6 ms·

This sounds cool from a tech-nerd perspective, but of course it all is pretty futile if we don't get emissions under control. The video says 10 gigatons/yr by 2

by abeppu 5y ago

This sounds cool from a tech-nerd perspective, but of course it all is pretty futile if we don't get emissions under control. The video says 10 gigatons/yr by 2050. Our 2019 emissions were ~36 gigatons. I.e. even if capture is successful, it needs to be accompanied by aggressive emissions reductions for us to even get to neutral, let alone reversing damage. I'm guessing Musk had some thought process around the expected marginal impact of funding this vs more on energy storage vs energy production. And perhaps capture/sequestration is under-explored. But I wonder what could be achieved with $100M of funds directed at research to intentionally changing and shifting culture towards consuming stuff with smaller footprints? Tesla made some people want an electric car really badly. For some, very small houses are becoming attractive. But so far this stuff mostly arises from ad-hoc marketing efforts around particular brands, products, influencers. What if we need systematic memetic engineering, to make lower energy consumption actually feel desirable?

lutorm 5y ago
I think at this point emissions reductions is a matter of will, not technology. Rather than waiting for some technological magic bullet when it comes to emissions reductions, we need to take aggressive action. But we're going to need CCS technologies to start pulling the carbon back out if we want to avoid really bad outcomes, and those technologies are much less developed.
- kisamoto 5y ago
  Underrated comment.
- abeppu 5y ago
  I agree that reducing emissions is about will, but I'm frightened that we seem not especially willful. And that does seem like a matter of culture, which could be changed. We just don't have a robust framework for deliberately creating those changes. We gave a portfolio of expensive one-offs.
  - cjblomqvist 5y ago
    Ah, but we do. Tax carbon emissions (cf EU) at a proper level and you'll solve the core incentive issue. Follow (policy) research on how to implement this and it should be fine. The biggest hurdle is will, especially to take the first step.
    - abeppu 5y ago
      I think we're talking about different things. Yes, I agree that a carbon tax is needed, and would change individual behavior. But as you say, the biggest hurdle is will, which we have been sorely lacking. I'm talking about, how can we change what people _want_, which would include as a consequence creating the political will which allows us to take such decisive action. So far, lots of places have not chosen to implement any carbon tax because they value the environment less than their present access to goods and services to which they are accustomed. And even the carbon taxes which have been put in place don't actually address the real externalities of emissions, suggesting that even if the polity there values the environment _some_, it's still less valuable than buying cheap stuff. EU carbon taxes vary wildly between countries, from €0.07 in Poland to €116 in Sweden. Sweden's tax is at the very low end of recommendations from a 2018 UN report, which gave the extremely broad range of $135 to $5,500 per ton. And only now is there a _proposal_ for an EU border tax to account for emissions in goods entering the EU. So even in Sweden, where perhaps cultural values made a comparatively high rate politically feasible, no one has yet paid a carbon tax which actually addresses the externalities of emissions, because of imports. My original comment mentioned Tesla as an example of how to get people to actually want the greener goods more than their alternatives. People that really wanted a Tesla wanted it more than any ICE car. They still wanted it after Tesla hit the tax break cap in the US. They perceived a Tesla as smart, glamorous, futuristic, and conveying status. This is qualitatively different than someone who lives in a place with a carbon tax who can be convinced to take a train trip rather than a regional flight, or buys a home which is better sealed and will be cheaper to heat/cool. I would claim that aside from typical corporate marketing activities which center around a given product or brand (which is what I was thinking of when I referred to a "portfolio of expensive one-offs"), the other primary precedents for getting people to want differently have been religious evangelism and state propaganda, neither of which ever yielded an engineering discipline of predictable, well-understood mechanisms.
kisamoto 5y ago
Agreed. Removal and reductions are not mutually exclusive. One huge positive I see from the creation of this prize is the publicity and interest in carbon removal. From my experience more people are learning about the requirement for carbon removal and realizing how expensive it is. For those of us who want to leave a minimal footprint, becoming aware of how expensive it is to undo our footprint incentivizes us to reduce too. (Credit where credit is due, Stripe, Shopify and Microsoft are also really helping this area grow too. )
- ant6n 5y ago
