3 ms·

> As a counterpoint we, as humans, got here in roughly 100 hundred years with the bulk of the damage done most recently. Right, of course. In the simplest pos

> As a counterpoint we, as humans, got here in roughly 100 hundred years with the bulk of the damage done most recently. Right, of course. In the simplest possible terms, causing a mess is always easier than cleaning it up. That is true in every sense; time, energy and resources. I tried to answer this question in my research. In other words, if we can make a mess in 100, 200 or 500 years (take your pick, we started burning oil a long time ago), why did we make such an impact and why is it that we can't clean it up just as quickly. In the end I think it boils down to energy. It's a long topic. I'll try to summarize it as best as I can. When we burn one liter, gallon or barrel of oil we are burning a concentrated form of energy that took mountains of plant and other matter and an unimaginable amount of time and energy to produce. I have not run the numbers at all. I would not be surprised to find out that the only energy source on earth that is denser (per unit mass) than oil is nuclear. A loose way to think of this is that each barrel of oil burned might represent burning down a forest-load of trees. I can't calculate an accurate number because it is so hard to get reasonable estimates. Just judging from the results then: If, in 100 years, we did what normal took 100K years (a 100 ppm increase in atmospheric CO2), then (very hand-wavy now) we are burning a thousands times more fuel per day than whatever occurred in the natural cycle. This is, in my opinion, also why we just can't fix this without, I don't know, magic of some fundamentally incredible discovery of the scale of the Theory of Relativity. We need a ridiculous amount of energy and resources to fix this. Most people think local/laboratory, when, in reality, this has to be viewed at a planetary scale. And, at that scale, we might just need more energy and resources than exist on this planet if we claim to be able to fix this (drop it by 100 ppm) in 20 to 50 years. I would really like to see honest scientific conversation around this reality. Why? Because, if it is true that we cannot fix it, we should be investing money, resources and brain-power on how to deal with it. I don't think I am wrong. I have yet to see any proposed solution --of any kind-- prove viability at a planetary scale. If I am right, we are wasting valuable time and resources. I just read this article this morning [0]. Quite a revelation. I am still trying to understand it. No conclusions on my part yet. There's so much we don't know. And, again, to be repetitive, we can barely control things at a local level (coal and forest fires) and we are actually claiming to be able to fix an entire planet in two decades. At some point one has to take a moment to think that this might just not be a reasonable claim. I'll repeat that none of what I say is to propose we do not need to cleanup our act. We definitely do, at all levels. I just don't want lies about why we should do it. And, of course, I firmly believe nuclear is the solution to energy generation. From what I've seen so far, nothing else can compare, not even close. [0] https://www.ornl.gov/news/inland-water-carbon-emissions-rise https://www.ornl.gov/news/inland-water-carbon-emissions-rise

