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Quick reminder that carbon removal is a necessary but secondary step. We need to stop pumping more carbon into the air faster than we need to stop taking it out

Quick reminder that carbon removal is a necessary but secondary step. We need to stop pumping more carbon into the air faster than we need to stop taking it out, simply because it takes more energy to get carbon out of the air than the energy that carbon was used for in the first place. To use a financial analogy: We have a high-interest credit card. That debt has compounding interest rates, and the interest rate is accelerating because of positive feedback loops. A "carbon removal" strategy is basically like putting X dollars on our accelerating-rate credit card in order to invest X in a fund with a lower interest rate than the card itself. Obviously this will result in spiraling debt. The ONLY solution is to take carbon spending to ~0 and only then focus on removing it from the air.

colincooke 6y ago
While ideal, this isn't very realistic. Likelier is that we will slowly get off carbon intensive energy sources and production mechanisms, but fail to move off them entirely for a long period. In this period it is essential that we invest in the technology required to stablize our climate, i.e. carbon capture. With the proper clean energy generation capacity these systems can exist in harmony. Where carbon capture buys us more time to get more people on board with cleaner mechanisms. In addition, as this page points out, sustained investment is essential to technological development. By pushing down the cost of capture we allow for new economic opportunities, which provide both incentives (carbon tax for example) and direct benefits (using that tax income for capture).
- el_nahual 6y ago
  I agree it's not realistic, but it's actually more realistic than the alternative. The key here is that every new emission today multiplies because of positive feedback. So every day that passes, the problem of scrubbing enough carbon actually becomes harder--whereas the problem of simply not putting it out there keeps the same magnitude. Put differently, it costs "one less airplane trip" to prevent the carbon associated with 1 flight out of the air, but it costs an increasing amount of trips to get it out. Lastly... we know how to keep carbon out of the air. It's a politically difficult problem but one with a known solution. Just stop doing things. And stop doing them by taxing them to oblivion.... whereas we don't actually know how to get carbon out of the air in a clean way with sufficient magnitude in order to prevent runaway growth. And it goes without saying that in that scenario we'd probably have to reduce emissions as well! The argument that reducing emissions to ~0 is unrealistic is true, but it's more realistic than the alternative.
  - colincooke 6y ago
    This isn't entirely true. There are many high benefit activities we should target (flights are a good one), however there are also others that are much more difficult to reduce (energy production in emerging economies for example). I think my main issue is that zero, or effectively zero, is too high a bar. Your thinking is in-line with mine. That we should treat carbon emission as an economic problem, as in we need to get to net zero, so what is the most effective (by $$$) way to get there. My bet is that it's a mix of reduction + capture, and we should pursue the most ecost-effective mix.
cialowicz 6y ago
I'm not super familiar on the subject, but are you sure the analogy holds? If we build enough capacity to scrub more carbon from the atmosphere than we add each year, then the problem will taper off, no? In your analogy, we'd be moving money from the high rate card to a lower rate one, and also making more $$$ than we spend annually.
- cultus 6y ago
  Scrubbing that carbon takes energy. Thus, if that energy is from fossil fuels, the carbon emitted can be greater than that captured. In that case, it is worse than doing nothing. At any rate, removing carbon from the atmosphere is a vastly harder problem than reducing our emissions. Geoengineering solutions are so impractical or beyond currently practical engineering can't be realistically done on human timescales. Planting trees is going to be insignificant, especially when places like the Amazon are being destroyed far faster. The exception is sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere. That doesn't solve ocean acidification, and the effects are still somewhat unpredictable, especially regionally. That, and the temp immediately shoots up once you stop. edit: I'm not sure people realize the difference, but there is a big difference between reducing emissions by capturing CO2 before it comes out of the stack vs. geoengineering removal of much more diffuse CO2 from the atmosphere itself, which Stripe seems to be implying. The first is a tool worth using sometimes, the second is hard enough to be impossible and would be massively energy-hungry. Either that or people really don't like to be told there isn't a magic tech fix for climate change and ecosystem collapse.
  - timerol 6y ago
    Not all carbon sequestration requires input energy from the grid. As an example, one of the projects that Stripe is funding is https://projectvesta.org/ https://projectvesta.org/, which distributes olivine, a volcanic rock that absorbs CO2 to become limestone when it is eroded. By moving this material to beaches, wave energy can be harnessed to remove CO2
    - cultus 6y ago
      Ah, simply crush billions of tons of olivine and move it to a beach. Weathering olivine doesn't scale, because you need so much. It involves hitherto unprecendented amounts of quarrying and then transport. The quarrying would destroy massive amounts of habitat. After the waves do their trick, near-shore habitats would be devastated because the entire ocean floor is covered in olivine. I am a former geophysicist by the way. While I did not work in geoengineering, I am familiar with most of the serious proposals with scientific support. Be skeptical of these groups that claim to have an easy answer. I can tell you that no one in the field thinks carbon capture from the atmosphere is realistic anytime soon. The scale is enormous. Most people have trouble understanding the difference in scale with what we actually have the capability for.
jakelazaroff 6y ago
Sure, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time. It's easy for me to directly contribute to carbon removal, because of things like this. It's a little more difficult for me to help pump less carbon into the air — I can try to minimize my carbon footprint, but ultimately the thing we need is investment in clean energy and legislation forcing companies to limit their emissions.
