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Negative Carbon Emissions
- saagarjha 8y agoThe article mentions this itself, but I think it's still worth mentioning that carbon scrubbing is hard to scale. IMO it's still better to work towards cutting emissions and finding sources of clean energy: in a very extreme case, assuming we can figure out how to get unlimited clean energy from fission/fusion/pushing baryons into the seventh dimension we can just pull CO₂ from the atmosphere and split it. Many of our problems can be solved with unlimited energy; clean water for example (just boil it!).
- fallingfrog 8y agoI can only imagine how it feels to be an 18 year old in 2019, knowing what’s going to happen in your lifetime. A lot of the social movements of the 60’s were ultimately based on the fact that every young male at that time had a draft number, and so the political struggle was personal and very real. I’m not surprised that young people are starting to treat climate change in the same way. It’s different when it’s your life that’s on the line.
- antt 8y agoBeing 18 anytime between 1948 and 1988 was worse. People forget that everyone expected a nuclear war to kill all of us in a way that makes climate change seem like a nice relaxing day at the beach.
- paulsutter 8y agoI was 18 in 1984 and I never met anyone in my entire life who expected nuclear war. Anyone with an interest in science already knew about global warming in 1984. And politicians from both parties haven’t done jack about it ever since.
- godelski 8y agoRelevant and good article about climate change and politics in the 80's https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/climate-change-losing-earth.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/08/01/magazine/clim...
- ars 8y agoThat is not true. I was (and am) obsessed with science and the only thing I heard about then was global cooling because of carbon (as in smoke, not carbon dioxide) pollution. The main fear back then was toxins of various kinds, from smog to nuclear to pesticides. I agree with you that nuclear war was an earlier fear, 1960's. Back then the concern was cleaning up the environment. CO2 was never mentioned. It was about air and water pollution, and garbage on land.
- tonyedgecombe 8y agoI remember first hearing about it in the early eighties, this was through the national news in the UK.
- mikeash 8y agoI would just like to remind everybody that nuclear war is still a major threat! It didn’t evaporate with the USSR, despite how people act. The US and Russia still have thousands of warheads ready to go at a moment’s notice. The numbers are down substantially from their peak, but the arsenals are still large enough to thoroughly wreck civilization. I’m constantly baffled at how everyone acts like nuclear war is a historical curiosity. This is not to take away from climate change, which is also a major threat. It’s not either-or, we should fix both.
- listenallyall 8y agoYou had to have really been out to lunch in 1983 if you were not at least aware of The Day After and its impact and controversy. https://www.avclub.com/the-day-after-traumatized-a-generation-with-the-horrors-1798447330 https://www.avclub.com/the-day-after-traumatized-a-generatio...
- ForHackernews 8y agoThe difference is that avoiding nuclear war just required not nuking each other. The default climate path is toward catastrophe. We needed to be taking urgent action on global warming 20 years ago. Now, we need to take even faster action and also try to invent scifi negative-emissions technology. I feel very sorry for young people. We've failed them.
- agumonkey 8y agoIt's true, but I'd suggest there's a scale difference between fighting a human enemy and planet scale thermodynamics
- mrpopo 8y agoThe article does a good job at keeping ideas within the realm of reality. > I especially like the idea of CO2 scrubbing for coal-fired power plants. Of course to cut carbon emissions it would be better to ban coal-fired power plants. I don't like this idea at all. It shows that at the current rate of action, global warming handling is a tragedy. It's a life threatening issue for billions of us, yet nothing happens, only insignificant changes.
- chrisco255 8y agoLife threatening? Cold weather and lack of electricity kill far more people than global warming.
- roryisok 8y agoRight now they do.
