8 ms·

Climate scientist David Ho has a good thread on CDR: https://mastodon.world/@davidho/109511745525784891 https://mastodon.world/@davidho/109511745525784891 It's

by shafyy 3y ago

Climate scientist David Ho has a good thread on CDR: https://mastodon.world/@davidho/109511745525784891 https://mastodon.world/@davidho/109511745525784891 It's hard for people to visualize removing tons or billions of tons of #carbon #dioxide (CO₂). I propose we talked about CO₂ #removal (CDR) like a #time #machine (e.g., this machine will take us back 5 minutes). For example: Q: How far back in time does planting 100 million #trees take us? A: If one mature tree takes up an average of 25 kg of CO₂ per year, then 100 million trees will take up 2.5 MtCO₂. That's a time machine that takes us back 33 minutes and 6 seconds in a year. It's not a lot. The bottom line being: 99.999% of today's efforts need to focus on cutting emissions. This is like if you want to lose weight: It won't help you if you keep eating 5k kcalories a day and work out for 2 hours a day. Cut the intake, and then do some workout for the rest.

jvanderbot 3y ago
My friend runs this amazing ASCII website which also happens to be the news feed for their Carbon-capture-to-fuel devices. Like top comment suggests, it doesn't make sense to just capture, you have to get off carbon positive processes entirely. This company aims to do both, effectively. https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/
MichaelZuo 3y ago
The numbers don't look right, they would imply human CO2 generation of over 100 million tons per day.
- dvh 3y ago
  That's 14kg per human per day. Seems about right.
  - onos 3y ago
    And one tree does 25kg per year. So each person should plant 14 * 365 / 25= 204 trees. Seems very reasonable.
    - johndunne 3y ago
      Consider UK; 204 trees * 65 million people = 13.2 billion trees. Woodland estimates there's approx 3 billion trees in the UK now. That's over 4 fold increase in trees every year. I doubt the terrain/nature could support such a significant increase in just one year, let alone a number of years. But I like the idea of more trees. https://woodlands.co.uk/blog/woodland-economics/how-many-trees-are-there-in-the-uk-will-tree-planting-help-much https://woodlands.co.uk/blog/woodland-economics/how-many-tre...
      - kitd 3y ago
        The UK is one of the least forested countries in Europe. It is very doable.
        uoaei 3y ago
        It used to be covered in trees! Surely it can support forests again.
      - onos 3y ago
        You don’t need a new tree each year cause they can live decades. UK 4xing it’s tree coverage sounds doable and nice!
        johndunne 3y ago
        :facepalm: you’re right! Just 4xing alone is enough to cover the population’s emission. I’m totally up for upping the tree population in the UK.
      - tda 3y ago
        This planting should happen one time, not yearly. Of course every dead tree should be replaced though. If there are 204 trees capturing CO2 for every human (and these numbers are correct) we should effectively be carbon neutral. No idea if that is even remotely realistic though
      - pydry 3y ago
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Humans emit about 35 billion tons a year according to the reports which comes out to emit 100 million tons per day.
  - 14 3y ago
    Then we will need to see these machines scale up over time like we see solar doing now. I hope one day industry will be required to match their carbon capture with devices like this to their carbon output. Perhaps someone will make a solar farm in tandem with these co2 capture devices with the fans from these devices cooling the solar panels as solar panels work more efficiently at cooler times (1). 1: https://www.solar.com/learn/do-solar-panels-work-less-efficiently-at-certain-temperatures/ https://www.solar.com/learn/do-solar-panels-work-less-effici...
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      It’s not enough to get to zero emissions. We’re well past the point where we need to get to negative. And afaik these machines can’t scale to even a fraction of the way to net 0 unless we start building out fission/break through with fusion. Think of it this way. It’s more energy intensive to capture carbon than it was to generate the electricity from that carbon. The amount of energy required to make this work requires you to generate roughly the same order of magnitude of energy as has been emitted through the burning of fossil fuels since the beginning. I’m a big fission supporter but I doubt even fission could get to the cost scaling needed to generate all this energy effectively. Even fusion might struggle since we don’t actually yet know what the unit economics of it will be. We might get lucky and figure out a way where recapturing carbon is net cheaper energy than it generated but I doubt it as that feels like it would be very close to a perpetual motion machine scenario.
specialist 3y ago
