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In theory, rocks from Oman could store hundreds of years of human CO2 emissions
- spodek 8y agoIt could store even more years' worth if we decrease our emissions. I don't mean a general "we." I mean you, reading these words, and me. You can decrease your emissions, plastic pollution, etc. No technology needed. No loss in quality of life.
- simonh 8y agoThe problem with that is that most of the CO2 emissions we depend on as individuals are beyond our control. Things like the emissions generated in growing, processing, packaging and transporting the goods we buy, our food and clothing, our mail, the utility resources we consume, the services we depend on, public transport. Yes we can do thing in our daily lives but in reality it’s a tiny fraction of our actual CO2 footprint. That’s why societal and industrial level action, and therefor public policy is so important. The biggest environmental issue we can affect in our daily lifestyle is recycling and reducing household rubbish. It’s another important issue and one where we really can make a difference in our everyday behaviour.
- jayd16 8y agoIt isn't beyond our control if we actually baked in the cost of co2 emissions into the cost of the goods and services we use. That said, these things end up being very hard to calculate.
- opportune 8y agoI think it makes more sense to put the cost on the emissions themselves (i.e. their production), not on the end-products. In a perfect world these two approaches would be equivalent, but since there are relatively few emission sources compared to end products, I think it would be easier to enforce. The problem with mixing carbon taxes with global trade in general is that if some countries don't participate in carbon taxation, then carbon-intensive production will just shift to those countries. Game-theoretically, it's a relatively unstable equilibrium because if all countries are participating, then a country that suddenly refuses carbon taxation could stand to benefit enormously.
- skosch 8y agoWell, there is a solution to that: border tax adjustments. Carbon taxes — and I mean at the well, not those bureaucratic, corruption-prone cap-and-trade schemes – are the simplest, cheapest, fastest way to get a carbon-free economy off the ground. And if you make them revenue-neutral, you can get conservatives on board as well (look up "fee and dividend").
- graeme 8y agoHow would you make it work in practice? Would every country sign a global accord to tax oil wells, coal mines, etc? Or would you have an import tax on such materials? How exactly would you adjust taxes at the border? I also think this is the best solution, but I'm not exactly sure how you'd implement it without loopholes.
- skosch 8y agoYes, import taxes would be the temporary solution. This is my go-to resource: https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/ https://citizensclimatelobby.org/carbon-fee-and-dividend/
- dvtv75 8y agoI recall reading that cargo and fishing vessels (or is that all seafaring vessels? Or all ships and boats?) produce at least as much CO2 and particulates as the cars we drive, as the ships aren't nearly as clean as road vehicles. I've no source for that, though, it was quite some time ago that I read it.
- comicjk 8y agoNo, this misleading stat refers to sulfur and soot emissions, not CO2. It's true that ships at sea burn a cheap sulfurous fuel, "bunker fuel", because there's nobody to inhale it out there. But it's misleading because people think this stat refers to CO2, which it doesn't. Ground transport produces far more CO2 than ships, which by weight are the most efficient way of moving anything.
- opportune 8y agoAccording to the EPA, 27% of total greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation, with only 2% of transportation emissions coming from boats. https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-greenhouse-gas-emissions https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/fast-facts-transportation-... However, I also recall reading that boats produce a ton of emissions (I'm pretty sure it was a popular reddit post about how the huge oil tankers and shipping containers account for almost all ship-related emissions). One explanation: the maritime emissions may be underestimated due to the practice of ships using flags of convince. This website, and wikipedia and a few other sources, claim that the global contribution of maritime transportation to GHG/CO2 emissions is around 2% http://www.airclim.org/acidnews/new-figures-global-ship-emissions http://www.airclim.org/acidnews/new-figures-global-ship-emis... 2% of the total is still nothing to sneeze at, though. Since tankers and container ships are so big, it's likely that individual ships are some of the largest individual contributors to emissions. Maybe we should allow/subsidize these ships to use nuclear energy
- comicjk 8y agoYou bring up "public transport" as one of the emissions sources beyond people's control, without bringing up the biggest source which is under our control: cars. US per capita CO2 emissions are 20 tons/year, of which a typical passenger car is 5 tons/year. If you're worried about the carbon footprint of your stuff...it is possible to buy less stuff.
