22 ms·

We need to take CO2 out of the sky

193 points by jseliger 5y ago

KingMachiavelli 5y ago
Is there a practical method to achieve sub-atmospheric CO2 concentrations indoors? If taking CO2 of the atmosphere may take a long time then at least keeping our indoor environments at low levels will prevent the cognitive & health issues.
- anonporridge 5y ago
  Have I got a product for you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWZUp2KF5ls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWZUp2KF5ls
- gruez 5y ago
  > Is there a practical method to achieve sub-atmospheric CO2 concentrations indoors? why? just because there's cognitive decline when co2 is above atmospheric levels, doesn't mean you get super-intelligence when it's below atmospheric levels. In that case you're better off ventilating your building than to scrub co2 from the air.
  - neltnerb 5y ago
    Atmospheric levels are increasing. You can't use ventilation to bring the indoor CO2 concentration down to, say, 350ppm like it used to be outdoors. But I think the answer is... practical, sure I guess. expensive? energy intensive? waste intensive? also yes.
    - philwelch 5y ago
      The health effects of high CO2 concentration start to appear in the mid-thousands of ppm. These problems are about an order of magnitude away from each other.
      - neltnerb 5y ago
        Yes, that's what the data suggests. It's just not what the question was... Of course, the data is necessarily all about short term exposure, not non-stop. I'm inclined to think that it won't be too bad, if there is a direct effect at lower levels.
- philwelch 5y ago
  This isn’t worth worrying about. The atmosphere has a CO2 concentration of about 413 ppm. The International Space Station operates at a maximum CO2 concentration of over 5000 ppm. 5000 ppm is also the maximum safe CO2 concentration recommended by OSHA and the approximate average CO2 concentration aboard nuclear submarines. This still might be slightly too high—astronauts and submariners commonly report headaches, for instance—but it’s about ten times the concentration of the outside atmosphere and the health effects are a little hard to measure. Plus, the people in these conditions are still capable of safely operating space stations and nuclear submarines, which is not a cognitively easy feat. If the CO2 concentration of Earth’s atmosphere got that high, we’d have much bigger problems.
jstsch 5y ago
We do. But it's so much easier to not pump carbon up, than to use tons of energy to put carbon back in the ground. Even if you'd use carbon free energy, for a long time coming that energy can offset existing fossil energy...
- anonporridge 5y ago
  I agree with this to some extent, but at the same time it seems like so long as there exists carbon in the volatile format of fossil fuels, someone or something will eventually find it expedient to burn it. Hell, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that certain superpowers (namely Russia) decide that climate change is actually in their long term interest, as it devastates regions near the equator and opens up currently difficult to tap resources in their own. Slowing down carbon emission is definitely worth pursuing as much as possible, if for no other reason than it buys us time to solve the problem. But I doubt we'll ever get to a safe steady state until all the fossil fuel has been converted into a format that can't be burned.
  - gruez 5y ago
    > I agree with this to some extent, but at the same time it seems like so long as there exists carbon in the volatile format of fossil fuels, someone or something will eventually find it expedient to burn it. wouldn't it be cheaper to buy fossil fuels on the open market, somehow convert it to a non-harmful form (eg. pure carbon) and then dump it in the ocean?
    - anonporridge 5y ago
      IDK. Maybe someone more in tune with the physics and chemistry can chime in, but I'd imagine you have to release the energy stored in the chemical bonds in some way before you can convert the carbon to a more stable form. The simple answer might be that you'd still have to burn it, but immediately convert the exhaust to a stable solid. I'm unaware if this conversion can be done with less energy than can be extracted from burning it.
Cryptonic 5y ago
I don't know where their data is from. But this graph looks like net zero till 2090 would be enough to limit warming to 2 degree Celsius. But what we need is net zero in 2050 or better tomorrow.
fspacef 5y ago
That’s what I’ve been saying…
deleted 5y ago
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potiuper 5y ago
1. Building the Tres Amigas SuperStation would have the biggest physical impact. Only eliminating industrial subsides would be easier, which is why the latest draft infrastructure bill is a sad joke. https://theintercept.com/2021/08/03/bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-climate-subsidies-fossil-fuel/ https://theintercept.com/2021/08/03/bipartisan-infrastructur...
- moralestapia 5y ago
  Do you have a nice reference to learn more about this project?
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation
- nielsbot 5y ago
  This might sound dumb, but it's crazy to me that we're actually (going to) use superconductors in real projects. Still sounds like science fiction to my ear... but I'm getting old :)
  - maxerickson 5y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Projec...
    - nielsbot 5y ago
      Interesting US DOE paid for it. So the lines are 100% efficient... but you have to subtract the cost of refrigeration.
polytronic 5y ago
Plant trees
- shakezula 5y ago
  Diversity in tactics will be necessary, and trees will not be fast enough. We need this carbon gone by 2050, that is drastically short timelines.
  - stooliepidgin 5y ago
    Regardless of Ethiopia or #TeamTrees, trees are not fast or permanent enough to sequester anything substantial. Not all tactics will be equally effective. It's worth investing in the approach(es) that are most effective in proof-of-concepts trial runs guided by a first principles perspective. That's how to maximize change. GMO kelp and phythoplankton for oceanic BECCS seem like the leading candidates.
- Symmetry 5y ago
  Trees eventually decay and rot. The problem is fundamentally that we're taking carbon from outside the biosphere and putting it into the biosphere. The Earth has self-regulatory mechanisms to keep that balanced with increased rock weathering going against constant levels of volcanic CO2 emissions but that solves the issue on the order of 10,000 years and trees don't last nearly that long. Plus, growing forests only absorb enough carbon per square meter to offset about watt of coal power production. Increasing the world's forest cover is worth doing for its own sake, on biodiversity grounds, but its at best a small part of the solution to global warming.
  - jjtheblunt 5y ago
    Do decay and rot, as processes, capture carbon? (I mean that I do not know)
    - Syonyk 5y ago
      No, they release the stored carbon from the tree in various cycles. Unless you're doing deep carbon extraction, nature is pretty well carbon neutral. A forest of some given density, over time, will remain carbon neutral. If it gets thicker, the carbon captured is more, but it's also more prone to fires (which obviously then release that carbon). Nature is circular. Any "waste" from one process is an input into another process. It's humans that think in linear "Resources into products into waste" ways.
axus 5y ago
Is it possible to produce plastics that don't degrade or return CO2 to the environment? Make everything out of plastic, and then bury it in landfills, seems like one way to capture carbon.
- dtech 5y ago
  Plastics can be made from starch which would capture CO2. However, bioplastics tend to degrade. Making plastic from oil as the vast majority are doesn't sequester CO2.
- uoaei 5y ago
  That carbon would have to come from the atmosphere in order to be "capture". Converting oil products (already-captured carbon) into plastics is the wrong direction. It doesn't make sense to take a step back just to attempt a step forward.
- Symmetry 5y ago
  Turning atmospheric CO2 into plastic probably isn't as feasible as turning CO2 into some other stable form directly. Diverting petroleum production into plastic and them making sure it ends up in landfills rather than the sea[1] does seem like a good thing to the extent that plastic production funges against fuel production, I'm not sure to what extent these rely on separating different parts of the oil that comes out of the ground in the refinery for different uses rather than having one common pool that could be used for either. But plastic buried in landfills does seem to remain out of the biosphere for long enough to be a useful repository of carbon. [1] Remember, throw plastic away don't try to recycle it or it'll mostly end up in the middle of the Pacific https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-straws https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-...
  - exporectomy 5y ago
    Yep. It's misguided attempts to recycle plastic that cause a lot of the environmental contamination in the west.
- Syonyk 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
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bob229 5y ago
lol, delusional. We are doomed as a species. Just accept it
Syonyk 5y ago
Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around? The power system on my solar shed is, admittedly, somewhat overkill in an attempt to get through the winter without having to light the generator (so far, I've failed at this, our inversions are nasty). The flip side is that I have quite a bit of surplus power most of the year (on the order of 10-15kWh/day). If I use it, great, if not... it just doesn't get pulled out of the panels. The office is standalone (and way more trouble than it's worth to grid tie), so when the battery bank is full, there's nowhere to stick extra energy. I've considered various methods to use some of the surplus in useful ways, which so far has looked like donating a lot of compute to various BOINC projects (including cpdn, which is now out of work...). But I've not seen much work in the way of "things that could actually capture concrete amounts of carbon and store them" at this scale. It's all huge facilities, big multinational investment, etc. I've considered an algae grow system that would cycle air through some grow tanks (I have a lot of sun, growing algae in containers is sort of the default around here) and then bury the algae down some holes, but I'm not sure it really accomplishes that much. Another option I've considered is making use of some of the basalt laying around, getting a rock crusher to grind it into powder, and then either spreading it on the hill, or trying to find some sort of more rapid system for weathering it (tanks of water with airflow through them?). Of course, if algae likes basalt... I could combine the two! I just can't find any information on smaller scale systems like this, and I lack the bio and chem background to really be able to do things like analyze rock dust for carbon content.
- davidw 5y ago
  > Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around? Trees? They make efficient use of solar energy to capture carbon and have a lot of other benefits: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/08/31/powerful-virtuous-cycles-street-trees https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/08/31/powerful-virtuou...
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    If I could grow the things... I struggle to get them watered properly. Practically, though, I'm out in some fairly high desert, and I have to pump water for irrigation out of a deep well. I can certainly do it, but I'm looking for something of a bit more "geologic scale" sequestration, if it's possible.
xqcgrek2 5y ago
Plant about a trillion trees.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  It's been done. It's not about planting the trees. You have to make sure they survive and thrive for at least 50 years, and that they are sequestering carbon while not destroying downstream ecosystems and livelihoods. It's not "plant a trillion trees" but "cleverly create huge, benign carbon-sequestering ecosystems". Politicians can't brain that much.
flerchin 5y ago
We need to ban crypto and decom the power plants bought for private mining.
rektide 5y ago
I think a lot of "Earth Is Dimming Due to Climate Change"[1] (a lack of clouds), and I start to think: even removing CO2 is not enough. We've already changed things too much. We have to make the earth shinier, reject more heat coming in. I'm not exactly thrilled to be at the "let's build an electric drone fleet that sprays sulfure dioxide into the sky", and that or whatever else would have some probably ungood reprecussions. But I think we've got to. The existential risk of not starting right now is too damned high. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716717 https://phys.org/news/2021-09-earth-dimming-due-climate.html https://phys.org/news/2021-09-earth-dimming-due-climate.html
- akira2501 5y ago
  I'm not entirely sure our reaction to dealing with the expected and unexpected effects of man's continual technological and global reach is to run global experiments that will impact everyone on earth without any democratic mechanism behind that decision. It's more or less exactly how we got where we are now. "More of the same, but in the opposite direction" isn't very convincing.
  - rektide 5y ago
    Fun fact @akira2501, 2501 happens to be my exact karma right now. Which will probably dive a bit tonight. ;) I don't see doing radical things to try to improve the earth as "exactly how we got where we are now." I see exploitation and capitalism & lack of governance & steerage as how we fucked shit up wicked bad. I see a lack of trying bold ambitious things to try and help rectify our situation as causing a colossal negative impact on earth, already, against our cloud cover, against our ocean oxygenation, against our planetwide survivable temperatures, against our more-moderate weather. We need some big projects. The earth is huge, massive. To begin to have a real effect, we need to start, start making, start experimenting, start scaling. We can assess & learn as we go. We can adapt. With hope, we (Earth) can find sufficient leverage to not become another Drake Equation casualty. What we cant do is what you propose: refuse to adapt. To gently seek peaceful global consensus, to reach unanimity before we start.
OrvalWintermute 5y ago
The Earth's historical, and natural state of CO2 is much higher than today, and we are still recovering from a little ice age. The greenest the earth has ever been was when CO2 levels were high, and the earth was incredibly fertile. https://holoceneclimate.com/temperature-versus-co2-the-big-picture.html https://holoceneclimate.com/temperature-versus-co2-the-big-p...
bcatanzaro 5y ago
This article doesn't talk about farming the ocean. It's hypothesized that Azolla water ferns drew atmospheric CO2 from 3500 to 650 ppm over 800000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event
- prawn 5y ago
  Had never heard about that. Great link. I wonder how salt-tolerant it is? Could it be grown in salt lakes, and the mature ferns be skimmed to compost unproductive soil or feed livestock? Downside of that is it would reduce the albedo of the lakes.
esturk 5y ago
Couldn't we make use of the excess solar energy that's often shown in the duck curve? That is, in the middle of the day, there's usually a time where more solar energy is produced than needed. We can harness that to capture CO2 during that time. It might not capture much but at least it's not wasted.
simonblack 5y ago
And where do you put it? A billion tons of CO2 doesn't convert to nothing. A ton of CO2 will convert to several tons of non-gaseous product like (say) calcium carbonate. For the sake of illustration: CO2 -> CaCO3 44 -> 100 (molar numbers) so one ton of CO2 gives you just over 2 tons of calcium carbonate. Extrapolating that to roughly 35 gigatons of CO2 per year means that we would have to find somewhere to put about 80 gigatons of calcium carbonate per year. That's a mountain range per decade. :)
- swiley 5y ago
  You'd want to reduce it and convert it to some organic solid. When that becomes remotely economical it will likely compete with crypto mining as a use for spare electrical power and won't need further incentives.
- beachy 5y ago
  Australia.
- arrosenberg 5y ago
  Ideally in the ocean, solving the acidification problem at the same time.
- hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
  I mean, to me this seems like a minor concern. There are tons of places on earth that are essentially a whole lotta nothing. I mean, have you ever driven east-to-west across Texas?
- cottager2 5y ago
  This is a weird argument because it’s not like CO2 is being produced from thin air (heh). Most of the CO2 we produce comes from fossil fuels stored deep inside the earth or inside literal mountain ranges. We can put it back there. Mountain top addition instead of mountain top removal.
- heavyset_go 5y ago
  Vegetative growth and forests are long-term carbon sinks, even though they reach a carbon neutral equilibrium once matured.
black_13 5y ago
Why not put it there in the first place? Fewer cars no coal and really fewer humans over time?
vr46 5y ago
Best take it out using the ocean by growing things in it - carbon is a cycle and we need to address the problems of this cycle.
- tuatoru 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization Some side effects likely.
Proven 5y ago
Oh the hubris... It's incredible how many people waste time on this nonsense.
unit486 5y ago
Won't help. We're already in a feedback loop releasing tons of methane from permafrost. Methane is 28 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It is already out of out if our control.
TSiege 5y ago
I love the enthusiasm of people reading this and supporting it, but something we need to understand is the scale of carbon in the atmosphere. We've released more carbon into the air than contained in all the plants alive on earth today, and we're on the path emitting more carbon than contained in all living organisms on the planet. Our climate is on the path to Miocene where temperatures were 3-4C above today's levels. sources: https://mobile.twitter.com/RARohde/status/1443890619433246721 https://mobile.twitter.com/RARohde/status/144389061943324672... https://medium.com/climate-conscious/cogs-in-the-climate-machine-167cf16750dd https://medium.com/climate-conscious/cogs-in-the-climate-mac...
- nix23 5y ago
  Absolutely! We (humans) think we can fix and revert everything what we have done wrong (hint we cannot). I think the idea is potentially harmful, because it give us the relaxation that sometime in the future we can undo it...so why the hurry? Same with species extinction...no hurry we can clone them later..but forgetting that we haven't found all the species that are already extinct.
- ivankirigin 5y ago