  > Agreed. Removal and reductions are not mutually exclusive. Making people believe that some magic techno fix will swoop in and somehow solve the climate change problem is undesirable. People need to accept that a large reduction in emissions is necessary and this will require many people to change at least some of their habits.
tito 5y ago
Indeed, getting emissions under control is key. And so are developing solutions to removing carbon from the ambient air, with fewer than 2,000 people working in the industry worldwide. Regarding your point about carbon capture, XPRIZE recently closed a $20 million prize for making products out of carbon emissions captured at industrial sources: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/carbon/articles/xprize-announces-the-two-winners-of-20m-nrg-cosia-carbon-xprize-with-each-team-creating-valuable-products-out-of-co2-emissions https://www.xprize.org/prizes/carbon/articles/xprize-announc...
flavius29663 5y ago
> Our 2019 emissions were ~36 gigatons The plants absorb about 25% of that and the oceans another 25%. If we absorb 10 gigatons yearly by 2050, that might be good enough.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  Wait, 36 originally × .75 from plants × .75 from oceans - 10 captured = 20¼ Gt. I think you're off by about 10 Gt? And that's assuming the ocean and plants will infinitely capture more and more carbon, which I sincerely doubt as well, but I'll go ahead and assume you mean this as a bridging method to get us another decade or two to finalize real solutions.
  - flavius29663 5y ago
    it's actually 36 - (36x0.25) - (36x0.25) - 10 = 8. But yeah, we would have to reduce our emissions by at least 8GT to get to zero. That is totally doable, advanced economies are already reducing CO2 at a faster rate than 25% over 30 years: the US has reduced it's emissions by 1GT in 10 years (16% reduction).
    - lucb1e 5y ago
      If you absorb 25% (you wrote "plants absorb about 25%" and same for trees), then 75% remains, so apply ×0.75 twice instead of applying ×0.25 twice.
      - flavius29663 5y ago
        but that's not how it works...plants absorb a quarter of total emissions and the oceans about a quarter too. So half the emissions are absorbed, and half are not.
        Mizza 5y ago
        I think you're making a very common mistake, which is misunderstanding the carbon cycle. We could, theoretically, grow enough plants to get down to pre-industrial levels. However, plants decompose when they die, re-releasing their carbon into the atmosphere, and lots of the plants alive to die are grown using petrochemical fertilizer, which was taken from under the ground, not the atmosphere.. So, we'd have to keep all of those new plants alive, forever, or maintain that extreme level of plant growth forever. This seems like an even harder problem.
sekai 5y ago
And it's futile if we don't start removing C02 from the atmosphere. I'd rather bet on C02 removal than anything else.
- lucb1e 5y ago
  (Side note: it's CO2, carbon+(oxide×2), not C zero two) It's not futile if we don't remove atmospheric CO2, but we would have to get to net zero warming without cheating and we would have to get there within our emission budget to stay below <insert your temperature target>.
slothtrop 5y ago
Those 36 gigatons aren't largely a result of consumer behaviors, but industry (which, admittedly, increases as a function of demand) Reducing footprints through innovation will go a ways. Changing "culture" (i.e. coerced minimalism) is a thing, but it's a band-aid solution on a leaking hoover-dam; virtue signaling for the most part. Carbon footprints scale up with population. Everyone eats, wants gadgets, wants a home, good infrastructure. If these demands can't be met without excess encroachment of land and destruction of the environment, then there's too many people. Innovation and increased efficiency can't outrun growth. Yes, it's poised to level off in the next 100 or so years after adding an extra few billion to the total, but the interventions needed are more urgent and by extension the reduced rate should be more urgent. Though changes to the energy sector alone can make a substantial dent in emissions in the near-term, given political will. All of this would be a moot point if the global population were halved and remained stagnant. The rampant op-ed push for minimalism on the part of the consumer, for housing especially, seems almost like a nefarious ploy to plant the idea that commoners should now be content with less, with environmentalism as the red herring. So being unable to afford a detached home is to be thought of as a happy virtuous accident.
- burgessaccount 5y ago
  I actually think all people in the developed world - rich people of course most of all, but “commoners” too - do need to learn to be content with a lot less. Before the industrial era, the average person in England owned 36 objects. And that’s counting like 1) table 2) bowl 3) cup 4) knife. The way people in America and Europe have been taught to live in the last century - even the lower-middle and working class, let alone the rich - is inherently unsustainable, and can never be sustainable. “Buy less sh*t” should be the first and most powerful front in our fight against climate change, but it isn’t because we are selfish and gluttonous beasts.
