment I think increasing temperatures have a higher chance of creating hostile environments.
Deleted Comment
Not even, say you could transform the Sahara to rain forest, awesome right? I mean it would be an incredible feat, but it would give you exactly 0 with reducing carbon. Contrary to popular belief the Amazon rain forest aren't the "lungs" of the planet, the Amazon rain forest is basically net 0. Why? Because the rain forest also has a tremendous amount of life/animals, those animals use the oxygen and produce carbon. The real "lungs" of the planet are in the ocean.
Trees sequester carbon. They also return that carbon to the atmosphere eventually, but as long as they're replaced by new trees, that's fine. That's not what's happening in the Amazon.
From a carbon perspective forests for timber are even better because then we keep several generations of trees worth of carbon locked up in our structures. It's also an easier sell because that has real economic value.
From a biodiversity perspective it's not as good to have monoculture crops of any kind, including trees.
Soil, in prodigious quantities. We need to be making it.
Using human waste - food and faecal from our cities; Using whatever plant fixes the most CO2 in a useful form that we can turn into charcoal (quick trees? bamboo grass? something genetically modified?), releasing heat energy, and then fixing carbon in a useful matrix, for soil regeneration a la Terra Preta.
I sort of made this post elsewhere here, I just wanted to repeat and focus on the soil angle.
We have huge swathes of the globe that due to poor historical environmental conditions have poor soil, so not much can grow. Some have become desertified, perhaps some of which is our fault (eg. Mediterranean deforestation). If we add soil to these places, at least hardier plants can grow and we can expand the reach of our efforts.
Strikes me that the most important thing is that plants can grow, and for that we need soil.
Soil.
.
Just don't leave bags of chestnuts outside - apparently foxes love them and will utterly lay waste to them. Who knew?
- ed: Oh, actually, it turns out I don't - Horse-chestnuts aren't the same species as sweet or Spanish chestnuts.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesculus_hippocastanum
Reality's a bitch, sometimes. Often.
Given poop isn't even a main constituent ingredient in new soil, but rather forms the 'flavouring' for the development of the biological and mineral matter otherwise, I'd suggest a well-developed bio-recycling infrastructure could be quite productive.
This isn't even factoring in food or farm waste, etc.
If you had prodigious quantities of good soil, you could grow trees and food at sea, where we have lots of space to grow, especially at the equator.
The problem then becomes a floating platform, and controlling it all, but those seem less difficult.
I'm guessing Musk had some thought process around the expected marginal impact of funding this vs more on energy storage vs energy production. And perhaps capture/sequestration is under-explored.
But I wonder what could be achieved with $100M of funds directed at research to intentionally changing and shifting culture towards consuming stuff with smaller footprints? Tesla made some people want an electric car really badly. For some, very small houses are becoming attractive. But so far this stuff mostly arises from ad-hoc marketing efforts around particular brands, products, influencers. What if we need systematic memetic engineering, to make lower energy consumption actually feel desirable?
But we're going to need CCS technologies to start pulling the carbon back out if we want to avoid really bad outcomes, and those technologies are much less developed.
Getting less abstract: there are no real technological hurdles for eliminating emissions for personal vehicles, and probably-manageable ones for other surface transport (cargo shipping, etc.). Decarbonizing the electric grid has some technological challenges to solve (mostly around intermittency and storage if we go all renewables, or cost if we go mixed renewables and nuclear), but there are reasonably clear paths forward. On the other hand, we really don't know how to do zero-carbon long haul aviation, or concrete production and curing, or aluminum smelting, or trans-oceanic shipping -- maybe portable/modular nuclear could be used for the last two, but it's still pretty pie-in-the-sky. So, maybe in the future we have electric cars but carbon capture for long-haul jets, or something.
(Aside: the recent Bill Gates climate book has a pretty thorough rundown of all the major current emitters and the levels of technological readiness for decarbonizing each.)
One huge positive I see from the creation of this prize is the publicity and interest in carbon removal. From my experience more people are learning about the requirement for carbon removal and realizing how expensive it is.
For those of us who want to leave a minimal footprint, becoming aware of how expensive it is to undo our footprint incentivizes us to reduce too.
(Credit where credit is due, Stripe, Shopify and Microsoft are also really helping this area grow too. )
Making people believe that some magic techno fix will swoop in and somehow solve the climate change problem is undesirable. People need to accept that a large reduction in emissions is necessary and this will require many people to change at least some of their habits.
Reducing footprints through innovation will go a ways. Changing "culture" (i.e. coerced minimalism) is a thing, but it's a band-aid solution on a leaking hoover-dam; virtue signaling for the most part.
Carbon footprints scale up with population. Everyone eats, wants gadgets, wants a home, good infrastructure. If these demands can't be met without excess encroachment of land and destruction of the environment, then there's too many people. Innovation and increased efficiency can't outrun growth. Yes, it's poised to level off in the next 100 or so years after adding an extra few billion to the total, but the interventions needed are more urgent and by extension the reduced rate should be more urgent. Though changes to the energy sector alone can make a substantial dent in emissions in the near-term, given political will.