- el_nahual 6y ago
  My point was that Stripe's massive resources are better spent lobbying/writing legislation/researching how to properly implement a carbon tax than this.
  - MrKristopher 6y ago
    Why would Stripe write legislation to create a new tax? How does that help their bottom line or their customers' bottom line?
    - ves 6y ago
      It helps about as much as this initiative does.
    - el_nahual 6y ago
      Presumably because the Collison brothers recognize that climate change poses an existential threat to the well being of their firm, their customers and their employees, and that because of their awesome entrepreneurial abilities their investors have granted them BDFL powers over Stripe.
  - nostromo 6y ago
    Spending money lobbying for something that has no chance of passing would be incredibly stupid. I'm glad people are taking direct action and not waiting around for some pie in the sky grand solution that simply isn't coming.
    - 6y ago
kisamoto 6y ago
Yes the two are complimentary but I wouldn't make a differentiation between primary and secondary. We need to reduce but we need to be removing at the same time. Not only so the net emissions are lower but even if we reduce to zero tomorrow there is already an excess we must remove.
angusb 6y ago
this isn't quite right - if you use zero carbon sources (e.g. solar) to power carbon removal the operation would be net carbon negative. "but why wouldn't you just use that solar capacity to displace coal plants on the electricity grid??????" there's already a rapid switch of installed electrical capacity from fossil fuels to solar/wind, but electricity typically accounts for 20% of a developed economy's emissions, so after that we need to look to decarbonise other parts of the economy. removing carbon from the wider economy involves some low hanging fruits (e.g. better insulation in houses) followed by a succession of increasingly difficult and expensive removal processes, with a very long tail. at the far end you have things like removing carbon emissions from long haul flights, which is extremely difficult - once it gets this hard, it's much more practical to use solar to power carbon removal. we can't wait for emissions to go to zero before investing in carbon capture because we'd be waiting decades for battery energy density to increase by orders of magnitude before they are good enough to support long haul flights. We don't have that long
- el_nahual 6y ago
  Agreed on the need to invest in carbon capture now. My main argument was that a) reducing emissions to ~0 is going to be necessary even if we invent some insanely efficient carbon sequestration tech; b) the longer we wait, the worse the problem gets, in an exponential way. Emissions reproduce; c) Therefore the bulk of our effort should be spent trying to get emissions down to 0. Because if we fail at that (a task that we know how to accomplish), then no amount of sequestration tech will save us.
  - angusb 6y ago
    Hmm, still not sure I agree. Reducing emissions to close to 0 is definitely very important but it seems probable that we'll reach a steady state where some niche sources of carbon still persist, and are accompanied by corresponding capture. Some niche sources are just unbelievably hard to decarbonise If in 20 years 1% of our emissions remain but they are accompanied by capture (with a multiplier to account for inefficiencies in capture) then that would be ok by me. (You'd still want the extra carbon removal to reverse the warming caused by past emissions ofc)
eloff 6y ago
No, your conclusion is wrong. You don't need to put more carbon into the atmosphere to take carbon out. Nobody would fund that, well without bad subsidies anyway. We need to reduce the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere AND increase the amount we take out. There is no reason not to pursue both strategies at the same time - indeed time is short and everything we can do counts.
- el_nahual 6y ago
  Agreed. What I was trying to convey is that reducing new emissions to ~0 is a necessary win condition. It's not optional...and it's also urgent because those emissions reproduce. We're going to have to cut emissions to 0 anyway, so the sooner we do so, the better...by a LOT. And besides being urgent, it's also something that we know how to do. As in, today. We have the technology! (It's called massive carbon taxes). Or at least we're much closer technologically than we are to any sort of clean, insanely efficient sequestration tech. Perhaps this is obvious to you, but if you read the replies to my comment you'll see a number of replies where the tenor is "it's impossible to enact carbon taxes to reduce our emissions so let's work on sequestration instead."
  - BurningFrog 6y ago
    > because those emissions reproduce What does that mean? > We have the technology! (It's called massive carbon taxes) I agree that that's the best solution. Buy I don't see any signs it's politically possible.
  - eloff 6y ago
    I don't think we'll get to 0, nor do we need to. We do need to get our net emissions to 0 though, or even drive it negative for a while. I'm such a fan of carbon taxes. If the market doesn't account for externalities, then price them in with taxes. Then the market will solve climate faster than any amount of regulation or wishful thinking. That's an excellent use of state power. Or governments or our people are too shortsighted or stupid I think it's fair to say in this case to see that. I'm not entirely sure which it is, maybe both. Working on carbon sequestration instead is also silly. I mean it's a typical engineer response of ignoring the messy regulatory and political world and trying to build our way out of the problem. But we need to focus on both, working on one approach does not preclude the other.
jackdeansmith 6y ago
> The ONLY solution is to take carbon spending to ~0 and only then focus on removing it from the air. I object to the "only then". Cutting emissions is absolutely the top priority, but we're going to need to scale up carbon removal dramatically by around mid-century. By starting soon we can bring costs down and get the tech ready for when we really need it to scale.
lopmotr 6y ago
You use the word "need" a lot, but need is relative. We need to do X in order to get Y. What's Y and what's its value? Is it greater than the cost of X? If not, then not only do we not need to do X, but we also should not do X.
hokkos 6y ago
We still need to fund those project, to make them able to be scaled and have ridden their learning curve when we have decarbonized our energy systems.