  - slothtrop 5y ago
    > Before the industrial era, the average person in England owned 36 objects. Life at the advent of the industrial revolution sucked. The Victorian age was also one of high inequality. I'm not sure what that's supposed to inspire. > inherently unsustainable What part? You're not addressing that. I did, however: increase in population increases demand for things. Environmental destruction is scaling with population, not consumer voraciousness. > “Buy less sh*t” should be the first and most powerful front in our fight against climate change, but it isn’t because we are selfish and gluttonous beasts. Look at the stuff you have lying around in your domicile. That's somewhere near the average of what people in the West own. Digital consumption has increased on average, people aren't tripping over things in their ever-shrinking domiciles with ever-shrinking purchasing power owing to stagnant wages. Not only are you overestimating consumption of "shit", you're failing to make a meaningful connection between consumer habits and lack of sustainability. It's a question of scale.
apendleton 5y ago
I think the general consensus is that where it's possible to eliminate emissions, that's much better than emitting and then capturing later, but there are huge disparities across emitters as to how easy that is to do, and there's a likely outcome where getting to net zero (or even net negative) emissions involves eliminating emissions in most industries and then using capture to deal with the laggards. Getting less abstract: there are no real technological hurdles for eliminating emissions for personal vehicles, and probably-manageable ones for other surface transport (cargo shipping, etc.). Decarbonizing the electric grid has some technological challenges to solve (mostly around intermittency and storage if we go all renewables, or cost if we go mixed renewables and nuclear), but there are reasonably clear paths forward. On the other hand, we really don't know how to do zero-carbon long haul aviation, or concrete production and curing, or aluminum smelting, or trans-oceanic shipping -- maybe portable/modular nuclear could be used for the last two, but it's still pretty pie-in-the-sky. So, maybe in the future we have electric cars but carbon capture for long-haul jets, or something. (Aside: the recent Bill Gates climate book has a pretty thorough rundown of all the major current emitters and the levels of technological readiness for decarbonizing each.)
- oconnore 5y ago
  Carbon neutral jet fuel exists (synthetic fuels from electrolysis, and/or biofuels), and could be scaled up. The issue is not “can we do this”, it’s “can we justify doing this economically”.
  - apendleton 5y ago
    For synthetic fuels: yes, absolutely... but it requires economical carbon capture, which GP was saying we maybe shouldn't invest in, in favor of emissions reductions (and if we want net zero, it'd have to be direct air capture, probably, rather than point source, because in this theoretical future, the coal power plants or whatever are all gone). Anyhow, whether you frame captured-carbon fuels as "you capture carbon and then burn it again so it's neutral" or "you burn it, and then deal with its emissions by capturing it again" is sort of arbitrary, and the latter is basically what I'm already arguing for. Biofuels seem mostly like a crock, honestly -- the ones we can produce now compete with food for arable land and would do so more aggressively at scale, and the ones that wouldn't do that (algal fuels, maybe cellulosic fuels like switchgrass) still require fundamental R&D to make the economics work. And again: even if they did work, this is a solution where you're burning fuels and emitting carbon, and then remedying by capturing again, this time with plants. So again: it's carbon capture.
motoboi 5y ago
Elon tweeted about making rocket fuel out of arrested carbon. This technology could, it seems, be used outside earth as well (other planets, not space).
Smoosh 5y ago
> Tesla made some people want an electric car really badly The emphasis here is on some people. Observe the morons who think they are clever/funny "rolling coal". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK6Amk4Hf4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK6Amk4Hf4Y My personal belief is that all governments should implement carbon tax/trading schemes which are either revenue neutral or 100% of the revenue is invested into carbon capture schemes.
sennight 5y ago
> What if we need systematic memetic engineering, to make lower energy consumption actually feel desirable? lol, there has been an unrelenting campaign to do so, going all the way back to the 70s - when global cooling and population control were the hot topics at Davos. Captain Planet, he's our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero... I'm all for abandoning conspicuous consumption and the treatment of electronics as consumable goods (sent from 2011 vintage Thinkpad), but I'm not on board with weird its-for-your-own-good social engineering/propaganda campaigns. It is a moot point anyway, as you'd be impotently counter-messaging every advertising/branding strategy that has (or will) ever exist.