All of this would be a moot point if the global population were halved and remained stagnant.
The rampant op-ed push for minimalism on the part of the consumer, for housing especially, seems almost like a nefarious ploy to plant the idea that commoners should now be content with less, with environmentalism as the red herring. So being unable to afford a detached home is to be thought of as a happy virtuous accident.
This is also where the US is pretty bad, because of a culture that aspires to urban sprawl.
More dense cities, more mixed use planning, more active transportation, less detached housing, less parking etc. are ways in which developed countries could really reduce their transportation carbon footprints (and incidentally also footprints related to AC/heating).
The emphasis here is on some people.
Observe the morons who think they are clever/funny "rolling coal".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK6Amk4Hf4Y
My personal belief is that all governments should implement carbon tax/trading schemes which are either revenue neutral or 100% of the revenue is invested into carbon capture schemes.
Regarding your point about carbon capture, XPRIZE recently closed a $20 million prize for making products out of carbon emissions captured at industrial sources: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/carbon/articles/xprize-announc...
It's not futile if we don't remove atmospheric CO2, but we would have to get to net zero warming without cheating and we would have to get there within our emission budget to stay below <insert your temperature target>.
lol, there has been an unrelenting campaign to do so, going all the way back to the 70s - when global cooling and population control were the hot topics at Davos. Captain Planet, he's our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero...
I'm all for abandoning conspicuous consumption and the treatment of electronics as consumable goods (sent from 2011 vintage Thinkpad), but I'm not on board with weird its-for-your-own-good social engineering/propaganda campaigns. It is a moot point anyway, as you'd be impotently counter-messaging every advertising/branding strategy that has (or will) ever exist.
The plants absorb about 25% of that and the oceans another 25%. If we absorb 10 gigatons yearly by 2050, that might be good enough.
And that's assuming the ocean and plants will infinitely capture more and more carbon, which I sincerely doubt as well, but I'll go ahead and assume you mean this as a bridging method to get us another decade or two to finalize real solutions.
Then there's the problem that there's no significant process that turns trees into sequestered carbon for longer than the trees' lifespan.
The reason it's important to keep saying this is that lots of people participate in these tree planting drives. They feel all accomplished and that they did their part. But if that doesn't have any real impact on the problem, then we've done lots of work, used up people's goodwill, but not dented the problem.
There is of course lumber, which can sequester CO2 for decades or hundreds of years. Lumber sequestration currently only amounts to ~1% of global annual carbon emissions, but regionally it can be big (9% in Sweden) [1]. Lumber might have a bigger impact if purposefully employed for sequestration and prioritized over other carbon positive building materials.
1 https://www.pnas.org/content/116/29/14526
Does the evidence support that people's goodwill get "used up"?
It seems as plausible a theory to me that, when people get involved and take direct action, it ends up driving them to take further actions. Being personally invested in the result may drive more action rather than using up the goodwill.
(To be clear, I agree that we should always encourage action with the highest impact, and if tree planting actually does nothing to help solve the problem, then we should direct people to other activities. I'm not really jumping in to defend tree-planting initiatives, but more to question the assumption that people have a fixed amount of effort that they're willing to put into a given problem)
But most of those don't involve trees. And "reducing certain industrial practices" has nothing to do with trees.
So I don't really understand your point. It's correct that we shouldn't be too reductionist, but even if we avoid reductionism it's still correct to say that plants and trees won't do the job, and is not "missing the entire point of regenerative methods".
Dead Comment
The carbon dioxide sits in the atmosphere for 50 years where it heats the planet, trashes the ecosystem and likely feeds at least as many positive feedbacks as negative - amplifying the climate change effects.
To capture this carbon you (your descendants) are going to have to: Put 4MJ of energy into the breaking the carbon-oxygen bonds... Which will take more than 4MJ of process energy and embodied energy in the capital plant... Once you have collected the diffuse CO2 from the atmosphere, which will not be free.
Our 'plan' for dealing with climate change is that we hand a burning planet to our descendants to deal with, if we can stagger to hand-off without crashing the system first. Future generations will have to be far more responsible than us, for centuries, and imagining what they will have to say makes me squirm.
[1] I am mildly optimistic about techniques that accelerate the weathering of (silicate?) rocks; and more trees will be nice. These technologies will be useful for the centuries of cleanup that will be needed, but cannot keep up with the huge rate of current emission.
[2] Yes, much of our current consumption delivers real benefits to people's lives; but much (most) of it doesn't. The point of my analogy is that the sheer wastefulness of the present excess will be paid for in the future at far greater cost and is being spent on such trivial or actively harmful goals.
In other words, wouldn’t the co2 concentration go down naturally within the next 100 years even if we let thing run naturally?
We are in such a situation that every +0.01°C increase in global warming is gained more or less indefinitely.