defrost 4y ago
> I tried to answer this question in my research. In other words, if we can make a mess in 100, 200 or 500 years (take your pick, we started burning oil a long time ago), Start from ~1880 or so, look at the records for (deep underground) oil consumption (as opposed to whale oil) and watch the consumption rates slowly ramp up with the adoption of cars, the industrialisation of WWI and WWII, and the post war boomer era ... it's not so much the "burning oil" that is the issue, it's the sheer scale of it once it really ramped up. > .. We need a ridiculous amount of energy and resources to fix this. Most people think local/laboratory, when, in reality, this has to be viewed at a planetary scale. Regardless of the vast base material tonnages and time to decay, compress, and transition that funnel INTO a barrel of oil, what's at issue is the percentage of that barrel that finds it way into the atmosphere as C02 and the means by which we can reduce that total and means by which we can extract C02 over the Holocene mean quantities. I'm not sure how your hard numeracy | physics | technical paper reading is, but have a look at the mean estimate of daily global energy consumption by humans (petawatts) and the daily energy fall on earth from the sun .. now you have an order of the energy at play here. Yes, this is "moving Mt. Fuji" scale engineering that needs to take place across the planet, yes there are existing companies that already work at this scale - the daily energy and material needs of human consumption are met by the likes of Rio Tinto, BHP, Exxon, BP, et al. Two decades isn't the timescale for a complete fix, two decades is the time to make a hard start on getting stuck into breaking the back on attack of a hard problem .. bear in mind the problem grew exponentially over 100 years from sweet FA to ever more every day, the pullback has the advantage of already having industry at scale, the challenge is to address the solution. Re: your [0] This is an Oak Ridge PR release (not the core technical papers) announcing they have a better grasp on part of the preexisting "non human status quo" carbon cycle - this is good to know and useful, but isn't carbon | methane emissions that are causing the "increase over the norm" that we have seen, this is "the norm" that acts as the reference base.
- robomartin 4y ago
  The paper is linked in the Oak Ridge release. That's what I am reading. I can't say anything intelligent about it yet. I do have a full time job that consumes 12 hours a day, almost 7 days a week (the life of an entrepreneur). Posting here takes far longer than I should devote to this. The fallacy with the commonly used argument about how much solar energy comes into the planet is one that ignores the fact that this energy isn't, for lack of a better term, doing nothing. A silly comparison would be to say something like "look at how much energy I have in my Tesla" and then attempt to use it both to drive the car and power your home. Sure, you can theoretically do both, yet the car's range will be greatly reduced and your home will go dark in less than a day. The assumption that we have so much energy often treats this as excess energy. Well, it isn't. We can only tap into it so much before we start to affect other things. It's Conservation of Energy at its most based: It can't be created. It is transformed. Right now, all of that energy from the sun is in use. It is being transformed into so many things it is impossible to list them. The estimates for just how much energy is required to extract CO2 from the atmosphere at a global scale are not very accurate. This is to be expected. No technology exists today that can do this at that scale. The numbers range from a requirement of 25% of all the electrical energy produced in the world to somewhere around eight times the worlds electric power production. Either end of that scale is a disaster of global scale waiting to happen. We can't go there. We probably have to quadruple energy production world-wide and might still be short. Not to mention the massive consequences of producing that much energy. Energy is transformed from one form to another and every time you do that. Heat, for example, is a byproduct of almost any transformation. And yet, there's another reality. All of this is absolutely futile unless we stop generating CO2. It would be a sad joke to quadruple world power generation (not sure it is even possible) only to add more CO2 than we can extract in the process. You don't quadruple anything at a global scale without producing an unimaginably large amount of CO2 and waste material. Restricting this to the US. We have to convert our entire ground transportation system to electric power. Sounds great. So long as one does not run through some of the basic physics of what that would mean. A few years ago I wrote a simulation in order to try and understand just how much more energy the US would need to go 100% electric. I divided the population into time zones, created thousands of behavioral patterns based on such things as drive distance, fast and slow charging, urban vs. rural, etc. The simulation resulted in a range between 900 GW and 1400 GW. This is additional power, over and above what the US produces today. How much is that? We produce 1200 GW of power today. That means a vast nation like the US would need to create a full duplicate (in terms of power) of the current power system. And I do mean this in the full sense of the term. The wires we have carrying power today could not handle transporting twice as much. The entire power distribution grid needs to be rebuilt to double its transport capacity. It is important to have a sense of proportion for things at this scale. A typical nuclear power plant produces 1 GW. In other words, the US would need to construct over a thousand nuclear power plants just to enable electric cars. This will not get us to zero carbon emissions. Not even close. And then we have to produce even more power to eventually run carbon capture systems. That could very well mean adding another 500 to 1000 GW to the power grid. Nobody knows. Once you start looking at the subject while exploring all the requisite tentacles, it is hard to avoid the thought that, at best there's a high level of hubris involved. An honest analysis of the matter includes conclusions such as the cost of oil having to come down to $20~$40 a barrel. This sounds crazy, until one looks at the cost of infrastructure and carbon capture systems at a global scale, all of which are driven by transportation and other costs that are inextricably linked to the cost of oil. Simply put, in the US alone, we cannot afford to engage in infrastructure construction at such a scale...with fuel at these prices it is impossible to pay for it. This topic isn't simple at all. And it sure as heck does not benefit from people coming at it from a blind ideological perspective, as many (most?) do today.