Time machine is neat metaphor. Thanks for sharing. -- Net Zero is not enough. We must do Net Negative, a much bigger project than Net Zero. The goal is CO2 350ppm, or lower. Today is 417ppm. It will be >600ppm in 2050, our current global Net Zero deadline. There is no either-or. We need all the solutions. To stop and then reverse emissions: solar, wind, geothermal, nukes (old and much more new), storage, transmission, carbon direct capture, solar reflection, etc, etc. Renewables and electrification buy us a little bit of time. Meanwhile, we need to over invest in CDR. Birth of Flight type thinking. Moonshot type efforts. Dump money onto every semi-plausible idea. Any viable CDR solutions will take decades to scale up. So we must start today. -- PS- Ditto methane and other GHGs. Ditto fusion and solar reflection (mirrors). And maybe even, god forbid, geoengineering.
- slashdev 3y ago
  I think we have to get used to the idea that we’re not going to be less than 600 ppm, even with CO2 capture. I would be surprised if we manage to scale that enough to make a larger difference. But that’s still much better than we’d get at without attempting to remove CO2, so it’s an important goal. The one thing that might change that is very ambitious geo engineering. Which actually is the solution that makes most sense to me. But the very people who are most concerned about climate change don’t seem to support that.
  - specialist 3y ago
    Yup. We'll need additional cooling strategies. Dr Tao's MEER project is so audacious and crazy, it just might work. https://www.meer.org https://www.meer.org "Volts podcast: Dr. Ye Tao on a grand scheme to cool the Earth" [2022/06/08] https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-dr-ye-tao-on-a-grand https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-dr-ye-tao-on-a-grand "MEER | Mirrors For earth’s Energy Rebalancing with Dr Ye Tao at Harvard University" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZAIIe4X2MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZAIIe4X2MU TLDR: We need to shade a lot of agriculture. So make those shades mirrors too. Practical and scalable with today's tech and supply chain. Adding mirror shades to 15% of arable land cools enough to stay under 1.5C warming. > ...very people who are most concerned about climate change don’t seem to support [geoengineering]. Ya. Boomers. Whaddya gonna do? Fortunately, or hopefully, the cohort of anti-development environmentalists are finally being displaced. Meanwhile, at least someone is finally doing the prerequisite basic science on the problem: "How to think about solar radiation management" [2023/02/24] https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-think-about-solar-radiation https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-think-about-solar-radiation -- Please share any other climate crisis mitigation ideas you may stumble upon. My inner geek appreciates these kinds of hacks.
photochemsyn 3y ago
Even a complete cessation of fossil fuel use won't change the current trajectory much, it'll just mean the slope (rate of warming) doesn't get much steeper. This is due to the long lag (much of it related to slow ocean equilibration to atmospheric forcing), as well as the permafrost emissions: > "Given current rates of warming, an estimated 130-160 billion tons of permafrost carbon, could be released in the form of greenhouse gases—primarily carbon dioxide but with an important warming contribution from methane—during this century. Thus, emissions from thawing permafrost, in total equivalent to 61-75 ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide, could be similar to other Jluxes from other environmental changes, such as deforestation, but far less than fossil fuel emissions. New plant growth is expected to offset only ~20% of this carbon release, but this offset could help to delay impacts on climate." - "Climate change and the permafrost carbon feedback", Schur et al. (2015) Nature Humans will have to adapt to a new climate regime, by necessity. It's not going to be very pretty.
- briantakita 3y ago
  > Humans will have to adapt to a new climate regime, by necessity. It's not going to be very pretty. Somehow, I get a sense that the governing bodies are going to cause far more harm to people than the climate change. Similar to how Mao ordered the mass killing of Sparrows in a misguided belief that since sparrows eat crops, killing sparrows will increase yields. Unfortunately, killing the sparrows meant a predator of bugs (which eat crops in a more destructive manner) was drastically reduced. The crop yields plummeted largely from the policy to kill sparrows, resulting in millions people dying of starvation. Human institutions with their "brilliant" ideas of intervening with nature often make matters worse, especially when chasing a single metric & ignoring other aspects of a system.
  - garbagecoder 3y ago
