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U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere

• hourislate 5y ago
  Just convert everything to solar, wind, hydro and nuclear, the earth will heal itself. No new taxes, departments, bureaucracies, crooks and additional burdens on the tax payer who will foot the cleanup bill while corporations keep on keeping on.
  • cblconfederate 5y ago
    How will the former happen without the latter
  • missedthecue 5y ago
    Electricity production is only 25% of GHG emissions.
• dane-pgp 5y ago
  > The Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Earthshot seeks to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 a tonne by the end of the decade At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary 5% pay cut, but that figure (if it's correct) does make it harder to argue that "we can't afford" to do anything about CO2 levels, or that tackling climate change requires us all to stop flying or heating our homes. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_world_product
  • bobcostas55 5y ago
    5% is still much higher than the costs of climate change for at least a century (at least if you believe the IPCC projections).
    • dane-pgp 5y ago
      I'm not sure which projections you're referring to, but researchers at UCL concluded: "the damage costs caused by climate change will reach $5.4 trillion a year by 2070, and $31 trillion a year by 2200" https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/energy/news/2020/oct/cdp-and-ucl-report-climate-crisis-cost-reach-31-trillion-year-if-emissions-not-rapidly https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/energy/news/2020/oct/cdp-and-...
      • bobcostas55 5y ago
        I'm thinking of this projection here: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SR15_Chapter3_Low_Res.pdf https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/sites/2/2019/02/SR15... Which gives an estimate of 2.6% of global GDP in 2100. The one you mention seems to be in the same ballpark: assuming 2% growth, in 2070 global GDP will probably be somewhere around 220T, so 5.4/220 = 2.4%.
        • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
          Thats for 1.5 degrees, a target we've already missed. We are now on track for over 3 degrees right now, and every extra degree of heating is exponentially more damaging than the last. Consider that -4 degrees chage had washington DC under a glacier thats two miles of ice, and now imagine the same change in the other direction.
      • PeterisP 5y ago
        The same report you linked (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/energy/sites/bartlett/files/cdp-gdp-report-2020.pdf https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/energy/sites/bartlett/files/c... page 10) includes interesting parts regarding e.g. climate change damage to agriculture like "temperate regions in Canada, US and Europe have positive GDP impacts whilst negative impacts are expected in India, other developing Asia, the Middle East, Central and South America." It does not go into that detail for the other types of damage because there it's just different rates of negatives, however, it's reasonable to assume that the regional differences there are also just as large. It's hard for politicians to ask a Kansas farmer for a large extra tax for CO2 removal if the main justification of it is that it eventually will prevent much larger costs to someone else overseas. In essence, policy decisions are made on a national level, mostly by people accountable to their own citizens and needing their approval (no matter if in democractic elections or needing to sustain their authoritarian power) - and you can't match national costs (since any decision to pay or invest will be national) versus global benefits of mitigation, you need to consider what the local consequences of doing nothing are going to be as that is what is going to drive all the actual action and decisions even while the same politicians make empty talks about global solidarity.
  • jandrese 5y ago
    More importantly, having an actual price tag on removing carbon from the atmosphere would allow carbon markets to finally work. Assuming there is enough political will to properly monitor and tax CO2 emissions worldwide, which is a huge ask. A lot of companies and countries will be tempted to lie because it will make their products more competitive.
    • aunty_helen 5y ago
      Cant we see this from space? Estimate the amount of co2 coming from each country that way and send them a bill every year. My first thought was “that’s where auditing and bureaucracy come in” but maybe satellites are a better way
      • dymk 5y ago
        CO2 is colorless, odorless, and is produced in many ways, not just from factories or out of tailpipes. For instance, would we want to bill countries with receding glaciers which release methane, a more powerful greenhouse gas that decays into CO2?
        • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
          Unless the glaciers are being operated in secret, couldn't we just calculate their emissions and not count them against that country?
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • spywaregorilla 5y ago
        Is "we" the united states sending a bill to other countries?
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • PeterisP 5y ago
        We can measure the total amount, but it's rapidly mixing and moving so we can't reliably allocate the CO2 production to states from space measurements, no. Furthermore, countries only are liable for the commitments to which they voluntarily agree in international treaties or get forced to agree with credible threats of excessive violence. As all the climate talks have clearly shown, no one is going to sign a treaty which accepts the obligation to pay such a bill even if it could be accurately calculated; the world simply does not work that way.
  • mchusma 5y ago
    It's highly likely that carbon removal follows similar economies of scale as solar too, so the costs are likely to continue a rapid decline.
  • mvanaltvorst 5y ago
    This sounds great, but how likely is it that the US will manage to reach 100$/GT?
    • chippiewill 5y ago
      Early estimates were at $600/ton, getting under $100/ton doesn't sound completely implausible.
      • deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      • fulafel 5y ago
        Indeed, but the "upper bound for net zero cost" is only a scenario.
  • AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    40 gigatonnes is just the "yearly deficit". That's just for carbon neutrality. We have put 2 teratons of carbon into the atmosphere since industrialization. Yes we probably don't need to remove all of that, but at least 1 teraton is probably a very good idea, by trees, olivine, seeding oceans, pumping into the ground (which I think eventually comes back out. This is kind of like the mainstream reporting on the budget deficit, which always concentrates on the YEARLY deficit (2.77 trillion) versus 129 trillion overall.
    • moffkalast 5y ago
      Well reaching net zero effective emissions would be a good start at least, we're not even close to that yet right now.
  • AnthonyMouse 5y ago
    > It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. It seems hard to believe that removing CO2 from the atmosphere could ever be less expensive than not emitting it to begin with. You're working against thermodynamics. So the whole thing seems like a fraud. An excuse to keep emitting CO2 while claiming that you'll do something about it "tomorrow."
    • civilized 5y ago
      Capturing it at the point of emission seems like it should be the priority. Way, way easier to get it at that point. But that would make fossil fuels more expensive, and we can't have that right? Maybe we should just massively subsidize point of emission carbon capture for fossil fuels. We need it for some use cases that renewables don't work for anyway (yet).
      • adam_arthur 5y ago
        I suspect the public would be on board with these type of policies if the cost to the poor and middle class were subsidized. Any legislation that increases cost of energy will impact poorest the most, but for some reason cost of energy to the poor is not brought up much in climate discussions. And of course China is the biggest emitter by far, so something special needs to be done there. Likely first world countries would have to subsidize third world country energy costs.
    • lumost 5y ago
      There are many biological and geological processes that remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Many of which could be sped up. Carbon removal need not involve mega facilities running co2 scrubbers.
    • sharp11 5y ago
      There is a moral hazard here, but the reality is that we’ve passed the point where emissions reductions alone can get us where we want to be. We will need both reductions and removal.
    • 5y ago
  • diego 5y ago
    They are different problems. You can stop filling the tub, but the water in the tub isn't going to evaporate in time. You still have to drain it. It's not either/or.
  • BurningFrog 5y ago
    You still have the problem that this is a textbook Public Good¹, and a textbook Collective Action Problem². As in, if someone pays $1B to decarbonize, the entire world benefits from it. So everyone is incentivised to make someone else pay for it. Empirically, things like these tend to be very underfunded. ¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good_(economics) ² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
  • stupendousyappi 5y ago
    That's based on two very cautious geoengineering approaches that have virtually no negative side effects. If governments were willing to consider other geoengineering approaches, I think that number could be driven down significantly. My favorite candidate is ocean-wave-based olivine weathering, as proposed by Project Vesta. They think that, at scale, that approach could get costs down to $21/ton, plus reduce ocean acidification more effectively too. But it's more complicated and could have some negative effects, such as putting a lot of poisonous heavy metals like nickel in the ocean. But because politicians hate ever having to say that they're knowingly causing any problem, those avenues get starved of research funding, as we see here. But I think that, within 50 years, we're probably going to find a scalable CO2 removal approach for less than half the target cost of this program, and that basically could solve global warming, but because of political cowardice it's discovered 30 years later than it could have been. Everyone wants to do emission reduction first and delay geoengineering as long as possible, when we should be doing the opposite. Even if the financial cost appears much smaller, it's clear now that large scale emission reduction is politically very expensive. Emission reduction is the clean, ideal solution that we don't have the ability to scalably implement yet. Geoengineering should be temporary quick and dirty approach we use to buy time, creating some problems that last decades in exchange for time to implement a solution for a problem that lasts for millennia. Assuming that cheap geoengineering techniques whose negative side effects are bounded in space and time can be found, but I think that they can.
  • anonuser123456 5y ago
    While it may impact GDP, it may not impact productive output. Less stuff will be consumed for the same output. There will be impacts on how money is shuffled around; fossil fuel profits flow from fossil fuel share holders to CCS companies, fossil fuel workers will be displaced by CCS industry workers. As renewables come online at cost parity, they will displace fossil fuel usage. That will cause a dramatic decline in fossil fuel price as oversupply becomes a constant problem. So people buying fossil fuel will be spending less for the same result. Now, one might make the following observation; we've taken fossil fuel profits away and consumed them immediately rather then re-investing them (what capital owners typically do). This means less investment and thus growth. Frankly, I find the hypothesis not so compelling. There is little evidence that capital is the bottleneck in Capex spending. My view is the world suffers from too few good ideas chased by even fewer people/organizations and under the constraints of bumbling governments. GDP issue aside, at 100$/ton this only adds 1$/gallon to the price of gas and 0.50$/therm to the price of natural gas. That's definitely absorbable by the declines that will happen from oversupply.
    • oopsyDoodl 5y ago
      I’m a vacuum this makes sense. When the right has folks who held power in the White House talking about wanting a religious theology to take over, you can be sure you don’t live in a vacuum. Too many people are against your vision, either explicitly, or implicitly given their ignorance, to take it as a given.
    • gruez 5y ago
      >While it may impact GDP, it may not impact productive output. Less stuff will be consumed for the same output. I think you got the first sentence flipped? GDP will stay the same, but actual productive output (eg. stuff being produced) will go down.
