6 ms·

Complete absurdity. By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exer

Complete absurdity. By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise. Predictions about what conditions look like in the year 2100 (let alone 2500!) are meaningless because they assume little to no improvement in technology or energy availability. This is like those articles about how "in 30,000 years humans will evolve to look like goblins because smartphone". It's status quo bias with James Burnham/Ray Kurzweil levels of unprincipled extrapolation.

hhs 5y ago
It was strange, but the paper [0] concludes: > Our projections and associated approaches to adaptation governance represent an initial attempt and have considerable uncertainty given their extended time horizon. These efforts are meant to highlight the need for more sophisticated climate and Earth system modelling beyond 2100, including a focus on aspects of ecosystem goods and services not considered here. Our work thus provides a framework and baseline for the assessment of longer-term anthropogenic effects on climate and Earth systems, and highlights the critical need for further work in this area. [0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871
clajiness 5y ago
> By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise. Source?
- zetalyrae 5y ago
  My own intuition and knowledge.
  - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    In 1895 Lord Kelvin stated that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” 1900's gave us first flight on a plane made of wood, by 1960's we had spaceflight and nuclear power. 'Intuition and knowledge' would suggest that today, as another 60 years passed, we should have fusion power and cities on Mars, but the world is still powered by coal and instead we got the iPhone.
    - dboreham 5y ago
      Kelvin also said other things that turned out to be unbreakable rules. You can't do anything you can imagine just because Kelvin was wrong once. That's magical thinking.
      - inter_netuser 5y ago
        What are the things he predicted to be unbreakable that withstood the test of time? Genuinely curious. thanks in advance.
      - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
        The point is about not about him, it's about increadible progreas that was made in 60 years past has definately slowed down, nothing 'impossible' was accomplished since. Skyscrapers, farming, construction, they are all the same as 60 years ago. 'exponential progress' is a myth
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- maxharris 5y ago
  "Liquid metal proven to be cheap and efficient CO2 converter" In their paper, the research team show a 92 percent efficiency in converting a ton of CO2 as described, using just 230kWh of energy. They estimate this equates to a cost of around $100 per ton of CO2. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-10-liquid-metal-proven-cheap-efficient.html https://phys.org/news/2021-10-liquid-metal-proven-cheap-effi... (To put this price into perspective, according to the EPA, a single passenger vehicle emits 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Source: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...) And if that's not your jam, check out Prometheus Fuels, which produces synthetic fuels from captured carbon: https://www.prometheusfuels.com https://www.prometheusfuels.com
  - gmuslera 5y ago
    How much time for that? How big can that scale? To give an idea of the current trend, every single day, near 100 million barrels of oil are produced. Each of those barrels make between 500 and 750kg of CO2 equivalent (source https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/02/09/breaking-down-barrel-tracing-ghg-emissions-through-oil-supply-chain-pub-62722 https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/02/09/breaking-down-barre...) And that only counts as fossil carbon from oil (gas and coal should be added), that has been going for decades (at a slower rate, in 1998 it was 73 million of barrels/day, still a big number). And positive feedback loops are adding new carbon to the party as coming from permafrost thawing and other sources in increasing volumes, as the planet warms up. So for making the trick carbon capture should not only offset what is being produced in that moment, but capture everything ever emitted till reaching an amount below the one we had in preindustrial times. And keep it that way for enough time to undo the warming and try to shutdown the bad feedback loops. Creating synthetic fuel from captured carbon doesn't lower the amount of carbon in the system (once it is burned as fuel, at least), but if it is used instead of pumping out fossil fuels, at least will accelerate less the amount of carbon we still add to the atmosphere. Having a small scale demo doesn't mean that it will be ever feasible a production of the size and the speed that will be needed.
    - EGreg 5y ago
kristopolous 5y ago
Unflinching confidence in the smashing success of an unproven speculative technology to be a silver bullet savior in some currently unspecified Hail Mary pass at the global scale is equally problematic. For instance, this pathogen is currently whipping us pretty good for such a master of the universe civilization. It would have been far worse before modern science but we aren't exactly living in a Gene Roddenberry fever dream. Our grasp and control of things is tenuous, fragile, narrow, and sometimes, completely imagined. These times, like all others, call for both a pessimism of the intellect And an optimism of the will.
- titzer 5y ago
