8 ms·

Exactly. I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to p

Exactly. I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less. In turn consumers will be incentivized to buy products that create less pollution. Also once companies are paying for these costs there will be lots of money to go around, suddenly the R&D budgets will be huge, which is a great thing. -- To illustrate -- if you drive 15k miles per year the cost of "recapture" for your carbon on driving is $3,600 (@25mpg). How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids? [Please double-check my math]

Supermancho 5y ago
> I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less I imagine the added-cost gets passed on to the consumer.
- Ericson2314 5y ago
  That doesn't take away the incentive, though. Anyone that can pass on less cost because of a better process now has a real competitive advantage, whereas today they can, what, virtue signal?
poopypoopington 5y ago
driving 15k miles @25 mpg = 600 gallons of gas (15,000 / 25) gallon of gas has 19.60 lb co2 / gallon [1] = 11,760 pounds of co2 (600 * 19.6) = 5.88 tons (19.6 * 600 / 2000) cost for clime works to sequester co2 is $600 [2] so total cost to sequester for the 15k is $3,528 (5.88 * 600) cost to sequester per gallon is $5.88 per gallon ($3,528 / 600 gallons) price of gas in NYC is $3.11 per gallon so new cost per gallon factoring in the current high cost of carbon capture is $3.11 base price + $5.88 to sequester = $8.99 per gallon yeah your math seems great lol assuming cost to sequester goes down to $100 per ton, the cost for 15k of driving at 25mpg would be $588 (5.88 * $100), cost to sequester per gallon would be $0.98 so the new price of gas in NYC would be $4.09 (3.11 + .98), actually not absurd given recent trends and probably not high enough to discourage people from driving sources: [1] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php [2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-... [3] https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/researchers-and-policymakers/energy-prices/motor-gasoline/weekly-average-motor-gasoline-prices https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/researchers-and-policymakers/ener...
- slashdot2008 5y ago
  thanks for plugging and chugging it all out. carbon engineering's carbon capture technology is projected to be significantly less than $600 tonne, they say the plant they are building for occidental petroleum in texas will be profitable from 1) cost of avoided CO2 purchases (CO2 is used to pump oil out of the ground) and 2) california CO2 credits for "low carbon oil" which is between $175 and $200 USD/tonne [0]. so if carbon ends up at $200 per tonne instead of $100, cost per gallon would be $3.11 + $1.96 = $5.07. If you drive a lot probably enough to nudge you towards an EV! [0] https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/lcfs-credit-price https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/lcfs-credit-pric...
- b9a2cab5 5y ago
  Good luck getting Congress to pass a tax increasing the price of gas by 1.33-3x. That's political suicide, even for Democrats. Directly fucks over the working class but corporate fleets can afford to pay the extra $$$ or switch to electric.
  - gorkish 5y ago
    This is not out of line with the price of fuel in some countries already; I think it demonstrates that the technology is quite possibly on the edge of economic viability for closing the carbon cycle of gasoline, even if we don't get hundredfold improvements in the technology. That's pretty good news for everybody.
    - pjc50 5y ago
      UK petrol is about £1.30/liter = $1.80/l = $6.80/US gallon. Not really enough to seriously deter driving yet.
      - raffraffraff 5y ago
        The biggest problem with any cost-driven incentive is that it has the ability to fuck people over. If you make electricity too expensive you end up with fuel poverty. There is no way out of it. There is no other 'choice' that poor people can make. Same with water charges. What do you do if you can't afford your water bill? But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that. (Yeah, I know, people who live in the country are married to their cars). If your country really pushes EV charge points and implements tax incentives on EV vehicles, then you are providing people with a way out of high carbon tax. And you need your PR campaign to be clear that people are getting a choice: high price fossil fuel or cheap EV. Because the chicken/egg here is that you won't get a government that'll make those changes until your convince people to vote for it. And people won't vote for poverty, but they will vote for options.
dillondoyle 5y ago
Wow. I recently got a car - first time in 10 years - and I used TeraPass monthly recurring to offset. Or so I thought. Is there a reason the cost per tonne is so far off? Is terrapass just BS? They say I think $5 per 1,000 pounds co2 https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped
- kisamoto 5y ago
  Terrapass and others offering these low prices are based on traditional offsets rather than carbon removal. By this I mean they typically purchase and resell carbon credits generated by theoretically reducing emissions somewhere else - a common example to this is supplying more efficient fuel stoves to African communities. A credit is generated as theoretically there are less emissions now going into the atmosphere. This however does nothing to tackle the emissions from your car which remain in the atmosphere. Carbon removal generally refers to these new technologies that actively capture and sequester CO2. These are currently immature and expensive but the result is "net-zero", if your car emits a ton, you remove a ton. Some links for you: Bloomberg dug a little into the forestation based carbon offsets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI [Disclaimer: I co-founded this] an alternative which aims to support a portfolio of carbon removals: https://carbonremoved.com https://carbonremoved.com
  - dillondoyle 5y ago
    Thank you! I completely overlooked this difference. That huge removal cost just shows how underpriced oil is given the externalities.
    - jaggederest 5y ago
      Yeah if you do the math and squint a little, virtually all of the economic value of the benefits of oil will be required to be repaid in order to undo the costs. I think over the long term e.g. Exxon is going to be a net-negative business.
xorcist 5y ago
> if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? It's easy to forget how incredibly cheap gasoline still is in the US. In Europe you expect to pay somewhere between $6 (Baltics) to $8 (Nordics). Given the enormous budgetary excesses of the covid situation, one would only expect these prices to rise even further. Gasoline consumption is something a society generally want to discourage given the externalities involved.
- marvin 5y ago
  This is a thing I don't get about climate politics in the Nordics. We have already implemented taxation that strongly disincentivizes a large source of CO2 emissions from businesses and private individuals. Gasoline is expensive here because we pay ~80% tax on it, not because it's expensive to ship. And granted, we do have very strong EV adoption to show for it. But it's a very small step from here to an effective climate stategy that also inventivizes emission reductions everywhere else. We should have a large-scale R&D program going to sequester CO2 for geological timescales, and pay for it using the existing gasoline taxes as well as an additional and gradually-increasing CO2 emission fee. But instead this tax money goes towards increasing the number of people working in the public sector. You'd think this was a big talking point for the Greens, but those folks don't understand economics and focus all their efforts on trying to decommission the oil sector. I don't get it!
modriano 5y ago
I'm very skeptical that the cost would be that low. The facility in this article claims it will be able to pull 4000 metric tons of CO2 from the air each year. Per the EPA, the average US driver produces 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Let's call it 4 for ease of calculation. That's 1000 cars negated. How much does this facility cost to operate and what is the cost of depreciation each year? $3.6M sounds impossibly low. [0] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
908B64B197 5y ago
> How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids? At current prices it's already economically viable to get a Tesla in many places.