The only thing we can do is stopping net emissions and learn to live with the climate as it is when we achieve this.
We really don’t care a lot about concentrations going down in the next centuries because by the time it happens, the harm would be done already for multiple centuries.
We are really facing today, 50°C in summer and devastating events, for our generation and our kids. This precise battle is already lost but we must fight for it to not be even more dramatic.
Deleted Comment
https://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2008/02/26/ghg_lifetimes/
Do the math, grab an investor and go get $100M.
"Just plant trees." Okay do the math on how many trees you need. Figure out how your going to build a program to get that many trees planted. What incentives, partnership, funding do you need. How will it scale to the amount needed. What will the full lifecycle look like.
"Just improve soil." Okay do the math on that. What's the timeframe for return on investment. What do the logistics look like for producing soil in huge quantities and deploying it where needed. How do we then use that soil to grow plants that sequester carbon.
90% of the comments in here are just the "middle-brow dismissal" of climate change of all things. As if we can "just do X" to solve it and everyone else is an idiot.
It's a hard problem, especially because part of the problem is determining how to actually implement and incentivize the population to do it. You can't just ignore that part, or just throw up your hands "people are stupid so we're fucked." Solving the incentive problem is actually part of the problem. Any solution that ends with "people just need to learn to do/value X" is dead in the water. You can start with "people just need to learn to do/value X" but you need to end with a plan on how you will bring about that change in mentality/incentive.
Let's get to work.
I feel like I see/hear a lot of uncritical faith in (techno|market|competition)-solutions, with little discussion of what Nth-order effects may travel with those approaches. Just some scattered thoughts:
- The best case for progress is probably technology that leads to profitable unsubsidized capture, but incremental technological progress may give the industry that springs up around it profit motives to overshoot.
- Profitable capture would, if fossil-fuel producers get in on the action themselves, shift their break-even points around somewhat.
- Even if this operates at a loss and depends on public funding, if the work is done by private industry and not the public sector, a few decades of capture may avert/blunt the crisis but leave us with yet another powerful lobby. It'll likely be flush with good-will and hard to regulate, let alone wind down once it has served its use.
- As @knodi123 puts it: "I can not-pump 100M of oil in my own back yard. And you wouldn't believe the rate I can not pump it at!" If all of the operators depend on subsidy, there will be a decent incentive towards graft/corruption/fraud. There'll have to be some amount of administrative overhead going to verifying what is captured, that it isn't double-counted, that it actually gets sequestered, and so on. A deepening crisis could mean more of this money sloshing around and less will to build the compliance mechanisms that ensure it accomplishes the goal. Rampant graft could be enough to sink the program.
But I worry that this path is already the one we're disposed to fail/default into, and that a rose-tinted view of it will only make it easier for other opportunities slip through our fingers while gobs of smart people focus on the technological half of the moon-shot.
Put another way, the degree of optimism I hear on these approaches smells like the kind of hubris that causes people to lose races they think they've won.
In any case, I do not intend to suggest any subsidy to fossil fuel producers, here. When I say operators, I mean the operators of capture operations. The only context in which I intentionally point to producers is around the possibility that they might also become capture operators if it was profitable.
Deleted Comment
$36/ton would raise the price of gasoline about 36 cents. The cost to capture ALL 6.5B tons of US emissions would be about $236B per year, or 1.1% of GDP. I think even getting it down to a $100/ton would change the discussion.
These are real, manageable numbers that should undermine opposition to mitigating climate change and get something resembling a carbon tax based on a feasible number. Policies like "A 39 cent/gallon tax on gasoline" is much more understandable and politically feasible then "you'll have to change everything you do." And then, once in place, we'll see the economic effects of taxing carbon accelerate movement away from carbon emitting solutions, which are already becoming non-competitive in many scenarios.
None of this means we shouldn't do things SOONER, espicially since DACC might never get that cheap, but I like the way this XPrize has the potential to change people's political calculus.
Sources: https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php#:...
https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/inventory-us-greenhouse-gas....
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.MKTP.CD?location...
The elephant in the room is that most of the proposed process chemistry does not have the necessary scale. If I need a billion tons of mined mineral per year to make a dent -- the reality for many of these proposals -- and current global production is a few thousand tons, you have a serious practicality problem. Not only would you need to develop those mines and the corresponding power generation facilities to manufacture the chemicals (which is energy intensive), we may not have the necessary mineral reserves. Addressing these all require massive amounts of capital investment that are not included in the cost per ton of the process at current scales. Buying a liter of water has completely different economics than buying a trillion liters of the same water, and the cost is always calculated as if it was the former case.
While recycling of reactant chemicals is always a part of these proposals, they are typically only ~90% efficient as designed (each marginal increase in recycling efficiency tends to be exponentially more expensive). At the scales involved, that requires billions of tons of reactants being produced that don't exist today. It would be the largest mining and chemical manufacturing endeavor ever undertaken on the planet, starting from zero.