  Not to mention, carbon capture these days is mostly about capturing emissions at source, not about distilling CO2 out of the atmosphere at large. It doesn't work very well, either. Extracting CO2 from the atmosphere will be energy-intensive and inefficient. Where are we going to get all this spare energy to scrape back the disastrous consequences of releasing a well-mixing destructive greenhouse gas? Uh, solar panels? Nuclear? A trillion trees? Spending energy on such CO2 extraction will literally have no economic value. And we're going to fund that how?
  - greeneggs 5y ago
    We don't do anything now because it is easier to put it off till later. In the future, the humans should be wealthier on average, and have access to better technology. But even then, it will always be easier to put it off till later. What generation is going to take a significant, and eventually massive, charge in order to help their grandchildren? It seems not unlikely that no generation does, the problem gets worse and worse, wealth stagnates and then starts to decline, and eventually the problem is unsolvable. This could happen even without any climate tipping points.
- zetalyrae 5y ago
  The Moderna vaccine was designed on January ~12 2020. All problems since have been social rather than technical. And if Balaji Srinivasan was head of the FDA we'd all have been vaccinated by December last year.
Shadonototra 5y ago
typical reply of a guy who live in SF > Predictions about what conditions look like in the year 2100 (let alone 2500!) are meaningless because they assume little to no improvement in technology or energy availability. As meaningless as assuming there will be improvement in technology or energy availability It's not profitable, therefore it is not the priority, at all We have the tech to build super cheap housing for everyone, yet poverty and homelessness skyrocket So to think we'll solve the issue we have with Earth's climate cycling through its natural cycles is mind blogging
- zetalyrae 5y ago
  >typical reply of a guy who live in SF I am Uruguayan and have never even visited the Bay Area. But just cry "tech bro" and move on. >We have the tech to build super cheap housing for everyone, yet poverty and homelessness skyrocket This is a great example of a regulatory (rather than technical) issue. Global cities should simply be built up into the stratosphere by decriminalizing construction, anything else is a policy failure. Similarly, climate is solved by decriminalizing nuclear power.
  - satellite2 5y ago
    I think you are attributing too much power to policy alone. I think human behaviour are much better explained via incentives. We are putting ridiculous amount of CO2 in the air because roughly every human is incentivized to do so. Basically the things that scale only scale because everyone has an incentives for it. I don't see any personal level incentives for carbon capture so I doubt it will scale.
  - DemocracyFTW 5y ago
    > Global cities should simply be built up into the stratosphere by decriminalizing construction, anything else is a policy failure. Physics, anyone?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
devoutsalsa 5y ago
> in 30,000 years humans will evolve to look like goblins because smartphone I'm really hoping we evolve into something with more than 1d4 hit points.
aaron695 5y ago
> By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise. The fact people are delusional enough to think this might not happen shows there are still a lot of suckers out there that need to be parted with their money [1] That's the entire industrial environmental complex. But it will also work at a more abstract level. What else can be made up to extract money from them? [1] With the obvious irony because they suck resources from pandemic preparedness and environmental measures they might cause a global collapse of some sort.
zhte415 5y ago
Let's keep burning as much coal as possible then, to ensure we get to this point even faster.
scythe 5y ago
The politics of carbon capture are all but guaranteed to be a much bigger headache than the politics of cutting emissions. There's a 5 trillion ton surplus of CO2 in the atmosphere and it keeps getting bigger. We might be able to turn some CO2 into useful materials, but five trillion tons? For scale, that's 50000 times the weight of all the buildings in Manhattan: https://www.thrillist.com/culture/how-much-does-manhattan-weigh https://www.thrillist.com/culture/how-much-does-manhattan-we...
xenocyon 5y ago
"By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture" We have this technology already. It's called "trees". Whether we choose to use it is a different matter. Environmental sustainability - like most hard problems in the world today - is not so much a technological challenge as a political one. I do believe technological progress in the future is a certainty, and will bring many good things with it, but it will not do the hard work of encouraging humans to do the right thing. That is something we have to do for ourselves. That's the bad news. The good news is that this work is something we can do immediately, right now, without waiting for the hope of our utopian Star Trek future to become reality.
ryandvm 5y ago
I think I agree. In the early 1900s New Yorkers were freaking out at the calculations that showed that their streets would be buried in 10 feet of horse shit within a hundred years. Obviously that didn't happen. Technological progress has a way of completely invalidating your old problems and replacing them with something totally different. As a thought experiment, look back on humanity for the last 500 years and imagine what would happen if you asked them to solve the problems of the next century. It would be ludicrous. Steam powered air travel, pneumatic computers, advances in blood-letting, etc. If we can crack fusion in the next 100 years, carbon capture becomes essentially free. And that's just ONE of the solutions we know about now. Imagine how many solutions we can't even conceive of...