- mrpopo 8y agoCurrently yes, although it's not long before things are really going to change. I am not sure where you stand on this but here are a few things to think about : I assume you heard of the 1.5C target from the COP21. Depending on the estimations we already reached +1, and there is a lot of inertia in the whole system, so it's just not gonna happen. It's all a political "aim high, think later" thing. Without doing anything about the climate itself, thepeak oil and the people aversion to coal pollution will probably slow down our carbon addiction by the end of the century. Estimates for this scenario are within 7-12C. More optimistic scientific reviews, that assume we would give a fuck about it, are in the 3-7C range. Note that there are more centuries to come. Assume we reach a rather optimistic 4C global warming. This is a worldwide average, and you may know that oceans trap most of the heat, so the air above the oceans will not warm up as much. To compensate, it means that the air above land will be a couple degrees hotter, say 6C, and depending on how the winds will change, some place will get hotter than others (for instance currently the Arctic region is already 2C warmer than ours industrial levels). So even in an optimistic scenario today the average year round temperature in some place could get to +10C. If nothing is done, I'm not quite sure, but it's probably safe to say that it will be +20-30C in some areas. Maybe this kind of temperature delta can make you think of the kind of challenge the next generations would face. Vegetation (food) would die during heat waves, mass migrations, etc. When ice caps melt, the earth's albedo changes, and it reflects less sunlight. That's one of the mechanisms behind the transitions from an ice age to a warm age. The Arctic is currently melting at unprecedented rates, which means that the warming is unlikely to stop unless drastic changes are done. Global warming causes sea level rises, through dilatation due to heat, and melting of on-land ice (greenland, Antarctica). Current warming is enough to make sea levels rise by 1m. This is locked in (unstoppable). Estimates vary but including future warming, it may rise by 2.4m. Bangladesh is the poster child for rising sea level dangers. It's not just about loss of coastal areas (40%), but also increased salinity in drinking water, less fertile lands. People will lose their houses and starve. There's a lot more to global warming than this, and the literature is plenty. I invite you to discover it.
- astazangasta 8y agoThis is a thermodynamically losing proposition for a human industry - liberating carbon is enthalpically and entropically favorable. Sequestering it requires putting the genie back in the bottle, and where will the energy budget for that come from? Fortunately there is a system to do this which dwarfs in scale pretty much any industry humans ever have and ever will come up with: photosynthesis. While 10 Gigatons of C is a lot, terrestrial biomass is ~600 Gigatons of C. The best strategy for reversing carbon emissions is letting the Earth soak it back up again.
- colechristensen 8y agoThese are my thoughts: we need to water the desert and fertilize the oceans. Use wind, solar, and biomass powered generators to desalinate water and pipe it inland. Pick locations that would have local positive rainfall feedback. Pump oxygen into deadzones caused by nutrient runoff encouraging algal blooms. Either harvest it or let it die and sink to the bottom of the sea.
- roryisok 8y agoThe problem in that solution is the "we" part. There is no global authority to take the responsibility or initiative, and nobody who wants to front the cost. It's so stupid that we have the technology and knowledge to save our species and civilisation but our imaginary number system won't let us.
- adrianN 8y agoPhotosynthesis is only about 1% efficient and you'd have to store the biomass in a form that doesn't decompose (e.g. as coal). It might be possible to improve this.
- godelski 8y ago> you'd have to store the biomass in a form that doesn't decompose Which for everyone that doesn't know, this is why if even today we stopped net greenhouse production world wide the planet would still warm. Because there is biomass underneath the ice that will (is) be(ing) released as it melts.
- cmutel 8y agoThe following open access publications give a broad overview of NETs: Part 1: Research landscape and synthesis: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9b https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9b Part 2: Costs, potentials and side effects: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabf9f Part 3: Innovation and upscaling: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabff4 https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aabff4
- aoner 8y agoIf you are interested in negative emissions this is the best review paper I've come across so far that covers all various negative emission technologies, from trees and oceans to bio-energy with carbon capture storage (BECSS) and direct air capture (DAC). Highly recommended.
