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The cost of engineering projects on this scale would be astronomical. Surely there would be a better ROI if that money were spent on efforts to replace fossil
by Reason077 8y ago
The cost of engineering projects on this scale would be astronomical.
Surely there would be a better ROI if that money were spent on efforts to replace fossil fuel power with low-carbon alternatives, electrification of ground transport, etc?
If we can reduce carbon emissions by 90% or so, quickly enough, then the climate should stabilise. If that fails, then we can build the mega-projects as a desperate last stand.
- alanbernstein 8y agoDo you think 90% is really feasible any time soon? Wouldn't that require nonexistent new technology for air travel and container ships?
- nine_k 8y agoFor air travel, yes. Large ships are large, and, unlike aircraft, have sufficient room and carrying capacity to install reasonably efficient carbon-capturing devices. It will cost a lot, of course.
- WalterBright 8y agoThere was a push to add computer-operated sails to cargo ships in the 80s. I don't know what happened to it - likely the cost of fuel dropped.
- larkeith 8y agoThere's a company that makes kite sails for cargo ships, which have proven effective [1]. However, as the fuel costs are payed by the shipper, there is a lack of economic incentive for ship owners to purchase them. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails
- unBrainSurgeon 8y agoHmmm, so what's a good mechanism for routing around moral hazards like just making the customer pay for the fuel? We see lots of models for corporate raiders using loss leaders to attack bloated industries, but not much else. Also, with technology, the actual cost of development is extremely murky and variable. The only things that seem to motivate loss leader tactics is the end game of cornering a market. In the case of SkySails, ship owners are averse to the up front cost, even if it means leaving money on the table, long term, by keeping their prices the same, but saving the fuel money with the sail, and pocketing the difference. So, push to integrate with newly built ships, and then what? Offer freebie/rebate deals? But then they never get used because crew are lazy, and bored, but not that bored, and lazy wins. Plus dealing with tangled lines means the kite is all but ruined without a rigger available. So does that mean training at least one crew member to rig the kite? It seems like maybe SkySails would need to operate a consultancy, where they supply a crew member who operates the kite on commission, collecting a cut of the savings in fuel costs. Then it becomes not unlike the vending machine model. Companies permit vending machines on the premises, because they know employees want snacks, so they let a coin-op company install soda and candy machines, and they get a cut of whatever the machine pulls in. So now, if that works, and then SkySails attacks the ship building angle, they've grown an ecosystem of consultant experts, and some of them can operate as free agents, once ship builders normalize SkySail integration as a common well-known add-on to maritime operations. Sounds like a business odyssey, thinking it over, but with decades of quiet patience and dedication, maybe it'd work.
- larkeith 8y agoThere's also currently a lack of incentives for ship owners to invest in emissions-reducing technologies, even if the cost per voyage is reduced - see SkySail's troubles [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkySails
- Reason077 8y agoThe real issue that fuel oil is so cheap. If customers are paying for the fuel, and fuel was a significant cost, then they'd certainly be interested in shopping around for a ship that can offer lower fuel consumption. But fuel oil is really just a byproduct of refining crude. It's the muck left over when you've extracted everything else that's useful. And of course, it is not taxed, so prices don't account for it's environmental externalities. If we can reduce overall demand for petroleum products, this should eventually cause fuel oil prices to rise because there'll be less crude being refined, and thus reduced supply.
- baddox 8y agoYou don’t have to reduce every carbon emitter by 90% to get an overall 90% reduction.
- larkeith 8y agoAir traffic alone accounts for about 3.5% of our climate impact [1]. How many major carbon emitters can you afford to ignore before a reduction of 90% becomes impossible? [1] http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/aviation/index.htm http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/aviation/index.htm
- TeMPOraL 8y agoTime to revive dirigibles. And tell people that we're sorry, but those extravagant vacations on another continent now come with a couple days of stay in a luxury hotel flying above the ocean.
- yk 8y agoAir travel is actually not that hard, just very energy inefficient. A turbine will work with almost anything that burns, that is the reason why airplanes use kerosene, it is the cheapest fossil fuel. To get green airplanes you just need to replace the kerosene with something else that burns, most vegetable oils should work fine after a bit of refinement. The real problem is, you need lots of oils and there synthesis and using chemical fuel as energy storage seems a certainly feasible path, however it is again quite a bit more complicated than just drilling a hole in the ground.
- growlist 8y agoThis would imply a vast additional amount of biomass production, which would place its own load on the environment in loss of biodiversity, run off pollution etc.
- baud147258 8y agoAnother externality of bio-fuel is increased cost of food, which could create issues in poorer countries which already have tense food situations.
- growlist 8y agoIndeed, forgot that. Biomass seems such a great idea that I was tremendously disappointed in A-level Geography to find out its downsides.
- pietroglyph 8y agoI would explore a carbon capture megaproject before the one in the article. If we're going to spend that much, let's get closer to the root cause.