  • mike_hock 5y ago
    Indeed. If their pie-in-the-sky $100 comes through, that is.
  • listenallyall 5y ago
    Lol "5% pay cut". Classic ivory tower, wealthy first-world thinking. 4 trillion dollars is $500 per person on earth, which is more than the annual wages for a significant percentage. Energy cost increases put vastly more of the burden on low-income individuals due to the demand inelasticity of heat, fuel, light.
    • unilynx 5y ago
      But GP didn't say it had to be distributed evenly, but referred to a 5% of GDP expense. That's 5% of income, whether it's $1000 or $100000.
      • listenallyall 5y ago
        Of course it won't be distributed evenly, that is the point. Just like always, energy cost increases harm poor people the most. If you are in USA, has the government absorbed the increase in energy prices? Of course not. It costs everyone more to pay their heating bill or buy gasoline than just a year ago. Wealthy people can afford it. Poor people cannot. And the energy spikes also contribute to the huge inflation in food and everyday goods, once again hurting poor people the most. That's the most basic of examples. Reality hits in many ways. Poor people generally have to travel much further to work every day. No matter whether they take public or private transportation, when fuel costs go up, maintenance drops... routes get cancelled, cars break down, tolls go up, whatever. Or employment goes away entirely. Are mines, factories, construction projects still profitable when energy costs spike? Some yes, some no.
  • andrei_says_ 5y ago
    In Ministry for the Future, governments started paying fossil fuel companies more money to keep the fuel in the ground than they could make by extracting and selling it. Only then the extraction slowed down. Maybe we can start by including the cost for sequestering the CO2 in the cost of the fuel?
  • guilhas 5y ago
    This looks like they finally found how to tax the oxygen
  • DanHulton 5y ago
    Can you imagine only needing to take a 5% pay cut and just _solving_ global warming? I'd sign up in a heartbeat. We're all going to end up paying a lot more than 5%, some of us a _lot more._
  • jjk166 5y ago
    Carbon capture and emissions reduction are like diet and exercise: you gotta do both. Yeah, if we keep emmitting at present rates, carbon capture is still going to be a very expensive way to stand still, but if you reduce emissions and you're only capturing the carbon from those sources which are hard to decarbonize, then it becomes a much more practical solution.
  • Teknoman117 5y ago
    Of course it's never going to be more economical to remove it than just avoiding producing it in the first place. Problem is, even if all human sourced CO2e emissions ceased tomorrow, the world would still continue to warm significantly because the blanket is already up there. The natural processes that sequester carbon take many millennia (or more) to make any significant changes.
    • pfdietz 5y ago
      This is not completely true. The oceans are still absorbing some of the emitted CO2, so if human CO2 emissions were to cease the atmospheric CO2 level would begin to decline. This will eventually cause the surface waters to become saturated with CO2 though, so this decline will slow before all the anthropogenic CO2 were absorbed. Eventually excess carbon will be transported to the deep ocean, allowing more CO2 to be absorbed.
  • godelski 5y ago
    I think there's two things to consider here. 1) this sets a quantifiable measure on what a carbon tax should be. Which is essentially higher than it would be to remove said carbon. The tax including a convenience fee. 2) We're still on the bottom of the S curve for carbon removal. I'm not sure why anyone that visits HN would be surprised that a new technology costs more. But if we're to survive climate change it is essential that we innovate this technology and make it as cheap as possible. So see $100/tonne as a stepping stone rather than a final product. That will not be the final price, but rather comparable to your first home computers. Edit: I know I said 2, but a third thing to consider is that we already have too much carbon in the atmosphere. We really need to be net negative, not zero. In addition to this we can't expect developing countries to choose between power and existential crisis. As rich countries we have burden from past emissions. So if we are the ones removing it, that's more equitable. But also probably the only way it's going to happen. If we don't step up, no one will. Though we're also the ones that will fare the best because of our already elevated status. But is that the kind of people we want to be?
• krisrm 5y ago
  I do worry about the oversight and auditing of such metrics. The article does refer to the problem of "I planted X trees therefore I removed Y carbon", when that is true only under particular conditions.
  • AndrewThrowaway 5y ago
    I guess you need to plant X trees, wait Y years for them to accumulate Z carbon and then bury all the trees M meters underground to stay there forever.
    • datameta 5y ago
      A forest will only grow as a carbon sink on the century timescale, which is the window in which we irreversibly enter headlong into the anthropocene or mitigate our global anthopogenic effects. We don't have to plan for burying them.
      • thatcat 5y ago
        That's incorrect, if you look into regenerative agriculture you'll see that soil carbon content can be increased from 1 to 8 percent in less than a decade. Carbon sequestration isn't just from biomass above the soil, it also occurs through carbohydrate transfer to microbes and as a result of the increase in microbial biomass in soils.
        • datameta 5y ago
          You're right in pointing this out. What I am saying is that we do not need to deliberately bury biomass. The forest ecosystem is not just the trees.
    • BurningFrog 5y ago
      "Forever" is over ambitious. I'd pile them up in some desert. Should last a few centuries.