    >Somehow, I get a sense that the governing bodies are going to cause far more harm to people than the climate change. That sense is called "your priors." This is a very simple, mostly linear switch on top of very very very complex systems, ie CO2 concentration. Your argument is basically "we broke it, but if we fix it it will be more broken" and there's just no evidence for that, just speculation. As long as other bad policy decisions aren't made because of the existence of CO2 sequestration there is absolutely no reason not to use it, but it's one out of perhaps 100 major initiatives that will be required to get us back to a good level. And by the way, if you're living in a man-made climate crisis and governments start doing bad shit (like Syria?) it's still the fault of the man-made climate crisis, at least in part.
tlb 3y ago
That must reflect a suboptimal choice of tree. Sequoias, for instance, can capture 400 kg / yr for a few hundred years.
GreedClarifies 3y ago
We created this problem by using energy and energy is the way back out of the problem. Energy released by burning one barrel of oil: ~6 GJ. Total number of barrels consumed per year: ~100M Total energy per year: 6 * 10^17 J Solar flux on 10^17 J/s or 3 * 10^24 if we had a machine that could convert CO2 -> Carbon in some stable form, we would need to use 10^-7 of the earth's solar flux. At a very high level such a machine would have two principle "knobs" (1) the efficiency and (2) percent of earth that would need to be covered. The product of the 2 must equal (or be less than) 10^7. Some example parameters: Efficiency : 10^-2 Area: 10^-5 This seems wildly plausible for some microbe that we design in the near future that lives in the ocean. This efficiency parameter is lower than current plants. For those wild eyed technologists that think we can beat nature by a good amount: Efficiency : 10^-1 Area: 10^-6 That's a couple of hundred square miles. That seems paltry for an "existential threat". Even a couple of orders of magnitude more area seem like they would be fine to sequester for this purpose. This type of technology seems well within our grasp (or within the next 20 years). I never understand the hysteria over this topic.
- nosmokewhereiam 3y ago
  Soil converts it to carbon.
- mrshadowgoose 3y ago
  > I never understand the hysteria over this topic. It seems to be a gross mix of a few things: -Most people are simply incapable of doing this type of analysis. They hear that "the sky is falling, and the only way out is to perpetually give up our comforts and live shittier lives", and they believe it. -People get really hung up on forcing their personal "correct" way of doing things on everyone else. Whatever their personally acceptable use of energy miraculously happens to be "acceptable", and anyone else who uses more is a "bad selfish person". -A lot of people seem to just enjoy the "us-vs-them" mentality, and shitting on others for their differing energy use seems to be a way to scratch that itch. Our entire civilization is fundamentally based on energy use, and we have so much energy available to us in the form of sunlight. We can unwind all our carbon issues, and enable everyone to consume as much energy as a typical American, and more. But people seem to be more interested in shaming and shrieking at each other over bullshit.
cameldrv 3y ago
This is an excellent unit of CO2 to communicate with. I’ve read Vacslav Simil’s books and I still have to look up numbers when hearing about a million tons of CO2.
- incrudible 3y ago
  Maybe 100 million trees sounds like a lot, but there is three trillion trees on earth right now and it is not like we are making a concerted effort to substantially increase that number.
it_citizen 3y ago
Yet I see carbon capture being a top pick in discussions about effective altruism and by the clean air task force. I believe their reasoning is that for the amount of money invested, it remains one of the most efficient investment to decarbonize. I don't know what to do with that information.
- blacksmith_tb 3y ago
  Presumably because getting the world to stop burning fossil fuels is an enormous effort, which we're not doing an especially good job of, so far. Carbon capture isn't practical yet either (opinions differ on if it ever can be, and there certainly are some big problems to overcome), but that might still make it easier to pull off than ceasing our CO2-producing ways.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- Sporktacular 3y ago
  Because no one is going to get rich by reducing consumption.
newsclues 3y ago
It's like bailing water out of a boat. Doesn't matter how fast you can bail the water if you can't stop or slow the leak coming in. Which is why world leaders flying jets to Climate Change Conferences makes no sense!
paxys 3y ago
Yup. First treat the problem then treat its symptoms.
credit_guy 3y ago
So 10 billion trees would take us back about 2.3 days. Still not a lot, but it’s something. 10 billion trees is what one can conservatively plant on 30 million acres, which is the area currently used in the US to produce bioethanol.