hhs 5y ago

It was strange, but the paper [0] concludes: > Our projections and associated approaches to adaptation governance represent an initial attempt and have considerable uncertainty given their extended time horizon. These efforts are meant to highlight the need for more sophisticated climate and Earth system modelling beyond 2100, including a focus on aspects of ecosystem goods and services not considered here. Our work thus provides a framework and baseline for the assessment of longer-term anthropogenic effects on climate and Earth systems, and highlights the critical need for further work in this area. [0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871

clajiness 5y ago

> By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise. Source?

zetalyrae 5y ago
My own intuition and knowledge.
- ClumsyPilot 5y ago
  In 1895 Lord Kelvin stated that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible” 1900's gave us first flight on a plane made of wood, by 1960's we had spaceflight and nuclear power. 'Intuition and knowledge' would suggest that today, as another 60 years passed, we should have fusion power and cities on Mars, but the world is still powered by coal and instead we got the iPhone.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    Kelvin also said other things that turned out to be unbreakable rules. You can't do anything you can imagine just because Kelvin was wrong once. That's magical thinking.
    - inter_netuser 5y ago
      What are the things he predicted to be unbreakable that withstood the test of time? Genuinely curious. thanks in advance.
    - ClumsyPilot 5y ago
      The point is about not about him, it's about increadible progreas that was made in 60 years past has definately slowed down, nothing 'impossible' was accomplished since. Skyscrapers, farming, construction, they are all the same as 60 years ago. 'exponential progress' is a myth
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
maxharris 5y ago
"Liquid metal proven to be cheap and efficient CO2 converter" In their paper, the research team show a 92 percent efficiency in converting a ton of CO2 as described, using just 230kWh of energy. They estimate this equates to a cost of around $100 per ton of CO2. Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-10-liquid-metal-proven-cheap-efficient.html https://phys.org/news/2021-10-liquid-metal-proven-cheap-effi... (To put this price into perspective, according to the EPA, a single passenger vehicle emits 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Source: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-typical-passenger-vehicle https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...) And if that's not your jam, check out Prometheus Fuels, which produces synthetic fuels from captured carbon: https://www.prometheusfuels.com https://www.prometheusfuels.com
- gmuslera 5y ago
  How much time for that? How big can that scale? To give an idea of the current trend, every single day, near 100 million barrels of oil are produced. Each of those barrels make between 500 and 750kg of CO2 equivalent (source https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/02/09/breaking-down-barrel-tracing-ghg-emissions-through-oil-supply-chain-pub-62722 https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/02/09/breaking-down-barre...) And that only counts as fossil carbon from oil (gas and coal should be added), that has been going for decades (at a slower rate, in 1998 it was 73 million of barrels/day, still a big number). And positive feedback loops are adding new carbon to the party as coming from permafrost thawing and other sources in increasing volumes, as the planet warms up. So for making the trick carbon capture should not only offset what is being produced in that moment, but capture everything ever emitted till reaching an amount below the one we had in preindustrial times. And keep it that way for enough time to undo the warming and try to shutdown the bad feedback loops. Creating synthetic fuel from captured carbon doesn't lower the amount of carbon in the system (once it is burned as fuel, at least), but if it is used instead of pumping out fossil fuels, at least will accelerate less the amount of carbon we still add to the atmosphere. Having a small scale demo doesn't mean that it will be ever feasible a production of the size and the speed that will be needed.
  - EGreg 5y ago

kristopolous 5y ago

Unflinching confidence in the smashing success of an unproven speculative technology to be a silver bullet savior in some currently unspecified Hail Mary pass at the global scale is equally problematic. For instance, this pathogen is currently whipping us pretty good for such a master of the universe civilization. It would have been far worse before modern science but we aren't exactly living in a Gene Roddenberry fever dream. Our grasp and control of things is tenuous, fragile, narrow, and sometimes, completely imagined. These times, like all others, call for both a pessimism of the intellect And an optimism of the will.