by abeppu 5y ago

lutorm 5y ago

I think at this point emissions reductions is a matter of will, not technology. Rather than waiting for some technological magic bullet when it comes to emissions reductions, we need to take aggressive action. But we're going to need CCS technologies to start pulling the carbon back out if we want to avoid really bad outcomes, and those technologies are much less developed.

kisamoto 5y ago
Underrated comment.
abeppu 5y ago
I agree that reducing emissions is about will, but I'm frightened that we seem not especially willful. And that does seem like a matter of culture, which could be changed. We just don't have a robust framework for deliberately creating those changes. We gave a portfolio of expensive one-offs.
- cjblomqvist 5y ago
  Ah, but we do. Tax carbon emissions (cf EU) at a proper level and you'll solve the core incentive issue. Follow (policy) research on how to implement this and it should be fine. The biggest hurdle is will, especially to take the first step.
  - abeppu 5y ago
    I think we're talking about different things. Yes, I agree that a carbon tax is needed, and would change individual behavior. But as you say, the biggest hurdle is will, which we have been sorely lacking. I'm talking about, how can we change what people _want_, which would include as a consequence creating the political will which allows us to take such decisive action. So far, lots of places have not chosen to implement any carbon tax because they value the environment less than their present access to goods and services to which they are accustomed. And even the carbon taxes which have been put in place don't actually address the real externalities of emissions, suggesting that even if the polity there values the environment _some_, it's still less valuable than buying cheap stuff. EU carbon taxes vary wildly between countries, from €0.07 in Poland to €116 in Sweden. Sweden's tax is at the very low end of recommendations from a 2018 UN report, which gave the extremely broad range of $135 to $5,500 per ton. And only now is there a _proposal_ for an EU border tax to account for emissions in goods entering the EU. So even in Sweden, where perhaps cultural values made a comparatively high rate politically feasible, no one has yet paid a carbon tax which actually addresses the externalities of emissions, because of imports. My original comment mentioned Tesla as an example of how to get people to actually want the greener goods more than their alternatives. People that really wanted a Tesla wanted it more than any ICE car. They still wanted it after Tesla hit the tax break cap in the US. They perceived a Tesla as smart, glamorous, futuristic, and conveying status. This is qualitatively different than someone who lives in a place with a carbon tax who can be convinced to take a train trip rather than a regional flight, or buys a home which is better sealed and will be cheaper to heat/cool. I would claim that aside from typical corporate marketing activities which center around a given product or brand (which is what I was thinking of when I referred to a "portfolio of expensive one-offs"), the other primary precedents for getting people to want differently have been religious evangelism and state propaganda, neither of which ever yielded an engineering discipline of predictable, well-understood mechanisms.

kisamoto 5y ago

Agreed. Removal and reductions are not mutually exclusive. One huge positive I see from the creation of this prize is the publicity and interest in carbon removal. From my experience more people are learning about the requirement for carbon removal and realizing how expensive it is. For those of us who want to leave a minimal footprint, becoming aware of how expensive it is to undo our footprint incentivizes us to reduce too. (Credit where credit is due, Stripe, Shopify and Microsoft are also really helping this area grow too. )

ant6n 5y ago
> Agreed. Removal and reductions are not mutually exclusive. Making people believe that some magic techno fix will swoop in and somehow solve the climate change problem is undesirable. People need to accept that a large reduction in emissions is necessary and this will require many people to change at least some of their habits.