- hannob 8y agoThis starts to sound right and at the end takes the completely wrong turn when he says: "I especially like the idea of CO2 scrubbing for coal-fired power plants." I actually believe this is the big risk of all Carbon removal and Carbon Storage technologies, and the one that always needs to be kept in mind: That they're used to justify the continuing use of fossil fuels. (This isn't theoretical. This happened around 10 years in Germany when many new coal plants were built, and when people brought up the climate issue a very common answer was: "Don't worry, we already planned to enhance those plants with Carbon Capture and Storage technology later." Of course the latter never happened. At around the same time Norway had very similar discussions and I'm sure it happened elsewhere, too.)
- taneq 8y agoIs continuing to use fossil fuels a bad thing, if it's in conjunction with sufficient cleanup systems? It sounds like in your example, the problem is the bait-and-switch from "clean CO2-neutral power plants" to "traditional coal power plants".
- saagarjha 8y agoThe question is how you're going to cleanup CO₂, which is almost always energy-negative.
- thatcat 8y agoCoal plant emissions contain toxic substances other than CO2. Also consider the fly ash disposal and the environmental disruption of mining. So, yes, aside from CO2, continued energy production using coal is an unsustainable strategy.
- hannob 8y agoStopping fossil fuel burning is always preferrable to carbon cleanup technologies. It's simply cheaper and easier. Also "CO2-neutral coal power plants" is a scam. You'll always have emissions left. Digging up coal causes emissions (the coal is not alone, there's e.g. always methane coming up with it that you can't capture). No Carbon removal tech can remove 100% of Carbon from emissions. (There was actually a lawsuite because Vattenfall called one of their CCS testing plants "carbon free". They lost.)
- l_camacho84 8y agoThe best negative carbon tech that exists are trees and plants. It's not future tech it's already here!
- ElKrist 8y agoYes. However it only works when trees grow and are not burnt after (use in construction for example). I will try to find sources if you're interested but basically this solution (planting forest & not burning wood) does not scale. You'd have to cover very large areas with trees (losing land for agriculture btw). To push it further as the amount of land is limited this can't work with a scenario of growing emissions. It's clearly interesting to mitigate the problem though.
- l_camacho84 8y agoWe don't need to scale up if the developed countries agree to scale down consumption. Reducing commuting (working from home when possible), have taxes on airplane travel, tax goods that come unnecessarily from far away, invest in durability. This is not scyfy solutions sorry to disappoint
- ben_w 8y agoSure, and the UK could have a 4-hour work week if it halved it’s manufacturing and automated all its services. Annoyingly, people don’t follow such oversimplified economic models. (If we did, free market economics and communism would both be ‘right’).
- leadingthenet 8y agoWell they are both "right" in the sense that they have different premises and optimise for different variables in the economy. They both work in certain circumstances and not in others. There's no such thing as a perfect economic system that magically solves all human problems, but that doesn't mean that there aren't gradations of how good one is compared to another, given a set of things you want to achieve in a society. Capitalism has advantages and disadvantages, and the same is true for communism. If, however, the variable you want to optimise for is carbon footprint, then clearly capitalism is the wrong tool for the job. Also, models are a perfect representation of reality, but since we can't possibly capture all the data inherent in a system as large as our planet (or Solar System, or the Universe), it's pretty much all we have to make sense of the world.
- ggm 8y agoI feel very strongly that proposed technical solutions to de-carbonise need to explain the energy cost of driving CO and CO2 into carbonate complexes. If the proposal is to make something like methane clathrates in extreme depth there is a pumping cost. If the proposal is to inject into fracking and have it form complexes underground there is a pumping cost. Most carbon intense energy sources depend on big pressure drop across the turbine so there is little energy in the stream and the smokestack for the fuel is decoupled from the steam anyway so either there is a reaction energy (coming from where?) Or it consumes power being generated which reduces overall system efficiency. I just don't get it: there is no free lunch burning coal to make heat to make steam implies combustion which necessarily makes CO and CO2 and it's in gaseous form. It's diffuse. So making liquids or pumpable gas expends energy and making to flow over a reaction surface to make carbonate implies back pressure on the flue gases.. it's just hard work.
