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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 eac

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.
    - imtringued 6y ago
      Once people realize the true impact of climate change they are going to be desperate enough to attempt anything that even shows a tiny glimmer of hope. The only problem is that some people pretend that this glimmer is a guaranteed solution.
      - cultus 6y ago
        There is a guaranteed solution to stop it from becoming apocalyptic which is comparatively easy and cheap, and we know it would work: just move away from fossil fuels and carbon intensive production ASAP. This requires political will we don't have, and fantasies like this just distract from what is necessary and the steps we must take. These kind of pie-in-the-sky things takes money and attention from real solutions that work. They are false hopes that make people complacent and the problem seem less urgent, thinking that we'll tech our way out without fundamental changes to how we live on this planet.
el_nahual 6y ago
The issue is two-fold: One, that there are positive feedback loops out there for existing carbon, but there are no positive feedback loops for carbon removal. You're never going to catch it. Two, it takes more energy to get carbon out of the air than the energy it took to put it in there. So not only do you have to find clean energy to replace our current needs, you then have to find an integer multiple of that clean energy to get the carbon out, plus an accelerating multiple to get the postive-feedback carbon out too. You'll never get that card down to 0 if you keep spending on it.

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.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    Once people realize the true impact of climate change they are going to be desperate enough to attempt anything that even shows a tiny glimmer of hope. The only problem is that some people pretend that this glimmer is a guaranteed solution.
    - cultus 6y ago
      There is a guaranteed solution to stop it from becoming apocalyptic which is comparatively easy and cheap, and we know it would work: just move away from fossil fuels and carbon intensive production ASAP. This requires political will we don't have, and fantasies like this just distract from what is necessary and the steps we must take. These kind of pie-in-the-sky things takes money and attention from real solutions that work. They are false hopes that make people complacent and the problem seem less urgent, thinking that we'll tech our way out without fundamental changes to how we live on this planet.

el_nahual 6y ago

The issue is two-fold: One, that there are positive feedback loops out there for existing carbon, but there are no positive feedback loops for carbon removal. You're never going to catch it. Two, it takes more energy to get carbon out of the air than the energy it took to put it in there. So not only do you have to find clean energy to replace our current needs, you then have to find an integer multiple of that clean energy to get the carbon out, plus an accelerating multiple to get the postive-feedback carbon out too. You'll never get that card down to 0 if you keep spending on it.