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Sequestering billions of tons of carbon every year requires billions of tons of chemical feedstock that we normally produce in the thousands of tons. That indus

Sequestering billions of tons of carbon every year requires billions of tons of chemical feedstock that we normally produce in the thousands of tons. That industrial capacity would have to be created. Scaling up the mining operations to the necessary level alone would be tangled in politics for decades, since it implies strip-mining the planet for the raw materials. Many of the emission neutral DAC models I’ve looked at lose 10% — billions of tons — of their industrial chemistry inputs every year even assuming expansive recycling of the input components to the extent possible. The annual loss greatly exceeds current annual production for all purposes.

jiggawatts 3y ago
Not to mention the energy costs of all of that industrial activity!
- barry-cotter 3y ago
  People talk about climate change as causing a 1m rise in sea levels. Averting that kind of economic and population dislocation makes the kind of energy costs being discussed seem like pissing into the ocean.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    1m rise is tiny cost wise compared tk the global economy, just look at the Netherlands, who have calculated[1] they'd need to spend under 0.1% of their GDP to get new barriers and flood control in place to counteract 1m sea level rise. The effects on agriculture are far more severe than sea level rise. [1] http://www.deltacommissie.com/en/advies http://www.deltacommissie.com/en/advies
  - ilyt 3y ago
    Right but you when you can put all the industry and money into not producing that much CO2 in the first place I'd wager that's far more effective way to having less CO2 in atmosphere than trying to capture it post-factum. Or just slapping the same CO2 sequestering method at the end of industrial chain that creates CO2 rather than trying to catch it later.
barry-cotter 3y ago
> Scaling up the mining operations to the necessary level alone would be tangled in politics for decades, since it implies strip-mining the planet for the raw materials. Better to resign ourselves to poverty and lower living standards than try to actually solve the problem quickly because it seems hard, right?
- tsimionescu 3y ago
  You don't need to live in poverty to live in a carbon-neutral world. The vast majority of the problem could be tackled by some reduction in the massive over-consumption and over-production of goods currently happening all over the world.
  - enraged_camel 3y ago
    All that consumption drives GDP though. As long as we continue to worship that (both economically and politically), we are unlikely to voluntarily consume less at the national level.
  - concordDance 3y ago
    Could it really? The biggest CO2 producer in the world is China (who emits more CO2 than the USA, EU and India combined), a big chunk of that on building buildings, are they massively overconsuming? I don't see how modern productive agriculture (without which the supportable world population without completely destroying the remaining natural areas of the world goes down to 2-3 billion) would work in a carbon neutral world without using giant solar or wind farms to essentially produce artificial fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2... which sounds like carbon capture tbh.
    - tsimionescu 3y ago
      China is producing the majority of junk the rest of the world consumes. Also, while of course, China needs to be a partner in reducing emissions, but it's also important to remember that they are emitting less per capita then many EU nations, not to mention than the USA. The ideal here would be for the world's richest countries, whose wealth has been built off of emitting the majority of the CO2 already in the atmosphere, to fund massive green energy projects in countries like China and India. There's no reason why China should be building new coal plants to bring electricity to their population while the already electrified EU and USA twiddle their thumbs and import another hundred million tonnes of plastic doodads.

jiggawatts 3y ago

Not to mention the energy costs of all of that industrial activity!

barry-cotter 3y ago
People talk about climate change as causing a 1m rise in sea levels. Averting that kind of economic and population dislocation makes the kind of energy costs being discussed seem like pissing into the ocean.
- concordDance 3y ago
  1m rise is tiny cost wise compared tk the global economy, just look at the Netherlands, who have calculated[1] they'd need to spend under 0.1% of their GDP to get new barriers and flood control in place to counteract 1m sea level rise. The effects on agriculture are far more severe than sea level rise. [1] http://www.deltacommissie.com/en/advies http://www.deltacommissie.com/en/advies
- ilyt 3y ago
  Right but you when you can put all the industry and money into not producing that much CO2 in the first place I'd wager that's far more effective way to having less CO2 in atmosphere than trying to capture it post-factum. Or just slapping the same CO2 sequestering method at the end of industrial chain that creates CO2 rather than trying to catch it later.

barry-cotter 3y ago

> Scaling up the mining operations to the necessary level alone would be tangled in politics for decades, since it implies strip-mining the planet for the raw materials. Better to resign ourselves to poverty and lower living standards than try to actually solve the problem quickly because it seems hard, right?

tsimionescu 3y ago
You don't need to live in poverty to live in a carbon-neutral world. The vast majority of the problem could be tackled by some reduction in the massive over-consumption and over-production of goods currently happening all over the world.
- enraged_camel 3y ago
  All that consumption drives GDP though. As long as we continue to worship that (both economically and politically), we are unlikely to voluntarily consume less at the national level.
- concordDance 3y ago
  Could it really? The biggest CO2 producer in the world is China (who emits more CO2 than the USA, EU and India combined), a big chunk of that on building buildings, are they massively overconsuming? I don't see how modern productive agriculture (without which the supportable world population without completely destroying the remaining natural areas of the world goes down to 2-3 billion) would work in a carbon neutral world without using giant solar or wind farms to essentially produce artificial fossil fuels from atmospheric CO2... which sounds like carbon capture tbh.
  - tsimionescu 3y ago
    China is producing the majority of junk the rest of the world consumes. Also, while of course, China needs to be a partner in reducing emissions, but it's also important to remember that they are emitting less per capita then many EU nations, not to mention than the USA. The ideal here would be for the world's richest countries, whose wealth has been built off of emitting the majority of the CO2 already in the atmosphere, to fund massive green energy projects in countries like China and India. There's no reason why China should be building new coal plants to bring electricity to their population while the already electrified EU and USA twiddle their thumbs and import another hundred million tonnes of plastic doodads.