- 205guy 8y agoNature invented solar-powered CO2 scrubbers, they're called plants (and algae). We just need to not kill them everywhere. This is hard when humans have an expanding population, which is why we humans need to realize that we are now so numerous we are competing for physical space (Our housing and agricultural needs) against the very resources we need to live (forests and clean water and clean air).
- AnimalMuppet 8y agoIt's not that simple. If we didn't kill any more plants, would the plants be able to pull CO2 out of the air at the rate we're producing it? I am not an expert, but I believe that the answer is no.
- agumonkey 8y agoA tiny gateway into cement replacement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement#Green_cement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cement#Green_cement
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoI feel like this article wrongly assumes that the switch from coal to alternative would take a very long time and presents a nifty graph of total energy use. The reality is that current policies worldwide favor coal for many reasons - most of which boil down to self-preservation. If a switch in policy was enacted quickly, that chart would see a dramatic rise in alternative energy sources. The trick is enacting self-harming policies that limit economic prosperity while ensuring the other guy does the same. This is where international agreements come in, which some countries ahem simply ignore. What is the ultimate solution? I don’t know, but it feels like we need a huge shift in political values that put climate as the one and only issue that matters before all else. This would require and educated public willing to put aside other policies that they may disagree with. Ultimately we are probably doomed because our individual self-preservation will trump our collective well being (however flawed this view may be given that we are all living on the same rock).
- alexandercrohde 8y agoHow about this proposal - Carbon tax. Over 30 years it scales up to the cost of carbon-scrubbing. All of the tax collected goes to purchasing scrubbing (within the US only, and monitored for accountability).
- fallingfrog 8y ago2 reasons that won’t work. 1) carbon scrubbing is a boondoggle and 2) we have 10 years, 15 at most to completely decarbonize, not 30.
- alexandercrohde 8y agoThat's such a counterproductive thing to say. You're basically shooting down the best plan mentioned because you think it isn't strict enough. Why not say "Great idea. Maybe once it gets enacted we can set the timeline even tighter." You shouldn't infight when you're in the 5% minority, you're just weakening your team.
- fallingfrog 8y agoThe market's not going to fix this one. Imagine if we tried CFC taxes and incentives for recapture to fix the hole in the ozone layer? You'd be wearing a lot more sunscreen. The answer is good old fashioned "make a plan and carry it out". Don't know why that's so hard to do anymore. Build the infrastructure to replace it, with public money, and then ban it.
- 205guy 8y agoHow about putting it much more simply: you can either change to reduce your carbon usage across the board (and help everyone else to understand and do the same) or your children will suffer by your own fault.
- alexandercrohde 8y agoThat's a terrible non-solution. Your strategy is to hope that every single person independently chooses to reduce carbon usage? It has to be government mandated. And most of the carbon is by COMPANIES not individuals.
- aoner 8y agoI've read a lot of papers about negative emissions. My main take-away was: 1. It will be necessary 2. We can solve part of the problem with cheaper/easier solutions like trees and ocean farming, but we will need more technological solutions. I think BECSS are difficult since it's still uncertain how the actual net carbon negativity changes when we change land to grow 'BECSS' crops/grasses. Also BECCS cost a land and water, something which will be a luxury when we are going from 7.5 billion to 10 billion people in 2050. With DAC we can actually set an upper boundary of the total cost of the negative emissions, which will only go down due to technological improvements. What I do agree on is that we need to stop using fossil fuels where possible. I don't think every sector will be ready in time (airplanes and boats for example). However we can make synthetic fuels using direct air capture which are almost carbon neutral (look at the super work David Keith is doing with Carbon Engineering: http://carbonengineering.com/ http://carbonengineering.com/ )
- roryisok 8y ago> Also BECCS cost a land and water, something which will be a luxury when we are going from 7.5 billion to 10 billion people in 2050 This is going to be the biggest challenge. It's going to be a struggle to maintain biodiversity and stop deforestation while also trying to feed 10 billion people , especially with the overfishing currently happening with just 7. We'll have more mouths to feed and less fish to do it with. The only way we can realistically achieve this is by cutting out livestock, increasing fish farming and lab grown meat and building lots and lots of vertical farms.