- GLjEI4YbnGD27LB 8y agoSo I can find that the US has about 16 tons/year of CO2 emissions per capita. Do you have a source for how much the passenger cars contribute?
- comicjk 8y agohttps://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
- simonh 8y agoThere was a journalist in the UK that lives for 3 months, with his family, doing everything they could manage to reduce their carbon footprint, and they got it down by about 5%. There are roughly 2 passenger cars per person in the US, so cars are about 12% of emission, but even if you had no car you’d still need to travel somehow. You’d never get your travel footprint to zero. I am not saying don’t try or don’t bother, I’m just saying firstly we are not going to solve this with public policy action. And second, sometimes there are other valid environmental issues we can focus on in our personal behaviour.
- FartyMcFarter 8y agoDid that journalist ever do plane trips? I recall reading that for many people that is the single biggest thing that accounts for their emissions.
- greglindahl 8y agoDifferent foods have different carbon intensity. My current small apartment has a smaller utility bill than the large house I used to own. These are choices.
- mac01021 8y agoThat's why, if you really want to limit your carbon footprint, you have to do it by conscientious consumption. Buy less meat or no meat. Never buy a car new. Used are more cost effective anyway. Same goes for clothes. Choose an electricity supplier that uses a green source of power or buys offset certificates for all the power they produce. If your employer is going to pay to send you to a conference of your choice, pick the one that is 300 miles away over the one that is 3000 miles away.
- gizmo686 8y agoWe are already past 400ppm. Going to net 0 emmisions is not enough anymore.
- jaggederest 8y agoWe most likely need a system of solar mirrors, massive quantities of sulfur dioxide dumped into the stratosphere, ocean fertilization, and probably a lot of direct removal of carbon from the atmosphere. It's pretty ridiculous that we've let it get this far.
- mirimir 8y agoIt's an intriguing idea. But you'd need to move humongous quantities of sone, air and water. Without releasing so much CO2 to negate advantages.
- cperciva 8y agoWhich is why we need nuclear power.
- mirimir 8y agoPerhaps so. With inherently safe designs, though. Not some simplistic scale-up of Rickover's submarine engine.
- coldtea 8y ago>With inherently safe designs, though. Funny how with reactors always the new designs are "safer" or "100% safe". Until time passes, and those are the "old unsafe designs". It's like there's an industry selling and promoting them each time (no, wait...)
- 21 8y agoAfter Fukushima nuclear fission power is dead and burred.
- Baeocystin 8y agoNot in China. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-set-to-overtake-us-as-biggest-nuclear-energy-nation-iea-says-2018-02-21 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/china-set-to-overtake-us-a...
- epistasis 8y agoPresumably you're suggesting nuclear because it's carbon free. But if that's the goal, both wind and solar are cheaper now. So nuclear would be a misallocation of resource, reducing the ability to spend on other efforts. And if that carbon-free electricity is going to charge the batteries of machinery to do this, wind and solar will be just as good at that.
- ggm 8y agoI think Yogi Berra said it best: In theory there is no difference between theory and practice - in practice there is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage#Mineral_storage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_capture_and_storage#Min...