• version_five 5y ago
  At a first read, this is great, because it's apolitical. It's about innovation, and is positive, I.e. doing something instead of telling people not to do something. For once this seems like something a government should be doing. I'm almost suspicious I missed something.
  • hannob 5y ago
    > At a first read, this is great, because it's apolitical. This is a strange statement to make about DAC. Once you think about what that means there's a lot of thorny political issues. Removing carbon from the air to store it permanently does not give you anything economically. Someone's going to have to have to pay for it. Is that people who made their wealth based on fossil fuels? People who emit most or who did so in the past? Or everyone? Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favor of supporting development of this tech. But there are complicated political questions to be answered. Framing this as "apolitical" is probably not going to help.
    • dymk 5y ago
      Side stepping the “is it political” part (which I have no interest in discussing- it’s a tarpit)… There is an economical advantage to reducing CO2 from the environment. It gives you an environment that humans can thrive in (by way of being an environment that the current food chain can thrive in). It’s hard to consider investing in the future when you think it might be apocalyptical. Easier if you think there is a future for humanity.
      • hannob 5y ago
        There is an advantage for society as a whole, but for the person running a single DAC machine the advantage is neglegible. (Which is kinda the inverse why climate mitigation is so hard to begin with - avoiding emissions doesn't give the person doing so a lot of advantage.)
  • jillesvangurp 5y ago
    Oh this is very political. You just need to follow the money. Basically carbon offsetting is the notion of adding carbon to our atmosphere by continuing to e.g. burn coal or gas and by offsetting that with carbon capture. The problem with that is that it is kind of expensive. To the point where it would be cheaper to simply stop burning stuff and maybe do something cleaner instead. By instead committing to lowering cost to 100$ per tonne, the US is basically announcing subsidizing the continued dumping of CO2 in our atmosphere by making it cheaper to green-wash that business with carbon offsetting. That is going to inevitably involve some creative bookkeeping. The net effect of that will be lots more carbon ending up in the atmosphere than actually captured. Courtesy of the US tax payer. The best way to capture carbon is to leave it in the ground.
• bobcostas55 5y ago
  You can remove CO2 extremely cheaply using olivine today, this is a completely fake problem.
  • Supermancho 5y ago
    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1750583609000656 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S17505... Relevant: Qualitative proposals to control atmospheric CO2 concentrations by spreading crushed olivine rock along the Earth's coastlines, thereby accelerating weathering reactions, are presently attracting considerable attention. This paper provides a critical evaluation of the concept, demonstrating quantitatively whether or not it can contribute significantly to CO2 sequestration. The feasibility of the concept depends on the rate of olivine dissolution, the sequestration capacity of the dominant reaction, and its CO2 footprint. Kinetics calculations show that offsetting 30% of worldwide 1990 CO2 emissions by beach weathering means distributing of 5.0 Gt of olivine per year. For mean seawater temperatures of 15–25 °C, olivine sand (300 μm grain size) takes 700–2100 years to reach the necessary steady state sequestration rate and is therefore of little practical value. To obtain useful, steady state CO2 uptake rates within 15–20 years requires grain sizes <10 μm. However, the preparation and movement of the required material poses major economic, infrastructural and public health questions. We conclude that coastal spreading of olivine is not a viable method of CO2 sequestration on the scale needed. The method certainly cannot replace CCS technologies as a means of controlling atmospheric CO2 concentrations. P.S. Counterpoint: This is from a preofessor in the Netherlands, 2016 He's giving lots of strategies, other than "Olivine all the things": http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2016/07/olivine-weathering-t http://arctic-news.blogspot.com/2016/07/olivine-weathering-t... This is a whitepaper from that professor 2017: https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid= https://www.scirp.org/journal/paperinformation.aspx?paperid=... His own summarized blogpost, where he is representing the "Olivine Foundation": https://smartstones.nl/the-rate-of-olivine-weathering-an-exp https://smartstones.nl/the-rate-of-olivine-weathering-an-exp... So I'm thinking this is probably a good foundation to start from. How long before someone can convince the US, much less China to olivine their fields? This is not a fake problem. It's a series of problems, but I concede that olivine is a good way to go.
  • detaro 5y ago
• Kapura 5y ago
  Anything to avoid changing the status quo to reduce emissions. Honestly embarrassing.
  • brutusborn 5y ago
    How do you expect humanity to get to pre-industrial revolution carbon dioxide levels without atmospheric extraction?
    • _lz4k 5y ago
      [flagged]
      • brutusborn 5y ago
        I'd much prefer if we kept that as plan B.
        • the8472 5y ago
          It is the default option through inaction.
          • GaryTang 5y ago
            Inaction is only the default option in totalitarian societies.
            • the8472 5y ago
              Uh, no? Business as usual scenarios are the default option (tautologically) and will lead to lots of dead bodies in the future. Anything else requires large-scale coordination to change course.
              • GaryTang 5y ago
                New businesses emerge everyday, many call themselves startups.
• m0llusk 5y ago
  Wouldn't it be more efficient to remove CO2 from the sea where it has been accumulating as the oceans act as sinks for atmospheric pollutants and ocean acidification is actually more of a problem in the short term?