  Soil contains 4X the amount of carbon than in the atmosphere, so while scale is enormous, it isn't impossible. The post goes through numerous sequestration techniques that could reach the scale to sequester 1000B tCO2e
- rp1 5y ago
  I like to imagine CO2 in solid form (dry ice) to help visualize the scale of the problem. 1) Burning a gallon of gasoline releases almost 10 kgs of CO2 into the atmosphere. Let's say the average driving American consumes 1.5 gallons of gas a day. That's almost 15 kgs of matter to deal with every day. Imagine instead of it being released as gaseous CO2, it accumulated in your car's trunk as dry ice. After a few days, what would you do with it all? Maybe you'd throw it in your basement or your backyard. After a week or two, all free space in even a large home would be totally occupied with the waste. And this is only for personal travel done by individuals. All transportation (including the transportation of goods) is less than a 3rd of U.S. CO2 emissions. If dealing with the waste of driving on an individual level is so hard, how can we possibly hope to deal with all CO2 emissions? 2) You can also do the same thought experiment with total CO2 emissions per capita, which is currently about 15.25 metric tons per year per person in the U.S. That averages out to 41 kg of CO2 per day. How could you possibly find a way to deal with 41 kg of dry ice per day. Right now, our solution is to happily dump it into the atmosphere, which conveniently carries the CO2 away from us without us needing to worry. There really isn't a solution to this problem. It's a tragedy of the commons.
deleted 5y ago
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lugged 5y ago
It's going to be a lot easier to take it out of the ocean. I don't know why people insist on working on the atmosphere. The ocean is a natural carbon buffer, the perfect place for us to draw down from with easy options for disposal.
lucidguppy 5y ago
Step one should be stopping subsidies to animal feed (corn, soy, etc) and moving those subsidies to plant foods (vegetables, grains, legumes, etc) that humans can directly eat. This would drive up the cost of rib eye, and drive down the production of methane from cow burps. Cutting methane would be a quick win. We need to make our farm land as efficient as possible and return as much land to forests that we can. We also need to repopulate the worlds oceans.
- pdonis 5y ago
  I agree with stopping subsidies to animal feed, but not with moving them to something else. We should not be subsidizing any crops.
  - IntrepidWorm 5y ago
    "Should" isn't always a great word when it comes to real world economics. I agree with you in theory, but realistically one would need to subsidize these crops: the market isn't equipped for the entire American Midwest (for instance) to suddenly begin growing beans, potatoes, and other staple crops at the frequency that they were raising beef cattle. It's a deep hole we're in, and its going to take considerable effort and a lengthy process to dig ourselves out.
    - pdonis 5y ago
      > the market isn't equipped for the entire American Midwest (for instance) to suddenly begin growing beans, potatoes, and other staple crops at the frequency that they were raising beef cattle. Subsidies won't change that. Yes, it takes time to shift an entire economic sector to a significantly different distribution of production and consumption. That just means we need to get started on the shift now--by stopping subsidies. Shifting the subsidies to something different just makes it take even longer to get to the only really sustainable state, which is nothing being subsidized and the free market determining what gets produced and what gets consumed.
- tdeck 5y ago
  If we want to discourage meat production, I think it would have to be something more direct. All of the crops you described are things that humans and non-human animals can eat. Cows can be fed wheat and soybeans. Farmers will feed them whatever is cheapest per calorie.
hikerclimber1 5y ago
hopefully we don't solve global warming.
dcolkitt 5y ago
Stratospheric aerosol injections are the logical stopgap measure until carbon scrubbing tech reaches maturity. Stratospheric aerosols are extremely well understood and the tech is mature today. We know from historical volcanoes exactly how the climate respond to dosage. The cost is dirt cheap, $10 billion/year, a rounding error for the US military budget. Moreover it requires no exotic tech, simply pre-existing missile delivery systems. The only downside is that the aerosols have to be refreshed semi-annually. So if civilization breaks down for some reason we get a sudden slingshot heating effect. For that reason, it’s not a long-long term solution. But it will more than suffice for 50-100 years to get carbon scrubbing tech enough time to mature.
- abacadaba 5y ago
  whelp, good enough for me steak and tropical fruits for dinner tonight!
- farnsworth 5y ago
  The chemtrail crowd will love that. Our experience with covid has stolen any hope I had that humanity would be able to rally around scientifically sound solutions to a common enemy.
  - javajosh 5y ago
    It's time to stop caring about what the "chemtrail crowd" will or will not like, and consider how to politically neuter them to prevent them from harming themselves and others.
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      When they stop armed stormings of government centres, kidnappings, and coup plots, ignoring them may be viable. I'd not advise letting them determine policy, goals, or methods, but I'd keep a very alert and wary eye on them for the forseable future.
      - javajosh 5y ago
boringg 5y ago
Direct air is a red herring. Please let’s not put more money in that tech, it takes away talent and capital from what already works. That and large scale CCS. Both technologies have high risk, super expensive and require heavy subsidies, and only hypothetically work at huge scales (which requires large investments to find out of it even works). Don’t even start me on the pure insanity of geoengineering - we will literally kill our own race or a range of other species by effing that up so bad. For those jumping in the climate train, welcome on this long slow painful journey. It appears there is some movement to fix it again, and I am hopeful that the balance of power swings towards climate and protecting the planet. We are a funny creature and I don’t trust us in large numbers to do the right thing. Energy system transformation, reforestation/protecting against development, political power and policy change, are some of the great high impact areas that are already getting lots of momentum but need continual work and effort. There’s lots in the agricultural arena as well.
corpMaverick 5y ago
Anyone care to comment on the Netflix documentary "Kiss the Ground" ?
stooliepidgin 5y ago
Oceanic BECCS is the likely superior route. Kelp and/or phytoplankton farming. Genetic modifications could improve efficiency. Reforestation is a feel good pipe dream as explained using logic by Phil Mason. Dry weather = fire hazard = no sequestration.
fighterpilot 5y ago
Great and we should invest in this tech but be weary of politicians who use this as a misdirection. Australia is investing large amounts into carbon capture even though the grid is mostly fossil fuels. It's a misdirection to avoid changing the grid and a corrupt transfer of wealth from regular people to oil and gas firms.
__MatrixMan__ 5y ago
I'm hoping that we end up converging on a plan that involves 3D printing as many things in diamond as possible.
baron816 5y ago
Question: if we take CO2 out of the oceans, will the oceans take it out of the air? And is it easier to take it out of the oceans than it is to take it out of the air/can we take out stuff out of ocean water at the same time (lithium, gold, etc.) that would make processing all that water worth it?
- ivankirigin 5y ago
  Biomass that falls into the deep ocean doesn't quickly cycle back into the carbon cycle, so some companies are look at the opposite, with the deep ocean as a sink. https://www.phykos.co/ https://www.phykos.co/ But your idea is somewhat correct, and it has to do with desalinization tailings. There are companies like Heimdal which can take the high mineral runoff from desalinization and use it to make concrete. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/heimdal https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/heimdal
- deftnerd 5y ago
  It looks like a group at the University of Exeter is working on that exact plan. "SeaCURE harnesses two natural properties of the ocean that can circumvent this problem. (1) The amount of carbon dissolved in a seawater is approximately 150 times higher than its concentration in air, making extraction significantly easier and quicker, (2) we can utilise the ocean’s vast surface area to remove CO2 from the enormous volume of air sitting above it, rather than having to push all of that air through air-based CO2 capture facilities." "SeaCURE will combine and refine existing approaches to develop a new system that removes CO2 from seawater and releases the CO2-depleted water back to the ocean, where it will naturally re-absorb an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Specifically, at the University of Exeter and Plymouth Marine Laboratory we will benchmark established approaches to prepare seawater for CO2 extraction, strip that CO2 from the seawater, and collaborating with Brunel University concentrate the CO2 to high purity. TP Group, a UK based technology and engineering firm with world leading expertise in gas extraction from seawater, will then develop and upscale the most cost effective approach from this toolkit. The SeaCURE team will design a portable pilot plant to remove at least 100 tonnes of CO2 a year. Future testing using the pilot plant would generate the data required to develop commercially viable CO2 removal at the megaton scale, aimed at public and private sector offsetting and the carbon trading market." [1] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/807198 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/807198