- opportune 8y agoHow dangerous is it to breathe in particulate matter from peridotite? There's another approach to making sequestration within these rocks economical - we could use underground explosives to simultaneously disperse peridotite particles into the air and uncover formations that haven't been exposed to CO2 yet. This would drastically increase the surface area and hence absorptive power of the rocks. Even if this could be done in a manner that keeps the air safe to continue breathing, the other problem from doing too much of this is that it could increase the Earth's albedo and have a global cooling effect (akin to when volcanic eruptions on earth have caused famines, skipped summers/growing seasons). But in some ways, that may make this the perfect worst-case-scenario solution to runaway global warming. We could periodically use "clean" nuclear detonations to put enough particulates in the air to reduce the global temperature and sequester carbon. Once the particulates settle, if there is still too much CO2, we could do another round of detonations, etc.
- legostormtroopr 8y agoThis is how apocalypse movies start.
- opportune 8y agoWell, I'm sure in a limited case it wouldn't be that dangerous. But yeah, regarding the nuclear detonations, that's why I think it would have to be a last resort. Like, last resort as in a situation where humanity is in danger of extinction or in making Earth mostly uninhabitable.
- mrfusion 8y agoCould we do this on Venus to start terraforming?
- shasheene 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus#Capture_in_carbonates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus#Capture_... Sounds like it could more than halve the atmosphere (from 93 times Earth atmosphere to 43 times). Though worth remembering that the surface of Venus is an untouched wilderness region containing billions of years of geologically significant information. I'm all for walking around a balmy Venus, but if it involves pulverising the surface, we need to be extracting all the scientific information from the untouched wilderness area as we do it, because a lot will be lost forever otherwise.
- DrPhish 8y agoThe best long-term carbon sequestration medium we have is wood. It is the slow and unsexy algorithm of: Plant trees, and then build things with them. Be careful not to burn them. Repeat
- stevenmays 8y agoI was under the impression it was phytoplankton, but I can't seem to find a source.
- lbenes 8y agoYour theory sounds good until you consider the practical aspects of the last step: > Be careful not to burn them. Repeat So what do you do with the wood? A billion years ago, your plan would have worked out brilliantly. Some say it's where our oil came from. But now we have fungus among us that evolved to rapidly turn your wood right back into CO2. Unless you sterilize the wood and bury it deep in the ground where it will never be exposed to air or spores, you're right back to square one. Also there's the logistics and carbon footprint of burying and sterilizing the wood. You're not the first person to think of this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266747/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2266747/
- mrfusion 8y agoCould we mass pressure treat wood to prevent it from being eaten?
- lettergram 8y agoThat only works for a period of time depending on conditions. In this case, even a few hundred years wouldn't be good enough.
- lbenes 8y agoHundred? If the wood is touching soil, try a few decades at best. I just replaced an old rotted out deck that was all pressure treated lumber. Also EPA considers it a hazardous waste. https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/chromated-arsenicals-cca https://www.epa.gov/ingredients-used-pesticide-products/chro...
- tim333 8y agoIt seems to me there is much promise in influencing the natural carbon cycle in these kind of ways. Apparently natural processes release and absorb about 800 gigatons of CO2 annually against human emissions of 29 gigatons or so, so there seems a lot of scope to try to tip the natural balance a few percent. Especially if we go carbon neutral and are then looking to reabsorb a bit. https://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natural-emissions.htm https://www.skepticalscience.com/human-co2-smaller-than-natu...
- coldtea 8y ago>processes release and absorb about 800 gigatons of CO2 annually against human emissions of 29 gigatons or so We don't see to be growing more trees anytime soon, and we aren't adding any new oceans either.
- tim333 8y agoThere's this kind of thing "Surge in plant growth explains slower CO2 rise over past decade" https://www.carbonbrief.org/surge-in-plant-growth-explains-slower-co2-rise-over-past-decade https://www.carbonbrief.org/surge-in-plant-growth-explains-s... which has happened without really any planning. It's just that sort of stuff could be actively encouraged.
- valw 8y agoOr, you know, maybe we could just emit less CO2 to start with. To be clear, I'm all for research about carbon sequestration, but it should not be an excuse to keep polluting irresponsibly. On the long term, we simply can't get away with compensating all our big negative impacts with big positive ones - how about introducing some moderation in our lifestyles instead?