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • MicahKV 5y ago
    Been a while since I read up on this, but I think the problem is the energy cost of extracting CO2 from sea water makes it a wash at least in terms of CO2 reduction.
  • MobiusHorizons 5y ago
    I had this thought too, an aqueous solution feels like it ought to be much easier to do chemistry with. But I haven’t heard of anyone working on it.
  • aembleton 5y ago
    Here's a possible solution - add sodium to the fuel mix for cargo ships. That's massively simplified, but this video gives more information and there are plenty of engineering challenges to overcome - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL3AZGw9xZM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL3AZGw9xZM
  • pfdietz 5y ago
    The concentration (in moles/volume) of CO2 in the ocean is higher than in the air, so it's not a bad idea. One proposal was to do this electrolytically or by electrodialysis. This has been called "Direct Ocean Capture". http://carbon.ycombinator.com/electro-geo-chemistry/ http://carbon.ycombinator.com/electro-geo-chemistry/ This may be considerably cheaper as a CO2 removal technology than DAC.
• abathur 5y ago
  When these come up, I like to note that we likely also have to think about how to unwind the organizations that will build up around these practices. Unless every removal op is a vertically integrated loss center in govt or large emitters, there will inevitably be people in the chain whose livelihoods or profits or stockholders benefit from keeping the spigot on (both of money for removal, and of emissions that necessitate it). This is all assuming invention and improvement don't bootstrap easily scalable straightforwardly profitable removal practices. Thinking ahead about this means a chance at putting up guardrails before there is an established lobby to push back.
  • ip26 5y ago
    Profitable removal organizations would actually allow certain industries to transition more slowly. Also, if you can close the money loop you can set up good incentives. If the money spigot is funded by the emitters, the capture orgs are directly incentivized to make capture cheaper to make it more attractive to emit, etc. Key to avoid direct public subsidy of said spigot though.
• timmg 5y ago
  I thought a recent study showed the most effective/cheap method of reducing CO2 was very simple: plant a lot of trees. Like, really.
  • hannob 5y ago
    Yeah, except that study was so bad that the publication that published it later published four replies by other groups of scientists pointing out all the flaws of it: https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/researchers-find-flaws-in-high-profile-study-on-trees-and-climate--66587 https://www.the-scientist.com/news-opinion/researchers-find-...
  • oblak 5y ago
    Ah, but how would certain entities make tons of money with trees? They wouldn't. And that's why we've been hearing about this nonsense for well over a decade now. It's about making money while pretending they're doing something.
    • phtrivier 5y ago
      As other commenters pointed out, the other trickiest problem (beyond feasibility and energy requirement) of CO2 removal is that it's not clear who would be paying for them, since you want to sequester the CO2 and not use it. So in the end, it will be either a voluntary deal, or paid by the taxpayers as part of the maintenance of the infrastructure that is earth. Do people make money out of road and bridge maintenance ? At some point, you might argue that planting trees can make you more money if something edible grows on them (or under them)
      • oblak 5y ago
        Trickiest problem? Not clear who's going to pay for all this? The people are going to pay for all of it and then some. That's the entire point of this operation. As for the second part of your post: are you playing devil's advocate here? Planting trees, sustainable agriculture - that's not great way to generate fantastic profit at everyone's expense. It's not going to happen any time soon. Sorry for being a nihilistic prick but surely you're not that naive. We need some kind of agrarian Elon Musk to shake things up while making profit.
• cletus 5y ago
  I've said this repeatedly here: the world won't address climate change even if it's mildly inconvenient to do so, let alone the massive endeavours that have been proposed thus far. The solution will be economic. Want to replace fossil fuels with cleaner energy sources? It won't happen until those alternatives are cheaper. When energy is sufficiently cheap or the byproducts are sufficiently valuable, that's when carbon extraction from the atmosphere will make sense. I've seen some ideas for this. One is to use renewable energy to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into gasoline. That's actually not that hard. It's just chemistry after all. Alternatives are things like graphene. There are places in the world where this could make sense. A given area might be remote such that building pipes of delivering such fuel is cost-prohibitive. Likewise, the cost of extending an electric grid might be too high. Or it simply may not be feasible because of politics. This can negate the disadvantage solar and wind have in being variable power output and/or simply using a hydrocarbon fuel as a means of storing excess energy. This would technically be carbon neutral not carbon negative but it'd be a start.
  • ClumsyPilot 5y ago
    "Want to replace fossil fuels with cleaner energy sources? It won't happen until those alternatives are cheaper" We are going to go extinct with that attitude - the laws on nature do not owe us a cheaper method of producing energy. The Moneyed classes have never given up anything willingly: the end of monarchy, the end of slavery and even labour laws were won in blood. Its likely to be the same with climate change
    • cletus 5y ago
      > We are going to go extinct with that attitude I understand your point and I agree (within limits) but that makes it no less true. Side note: total extinction of the human race is incredibly unlikely at this point and certainly not from climate change. That's not to say that huge numbers of us won't die in the process. > the laws on nature do not owe us a cheaper method of producing energy Of course not but increasing fossil fuel costs ultimately make other forms of energy production economic. > The Moneyed classes have never given up anything willingly: the end of monarchy, the end of slavery and even labour laws were won in blood. I agree but that's really a whole separate topic. The unwillingness of the ultra-wealthy to pay for the society that makes their wealth possible and the legions of people who adamantly oppose the ultra-wealthy just being slightly less ultra-wealthy is a recipe for disaster. The ultimate form of wealth redistribution is war and revolution.