tito 5y ago

Indeed, getting emissions under control is key. And so are developing solutions to removing carbon from the ambient air, with fewer than 2,000 people working in the industry worldwide. Regarding your point about carbon capture, XPRIZE recently closed a $20 million prize for making products out of carbon emissions captured at industrial sources: https://www.xprize.org/prizes/carbon/articles/xprize-announces-the-two-winners-of-20m-nrg-cosia-carbon-xprize-with-each-team-creating-valuable-products-out-of-co2-emissions https://www.xprize.org/prizes/carbon/articles/xprize-announc...

flavius29663 5y ago

> Our 2019 emissions were ~36 gigatons The plants absorb about 25% of that and the oceans another 25%. If we absorb 10 gigatons yearly by 2050, that might be good enough.

lucb1e 5y ago
Wait, 36 originally × .75 from plants × .75 from oceans - 10 captured = 20¼ Gt. I think you're off by about 10 Gt? And that's assuming the ocean and plants will infinitely capture more and more carbon, which I sincerely doubt as well, but I'll go ahead and assume you mean this as a bridging method to get us another decade or two to finalize real solutions.
- flavius29663 5y ago
  it's actually 36 - (36x0.25) - (36x0.25) - 10 = 8. But yeah, we would have to reduce our emissions by at least 8GT to get to zero. That is totally doable, advanced economies are already reducing CO2 at a faster rate than 25% over 30 years: the US has reduced it's emissions by 1GT in 10 years (16% reduction).
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    If you absorb 25% (you wrote "plants absorb about 25%" and same for trees), then 75% remains, so apply ×0.75 twice instead of applying ×0.25 twice.
    - flavius29663 5y ago
      but that's not how it works...plants absorb a quarter of total emissions and the oceans about a quarter too. So half the emissions are absorbed, and half are not.
      - Mizza 5y ago
        I think you're making a very common mistake, which is misunderstanding the carbon cycle. We could, theoretically, grow enough plants to get down to pre-industrial levels. However, plants decompose when they die, re-releasing their carbon into the atmosphere, and lots of the plants alive to die are grown using petrochemical fertilizer, which was taken from under the ground, not the atmosphere.. So, we'd have to keep all of those new plants alive, forever, or maintain that extreme level of plant growth forever. This seems like an even harder problem.

sekai 5y ago

And it's futile if we don't start removing C02 from the atmosphere. I'd rather bet on C02 removal than anything else.

lucb1e 5y ago
(Side note: it's CO2, carbon+(oxide×2), not C zero two) It's not futile if we don't remove atmospheric CO2, but we would have to get to net zero warming without cheating and we would have to get there within our emission budget to stay below <insert your temperature target>.

slothtrop 5y ago

Those 36 gigatons aren't largely a result of consumer behaviors, but industry (which, admittedly, increases as a function of demand) Reducing footprints through innovation will go a ways. Changing "culture" (i.e. coerced minimalism) is a thing, but it's a band-aid solution on a leaking hoover-dam; virtue signaling for the most part. Carbon footprints scale up with population. Everyone eats, wants gadgets, wants a home, good infrastructure. If these demands can't be met without excess encroachment of land and destruction of the environment, then there's too many people. Innovation and increased efficiency can't outrun growth. Yes, it's poised to level off in the next 100 or so years after adding an extra few billion to the total, but the interventions needed are more urgent and by extension the reduced rate should be more urgent. Though changes to the energy sector alone can make a substantial dent in emissions in the near-term, given political will. All of this would be a moot point if the global population were halved and remained stagnant. The rampant op-ed push for minimalism on the part of the consumer, for housing especially, seems almost like a nefarious ploy to plant the idea that commoners should now be content with less, with environmentalism as the red herring. So being unable to afford a detached home is to be thought of as a happy virtuous accident.

