3 ms·
Industrial carbon sequestration costs about $150/ton, so that's ~$3,000 to fully eliminate your carbon footprint. Yes, that's substantial, but it's also not li
by jefftk 8y ago
Industrial carbon sequestration costs about $150/ton, so that's ~$3,000 to fully eliminate your carbon footprint. Yes, that's substantial, but it's also not like we would have to got to a subsistence farming standard of living in order to stop contributing to climate change.
(Offsets via getting others to stop emitting carbon, like methane capture on farms, are a lot cheaper but harder to be sure of the counterfactual impact.)
- harryh 8y agoJust adding on to this, some math: The US emits about 11 gigatonnes of CO2 per year. At $150/ton, sequestering it all would cost 1.65 trillion dollars or about 8.25% of GDP. That's about what we spend on social security and the military combined. So, it's a lot. But it's possible to imagine doing it. I kinda wish there was a company with a bunch of sequestration equipment out somewhere that people could just give money to in order to suck out more CO2 from the air. Why doesn't this exist yet?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- harryh 8y agoEr, I screwed that up. China emits 11 gigatonnes. The US emits ~half that. So more like 800 billion or 4% of GDP. About what we spend on Medicare. Of course, even if US emissions went to zero, it wouldn't be enough to stop global warming. So there's that.