• mikesabbagh 5y ago
  Maybe instead of paying 100$ for a ton of CO2 captured, add a CO2 tax of few $ to every ton released
  • grayfaced 5y ago
    If it costs $100 to remove, then that should set the price. If you can set a reasoned price on a externality then charging anything less is subsidizing the pollution.
    • novok 5y ago
      I agree that creating an upper bound price is powerful, because it economically incentivizes those companies to figure out cheaper ways to save on that tax, like not emitting in the first place :p
    • 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
      Why not look at it as costing $10 of externalities plus $90 worth of steel bars that you’re preventing? That combination would make a $100 removal cost a good goal. Or at least something that includes both the positive (stuff is good, jobs are good) and negative externalities (carbon is bad).
  • exyi 5y ago
    "that would hurt the economy however" ...
  • spywaregorilla 5y ago
    Ok, you just killed the US steel industry and several others. Massive amounts of manufacturing have moved to other industries to avoid the tax. US economy is now significantly less competitive. What's the next move?
    • istjohn 5y ago
      Just tax imports from countries that don't have an equivalent carbon tax.
• nabakin 5y ago
  https://archive.md/GUDlj https://archive.md/GUDlj
• baron816 5y ago
  Seems to me that everything becomes much easier if we just get fusion right. Carbon removal would be cheap at that point, correct? I’d like to see governments band together and offer up a $1 trillion prize for whomever comes up with a scalable fusion power plant, which would then be released to the public domain.
  • DangitBobby 5y ago
    I don't think fusion is coming soon enough to be part of the plans for Climate Change. People working on fusion reactors have been misleading the public about progress. They have been using a "Q" value (energy in versus energy out) to describe some internal process rather than the entire process. So when they say something like "67% efficiency" they really meant "1% efficiency." 1. https://whyy.org/segments/fusion-energy/ https://whyy.org/segments/fusion-energy/
    • TillE 5y ago
      Even building boring old nuclear fission plants is far too slow! We need big changes now, not in 5-10 years, and definitely not in (really optimistically for fusion) 25+ years.
  • exyi 5y ago
    Or just put a ton of solar plants into the US deserts. it's super cheap now, I doubt fusion will ever be cheaper than just collecting whatever sun sends to us. And for carbon removal you don't need a stable electricity source
• tschellenbach 5y ago
  Without a price on carbon emissions all these measures seem unlikely to really change things.
  • ratboy666 5y ago
    But where I live, it would be difficult. Yes, there is a "CO2 tax" here. Twenty years ago I converted my wood-burning fireplace to natural gas. That was being, in my opinion, environmentally friendly (I prefer burning wood -- more pleasant). If the cost of NG goes too high I can revert to wood. Electricity is out, because the local power company prices it at around 7 times higher than natural gas. $800 per month to heat my house. $125 for natural gas. Wood? 3 to 6 cords should do... At 1 cord per acre, I would need 3 to 6 acres. I could buy 40 acres, put up a house, and produce my own biofuel as well. No "price on carbon emissions". If you can convince me that CO2 is an existential threat, that is one thing. I can move to Memphis where I don't need to heat my home. You cannot deny me the right to do that, if you think that CO2 is that threat. Otherwise, you can tax me until I refuse to participate.
• Proven 5y ago
  [dead]
• epmatsw 5y ago
  Are there any public companies actually working on this? The last time I looked it seemed like the answer was “Chevron, kinda”, but that doesn’t seem like the right spirit.
• xyst 5y ago
  Impose a tax on O&G industry, remove all of their subsidies, and earmark the collected tax towards CO2 removal and other climate change reversal methods. Could get to the $100 per tonne in a fraction of a time.
  • missedthecue 5y ago
    A tax on the O&G industry is a tax on consumers. Demand for energy is largely inelastic, so costs are easy to pass on. Gas prices at only $3.50 are already sending Joe Biden's approval ratings through the floor. Sending gas prices past $5 or more means a reactionary panel of candidates get elected next cycle, which is counter-productive.
    • orf 5y ago
      I always forget US gas prices are dollars per gallon. According to Google prices are currently less than a dollar a litre, in Europe the median seems to be about 1.8 dollars per litre (4.5 litres in a gallon). In the UK it is about 7.5 dollars per gallon. The USA seems addicted to cheap fuel. That addiction needs to end sometime, and if you collectively cry about prices raising to less than the levels the rest of the world deals with just fine it doesn’t give much hope for the future.
      • lg 5y ago
        Consider the american built environment since WW2, gas at 7.50/gal would simply make many people’s daily lives unaffordable, and the most impacted people have the largest clout politically due to the rural bias at every level of our government. We would happily commit climate suicide first.