- WalterBright 8y ago> carbon capture megaproject Planting trees ought to do it.
- nine_k 8y agoYou also need to prevent the resulting trees from burning or rotting, to keep the carbon they captured intact. It was "easy" when tree trunks kept falling into ancient swamps for millennia. Right now it's not as feasible.
- WalterBright 8y agoLog them and build things with the wood.
- Something1234 8y agoWe're already kind of doing this. It just needs to be on a much larger scale maybe. I'm not sure of the complete process of how much CO2 is captured by a tree, so it might not make sense.
- WalterBright 8y agoCoal comes from dead trees.
- Something1234 8y agoYes. Old dead trees who's carbon has been removed for millions of years from the system. What happens when you dump a bunch more of anything into a system. Usually the system blows up.
- hprotagonist 8y agoi think this line of reasoning made a lot more sense 40 years ago. we might well be at “desperate last stand” right now.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tejohnso 8y agoThe costs are astronomical because we've been taking on massive amounts of environmental debt for over a century. Mostly over the last 25 years. It's payback time. According to the IPCC, even their conservative estimates indicate a requirement for some kind of atmospheric carbon removal to avoid severe climate related problems. Even if we could somehow reduce carbon emissions by 100% tomorrow we'd still need mega-projects. The time for reduction was perhaps 30 years ago when James Hansen testified before the United States Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources.
- pdonis 8y ago> According to the IPCC, even their conservative estimates Which still overpredict the actual warming which has taken place. What I like about the proposal in the subject article is that it actually focuses on a measurable impact--sea level rise--and a remedy targeted at that specific impact. It doesn't drag in speculative scenarios based on models that have been falsified by the data.
- tejohnso 8y ago> Which still overpredict... Overpredict? According to what? According to NASA[1] we're already at a 0.9 degree anomaly for 2017. The IPCC prediction[2] is 1 degree anomaly in 2020 for the worst case prediction in the worst case scenario. The NASA anomaly is relative to 1951-1980 average while IPCC is 1986-2005 average. So it's not a perfect comparison. But if you want to look at IPCC's best case scenarios, the prediction is about 0.1 degree, which certainly refutes your claim that they overpredict. [1]: https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ [2]: https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FINAL_SPM.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/syr/AR5_SYR_FI... See page 11
- pdonis 8y ago> Overpredict? According to what? See, for example, here: https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-climate-reality/ https://judithcurry.com/2015/12/17/climate-models-versus-cli... Note that this actually understates the overprediction, because the models whose average is shown included three sets of models that made three different assumptions about how CO2 would rise. But CO2's actual rise over the period where we're comparing models with data was about the same as the assumption of the "worst case" (or "business as usual") scenario, so that scenario is the only one that's relevant to the comparison between models and data. And when you compare just that sheaf of models with the data, the divergence between model and data is even larger. For the reasons why the upper troposphere temperature comparison is more relevant than the surface temperature comparison (which is what is shown in the IPCC AR5), see the article. > According to NASA[1] we're already at a 0.9 degree anomaly for 2017. The IPCC prediction[2] is 1 degree anomaly in 2020 for the worst case prediction in the worst case scenario. But, as you note, the two anomalies are relevant to two different baselines. That means the comparison is invalid, not "not perfect". > if you want to look at IPCC's best case scenarios, the prediction is about 0.1 degree That's for future temperature change under the future best case scenario. It has nothing to do with past temperature change under the actual scenario that actually happened. > See page 11 Those graphs don't show models vs. data. They show models only (and with the actual time period for which we have data compressed on the far left of the graphs so you can't extract any useful comparison with data from them). The Summary for Policymakers, which is what you linked to, does not show any direct comparison between models and data for a period for which we have data. Previous reports did, but in this one they decided not to--it's only buried in the WG1 report, in Chapter 9, p. 768: http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chapter09_FINAL.pdf http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_Chap... The divergence between the CMIP5 mean (red) and the actual temperatures (black) in the upper graph in the 2000s is visible; the EMIC mean in the lower graph only appears to go up to 2000 so it doesn't provide a useful comparison. Also, both of these graphs show all of the models, not just the ones whose CO2 rise assumptions matched reality over the data period, so they understate the actual overprediction for the reason I gave above.
- X6S1x6Okd1st 8y agoIt looks like we are already about at 400ppm if we cut emissions down to 20% of current amount we'd still see a 50% chance of 2 degrees Celsius rise in avg temp. Geoengineering seems like a foregone conclusion to me.
- lgats 8y agostratospheric, not astronomical ;)
- stephengillie 8y agoWe should build a huge robot first, and use that to build these megaprojects. If worse becomes worst, we could all upload our consciousnesses into the robot, let it weather the apocalypse, then have a tortured yet spineless teenage boy trigger our literal post-apocalyptic reincarnation.
- baud147258 8y agoUh what? I don't have the same cultural references, could you explain this to me?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]