- pkrein 8y agoLots of discussion here, but is anybody here working on a negative emission technology that might help? Would love to hear about it! We’re working on carbon negative industrial hydrogen at Charm Industrial, and we’re hiring: https://www.charmindustrial.com/about https://www.charmindustrial.com/about
- planck01 8y agoCouldn't we achieve negative carbon emission simply by build all houses from wood? Cut down all grown trees and replace them by young ones. The houses act as carbon sinks. The young trees capture more co2 than the old trees. Easy. Takes little technology, but does take up land. Probably we need all alternatives too, but this seems low hanging fruit to me.
- kanjus 8y agoThe theory that young trees capture more CO2 than older trees has been debunked as far as I know. The best carbon sinks are older large trees: they grow at lower rates height-wise, but faster mass-wise, sequestering much more carbon. A single large tree might add the same amount of carbon to a forest within a year as is contained in an entire mid-sized tree, I’ll add some sources later
- 205guy 8y agoI read once that the highest density of living entities on the planet, measured in weight per surface area, are the Sequoia groves in California. That is, the mature ones that escaped logging. Now, I'm not sure we can consider the entire tree to be alive, but relevant to this discussion, they are almost entirely composed of atmospheric carbon, tons and tons of it quite literally. In all practicality though, I think sequoia and redwoods are more difficult to grow and have limited climate tolerances (an issue when the the climate is changing). I wonder if go fast-growing tropical trees such as albezias or others would be better. But we should also be looking for 3-4 ideal trees for each climate zone or better yet, trees adapted to several zones.
- aoner 8y agoAfforestation is part of the solution but even if we would plant a lot of trees and not use them, this solution does not scale. Current most optimistic estimates think trees can sequester 600 GtCO2 by 2050 max while most estimated think this is around 100 GtCO2 or less. We'll probably need around 1000-1500 GtCO2 of negative emissions. So yes we need to plant more trees, but we also need to pursue other negative emission technologies such as ocean fertilization/ocean liming, soil carbon sequestration, direct air capture and enhanced weathering.
- teslaberry 8y agoi oppose carbon capture and storeage on basic premises that it's stupid and energy intensive. but my meta reasoning kicke in and i supported in because i'm basically pro-spending money on any technology because of the unintended side effects of major discoveries along the way that will spill over . In the case of carbon storeage you're talking about material science, chemistry and physics. . however, the argument about opportunity costs is always essential. so one must ask-----what money/spending is being displaced by the amounts invested into carbon storeage. if it is money otherwise spent on football stadiums than hell yes. if it is money otherwise spent on grants that are well thought out scientific investigations, probably definitely not. ---then again, it's not always so easy to identify true opportunity costs and just because tons of money is wasted , doesn't always mean it's good to waste some more. ultiamtely the u.s. debt will result in hyperinflation, so digging more holes and wasting more money just accelerates the date by which this will happen. and then.....there will be no more money for research , but perhaps, ironically, not much more money for burning fossil fuels either--------the great paradox of choosing policy on carbon is that if mankind's activity is destroying mankind, than any foolish policies that are self destructive will accelerate the point in time where mankind's activies are lowered and mitigated , whereas any genuiline helpful policies to remediate carbon emissions, may only further delay and strengthen mankind's development and growth and population explosion. this paradox is that there may very well be built in a negative and positive feedback loop which balance one another and , on the long run, ensure mankind is in fact not really able to influence all that much other than direct extinction of other species ( which is what all species can and have done over time ) so really the race , if there possibly is one worth worrying about, is not against our own carbon problems, but against possibly eating everything in site. there's no feedback loop stopping that. we can eat.