        • pfdietz 5y ago
          It would make people buy electric cars, or just trade 20 mpg SUVs for 40 mpg small cars. If there is a rural bias, the solution would be to subsidize the rural areas to buy their votes. The solution to a problem of the commons, and the distribution of benefits, are separable (Coase Theorem).
• Sapere_Aude 5y ago
  [flagged]
  • cassepipe 5y ago
    Your only argument is that CO2 is good for the plants. It's a bit light and does not really account for the cycle of carbon on the planet. It's like saying, since sun is good for the health, fuck the ozone layer of the atmosphere haha. So now I am quite weary of visiting "Ice age farmer"'s personal website. Please get out of your information bubble, it's not too late. Btw I rather prefer my own conspiracy theory that the most wealthy on the planet are already old, do not care about what happens after they die and don't want to change anything that might affect profits on which rest their privileges. I don't any secret documents to prove it though. Just a feeling.
    • Sapere_Aude 5y ago
      No, of course it's not my sole argument. I have more than two dozens well researched books full with arguments for and mostly against this bunk science which is underpinning "climate change" and the CO2 lie. I just don't have the time to argue with internet people over such things, there are enough scientists out there disproving the silly notion CO2 or humans are is to blame for "climate change", a term that has been used since their "global warming" phrase has become a burden. All of their predictions were wrong over the last 100 years and their fear mongering is completely based on falsified data and corporate science. You don't need any "secret documents" to prove that there is an agenda behind it all, since they are publicly available and pretty easy to access from their sites and all of their wonderful front companies. Just start reading the UN's Agenda 2030 document. If you actually looked into history then you'll see that much of what has happened from WW1 onwards was an effort by wealthy people, dynasties in finance etc., to build a world of their liking, which gives them top down control via a lot of fronts. Check out who owns the world economy. It's BlackRock and Vanguard, the latter owning the former. Then there are a lot of foundations and NGO/NPOs which have their function of control and wealth funnelling as well, connecting finance, business, politics and the media. The "climate change" bullshit is for natural resource and social control. The carbon credits are nothing more than a new financial product and their green governance guidelines are for leverage. Nothing about it is about saving the earth or the environment. This is provable and not "just a feeling".
• errcorrectcode 5y ago
  Bio CCS using the ocean. Nothing else can be cheaper than letting nature do 99% of the work. That is if there's the will to do it. Also, Putin is mostly fine with climate change because Russia (and possibly Canada) will be arguably the disproportionate net winner in a 2.5 C world.
• perfunctory 5y ago
  I always felt that trying to remove co2 out of the atmosphere without decarbonizing energy production is like trying to build a perpetuum mobile.
• thriftwy 5y ago
  How much does a solar shade cost?
• deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  Removal of CO2 at such grand scale and speed will probably affect ecosystems drastically and cause violent disasters
  • dane-pgp 5y ago
    If the aim is to reach "net zero", then the ecosystem will have the same amount of CO2 in year N as in year N-1. That doesn't seem like a drastic situation (except that the level we stop at will already be well outside the recent historic average). After reaching a steady state, we can then consider how much we want to continue scaling up the CO2 removal process, and for how long we want to run it at "net negative" levels. Whatever rate we choose should cause fewer violent disasters than the process of extracting and emitting the carbon did in the first place.
• worik 5y ago
  What about compost? Surely the best place to sequester carbon is in topsoil where we can use if to grow food. I have not done the maths, but I do do a lot of composting myself and it makes me wonder as I watch my soil get deeper.
  • throaway46546 5y ago
    Doesn't composting actually release greenhouse gasses?
    • worik 5y ago
      No. The resulting soil is mostly carbon. I think....
• rayiner 5y ago
  Carbon recapture is essential for humanitarian purposes. Countries like China, India, and Bangladesh, won’t forgo industrialization to go to net zero CO2 emissions. I’m from Bangladesh and there’s just zero political will to do that. Maintaining the 6-7% annual GDP growth is literally what the legitimacy of the government is built upon. So it’s imperative for the developed world to build the technology to recapture that carbon.
  • mynegation 5y ago
    It is ironic as Bangladesh is going to be one of the countries hardest hit by rising sea levels and climate change.
    • rayiner 5y ago
      Which is why it’s in their interest to develop economically as fast as possible so they can be best prepared for the future. The Netherlands handled a similar degree of their land being underwater using 19th century technology. But there is zero appetite for curbing growth. Bangladesh is a miracle of capitalism. When my dad was a kid 1 out of 3 children died by age 5. Now it’s 1 out of 40 and the life expectancy is 72 years. (Closing in on white Americans.) Nobody wants to change course on that.
      • mynegation 5y ago
        Oh I certainly did not mean Bangladesh should not develop. Even outside of the things like child mortality, transitioning to less carbon-intensive economy will require certain level of economic development. In the longer term, ignoring climate change in politics will not work though, because (a) rising seas do not care (b) even if developed world introduces enough innovation to fight climate change, they will find a way for everyone else either to adopt it or pay for it.