philshem 5y ago
If anyone is curious about the atmospheric CO2 on a certain date, e.g. your birth date, you can check out this site: https://co2birth.date https://co2birth.date All static content, no trackers: https://co2birth.date/co2/1990-12-31 https://co2birth.date/co2/1990-12-31 https://github.com/co2birthdate/website/ https://github.com/co2birthdate/website/
- BoHerfVIJrEsq 5y ago
  It's too bad nobody was born 50M years ago, or they'd see atmospheric CO2 of 1000ppm. Or 2000ppm if they were born 150M years ago. Or 4000 ppm if they were born 400M years ago.
chinathrow 5y ago
OP Ryan Orbuch works for Stripe Climate. If you agree with the article (I do and so do others, e.g. renowned swiss climate physicist Prof. Dr. Reto Knutti at ETH Zurich) and use Stripe, you can setup some percentages to pay for CO2 removal through Stripe Climate (I do). I helps kick-start early stage technologies. https://stripe.com/climate https://stripe.com/climate
jillesvangurp 5y ago
We need to first stop adding more CO2 to the sky. That's vastly cheaper and easier than trying to reverse the process. And potentially quite profitable. The most effective form of carbon capture is to leave it in the ground. We need to stop any form of wacky carbon capture scheme that excuses companies into releasing more of it. This BTW. is exactly what most carbon capture adds up to. Burn a few tonnes of coal and plant a few trees or go to ridiculous lengths of trouble to pump less than a percent of the emissions in some underground cavity. It's a scam and it's the current reality of the industry. You hype it up, get the government subsidies & photo opportunity with the local government stooges and then a few years later it adds up to nothing worth mentioning. The planted forest has wilted away (or burned off), and the vast majority of the carbon that was supposed to go in the ground instead got released into the atmosphere. Australia has a carbon capture facility right next to a brown coal plant. It's beyond cynical if you start looking at the numbers. The only way of even getting to net zero (never mind negative carbon) is by fixing the economics around the whole topic. Releasing CO2 needs to be an expensive hobby with extremely low cost alternatives. That removes much more carbon from the equation than the cumulative carbon capture efforts (past, present, and planned future). Better still, it drives companies away from the business of making things worse. We are still subsidizing that even. Just stop doing that. It actually can work quite fast too. Ten years ago, offshore wind was barely a thing, now it's heading to double digit percentages of energy supply in a lot of places. Same with domestic solar, batteries, etc. EV sales are going through the roof. All of that adds up to CO2 that we leave in the ground. Lots of it. Why is that happening? It's cheaper this way now. Simply accelerating what's already happening here will speed things up.
- mattashii 5y ago
  ... But at the current pace, we _will_ need active capture, so that we get back down from the suspected 2.5-3° temperature increase. Sure, carbon capture from air might not be the most efficient use of energy, but if you're overproducing energy (e.g. solar at a sunny day, and grid is otherwise saturated) then I would very much like to have all that energy go into removing carbon from the air.
- scrollaway 5y ago
  > We need to first stop adding more CO2 to the sky. We need to do both. Every single comment on an article that talks about one has commenters like you arguing "no but check this out, doing the other is so much easier/better/whatever". We. Need. Both.
ZeroGravitas 5y ago
What's the amount of carbon in food related waste? If we could turn that into turquoise hydrogen and use the carbon for other stuff what percentage of the problem is that? Seems like an obvious place to start since it'll turn to methane if we don't do anything.
sva_ 5y ago
Alright, here's a dumb question that I've pondered on for a while: If capturing CO2 from the atmosphere is so difficult, why aren't we capturing it where it is produced, at the exhaust? Impractical? More impractical than the former? Or just impossible?
- thinkcontext 5y ago
  There are a number of capture projects doing what you suggest on full scale power plants and other industrial facilities. And yes you are right, its cheaper to catch it at a point source than in the atmosphere. The projects work by circulating chemicals through the smokestack that latch onto the CO2 in the flue gas. The chemical is then heated up to remove the CO2 which is then pumped underground where it is sequestered, hopefully forever. The chemical is recycled back to the smokestack for the process to begin again. When working well such systems capture around 80% of the CO2 at a energy penalty of around 20%. The problem is that the system rarely work well, so in the real world those numbers aren't achieved. This is why there are relatively few such systems deployed in the world despite $Bs in subsidies spent. Lately, oil companies have been feeling the pressure to show results on this, so there are a lot of projects that have gone into development.
sumosudo 5y ago
Just plant more trees
kennethh 5y ago
Anyone have some good links to articles about the consequences of higher temperatures? Personally I dont think we will able to reduce the co2 growth before 2030-2040 since population in developing countries will increase their energy consumption while the west might decrease theirs but in total the energy consumption is going to increase. It takes a while to change from 80% of energy from fossil fuels to 0.
jollybean 5y ago
This is a wonderful overview for slightly technically literate reader. I'm wondering if there is room for a kind of magazine that's focused much more heavily on data than narrative, filled wit such articles.
leoedin 5y ago
The only vaguely practical large scale carbon capture I've seen proposed is to convert plants into biochar which can then be buried [1]. Any "machine" based method just needs huge amounts of capital, manufacturing and energy to be done on a big enough scale. It's attractive for a few reasons: 1. The actual carbon capture is pretty hands off 2. You can extract some (carbon negative) hydrocarbon fuel from the pyrolisis process to help pay for everything 3. The carbon you get is fairly stable as solid carbon - there's no worrying about CO2 gas escaping. There's pretty much no way we could do this at a scale big enough to cancel out current emissions (I'd say maybe 10-20% would be feasible). But as a way of reducing CO2 once we've managed to stop burning as many fossil fuels, it's pretty attractive. [1] https://concretecuts.xyz/articles/biochar/ https://concretecuts.xyz/articles/biochar/
denton-scratch 5y ago
Taking CO2 "out of the sky" will naturally be seen as a way of offsetting fossil-fuel consumption. It would reduce the incentives to stop digging-up fossil fuels. This doesn't just apply to mining/drilling companies; it applies to all of us. We all need energy - individuals, our employers, our suppliers. None of us want to pay a lot of money for that energy; even eco-nutters will blench at the prospect of higher bills or taxes. So I'm against all excuses for mining and burning fossils. I'm against offsetting and (feeble attempts at) CC&S. And I'm against attempts to reduce emissions by means of taxes and regulation - that's all very well, but many places in the world have quite weak law enforcement, and many large countries seem to be perfectly OK with building new coal-fired power stations. Instead, we need to just stop digging up and burning fossils. EVs, solar and wind-power, enery storage systems, CHP systems and so on can't (easily) be used as excuses for continued fossil energy generation. Frankly, I despair. The biggest producers of emissions is rich people. Rich people also have the greatest lobbying clout and the most influence on governments. Their pensions are invested in oil and gas companies. Even if an individual expresses support for climate-change mitigation, the manager of his pension fund may well have other views. So I'm pretty certain that my grand-daughters are going to be faced with worse problems than we face today. The sooner we act, the easier and cheaper it will be; but evidently we are not willing to act, until we are face-to-face with death and apocalypse. That will be my legacy to my grand-daughters, I fear.
beders 5y ago
I also like how people ignore all the other toxic cases produced by burning fuel. As if CO2 is the only problem. Apparently, spreading CO, SO2, NOx, VOCs, O3 is just fine
shawn-butler 5y ago
The evidence that regenerative agriculture / soil carbon sequestration actually works is really thin. The only way you get functional sequestration over any meaningful time period is for the carbon to subsist below the plow layer of soil (50-60 cm and below). There is little actual evidence this happens. Just shoving carbon into the soil doesn't mean it actually stays there. Definitely an open question not settled science.