colincooke 6y ago

While ideal, this isn't very realistic. Likelier is that we will slowly get off carbon intensive energy sources and production mechanisms, but fail to move off them entirely for a long period. In this period it is essential that we invest in the technology required to stablize our climate, i.e. carbon capture. With the proper clean energy generation capacity these systems can exist in harmony. Where carbon capture buys us more time to get more people on board with cleaner mechanisms. In addition, as this page points out, sustained investment is essential to technological development. By pushing down the cost of capture we allow for new economic opportunities, which provide both incentives (carbon tax for example) and direct benefits (using that tax income for capture).

el_nahual 6y ago
I agree it's not realistic, but it's actually more realistic than the alternative. The key here is that every new emission today multiplies because of positive feedback. So every day that passes, the problem of scrubbing enough carbon actually becomes harder--whereas the problem of simply not putting it out there keeps the same magnitude. Put differently, it costs "one less airplane trip" to prevent the carbon associated with 1 flight out of the air, but it costs an increasing amount of trips to get it out. Lastly... we know how to keep carbon out of the air. It's a politically difficult problem but one with a known solution. Just stop doing things. And stop doing them by taxing them to oblivion.... whereas we don't actually know how to get carbon out of the air in a clean way with sufficient magnitude in order to prevent runaway growth. And it goes without saying that in that scenario we'd probably have to reduce emissions as well! The argument that reducing emissions to ~0 is unrealistic is true, but it's more realistic than the alternative.
- colincooke 6y ago
  This isn't entirely true. There are many high benefit activities we should target (flights are a good one), however there are also others that are much more difficult to reduce (energy production in emerging economies for example). I think my main issue is that zero, or effectively zero, is too high a bar. Your thinking is in-line with mine. That we should treat carbon emission as an economic problem, as in we need to get to net zero, so what is the most effective (by $$$) way to get there. My bet is that it's a mix of reduction + capture, and we should pursue the most ecost-effective mix.