Supermancho 5y ago

> I imagine as the extra added-cost of pollution gets funneled back to the producers, they will have a financial incentive to adjust their processes to pollute less I imagine the added-cost gets passed on to the consumer.

Ericson2314 5y ago
That doesn't take away the incentive, though. Anyone that can pass on less cost because of a better process now has a real competitive advantage, whereas today they can, what, virtue signal?

poopypoopington 5y ago

driving 15k miles @25 mpg = 600 gallons of gas (15,000 / 25) gallon of gas has 19.60 lb co2 / gallon [1] = 11,760 pounds of co2 (600 * 19.6) = 5.88 tons (19.6 * 600 / 2000) cost for clime works to sequester co2 is $600 [2] so total cost to sequester for the 15k is $3,528 (5.88 * 600) cost to sequester per gallon is $5.88 per gallon ($3,528 / 600 gallons) price of gas in NYC is $3.11 per gallon so new cost per gallon factoring in the current high cost of carbon capture is $3.11 base price + $5.88 to sequester = $8.99 per gallon yeah your math seems great lol assuming cost to sequester goes down to $100 per ton, the cost for 15k of driving at 25mpg would be $588 (5.88 * $100), cost to sequester per gallon would be $0.98 so the new price of gas in NYC would be $4.09 (3.11 + .98), actually not absurd given recent trends and probably not high enough to discourage people from driving sources: [1] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php [2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-... [3] https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/researchers-and-policymakers/energy-prices/motor-gasoline/weekly-average-motor-gasoline-prices https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/researchers-and-policymakers/ener...