193 points by jseliger 5y ago

Is there a practical method to achieve sub-atmospheric CO2 concentrations indoors? If taking CO2 of the atmosphere may take a long time then at least keeping our indoor environments at low levels will prevent the cognitive & health issues.

anonporridge 5y ago
Have I got a product for you! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWZUp2KF5ls https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NWZUp2KF5ls
gruez 5y ago
> Is there a practical method to achieve sub-atmospheric CO2 concentrations indoors? why? just because there's cognitive decline when co2 is above atmospheric levels, doesn't mean you get super-intelligence when it's below atmospheric levels. In that case you're better off ventilating your building than to scrub co2 from the air.
- neltnerb 5y ago
  Atmospheric levels are increasing. You can't use ventilation to bring the indoor CO2 concentration down to, say, 350ppm like it used to be outdoors. But I think the answer is... practical, sure I guess. expensive? energy intensive? waste intensive? also yes.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    The health effects of high CO2 concentration start to appear in the mid-thousands of ppm. These problems are about an order of magnitude away from each other.
    - neltnerb 5y ago
      Yes, that's what the data suggests. It's just not what the question was... Of course, the data is necessarily all about short term exposure, not non-stop. I'm inclined to think that it won't be too bad, if there is a direct effect at lower levels.
philwelch 5y ago
This isn’t worth worrying about. The atmosphere has a CO2 concentration of about 413 ppm. The International Space Station operates at a maximum CO2 concentration of over 5000 ppm. 5000 ppm is also the maximum safe CO2 concentration recommended by OSHA and the approximate average CO2 concentration aboard nuclear submarines. This still might be slightly too high—astronauts and submariners commonly report headaches, for instance—but it’s about ten times the concentration of the outside atmosphere and the health effects are a little hard to measure. Plus, the people in these conditions are still capable of safely operating space stations and nuclear submarines, which is not a cognitively easy feat. If the CO2 concentration of Earth’s atmosphere got that high, we’d have much bigger problems.

jstsch 5y ago

We do. But it's so much easier to not pump carbon up, than to use tons of energy to put carbon back in the ground. Even if you'd use carbon free energy, for a long time coming that energy can offset existing fossil energy...

anonporridge 5y ago
I agree with this to some extent, but at the same time it seems like so long as there exists carbon in the volatile format of fossil fuels, someone or something will eventually find it expedient to burn it. Hell, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that certain superpowers (namely Russia) decide that climate change is actually in their long term interest, as it devastates regions near the equator and opens up currently difficult to tap resources in their own. Slowing down carbon emission is definitely worth pursuing as much as possible, if for no other reason than it buys us time to solve the problem. But I doubt we'll ever get to a safe steady state until all the fossil fuel has been converted into a format that can't be burned.
- gruez 5y ago
  > I agree with this to some extent, but at the same time it seems like so long as there exists carbon in the volatile format of fossil fuels, someone or something will eventually find it expedient to burn it. wouldn't it be cheaper to buy fossil fuels on the open market, somehow convert it to a non-harmful form (eg. pure carbon) and then dump it in the ocean?
  - anonporridge 5y ago
    IDK. Maybe someone more in tune with the physics and chemistry can chime in, but I'd imagine you have to release the energy stored in the chemical bonds in some way before you can convert the carbon to a more stable form. The simple answer might be that you'd still have to burn it, but immediately convert the exhaust to a stable solid. I'm unaware if this conversion can be done with less energy than can be extracted from burning it.

Cryptonic 5y ago

I don't know where their data is from. But this graph looks like net zero till 2090 would be enough to limit warming to 2 degree Celsius. But what we need is net zero in 2050 or better tomorrow.

fspacef 5y ago

That’s what I’ve been saying…

deleted 5y ago

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potiuper 5y ago

1. Building the Tres Amigas SuperStation would have the biggest physical impact. Only eliminating industrial subsides would be easier, which is why the latest draft infrastructure bill is a sad joke. https://theintercept.com/2021/08/03/bipartisan-infrastructure-bill-climate-subsidies-fossil-fuel/ https://theintercept.com/2021/08/03/bipartisan-infrastructur...

moralestapia 5y ago
Do you have a nice reference to learn more about this project?
- anonporridge 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tres_Amigas_SuperStation
nielsbot 5y ago
This might sound dumb, but it's crazy to me that we're actually (going to) use superconductors in real projects. Still sounds like science fiction to my ear... but I'm getting old :)
- maxerickson 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holbrook_Superconductor_Projec...
  - nielsbot 5y ago
    Interesting US DOE paid for it. So the lines are 100% efficient... but you have to subtract the cost of refrigeration.

polytronic 5y ago

Plant trees

shakezula 5y ago
Diversity in tactics will be necessary, and trees will not be fast enough. We need this carbon gone by 2050, that is drastically short timelines.
- stooliepidgin 5y ago
  Regardless of Ethiopia or #TeamTrees, trees are not fast or permanent enough to sequester anything substantial. Not all tactics will be equally effective. It's worth investing in the approach(es) that are most effective in proof-of-concepts trial runs guided by a first principles perspective. That's how to maximize change. GMO kelp and phythoplankton for oceanic BECCS seem like the leading candidates.
Symmetry 5y ago
Trees eventually decay and rot. The problem is fundamentally that we're taking carbon from outside the biosphere and putting it into the biosphere. The Earth has self-regulatory mechanisms to keep that balanced with increased rock weathering going against constant levels of volcanic CO2 emissions but that solves the issue on the order of 10,000 years and trees don't last nearly that long. Plus, growing forests only absorb enough carbon per square meter to offset about watt of coal power production. Increasing the world's forest cover is worth doing for its own sake, on biodiversity grounds, but its at best a small part of the solution to global warming.
- jjtheblunt 5y ago
  Do decay and rot, as processes, capture carbon? (I mean that I do not know)
  - Syonyk 5y ago
    No, they release the stored carbon from the tree in various cycles. Unless you're doing deep carbon extraction, nature is pretty well carbon neutral. A forest of some given density, over time, will remain carbon neutral. If it gets thicker, the carbon captured is more, but it's also more prone to fires (which obviously then release that carbon). Nature is circular. Any "waste" from one process is an input into another process. It's humans that think in linear "Resources into products into waste" ways.

axus 5y ago

Is it possible to produce plastics that don't degrade or return CO2 to the environment? Make everything out of plastic, and then bury it in landfills, seems like one way to capture carbon.

dtech 5y ago
Plastics can be made from starch which would capture CO2. However, bioplastics tend to degrade. Making plastic from oil as the vast majority are doesn't sequester CO2.
uoaei 5y ago
That carbon would have to come from the atmosphere in order to be "capture". Converting oil products (already-captured carbon) into plastics is the wrong direction. It doesn't make sense to take a step back just to attempt a step forward.
Symmetry 5y ago
Turning atmospheric CO2 into plastic probably isn't as feasible as turning CO2 into some other stable form directly. Diverting petroleum production into plastic and them making sure it ends up in landfills rather than the sea[1] does seem like a good thing to the extent that plastic production funges against fuel production, I'm not sure to what extent these rely on separating different parts of the oil that comes out of the ground in the refinery for different uses rather than having one common pool that could be used for either. But plastic buried in landfills does seem to remain out of the biosphere for long enough to be a useful repository of carbon. [1] Remember, throw plastic away don't try to recycle it or it'll mostly end up in the middle of the Pacific https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-straws https://hwfo.substack.com/p/an-illustrated-guide-to-plastic-...
- exporectomy 5y ago
  Yep. It's misguided attempts to recycle plastic that cause a lot of the environmental contamination in the west.
Syonyk 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