    • HamburgerEmoji 5y ago
      The NOAA sea level measuring station in that region of the world with the most history seems to be the one in Visakhapatnam in India. It shows 1.05mm/year rise, steady since 1940. Very little sign of acceleration. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=500-101 https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.... Here are some other charts with less history but that are closer to Bangladesh. They are also very slow and steady rates of rise with little sign of any acceleration. https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=500-106 https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.... https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=500-109 https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.... https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=500-110 https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station....
• betwixthewires 5y ago
  Imagine that tomorrow someone came and said that they have found a technique to remove any arbitrary amount of carbon dioxide for a trivial cost. What do you think that would do to the world? Whoever controls that is the most powerful person in the world because they can literally suffocate all life on the surface. Carbon capture technology is more dangerous than nuclear weapons. Just convert the carbon to biomass. Just plant trees.
  • dataflow 5y ago
    I'm not sure if you mean this seriously but even with a miracle technology it's going to be hard to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at dangerous levels without risking serious repercussions to yourself.
• alltakendamned 5y ago
  Can someone point me to an explanation how CO2 is removed from the atmosphere ? What's the process and what happens to it ?
  • ratboy666 5y ago
    CO2 is combined with sunlight by plants to produce wood (carbon) and O2. We take in the O2, combine it with carbon, and produce CO2. Its a cycle https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/carbon-cycle.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/carbon-cycle.html https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.8b02803 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.energyfuels.8b02803 which is CO2 to calcium carbonate. This happens in nature and is used by coral. So, all that CO2 in the atmosphere can become trees and coral.
• bob229 5y ago
  Lol good luck. We are a moronic doomed species. Good riddance to us
• andy_ppp 5y ago
  When we are going to start taxing coal manufactured products (like e.g. Bitcoin) correctly? There should already be a huge tax on, for example, Chinese made steel that imported both iron ore and coal from Australia by ship to be smelted in the mainland... Until we make capitalism work for climate it will work against it.
  • missedthecue 5y ago
    What's the difference between smelting the steel in Australia and shipping it to China, vs shipping the coal to China and smelting the steel on location? I don't think there is any material difference there.
    • exyi 5y ago
      Then both should be equally carbon-taxed when sold in EU/US, that would actually incentivize figuring out how to do these processes in low-carbon way (or, how to lie about the emissions)
    • andy_ppp 5y ago
      The marine fuel used to transport 60%+ more stuff, it increases the carbon cost in a way that’s hugely inefficient. I worked on a project for an unnamed Australian mining company trying to optimise the shipping routes and I just see this sort of thing as profoundly wasteful.
      • missedthecue 5y ago
        But my point is that you aren't necessarily reducing the amount of fuel used. Either you ship coal, and make steel there, or you keep the coal here and ship the finished steel off. Either way, the metal has to get to China.
        • andy_ppp 5y ago
          Iron ore is about 60% iron and the stats I’m seeing suggest 1 tonne of steel takes about 0.77 tonnes of coal. So you need fewer than half the amount of heavily polluting ships if the steel was made in Australia.
• ratboy666 5y ago
  Reminds me of: https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-02-12 https://dilbert.com/strip/2019-02-12
• m3at 5y ago
  Carbon capture certainly has some appeal, though it seems far from clearly being a net positive yet. Notably questionable IMO is the sequestration when used to simply pump more oil, so taxes end up subsidizing fuel extraction. Oil giants are some of the biggest DAC investors, along with airlines [1][2]. [1] https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2021/03/the-direct-air-capture-debate/ https://www.anthropocenemagazine.org/2021/03/the-direct-air-... [2] https://www.wired.com/story/is-it-time-for-an-emergency-rollout-of-carbon-eating-machines/ https://www.wired.com/story/is-it-time-for-an-emergency-roll...
• tehjoker 5y ago
  So they're just giving up. Carbon needs to stay in the ground, this is just fantasy until there's a real proven technology. See you all in hell.
• cryptonector 5y ago
  This is a very bad idea. Photosynthesis and sea life suck CO2 out of the atmosphere very fast, which is why CO2 isn't as high as people used to forecast it would be. Moreover, each glacial period ends with CO2 levels lower than at the end of the preceding one. The last one ended with CO2 levels not too far from starvation for photosynthesis. At the current rate of CO2 depletion we were headed for mass extinctions in just a few more glacial periods. Bringing CO2 up above 400ppm at the end of the current interglacial will extend life on Earth by a lot, possibly millions of years.
• bg117 5y ago
  Stitch in time saves nine. It's always better to move to a less polluting lifestyle instead of coming up with a round-about expensive way to capture what was released into the atmosphere. Trying to remove CO2 from the atmosphere is like capturing fart. Except that it is way more complicated.
• entropicgravity 5y ago
  In the antArctic the temperatures can get very close to the freezing point of C02. A little bit of extra energy (nuclear or wind?) would be enough to freeze atmospheric C02 into solid blocks. Would there be any easy and inexpensive way to store those blocks long term? Under the ice sheets? Bottom of the ocean? Send it into space on Musk's rockets?