cialowicz 6y ago

I'm not super familiar on the subject, but are you sure the analogy holds? If we build enough capacity to scrub more carbon from the atmosphere than we add each year, then the problem will taper off, no? In your analogy, we'd be moving money from the high rate card to a lower rate one, and also making more $$$ than we spend annually.

cultus 6y ago
Scrubbing that carbon takes energy. Thus, if that energy is from fossil fuels, the carbon emitted can be greater than that captured. In that case, it is worse than doing nothing. At any rate, removing carbon from the atmosphere is a vastly harder problem than reducing our emissions. Geoengineering solutions are so impractical or beyond currently practical engineering can't be realistically done on human timescales. Planting trees is going to be insignificant, especially when places like the Amazon are being destroyed far faster. The exception is sulfur dioxide in the stratosphere. That doesn't solve ocean acidification, and the effects are still somewhat unpredictable, especially regionally. That, and the temp immediately shoots up once you stop. edit: I'm not sure people realize the difference, but there is a big difference between reducing emissions by capturing CO2 before it comes out of the stack vs. geoengineering removal of much more diffuse CO2 from the atmosphere itself, which Stripe seems to be implying. The first is a tool worth using sometimes, the second is hard enough to be impossible and would be massively energy-hungry. Either that or people really don't like to be told there isn't a magic tech fix for climate change and ecosystem collapse.
- timerol 6y ago
  Not all carbon sequestration requires input energy from the grid. As an example, one of the projects that Stripe is funding is https://projectvesta.org/ https://projectvesta.org/, which distributes olivine, a volcanic rock that absorbs CO2 to become limestone when it is eroded. By moving this material to beaches, wave energy can be harnessed to remove CO2
  - cultus 6y ago
    Ah, simply crush billions of tons of olivine and move it to a beach. Weathering olivine doesn't scale, because you need so much. It involves hitherto unprecendented amounts of quarrying and then transport. The quarrying would destroy massive amounts of habitat. After the waves do their trick, near-shore habitats would be devastated because the entire ocean floor is covered in olivine. I am a former geophysicist by the way. While I did not work in geoengineering, I am familiar with most of the serious proposals with scientific support. Be skeptical of these groups that claim to have an easy answer. I can tell you that no one in the field thinks carbon capture from the atmosphere is realistic anytime soon. The scale is enormous. Most people have trouble understanding the difference in scale with what we actually have the capability for.

jakelazaroff 6y ago

Sure, but we can walk and chew gum at the same time. It's easy for me to directly contribute to carbon removal, because of things like this. It's a little more difficult for me to help pump less carbon into the air — I can try to minimize my carbon footprint, but ultimately the thing we need is investment in clean energy and legislation forcing companies to limit their emissions.

el_nahual 6y ago
My point was that Stripe's massive resources are better spent lobbying/writing legislation/researching how to properly implement a carbon tax than this.
- MrKristopher 6y ago
  Why would Stripe write legislation to create a new tax? How does that help their bottom line or their customers' bottom line?
  - ves 6y ago
    It helps about as much as this initiative does.
  - el_nahual 6y ago
    Presumably because the Collison brothers recognize that climate change poses an existential threat to the well being of their firm, their customers and their employees, and that because of their awesome entrepreneurial abilities their investors have granted them BDFL powers over Stripe.
- nostromo 6y ago
  Spending money lobbying for something that has no chance of passing would be incredibly stupid. I'm glad people are taking direct action and not waiting around for some pie in the sky grand solution that simply isn't coming.
  - 6y ago

kisamoto 6y ago

Yes the two are complimentary but I wouldn't make a differentiation between primary and secondary. We need to reduce but we need to be removing at the same time. Not only so the net emissions are lower but even if we reduce to zero tomorrow there is already an excess we must remove.