slashdot2008 5y ago
thanks for plugging and chugging it all out. carbon engineering's carbon capture technology is projected to be significantly less than $600 tonne, they say the plant they are building for occidental petroleum in texas will be profitable from 1) cost of avoided CO2 purchases (CO2 is used to pump oil out of the ground) and 2) california CO2 credits for "low carbon oil" which is between $175 and $200 USD/tonne [0]. so if carbon ends up at $200 per tonne instead of $100, cost per gallon would be $3.11 + $1.96 = $5.07. If you drive a lot probably enough to nudge you towards an EV! [0] https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/lcfs-credit-price https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/lcfs-credit-pric...
b9a2cab5 5y ago
Good luck getting Congress to pass a tax increasing the price of gas by 1.33-3x. That's political suicide, even for Democrats. Directly fucks over the working class but corporate fleets can afford to pay the extra $$$ or switch to electric.
- gorkish 5y ago
  This is not out of line with the price of fuel in some countries already; I think it demonstrates that the technology is quite possibly on the edge of economic viability for closing the carbon cycle of gasoline, even if we don't get hundredfold improvements in the technology. That's pretty good news for everybody.
  - pjc50 5y ago
    UK petrol is about £1.30/liter = $1.80/l = $6.80/US gallon. Not really enough to seriously deter driving yet.
    - raffraffraff 5y ago
      The biggest problem with any cost-driven incentive is that it has the ability to fuck people over. If you make electricity too expensive you end up with fuel poverty. There is no way out of it. There is no other 'choice' that poor people can make. Same with water charges. What do you do if you can't afford your water bill? But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that. (Yeah, I know, people who live in the country are married to their cars). If your country really pushes EV charge points and implements tax incentives on EV vehicles, then you are providing people with a way out of high carbon tax. And you need your PR campaign to be clear that people are getting a choice: high price fossil fuel or cheap EV. Because the chicken/egg here is that you won't get a government that'll make those changes until your convince people to vote for it. And people won't vote for poverty, but they will vote for options.

dillondoyle 5y ago

Wow. I recently got a car - first time in 10 years - and I used TeraPass monthly recurring to offset. Or so I thought. Is there a reason the cost per tonne is so far off? Is terrapass just BS? They say I think $5 per 1,000 pounds co2 https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped

kisamoto 5y ago
Terrapass and others offering these low prices are based on traditional offsets rather than carbon removal. By this I mean they typically purchase and resell carbon credits generated by theoretically reducing emissions somewhere else - a common example to this is supplying more efficient fuel stoves to African communities. A credit is generated as theoretically there are less emissions now going into the atmosphere. This however does nothing to tackle the emissions from your car which remain in the atmosphere. Carbon removal generally refers to these new technologies that actively capture and sequester CO2. These are currently immature and expensive but the result is "net-zero", if your car emits a ton, you remove a ton. Some links for you: Bloomberg dug a little into the forestation based carbon offsets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI [Disclaimer: I co-founded this] an alternative which aims to support a portfolio of carbon removals: https://carbonremoved.com https://carbonremoved.com
- dillondoyle 5y ago
  Thank you! I completely overlooked this difference. That huge removal cost just shows how underpriced oil is given the externalities.
  - jaggederest 5y ago
    Yeah if you do the math and squint a little, virtually all of the economic value of the benefits of oil will be required to be repaid in order to undo the costs. I think over the long term e.g. Exxon is going to be a net-negative business.

xorcist 5y ago

> if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? It's easy to forget how incredibly cheap gasoline still is in the US. In Europe you expect to pay somewhere between $6 (Baltics) to $8 (Nordics). Given the enormous budgetary excesses of the covid situation, one would only expect these prices to rise even further. Gasoline consumption is something a society generally want to discourage given the externalities involved.

marvin 5y ago
This is a thing I don't get about climate politics in the Nordics. We have already implemented taxation that strongly disincentivizes a large source of CO2 emissions from businesses and private individuals. Gasoline is expensive here because we pay ~80% tax on it, not because it's expensive to ship. And granted, we do have very strong EV adoption to show for it. But it's a very small step from here to an effective climate stategy that also inventivizes emission reductions everywhere else. We should have a large-scale R&D program going to sequester CO2 for geological timescales, and pay for it using the existing gasoline taxes as well as an additional and gradually-increasing CO2 emission fee. But instead this tax money goes towards increasing the number of people working in the public sector. You'd think this was a big talking point for the Greens, but those folks don't understand economics and focus all their efforts on trying to decommission the oil sector. I don't get it!

modriano 5y ago

I'm very skeptical that the cost would be that low. The facility in this article claims it will be able to pull 4000 metric tons of CO2 from the air each year. Per the EPA, the average US driver produces 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Let's call it 4 for ease of calculation. That's 1000 cars negated. How much does this facility cost to operate and what is the cost of depreciation each year? $3.6M sounds impossibly low. [0] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...

908B64B197 5y ago

> How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids? At current prices it's already economically viable to get a Tesla in many places.