by shafyy 3y ago

jvanderbot 3y ago

My friend runs this amazing ASCII website which also happens to be the news feed for their Carbon-capture-to-fuel devices. Like top comment suggests, it doesn't make sense to just capture, you have to get off carbon positive processes entirely. This company aims to do both, effectively. https://terraformindustries.com/ https://terraformindustries.com/

MichaelZuo 3y ago

The numbers don't look right, they would imply human CO2 generation of over 100 million tons per day.

dvh 3y ago
That's 14kg per human per day. Seems about right.
- onos 3y ago
  And one tree does 25kg per year. So each person should plant 14 * 365 / 25= 204 trees. Seems very reasonable.
  - johndunne 3y ago
    Consider UK; 204 trees * 65 million people = 13.2 billion trees. Woodland estimates there's approx 3 billion trees in the UK now. That's over 4 fold increase in trees every year. I doubt the terrain/nature could support such a significant increase in just one year, let alone a number of years. But I like the idea of more trees. https://woodlands.co.uk/blog/woodland-economics/how-many-trees-are-there-in-the-uk-will-tree-planting-help-much https://woodlands.co.uk/blog/woodland-economics/how-many-tre...
    - kitd 3y ago
      The UK is one of the least forested countries in Europe. It is very doable.
      - uoaei 3y ago
        It used to be covered in trees! Surely it can support forests again.
    - onos 3y ago
      You don’t need a new tree each year cause they can live decades. UK 4xing it’s tree coverage sounds doable and nice!
      - johndunne 3y ago
        :facepalm: you’re right! Just 4xing alone is enough to cover the population’s emission. I’m totally up for upping the tree population in the UK.
    - tda 3y ago
      This planting should happen one time, not yearly. Of course every dead tree should be replaced though. If there are 204 trees capturing CO2 for every human (and these numbers are correct) we should effectively be carbon neutral. No idea if that is even remotely realistic though
    - pydry 3y ago
vlovich123 3y ago
Humans emit about 35 billion tons a year according to the reports which comes out to emit 100 million tons per day.
- 14 3y ago
  Then we will need to see these machines scale up over time like we see solar doing now. I hope one day industry will be required to match their carbon capture with devices like this to their carbon output. Perhaps someone will make a solar farm in tandem with these co2 capture devices with the fans from these devices cooling the solar panels as solar panels work more efficiently at cooler times (1). 1: https://www.solar.com/learn/do-solar-panels-work-less-efficiently-at-certain-temperatures/ https://www.solar.com/learn/do-solar-panels-work-less-effici...
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    It’s not enough to get to zero emissions. We’re well past the point where we need to get to negative. And afaik these machines can’t scale to even a fraction of the way to net 0 unless we start building out fission/break through with fusion. Think of it this way. It’s more energy intensive to capture carbon than it was to generate the electricity from that carbon. The amount of energy required to make this work requires you to generate roughly the same order of magnitude of energy as has been emitted through the burning of fossil fuels since the beginning. I’m a big fission supporter but I doubt even fission could get to the cost scaling needed to generate all this energy effectively. Even fusion might struggle since we don’t actually yet know what the unit economics of it will be. We might get lucky and figure out a way where recapturing carbon is net cheaper energy than it generated but I doubt it as that feels like it would be very close to a perpetual motion machine scenario.