titzer 5y ago
Not to mention, carbon capture these days is mostly about capturing emissions at source, not about distilling CO2 out of the atmosphere at large. It doesn't work very well, either. Extracting CO2 from the atmosphere will be energy-intensive and inefficient. Where are we going to get all this spare energy to scrape back the disastrous consequences of releasing a well-mixing destructive greenhouse gas? Uh, solar panels? Nuclear? A trillion trees? Spending energy on such CO2 extraction will literally have no economic value. And we're going to fund that how?
- greeneggs 5y ago
  We don't do anything now because it is easier to put it off till later. In the future, the humans should be wealthier on average, and have access to better technology. But even then, it will always be easier to put it off till later. What generation is going to take a significant, and eventually massive, charge in order to help their grandchildren? It seems not unlikely that no generation does, the problem gets worse and worse, wealth stagnates and then starts to decline, and eventually the problem is unsolvable. This could happen even without any climate tipping points.
zetalyrae 5y ago
The Moderna vaccine was designed on January ~12 2020. All problems since have been social rather than technical. And if Balaji Srinivasan was head of the FDA we'd all have been vaccinated by December last year.

Shadonototra 5y ago

typical reply of a guy who live in SF > Predictions about what conditions look like in the year 2100 (let alone 2500!) are meaningless because they assume little to no improvement in technology or energy availability. As meaningless as assuming there will be improvement in technology or energy availability It's not profitable, therefore it is not the priority, at all We have the tech to build super cheap housing for everyone, yet poverty and homelessness skyrocket So to think we'll solve the issue we have with Earth's climate cycling through its natural cycles is mind blogging

zetalyrae 5y ago
>typical reply of a guy who live in SF I am Uruguayan and have never even visited the Bay Area. But just cry "tech bro" and move on. >We have the tech to build super cheap housing for everyone, yet poverty and homelessness skyrocket This is a great example of a regulatory (rather than technical) issue. Global cities should simply be built up into the stratosphere by decriminalizing construction, anything else is a policy failure. Similarly, climate is solved by decriminalizing nuclear power.
- satellite2 5y ago
  I think you are attributing too much power to policy alone. I think human behaviour are much better explained via incentives. We are putting ridiculous amount of CO2 in the air because roughly every human is incentivized to do so. Basically the things that scale only scale because everyone has an incentives for it. I don't see any personal level incentives for carbon capture so I doubt it will scale.
- DemocracyFTW 5y ago
  > Global cities should simply be built up into the stratosphere by decriminalizing construction, anything else is a policy failure. Physics, anyone?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

devoutsalsa 5y ago

> in 30,000 years humans will evolve to look like goblins because smartphone I'm really hoping we evolve into something with more than 1d4 hit points.

aaron695 5y ago

> By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise. The fact people are delusional enough to think this might not happen shows there are still a lot of suckers out there that need to be parted with their money [1] That's the entire industrial environmental complex. But it will also work at a more abstract level. What else can be made up to extract money from them? [1] With the obvious irony because they suck resources from pandemic preparedness and environmental measures they might cause a global collapse of some sort.

zhte415 5y ago

Let's keep burning as much coal as possible then, to ensure we get to this point even faster.

scythe 5y ago

The politics of carbon capture are all but guaranteed to be a much bigger headache than the politics of cutting emissions. There's a 5 trillion ton surplus of CO2 in the atmosphere and it keeps getting bigger. We might be able to turn some CO2 into useful materials, but five trillion tons? For scale, that's 50000 times the weight of all the buildings in Manhattan: https://www.thrillist.com/culture/how-much-does-manhattan-weigh https://www.thrillist.com/culture/how-much-does-manhattan-we...

xenocyon 5y ago

"By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture" We have this technology already. It's called "trees". Whether we choose to use it is a different matter. Environmental sustainability - like most hard problems in the world today - is not so much a technological challenge as a political one. I do believe technological progress in the future is a certainty, and will bring many good things with it, but it will not do the hard work of encouraging humans to do the right thing. That is something we have to do for ourselves. That's the bad news. The good news is that this work is something we can do immediately, right now, without waiting for the hope of our utopian Star Trek future to become reality.

ryandvm 5y ago

I think I agree. In the early 1900s New Yorkers were freaking out at the calculations that showed that their streets would be buried in 10 feet of horse shit within a hundred years. Obviously that didn't happen. Technological progress has a way of completely invalidating your old problems and replacing them with something totally different. As a thought experiment, look back on humanity for the last 500 years and imagine what would happen if you asked them to solve the problems of the next century. It would be ludicrous. Steam powered air travel, pneumatic computers, advances in blood-letting, etc. If we can crack fusion in the next 100 years, carbon capture becomes essentially free. And that's just ONE of the solutions we know about now. Imagine how many solutions we can't even conceive of...