burgessaccount 5y ago
I actually think all people in the developed world - rich people of course most of all, but “commoners” too - do need to learn to be content with a lot less. Before the industrial era, the average person in England owned 36 objects. And that’s counting like 1) table 2) bowl 3) cup 4) knife. The way people in America and Europe have been taught to live in the last century - even the lower-middle and working class, let alone the rich - is inherently unsustainable, and can never be sustainable. “Buy less sh*t” should be the first and most powerful front in our fight against climate change, but it isn’t because we are selfish and gluttonous beasts.
- slothtrop 5y ago
  > Before the industrial era, the average person in England owned 36 objects. Life at the advent of the industrial revolution sucked. The Victorian age was also one of high inequality. I'm not sure what that's supposed to inspire. > inherently unsustainable What part? You're not addressing that. I did, however: increase in population increases demand for things. Environmental destruction is scaling with population, not consumer voraciousness. > “Buy less sh*t” should be the first and most powerful front in our fight against climate change, but it isn’t because we are selfish and gluttonous beasts. Look at the stuff you have lying around in your domicile. That's somewhere near the average of what people in the West own. Digital consumption has increased on average, people aren't tripping over things in their ever-shrinking domiciles with ever-shrinking purchasing power owing to stagnant wages. Not only are you overestimating consumption of "shit", you're failing to make a meaningful connection between consumer habits and lack of sustainability. It's a question of scale.

apendleton 5y ago

I think the general consensus is that where it's possible to eliminate emissions, that's much better than emitting and then capturing later, but there are huge disparities across emitters as to how easy that is to do, and there's a likely outcome where getting to net zero (or even net negative) emissions involves eliminating emissions in most industries and then using capture to deal with the laggards. Getting less abstract: there are no real technological hurdles for eliminating emissions for personal vehicles, and probably-manageable ones for other surface transport (cargo shipping, etc.). Decarbonizing the electric grid has some technological challenges to solve (mostly around intermittency and storage if we go all renewables, or cost if we go mixed renewables and nuclear), but there are reasonably clear paths forward. On the other hand, we really don't know how to do zero-carbon long haul aviation, or concrete production and curing, or aluminum smelting, or trans-oceanic shipping -- maybe portable/modular nuclear could be used for the last two, but it's still pretty pie-in-the-sky. So, maybe in the future we have electric cars but carbon capture for long-haul jets, or something. (Aside: the recent Bill Gates climate book has a pretty thorough rundown of all the major current emitters and the levels of technological readiness for decarbonizing each.)

oconnore 5y ago
Carbon neutral jet fuel exists (synthetic fuels from electrolysis, and/or biofuels), and could be scaled up. The issue is not “can we do this”, it’s “can we justify doing this economically”.
- apendleton 5y ago
  For synthetic fuels: yes, absolutely... but it requires economical carbon capture, which GP was saying we maybe shouldn't invest in, in favor of emissions reductions (and if we want net zero, it'd have to be direct air capture, probably, rather than point source, because in this theoretical future, the coal power plants or whatever are all gone). Anyhow, whether you frame captured-carbon fuels as "you capture carbon and then burn it again so it's neutral" or "you burn it, and then deal with its emissions by capturing it again" is sort of arbitrary, and the latter is basically what I'm already arguing for. Biofuels seem mostly like a crock, honestly -- the ones we can produce now compete with food for arable land and would do so more aggressively at scale, and the ones that wouldn't do that (algal fuels, maybe cellulosic fuels like switchgrass) still require fundamental R&D to make the economics work. And again: even if they did work, this is a solution where you're burning fuels and emitting carbon, and then remedying by capturing again, this time with plants. So again: it's carbon capture.

motoboi 5y ago

Elon tweeted about making rocket fuel out of arrested carbon. This technology could, it seems, be used outside earth as well (other planets, not space).

Smoosh 5y ago

> Tesla made some people want an electric car really badly The emphasis here is on some people. Observe the morons who think they are clever/funny "rolling coal". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK6Amk4Hf4Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PK6Amk4Hf4Y My personal belief is that all governments should implement carbon tax/trading schemes which are either revenue neutral or 100% of the revenue is invested into carbon capture schemes.

sennight 5y ago

> What if we need systematic memetic engineering, to make lower energy consumption actually feel desirable? lol, there has been an unrelenting campaign to do so, going all the way back to the 70s - when global cooling and population control were the hot topics at Davos. Captain Planet, he's our hero, gonna take pollution down to zero... I'm all for abandoning conspicuous consumption and the treatment of electronics as consumable goods (sent from 2011 vintage Thinkpad), but I'm not on board with weird its-for-your-own-good social engineering/propaganda campaigns. It is a moot point anyway, as you'd be impotently counter-messaging every advertising/branding strategy that has (or will) ever exist.