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bob229 5y ago

lol, delusional. We are doomed as a species. Just accept it

Syonyk 5y ago

Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around? The power system on my solar shed is, admittedly, somewhat overkill in an attempt to get through the winter without having to light the generator (so far, I've failed at this, our inversions are nasty). The flip side is that I have quite a bit of surplus power most of the year (on the order of 10-15kWh/day). If I use it, great, if not... it just doesn't get pulled out of the panels. The office is standalone (and way more trouble than it's worth to grid tie), so when the battery bank is full, there's nowhere to stick extra energy. I've considered various methods to use some of the surplus in useful ways, which so far has looked like donating a lot of compute to various BOINC projects (including cpdn, which is now out of work...). But I've not seen much work in the way of "things that could actually capture concrete amounts of carbon and store them" at this scale. It's all huge facilities, big multinational investment, etc. I've considered an algae grow system that would cycle air through some grow tanks (I have a lot of sun, growing algae in containers is sort of the default around here) and then bury the algae down some holes, but I'm not sure it really accomplishes that much. Another option I've considered is making use of some of the basalt laying around, getting a rock crusher to grind it into powder, and then either spreading it on the hill, or trying to find some sort of more rapid system for weathering it (tanks of water with airflow through them?). Of course, if algae likes basalt... I could combine the two! I just can't find any information on smaller scale systems like this, and I lack the bio and chem background to really be able to do things like analyze rock dust for carbon content.

davidw 5y ago
> Is there any work on smaller scale, "home" or "neighborhood" carbon capture technologies that could work with some extra energy laying around? Trees? They make efficient use of solar energy to capture carbon and have a lot of other benefits: https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/08/31/powerful-virtuous-cycles-street-trees https://www.cnu.org/publicsquare/2020/08/31/powerful-virtuou...
- Syonyk 5y ago
  If I could grow the things... I struggle to get them watered properly. Practically, though, I'm out in some fairly high desert, and I have to pump water for irrigation out of a deep well. I can certainly do it, but I'm looking for something of a bit more "geologic scale" sequestration, if it's possible.

xqcgrek2 5y ago

Plant about a trillion trees.

tuatoru 5y ago
It's been done. It's not about planting the trees. You have to make sure they survive and thrive for at least 50 years, and that they are sequestering carbon while not destroying downstream ecosystems and livelihoods. It's not "plant a trillion trees" but "cleverly create huge, benign carbon-sequestering ecosystems". Politicians can't brain that much.

flerchin 5y ago

We need to ban crypto and decom the power plants bought for private mining.

rektide 5y ago

I think a lot of "Earth Is Dimming Due to Climate Change"[1] (a lack of clouds), and I start to think: even removing CO2 is not enough. We've already changed things too much. We have to make the earth shinier, reject more heat coming in. I'm not exactly thrilled to be at the "let's build an electric drone fleet that sprays sulfure dioxide into the sky", and that or whatever else would have some probably ungood reprecussions. But I think we've got to. The existential risk of not starting right now is too damned high. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28716717 https://phys.org/news/2021-09-earth-dimming-due-climate.html https://phys.org/news/2021-09-earth-dimming-due-climate.html

akira2501 5y ago
I'm not entirely sure our reaction to dealing with the expected and unexpected effects of man's continual technological and global reach is to run global experiments that will impact everyone on earth without any democratic mechanism behind that decision. It's more or less exactly how we got where we are now. "More of the same, but in the opposite direction" isn't very convincing.
- rektide 5y ago
  Fun fact @akira2501, 2501 happens to be my exact karma right now. Which will probably dive a bit tonight. ;) I don't see doing radical things to try to improve the earth as "exactly how we got where we are now." I see exploitation and capitalism & lack of governance & steerage as how we fucked shit up wicked bad. I see a lack of trying bold ambitious things to try and help rectify our situation as causing a colossal negative impact on earth, already, against our cloud cover, against our ocean oxygenation, against our planetwide survivable temperatures, against our more-moderate weather. We need some big projects. The earth is huge, massive. To begin to have a real effect, we need to start, start making, start experimenting, start scaling. We can assess & learn as we go. We can adapt. With hope, we (Earth) can find sufficient leverage to not become another Drake Equation casualty. What we cant do is what you propose: refuse to adapt. To gently seek peaceful global consensus, to reach unanimity before we start.

OrvalWintermute 5y ago

The Earth's historical, and natural state of CO2 is much higher than today, and we are still recovering from a little ice age. The greenest the earth has ever been was when CO2 levels were high, and the earth was incredibly fertile. https://holoceneclimate.com/temperature-versus-co2-the-big-picture.html https://holoceneclimate.com/temperature-versus-co2-the-big-p...

bcatanzaro 5y ago

This article doesn't talk about farming the ocean. It's hypothesized that Azolla water ferns drew atmospheric CO2 from 3500 to 650 ppm over 800000 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

prawn 5y ago
Had never heard about that. Great link. I wonder how salt-tolerant it is? Could it be grown in salt lakes, and the mature ferns be skimmed to compost unproductive soil or feed livestock? Downside of that is it would reduce the albedo of the lakes.

esturk 5y ago

Couldn't we make use of the excess solar energy that's often shown in the duck curve? That is, in the middle of the day, there's usually a time where more solar energy is produced than needed. We can harness that to capture CO2 during that time. It might not capture much but at least it's not wasted.

simonblack 5y ago

And where do you put it? A billion tons of CO2 doesn't convert to nothing. A ton of CO2 will convert to several tons of non-gaseous product like (say) calcium carbonate. For the sake of illustration: CO2 -> CaCO3 44 -> 100 (molar numbers) so one ton of CO2 gives you just over 2 tons of calcium carbonate. Extrapolating that to roughly 35 gigatons of CO2 per year means that we would have to find somewhere to put about 80 gigatons of calcium carbonate per year. That's a mountain range per decade. :)

swiley 5y ago
You'd want to reduce it and convert it to some organic solid. When that becomes remotely economical it will likely compete with crypto mining as a use for spare electrical power and won't need further incentives.
beachy 5y ago
Australia.
arrosenberg 5y ago
Ideally in the ocean, solving the acidification problem at the same time.
hn_throwaway_99 5y ago
I mean, to me this seems like a minor concern. There are tons of places on earth that are essentially a whole lotta nothing. I mean, have you ever driven east-to-west across Texas?
cottager2 5y ago
This is a weird argument because it’s not like CO2 is being produced from thin air (heh). Most of the CO2 we produce comes from fossil fuels stored deep inside the earth or inside literal mountain ranges. We can put it back there. Mountain top addition instead of mountain top removal.
heavyset_go 5y ago
Vegetative growth and forests are long-term carbon sinks, even though they reach a carbon neutral equilibrium once matured.

black_13 5y ago

Why not put it there in the first place? Fewer cars no coal and really fewer humans over time?

vr46 5y ago

Best take it out using the ocean by growing things in it - carbon is a cycle and we need to address the problems of this cycle.

tuatoru 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization Some side effects likely.

Proven 5y ago

Oh the hubris... It's incredible how many people waste time on this nonsense.

unit486 5y ago

Won't help. We're already in a feedback loop releasing tons of methane from permafrost. Methane is 28 times more powerful a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It is already out of out if our control.

