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> 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 ye

• 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.
  • matthewdgreen 5y ago
    >at least if you believe the IPCC projection Maybe you shouldn't. The IPCC does good work, but their predictions are conservative and imperfect, and they mostly ignore tail risks. Up until 2012 they predicted that arctic summer sea ice would last until the 2050s, and now it's estimated to be gone by the 2030s.
    • BurningFrog 5y ago
      > The IPCC does good work, but... Does anyone do better projection work?
• 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
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    • spywaregorilla 5y ago
      Is "we" the united states sending a bill to other countries?
    • deleted 5y ago
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    • 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
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    • 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.
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• 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?