- FreeFull 8y agoIf we want to avert a bad scenario, we need to both drastically reduce CO2 emissions and find a way to sequester the CO2 currently in the air (either through technological means, or through something like making big tracts of land into forests). Just sequestering is unlikely to be enough, unless it is extremely efficient.
- anoncoward1234 8y agoI remember reading this article waiting for my haircut this morning. Here was my biggest takeaway: > More realistically, he said, Oman could store at least a billion tons of CO2 annually. (Current yearly worldwide emissions are close to 40 billion tons.) So we're looking at 2.5% sequestration of what we're currently adding, from the largest deposits in the world. Best case, realistically. The whole thing sounds like a total non-starter.
- simonh 8y agoSometimes the way you solve a big complex distributed global problem is a bit at a time. It’s unlikely we’re going to find one single global solution to carbon sequestration.
- coldtea 8y ago>Sometimes the way you solve a big complex distributed global problem is a bit at a time. An example of such a time, from various available such historical "sometimes"?
- simonh 8y agoThere are so many examples I don't even know where to start. Disease eradication (through education, sanitation improvement, suppressing disease vectors, vaccination, etc), then there's poverty reduction, the way piracy was eradicated in the 19th Century, the way ozone depletion was tackled. There are endless examples. Anyway, what are you actually saying other than taking a cheap shot?
- IkmoIkmo 8y agoIsn't it the case that much of our emissions are absorbed already (e.g. by oceans, about a third of human activity) such that the 2.5% is a lot higher on the net amount. e.g. say we emit 100 and absorb 95, absorbing 2.5% of our total emissions actually cuts net emissions in half. Or are you already figuring that in?
- lafar6502 8y agoPlants are pretty good at capturing carbon, why would anyone want something more expensive and difficult?
- pfdietz 8y agoThe area of plants needed to capture current CO2 emissions would be impossibly large. The energy efficiency of photosynthesis is horrible. In contrast, mineral carbonation is an exothermic process, in principle requiring no energy input.
- voidmain 8y agoFind a way to extract enough energy from this reaction (it has to be at least slightly exothermic) to pay for it, and we're good.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago"Fake" or rather misleading news! So: Geologists for a long time assumed the carbonates found with igneous rocks resulted from CO2 reacting with these igneous rocks were formed very very long ago. A scientists uses carbon dating and discovers that the carbon in these carbonates was in fact formed relatively recently. This should prompt 2 questions, but seemingly only prompted the first: 1) If unreacted pyroxenes and olivine in these rocks can capture CO2 to form carbonates relatively fast on geological timescales, can we help this natural process speed up? Answer: yes, but unclear at what energetic cost, and unclear what to do with these carbonates afterwards. 2) WHERE do the carbonates end up, if the carbonates from older carbon are mysteriously MISSING??? Answer: reacting back to CO2 upon rainfall, or by erosion and weather ended up in seas and lakes! One does not need rocks to create cabronates: simply expose water with CO2 and CO2 will both absorb as (CO2)_gas and also react with water to form carbonic acid H2CO3: (H2O)l + (CO2)g <=> (H2CO3)l If we take the resulting say magnesiumcarbonate from the rock that has captured CO2, and put it in water, it will first dissociate like all salts (metal, non-metal compounds) resulting in free mobile Magnesium ions and free mobile carbonate ions. You might as well just let CO2 in the air react with the sea acidifying it... They pretend the carbonate form is a sink where we can dump our CO2, while in fact this very interpretation is inconsistent with the original discovery that the carbon in these carbonates is young. If it was truely stable the carbonates would predominantly contain old carbon. So unless they have a plan to store these carbonates and protect it from rainfall, and prevent it from flowing into bigger bodies of water, I see no solution, only excuses to appear green such that banks can invest "green money" into these mining companies again, or perhaps to get "green subsidies" or perhaps to escape carbon taxes...