TSiege 5y ago

I love the enthusiasm of people reading this and supporting it, but something we need to understand is the scale of carbon in the atmosphere. We've released more carbon into the air than contained in all the plants alive on earth today, and we're on the path emitting more carbon than contained in all living organisms on the planet. Our climate is on the path to Miocene where temperatures were 3-4C above today's levels. sources: https://mobile.twitter.com/RARohde/status/1443890619433246721 https://mobile.twitter.com/RARohde/status/144389061943324672... https://medium.com/climate-conscious/cogs-in-the-climate-machine-167cf16750dd https://medium.com/climate-conscious/cogs-in-the-climate-mac...

nix23 5y ago
Absolutely! We (humans) think we can fix and revert everything what we have done wrong (hint we cannot). I think the idea is potentially harmful, because it give us the relaxation that sometime in the future we can undo it...so why the hurry? Same with species extinction...no hurry we can clone them later..but forgetting that we haven't found all the species that are already extinct.
ivankirigin 5y ago
Soil contains 4X the amount of carbon than in the atmosphere, so while scale is enormous, it isn't impossible. The post goes through numerous sequestration techniques that could reach the scale to sequester 1000B tCO2e
rp1 5y ago
I like to imagine CO2 in solid form (dry ice) to help visualize the scale of the problem. 1) Burning a gallon of gasoline releases almost 10 kgs of CO2 into the atmosphere. Let's say the average driving American consumes 1.5 gallons of gas a day. That's almost 15 kgs of matter to deal with every day. Imagine instead of it being released as gaseous CO2, it accumulated in your car's trunk as dry ice. After a few days, what would you do with it all? Maybe you'd throw it in your basement or your backyard. After a week or two, all free space in even a large home would be totally occupied with the waste. And this is only for personal travel done by individuals. All transportation (including the transportation of goods) is less than a 3rd of U.S. CO2 emissions. If dealing with the waste of driving on an individual level is so hard, how can we possibly hope to deal with all CO2 emissions? 2) You can also do the same thought experiment with total CO2 emissions per capita, which is currently about 15.25 metric tons per year per person in the U.S. That averages out to 41 kg of CO2 per day. How could you possibly find a way to deal with 41 kg of dry ice per day. Right now, our solution is to happily dump it into the atmosphere, which conveniently carries the CO2 away from us without us needing to worry. There really isn't a solution to this problem. It's a tragedy of the commons.

deleted 5y ago

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lugged 5y ago

It's going to be a lot easier to take it out of the ocean. I don't know why people insist on working on the atmosphere. The ocean is a natural carbon buffer, the perfect place for us to draw down from with easy options for disposal.

lucidguppy 5y ago

Step one should be stopping subsidies to animal feed (corn, soy, etc) and moving those subsidies to plant foods (vegetables, grains, legumes, etc) that humans can directly eat. This would drive up the cost of rib eye, and drive down the production of methane from cow burps. Cutting methane would be a quick win. We need to make our farm land as efficient as possible and return as much land to forests that we can. We also need to repopulate the worlds oceans.

pdonis 5y ago
I agree with stopping subsidies to animal feed, but not with moving them to something else. We should not be subsidizing any crops.
- IntrepidWorm 5y ago
  "Should" isn't always a great word when it comes to real world economics. I agree with you in theory, but realistically one would need to subsidize these crops: the market isn't equipped for the entire American Midwest (for instance) to suddenly begin growing beans, potatoes, and other staple crops at the frequency that they were raising beef cattle. It's a deep hole we're in, and its going to take considerable effort and a lengthy process to dig ourselves out.
  - pdonis 5y ago
    > the market isn't equipped for the entire American Midwest (for instance) to suddenly begin growing beans, potatoes, and other staple crops at the frequency that they were raising beef cattle. Subsidies won't change that. Yes, it takes time to shift an entire economic sector to a significantly different distribution of production and consumption. That just means we need to get started on the shift now--by stopping subsidies. Shifting the subsidies to something different just makes it take even longer to get to the only really sustainable state, which is nothing being subsidized and the free market determining what gets produced and what gets consumed.
tdeck 5y ago
If we want to discourage meat production, I think it would have to be something more direct. All of the crops you described are things that humans and non-human animals can eat. Cows can be fed wheat and soybeans. Farmers will feed them whatever is cheapest per calorie.

hikerclimber1 5y ago

hopefully we don't solve global warming.

dcolkitt 5y ago

Stratospheric aerosol injections are the logical stopgap measure until carbon scrubbing tech reaches maturity. Stratospheric aerosols are extremely well understood and the tech is mature today. We know from historical volcanoes exactly how the climate respond to dosage. The cost is dirt cheap, $10 billion/year, a rounding error for the US military budget. Moreover it requires no exotic tech, simply pre-existing missile delivery systems. The only downside is that the aerosols have to be refreshed semi-annually. So if civilization breaks down for some reason we get a sudden slingshot heating effect. For that reason, it’s not a long-long term solution. But it will more than suffice for 50-100 years to get carbon scrubbing tech enough time to mature.

abacadaba 5y ago
whelp, good enough for me steak and tropical fruits for dinner tonight!
farnsworth 5y ago
The chemtrail crowd will love that. Our experience with covid has stolen any hope I had that humanity would be able to rally around scientifically sound solutions to a common enemy.
- javajosh 5y ago
  It's time to stop caring about what the "chemtrail crowd" will or will not like, and consider how to politically neuter them to prevent them from harming themselves and others.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    When they stop armed stormings of government centres, kidnappings, and coup plots, ignoring them may be viable. I'd not advise letting them determine policy, goals, or methods, but I'd keep a very alert and wary eye on them for the forseable future.
    - javajosh 5y ago

boringg 5y ago

Direct air is a red herring. Please let’s not put more money in that tech, it takes away talent and capital from what already works. That and large scale CCS. Both technologies have high risk, super expensive and require heavy subsidies, and only hypothetically work at huge scales (which requires large investments to find out of it even works). Don’t even start me on the pure insanity of geoengineering - we will literally kill our own race or a range of other species by effing that up so bad. For those jumping in the climate train, welcome on this long slow painful journey. It appears there is some movement to fix it again, and I am hopeful that the balance of power swings towards climate and protecting the planet. We are a funny creature and I don’t trust us in large numbers to do the right thing. Energy system transformation, reforestation/protecting against development, political power and policy change, are some of the great high impact areas that are already getting lots of momentum but need continual work and effort. There’s lots in the agricultural arena as well.

corpMaverick 5y ago

Anyone care to comment on the Netflix documentary "Kiss the Ground" ?

stooliepidgin 5y ago

Oceanic BECCS is the likely superior route. Kelp and/or phytoplankton farming. Genetic modifications could improve efficiency. Reforestation is a feel good pipe dream as explained using logic by Phil Mason. Dry weather = fire hazard = no sequestration.

fighterpilot 5y ago

Great and we should invest in this tech but be weary of politicians who use this as a misdirection. Australia is investing large amounts into carbon capture even though the grid is mostly fossil fuels. It's a misdirection to avoid changing the grid and a corrupt transfer of wealth from regular people to oil and gas firms.

__MatrixMan__ 5y ago

I'm hoping that we end up converging on a plan that involves 3D printing as many things in diamond as possible.

baron816 5y ago

Question: if we take CO2 out of the oceans, will the oceans take it out of the air? And is it easier to take it out of the oceans than it is to take it out of the air/can we take out stuff out of ocean water at the same time (lithium, gold, etc.) that would make processing all that water worth it?

ivankirigin 5y ago
Biomass that falls into the deep ocean doesn't quickly cycle back into the carbon cycle, so some companies are look at the opposite, with the deep ocean as a sink. https://www.phykos.co/ https://www.phykos.co/ But your idea is somewhat correct, and it has to do with desalinization tailings. There are companies like Heimdal which can take the high mineral runoff from desalinization and use it to make concrete. https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/heimdal https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/heimdal
deftnerd 5y ago
It looks like a group at the University of Exeter is working on that exact plan. "SeaCURE harnesses two natural properties of the ocean that can circumvent this problem. (1) The amount of carbon dissolved in a seawater is approximately 150 times higher than its concentration in air, making extraction significantly easier and quicker, (2) we can utilise the ocean’s vast surface area to remove CO2 from the enormous volume of air sitting above it, rather than having to push all of that air through air-based CO2 capture facilities." "SeaCURE will combine and refine existing approaches to develop a new system that removes CO2 from seawater and releases the CO2-depleted water back to the ocean, where it will naturally re-absorb an equivalent amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. Specifically, at the University of Exeter and Plymouth Marine Laboratory we will benchmark established approaches to prepare seawater for CO2 extraction, strip that CO2 from the seawater, and collaborating with Brunel University concentrate the CO2 to high purity. TP Group, a UK based technology and engineering firm with world leading expertise in gas extraction from seawater, will then develop and upscale the most cost effective approach from this toolkit. The SeaCURE team will design a portable pilot plant to remove at least 100 tonnes of CO2 a year. Future testing using the pilot plant would generate the data required to develop commercially viable CO2 removal at the megaton scale, aimed at public and private sector offsetting and the carbon trading market." [1] https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/807198 https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/807198

philshem 5y ago

If anyone is curious about the atmospheric CO2 on a certain date, e.g. your birth date, you can check out this site: https://co2birth.date https://co2birth.date All static content, no trackers: https://co2birth.date/co2/1990-12-31 https://co2birth.date/co2/1990-12-31 https://github.com/co2birthdate/website/ https://github.com/co2birthdate/website/