specialist 3y ago

Time machine is neat metaphor. Thanks for sharing. -- Net Zero is not enough. We must do Net Negative, a much bigger project than Net Zero. The goal is CO2 350ppm, or lower. Today is 417ppm. It will be >600ppm in 2050, our current global Net Zero deadline. There is no either-or. We need all the solutions. To stop and then reverse emissions: solar, wind, geothermal, nukes (old and much more new), storage, transmission, carbon direct capture, solar reflection, etc, etc. Renewables and electrification buy us a little bit of time. Meanwhile, we need to over invest in CDR. Birth of Flight type thinking. Moonshot type efforts. Dump money onto every semi-plausible idea. Any viable CDR solutions will take decades to scale up. So we must start today. -- PS- Ditto methane and other GHGs. Ditto fusion and solar reflection (mirrors). And maybe even, god forbid, geoengineering.

slashdev 3y ago
I think we have to get used to the idea that we’re not going to be less than 600 ppm, even with CO2 capture. I would be surprised if we manage to scale that enough to make a larger difference. But that’s still much better than we’d get at without attempting to remove CO2, so it’s an important goal. The one thing that might change that is very ambitious geo engineering. Which actually is the solution that makes most sense to me. But the very people who are most concerned about climate change don’t seem to support that.
- specialist 3y ago
  Yup. We'll need additional cooling strategies. Dr Tao's MEER project is so audacious and crazy, it just might work. https://www.meer.org https://www.meer.org "Volts podcast: Dr. Ye Tao on a grand scheme to cool the Earth" [2022/06/08] https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-dr-ye-tao-on-a-grand https://www.volts.wtf/p/volts-podcast-dr-ye-tao-on-a-grand "MEER | Mirrors For earth’s Energy Rebalancing with Dr Ye Tao at Harvard University" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZAIIe4X2MU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZAIIe4X2MU TLDR: We need to shade a lot of agriculture. So make those shades mirrors too. Practical and scalable with today's tech and supply chain. Adding mirror shades to 15% of arable land cools enough to stay under 1.5C warming. > ...very people who are most concerned about climate change don’t seem to support [geoengineering]. Ya. Boomers. Whaddya gonna do? Fortunately, or hopefully, the cohort of anti-development environmentalists are finally being displaced. Meanwhile, at least someone is finally doing the prerequisite basic science on the problem: "How to think about solar radiation management" [2023/02/24] https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-think-about-solar-radiation https://www.volts.wtf/p/how-to-think-about-solar-radiation -- Please share any other climate crisis mitigation ideas you may stumble upon. My inner geek appreciates these kinds of hacks.

photochemsyn 3y ago

Even a complete cessation of fossil fuel use won't change the current trajectory much, it'll just mean the slope (rate of warming) doesn't get much steeper. This is due to the long lag (much of it related to slow ocean equilibration to atmospheric forcing), as well as the permafrost emissions: > "Given current rates of warming, an estimated 130-160 billion tons of permafrost carbon, could be released in the form of greenhouse gases—primarily carbon dioxide but with an important warming contribution from methane—during this century. Thus, emissions from thawing permafrost, in total equivalent to 61-75 ppm atmospheric carbon dioxide, could be similar to other Jluxes from other environmental changes, such as deforestation, but far less than fossil fuel emissions. New plant growth is expected to offset only ~20% of this carbon release, but this offset could help to delay impacts on climate." - "Climate change and the permafrost carbon feedback", Schur et al. (2015) Nature Humans will have to adapt to a new climate regime, by necessity. It's not going to be very pretty.

briantakita 3y ago
> Humans will have to adapt to a new climate regime, by necessity. It's not going to be very pretty. Somehow, I get a sense that the governing bodies are going to cause far more harm to people than the climate change. Similar to how Mao ordered the mass killing of Sparrows in a misguided belief that since sparrows eat crops, killing sparrows will increase yields. Unfortunately, killing the sparrows meant a predator of bugs (which eat crops in a more destructive manner) was drastically reduced. The crop yields plummeted largely from the policy to kill sparrows, resulting in millions people dying of starvation. Human institutions with their "brilliant" ideas of intervening with nature often make matters worse, especially when chasing a single metric & ignoring other aspects of a system.
- garbagecoder 3y ago
  >Somehow, I get a sense that the governing bodies are going to cause far more harm to people than the climate change. That sense is called "your priors." This is a very simple, mostly linear switch on top of very very very complex systems, ie CO2 concentration. Your argument is basically "we broke it, but if we fix it it will be more broken" and there's just no evidence for that, just speculation. As long as other bad policy decisions aren't made because of the existence of CO2 sequestration there is absolutely no reason not to use it, but it's one out of perhaps 100 major initiatives that will be required to get us back to a good level. And by the way, if you're living in a man-made climate crisis and governments start doing bad shit (like Syria?) it's still the fault of the man-made climate crisis, at least in part.

tlb 3y ago

That must reflect a suboptimal choice of tree. Sequoias, for instance, can capture 400 kg / yr for a few hundred years.