defrost 4y ago

> I tried to answer this question in my research. In other words, if we can make a mess in 100, 200 or 500 years (take your pick, we started burning oil a long time ago), Start from ~1880 or so, look at the records for (deep underground) oil consumption (as opposed to whale oil) and watch the consumption rates slowly ramp up with the adoption of cars, the industrialisation of WWI and WWII, and the post war boomer era ... it's not so much the "burning oil" that is the issue, it's the sheer scale of it once it really ramped up. > .. We need a ridiculous amount of energy and resources to fix this. Most people think local/laboratory, when, in reality, this has to be viewed at a planetary scale. Regardless of the vast base material tonnages and time to decay, compress, and transition that funnel INTO a barrel of oil, what's at issue is the percentage of that barrel that finds it way into the atmosphere as C02 and the means by which we can reduce that total and means by which we can extract C02 over the Holocene mean quantities. I'm not sure how your hard numeracy | physics | technical paper reading is, but have a look at the mean estimate of daily global energy consumption by humans (petawatts) and the daily energy fall on earth from the sun .. now you have an order of the energy at play here. Yes, this is "moving Mt. Fuji" scale engineering that needs to take place across the planet, yes there are existing companies that already work at this scale - the daily energy and material needs of human consumption are met by the likes of Rio Tinto, BHP, Exxon, BP, et al. Two decades isn't the timescale for a complete fix, two decades is the time to make a hard start on getting stuck into breaking the back on attack of a hard problem .. bear in mind the problem grew exponentially over 100 years from sweet FA to ever more every day, the pullback has the advantage of already having industry at scale, the challenge is to address the solution. Re: your [0] This is an Oak Ridge PR release (not the core technical papers) announcing they have a better grasp on part of the preexisting "non human status quo" carbon cycle - this is good to know and useful, but isn't carbon | methane emissions that are causing the "increase over the norm" that we have seen, this is "the norm" that acts as the reference base.

robomartin 4y ago
The paper is linked in the Oak Ridge release. That's what I am reading. I can't say anything intelligent about it yet. I do have a full time job that consumes 12 hours a day, almost 7 days a week (the life of an entrepreneur). Posting here takes far longer than I should devote to this. The fallacy with the commonly used argument about how much solar energy comes into the planet is one that ignores the fact that this energy isn't, for lack of a better term, doing nothing. A silly comparison would be to say something like "look at how much energy I have in my Tesla" and then attempt to use it both to drive the car and power your home. Sure, you can theoretically do both, yet the car's range will be greatly reduced and your home will go dark in less than a day. The assumption that we have so much energy often treats this as excess energy. Well, it isn't. We can only tap into it so much before we start to affect other things. It's Conservation of Energy at its most based: It can't be created. It is transformed. Right now, all of that energy from the sun is in use. It is being transformed into so many things it is impossible to list them. The estimates for just how much energy is required to extract CO2 from the atmosphere at a global scale are not very accurate. This is to be expected. No technology exists today that can do this at that scale. The numbers range from a requirement of 25% of all the electrical energy produced in the world to somewhere around eight times the worlds electric power production. Either end of that scale is a disaster of global scale waiting to happen. We can't go there. We probably have to quadruple energy production world-wide and might still be short. Not to mention the massive consequences of producing that much energy. Energy is transformed from one form to another and every time you do that. Heat, for example, is a byproduct of almost any transformation. And yet, there's another reality. All of this is absolutely futile unless we stop generating CO2. It would be a sad joke to quadruple world power generation (not sure it is even possible) only to add more CO2 than we can extract in the process. You don't quadruple anything at a global scale without producing an unimaginably large amount of CO2 and waste material. Restricting this to the US. We have to convert our entire ground transportation system to electric power. Sounds great. So long as one does not run through some of the basic physics of what that would mean. A few years ago I wrote a simulation in order to try and understand just how much more energy the US would need to go 100% electric. I divided the population into time zones, created thousands of behavioral patterns based on such things as drive distance, fast and slow charging, urban vs. rural, etc. The simulation resulted in a range between 900 GW and 1400 GW. This is additional power, over and above what the US produces today. How much is that? We produce 1200 GW of power today. That means a vast nation like the US would need to create a full duplicate (in terms of power) of the current power system. And I do mean this in the full sense of the term. The wires we have carrying power today could not handle transporting twice as much. The entire power distribution grid needs to be rebuilt to double its transport capacity. It is important to have a sense of proportion for things at this scale. A typical nuclear power plant produces 1 GW. In other words, the US would need to construct over a thousand nuclear power plants just to enable electric cars. This will not get us to zero carbon emissions. Not even close. And then we have to produce even more power to eventually run carbon capture systems. That could very well mean adding another 500 to 1000 GW to the power grid. Nobody knows. Once you start looking at the subject while exploring all the requisite tentacles, it is hard to avoid the thought that, at best there's a high level of hubris involved. An honest analysis of the matter includes conclusions such as the cost of oil having to come down to $20~$40 a barrel. This sounds crazy, until one looks at the cost of infrastructure and carbon capture systems at a global scale, all of which are driven by transportation and other costs that are inextricably linked to the cost of oil. Simply put, in the US alone, we cannot afford to engage in infrastructure construction at such a scale...with fuel at these prices it is impossible to pay for it. This topic isn't simple at all. And it sure as heck does not benefit from people coming at it from a blind ideological perspective, as many (most?) do today.