BoHerfVIJrEsq 5y ago
It's too bad nobody was born 50M years ago, or they'd see atmospheric CO2 of 1000ppm. Or 2000ppm if they were born 150M years ago. Or 4000 ppm if they were born 400M years ago.

chinathrow 5y ago

OP Ryan Orbuch works for Stripe Climate. If you agree with the article (I do and so do others, e.g. renowned swiss climate physicist Prof. Dr. Reto Knutti at ETH Zurich) and use Stripe, you can setup some percentages to pay for CO2 removal through Stripe Climate (I do). I helps kick-start early stage technologies. https://stripe.com/climate https://stripe.com/climate

jillesvangurp 5y ago

We need to first stop adding more CO2 to the sky. That's vastly cheaper and easier than trying to reverse the process. And potentially quite profitable. The most effective form of carbon capture is to leave it in the ground. We need to stop any form of wacky carbon capture scheme that excuses companies into releasing more of it. This BTW. is exactly what most carbon capture adds up to. Burn a few tonnes of coal and plant a few trees or go to ridiculous lengths of trouble to pump less than a percent of the emissions in some underground cavity. It's a scam and it's the current reality of the industry. You hype it up, get the government subsidies & photo opportunity with the local government stooges and then a few years later it adds up to nothing worth mentioning. The planted forest has wilted away (or burned off), and the vast majority of the carbon that was supposed to go in the ground instead got released into the atmosphere. Australia has a carbon capture facility right next to a brown coal plant. It's beyond cynical if you start looking at the numbers. The only way of even getting to net zero (never mind negative carbon) is by fixing the economics around the whole topic. Releasing CO2 needs to be an expensive hobby with extremely low cost alternatives. That removes much more carbon from the equation than the cumulative carbon capture efforts (past, present, and planned future). Better still, it drives companies away from the business of making things worse. We are still subsidizing that even. Just stop doing that. It actually can work quite fast too. Ten years ago, offshore wind was barely a thing, now it's heading to double digit percentages of energy supply in a lot of places. Same with domestic solar, batteries, etc. EV sales are going through the roof. All of that adds up to CO2 that we leave in the ground. Lots of it. Why is that happening? It's cheaper this way now. Simply accelerating what's already happening here will speed things up.

mattashii 5y ago
... But at the current pace, we _will_ need active capture, so that we get back down from the suspected 2.5-3° temperature increase. Sure, carbon capture from air might not be the most efficient use of energy, but if you're overproducing energy (e.g. solar at a sunny day, and grid is otherwise saturated) then I would very much like to have all that energy go into removing carbon from the air.
scrollaway 5y ago
> We need to first stop adding more CO2 to the sky. We need to do both. Every single comment on an article that talks about one has commenters like you arguing "no but check this out, doing the other is so much easier/better/whatever". We. Need. Both.

ZeroGravitas 5y ago

What's the amount of carbon in food related waste? If we could turn that into turquoise hydrogen and use the carbon for other stuff what percentage of the problem is that? Seems like an obvious place to start since it'll turn to methane if we don't do anything.

sva_ 5y ago

Alright, here's a dumb question that I've pondered on for a while: If capturing CO2 from the atmosphere is so difficult, why aren't we capturing it where it is produced, at the exhaust? Impractical? More impractical than the former? Or just impossible?

thinkcontext 5y ago
There are a number of capture projects doing what you suggest on full scale power plants and other industrial facilities. And yes you are right, its cheaper to catch it at a point source than in the atmosphere. The projects work by circulating chemicals through the smokestack that latch onto the CO2 in the flue gas. The chemical is then heated up to remove the CO2 which is then pumped underground where it is sequestered, hopefully forever. The chemical is recycled back to the smokestack for the process to begin again. When working well such systems capture around 80% of the CO2 at a energy penalty of around 20%. The problem is that the system rarely work well, so in the real world those numbers aren't achieved. This is why there are relatively few such systems deployed in the world despite $Bs in subsidies spent. Lately, oil companies have been feeling the pressure to show results on this, so there are a lot of projects that have gone into development.

sumosudo 5y ago

Just plant more trees

kennethh 5y ago

Anyone have some good links to articles about the consequences of higher temperatures? Personally I dont think we will able to reduce the co2 growth before 2030-2040 since population in developing countries will increase their energy consumption while the west might decrease theirs but in total the energy consumption is going to increase. It takes a while to change from 80% of energy from fossil fuels to 0.

jollybean 5y ago

This is a wonderful overview for slightly technically literate reader. I'm wondering if there is room for a kind of magazine that's focused much more heavily on data than narrative, filled wit such articles.

leoedin 5y ago

The only vaguely practical large scale carbon capture I've seen proposed is to convert plants into biochar which can then be buried [1]. Any "machine" based method just needs huge amounts of capital, manufacturing and energy to be done on a big enough scale. It's attractive for a few reasons: 1. The actual carbon capture is pretty hands off 2. You can extract some (carbon negative) hydrocarbon fuel from the pyrolisis process to help pay for everything 3. The carbon you get is fairly stable as solid carbon - there's no worrying about CO2 gas escaping. There's pretty much no way we could do this at a scale big enough to cancel out current emissions (I'd say maybe 10-20% would be feasible). But as a way of reducing CO2 once we've managed to stop burning as many fossil fuels, it's pretty attractive. [1] https://concretecuts.xyz/articles/biochar/ https://concretecuts.xyz/articles/biochar/

denton-scratch 5y ago

Taking CO2 "out of the sky" will naturally be seen as a way of offsetting fossil-fuel consumption. It would reduce the incentives to stop digging-up fossil fuels. This doesn't just apply to mining/drilling companies; it applies to all of us. We all need energy - individuals, our employers, our suppliers. None of us want to pay a lot of money for that energy; even eco-nutters will blench at the prospect of higher bills or taxes. So I'm against all excuses for mining and burning fossils. I'm against offsetting and (feeble attempts at) CC&S. And I'm against attempts to reduce emissions by means of taxes and regulation - that's all very well, but many places in the world have quite weak law enforcement, and many large countries seem to be perfectly OK with building new coal-fired power stations. Instead, we need to just stop digging up and burning fossils. EVs, solar and wind-power, enery storage systems, CHP systems and so on can't (easily) be used as excuses for continued fossil energy generation. Frankly, I despair. The biggest producers of emissions is rich people. Rich people also have the greatest lobbying clout and the most influence on governments. Their pensions are invested in oil and gas companies. Even if an individual expresses support for climate-change mitigation, the manager of his pension fund may well have other views. So I'm pretty certain that my grand-daughters are going to be faced with worse problems than we face today. The sooner we act, the easier and cheaper it will be; but evidently we are not willing to act, until we are face-to-face with death and apocalypse. That will be my legacy to my grand-daughters, I fear.

beders 5y ago

I also like how people ignore all the other toxic cases produced by burning fuel. As if CO2 is the only problem. Apparently, spreading CO, SO2, NOx, VOCs, O3 is just fine

shawn-butler 5y ago

The evidence that regenerative agriculture / soil carbon sequestration actually works is really thin. The only way you get functional sequestration over any meaningful time period is for the carbon to subsist below the plow layer of soil (50-60 cm and below). There is little actual evidence this happens. Just shoving carbon into the soil doesn't mean it actually stays there. Definitely an open question not settled science.