GreedClarifies 3y ago

We created this problem by using energy and energy is the way back out of the problem. Energy released by burning one barrel of oil: ~6 GJ. Total number of barrels consumed per year: ~100M Total energy per year: 6 * 10^17 J Solar flux on 10^17 J/s or 3 * 10^24 if we had a machine that could convert CO2 -> Carbon in some stable form, we would need to use 10^-7 of the earth's solar flux. At a very high level such a machine would have two principle "knobs" (1) the efficiency and (2) percent of earth that would need to be covered. The product of the 2 must equal (or be less than) 10^7. Some example parameters: Efficiency : 10^-2 Area: 10^-5 This seems wildly plausible for some microbe that we design in the near future that lives in the ocean. This efficiency parameter is lower than current plants. For those wild eyed technologists that think we can beat nature by a good amount: Efficiency : 10^-1 Area: 10^-6 That's a couple of hundred square miles. That seems paltry for an "existential threat". Even a couple of orders of magnitude more area seem like they would be fine to sequester for this purpose. This type of technology seems well within our grasp (or within the next 20 years). I never understand the hysteria over this topic.

nosmokewhereiam 3y ago
Soil converts it to carbon.
mrshadowgoose 3y ago
> I never understand the hysteria over this topic. It seems to be a gross mix of a few things: -Most people are simply incapable of doing this type of analysis. They hear that "the sky is falling, and the only way out is to perpetually give up our comforts and live shittier lives", and they believe it. -People get really hung up on forcing their personal "correct" way of doing things on everyone else. Whatever their personally acceptable use of energy miraculously happens to be "acceptable", and anyone else who uses more is a "bad selfish person". -A lot of people seem to just enjoy the "us-vs-them" mentality, and shitting on others for their differing energy use seems to be a way to scratch that itch. Our entire civilization is fundamentally based on energy use, and we have so much energy available to us in the form of sunlight. We can unwind all our carbon issues, and enable everyone to consume as much energy as a typical American, and more. But people seem to be more interested in shaming and shrieking at each other over bullshit.

cameldrv 3y ago

This is an excellent unit of CO2 to communicate with. I’ve read Vacslav Simil’s books and I still have to look up numbers when hearing about a million tons of CO2.

incrudible 3y ago
Maybe 100 million trees sounds like a lot, but there is three trillion trees on earth right now and it is not like we are making a concerted effort to substantially increase that number.

it_citizen 3y ago

Yet I see carbon capture being a top pick in discussions about effective altruism and by the clean air task force. I believe their reasoning is that for the amount of money invested, it remains one of the most efficient investment to decarbonize. I don't know what to do with that information.

blacksmith_tb 3y ago
Presumably because getting the world to stop burning fossil fuels is an enormous effort, which we're not doing an especially good job of, so far. Carbon capture isn't practical yet either (opinions differ on if it ever can be, and there certainly are some big problems to overcome), but that might still make it easier to pull off than ceasing our CO2-producing ways.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
Sporktacular 3y ago
Because no one is going to get rich by reducing consumption.

newsclues 3y ago

It's like bailing water out of a boat. Doesn't matter how fast you can bail the water if you can't stop or slow the leak coming in. Which is why world leaders flying jets to Climate Change Conferences makes no sense!

paxys 3y ago

Yup. First treat the problem then treat its symptoms.

credit_guy 3y ago

So 10 billion trees would take us back about 2.3 days. Still not a lot, but it’s something. 10 billion trees is what one can conservatively plant on 30 million acres, which is the area currently used in the US to produce bioethanol.