angusb 6y ago

this isn't quite right - if you use zero carbon sources (e.g. solar) to power carbon removal the operation would be net carbon negative. "but why wouldn't you just use that solar capacity to displace coal plants on the electricity grid??????" there's already a rapid switch of installed electrical capacity from fossil fuels to solar/wind, but electricity typically accounts for 20% of a developed economy's emissions, so after that we need to look to decarbonise other parts of the economy. removing carbon from the wider economy involves some low hanging fruits (e.g. better insulation in houses) followed by a succession of increasingly difficult and expensive removal processes, with a very long tail. at the far end you have things like removing carbon emissions from long haul flights, which is extremely difficult - once it gets this hard, it's much more practical to use solar to power carbon removal. we can't wait for emissions to go to zero before investing in carbon capture because we'd be waiting decades for battery energy density to increase by orders of magnitude before they are good enough to support long haul flights. We don't have that long

el_nahual 6y ago
Agreed on the need to invest in carbon capture now. My main argument was that a) reducing emissions to ~0 is going to be necessary even if we invent some insanely efficient carbon sequestration tech; b) the longer we wait, the worse the problem gets, in an exponential way. Emissions reproduce; c) Therefore the bulk of our effort should be spent trying to get emissions down to 0. Because if we fail at that (a task that we know how to accomplish), then no amount of sequestration tech will save us.
- angusb 6y ago
  Hmm, still not sure I agree. Reducing emissions to close to 0 is definitely very important but it seems probable that we'll reach a steady state where some niche sources of carbon still persist, and are accompanied by corresponding capture. Some niche sources are just unbelievably hard to decarbonise If in 20 years 1% of our emissions remain but they are accompanied by capture (with a multiplier to account for inefficiencies in capture) then that would be ok by me. (You'd still want the extra carbon removal to reverse the warming caused by past emissions ofc)

eloff 6y ago

No, your conclusion is wrong. You don't need to put more carbon into the atmosphere to take carbon out. Nobody would fund that, well without bad subsidies anyway. We need to reduce the amount of carbon we put into the atmosphere AND increase the amount we take out. There is no reason not to pursue both strategies at the same time - indeed time is short and everything we can do counts.

el_nahual 6y ago
Agreed. What I was trying to convey is that reducing new emissions to ~0 is a necessary win condition. It's not optional...and it's also urgent because those emissions reproduce. We're going to have to cut emissions to 0 anyway, so the sooner we do so, the better...by a LOT. And besides being urgent, it's also something that we know how to do. As in, today. We have the technology! (It's called massive carbon taxes). Or at least we're much closer technologically than we are to any sort of clean, insanely efficient sequestration tech. Perhaps this is obvious to you, but if you read the replies to my comment you'll see a number of replies where the tenor is "it's impossible to enact carbon taxes to reduce our emissions so let's work on sequestration instead."
- BurningFrog 6y ago
  > because those emissions reproduce What does that mean? > We have the technology! (It's called massive carbon taxes) I agree that that's the best solution. Buy I don't see any signs it's politically possible.
- eloff 6y ago
  I don't think we'll get to 0, nor do we need to. We do need to get our net emissions to 0 though, or even drive it negative for a while. I'm such a fan of carbon taxes. If the market doesn't account for externalities, then price them in with taxes. Then the market will solve climate faster than any amount of regulation or wishful thinking. That's an excellent use of state power. Or governments or our people are too shortsighted or stupid I think it's fair to say in this case to see that. I'm not entirely sure which it is, maybe both. Working on carbon sequestration instead is also silly. I mean it's a typical engineer response of ignoring the messy regulatory and political world and trying to build our way out of the problem. But we need to focus on both, working on one approach does not preclude the other.

jackdeansmith 6y ago

> The ONLY solution is to take carbon spending to ~0 and only then focus on removing it from the air. I object to the "only then". Cutting emissions is absolutely the top priority, but we're going to need to scale up carbon removal dramatically by around mid-century. By starting soon we can bring costs down and get the tech ready for when we really need it to scale.

lopmotr 6y ago

You use the word "need" a lot, but need is relative. We need to do X in order to get Y. What's Y and what's its value? Is it greater than the cost of X? If not, then not only do we not need to do X, but we also should not do X.

hokkos 6y ago

We still need to fund those project, to make them able to be scaled and have ridden their learning curve when we have decarbonized our energy systems.