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> Surely we should be trying harder to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and spend less time on reducing emissions? It's simply a matter of cost. While we are cont

> Surely we should be trying harder to scrub CO2 from the atmosphere and spend less time on reducing emissions? It's simply a matter of cost. While we are continuing to put CO2 into the atmosphere, preventing one gram of CO2 from being emitted is equivalent to scrubbing one gram of CO2 from the atmosphere, and at present the former is far, far cheaper than the latter, and there is a huge amount of low hanging fruit still to be gathered. In fact, a lot of the emissions abatement is profitable - for instance an LED lightbulb might cost $5-10, but saves you 500-750 kWh over its lifetime, which is $50-100 worth of electricity even without pricing in carbon. The hope is if you introduce a carbon price (for instance by cutting other taxes and introducing a revenue neutral carbon tax) that you can further spur investment so that the market will make more of these technological developments towards resolving the problem. That may involve scrubbing carbon, for instance the recent process which has got a lot of publicity, using renewable electricity to turn CO2 into ethanol. But you're looking to resolve things at the lowest cost, and it may be that scrubbing is unnecessarily costly, and you can do everything through other means. We need to just price in the externality and let the market do what it does best.

rb808 10y ago
Sure maybe cutting emissions can be cheaper than scrubbing - but the article says the CO2 levels are already too high. If we magically stop all emissions right we should be scrubbing as well. So maybe we should be reducing emissions where its easy - and scrub
- Brakenshire 10y ago
  > Sure maybe cutting emissions can be cheaper than scrubbing - but the article says the CO2 levels are already too high Ah, I see what you mean. It's a bit like national debt and deficit I suppose. At the moment, debt is high, and the deficit is high. CO2 abatement measures can reduce the deficit, but not the debt. You'd need CO2 scrubbing to actually push the deficit into surplus, and reduce the debt, rather than just stabilize it. In an ideal world, you're right that we want to be getting the total concentration down, not just stabilizing it by reducing the rate of increase. But I think that stabilization would be such a major challenge for the foreseeable future that we should be looking to that first. Prioritizing more expensive ways of trying to reduce the total concentration in 30-50 years, over cheaper ways of stabilizing the concentration right now would, in my opinion, be making the perfect the enemy of the good. Also, I'm not sure stabilization at 450 or 500 ppm (equivalent to 2-3C warming) would be that bad, what we're trying to do is avoid the definitively atrocious outcome of warming above the 2-3C range.

rb808 10y ago

Sure maybe cutting emissions can be cheaper than scrubbing - but the article says the CO2 levels are already too high. If we magically stop all emissions right we should be scrubbing as well. So maybe we should be reducing emissions where its easy - and scrub

Brakenshire 10y ago
> Sure maybe cutting emissions can be cheaper than scrubbing - but the article says the CO2 levels are already too high Ah, I see what you mean. It's a bit like national debt and deficit I suppose. At the moment, debt is high, and the deficit is high. CO2 abatement measures can reduce the deficit, but not the debt. You'd need CO2 scrubbing to actually push the deficit into surplus, and reduce the debt, rather than just stabilize it. In an ideal world, you're right that we want to be getting the total concentration down, not just stabilizing it by reducing the rate of increase. But I think that stabilization would be such a major challenge for the foreseeable future that we should be looking to that first. Prioritizing more expensive ways of trying to reduce the total concentration in 30-50 years, over cheaper ways of stabilizing the concentration right now would, in my opinion, be making the perfect the enemy of the good. Also, I'm not sure stabilization at 450 or 500 ppm (equivalent to 2-3C warming) would be that bad, what we're trying to do is avoid the definitively atrocious outcome of warming above the 2-3C range.