5 ms·

Before anyone points out that trees already handle this, let me clarify: We need to pursue all available options simultaneously to effectively combat climate c

Before anyone points out that trees already handle this, let me clarify: We need to pursue all available options simultaneously to effectively combat climate change. This includes: Reducing reliance on carbon-based energy to lower emissions. Implementing carbon capture and long-term storage solutions to remove excess CO₂ from the atmosphere.

acc_297 2y ago
+ it can be worked out based on photosynthesis efficiency and available surface area that we would need ~4 earths of trees to handle current human CO2 production rate Planting trees is nice and should be done but isn’t a solution for drawdown
the-chitmonger 2y ago
Fully agree. In my college ecology course, my professor stressed that sequestration/capture, while not ideal, will likely be crucial as our production of greenhouse gases outpaces the rate of absorption by plant biomass and ocean algae.
- OutOfHere 2y ago
  Sequestration underground doesn't really work. It is based on lies. It will just bubble back up when the Earth's plates move. For capture to work, it has to be reacted with a stable absorber, so it cannot bubble back up into the atmosphere.
  - mapt 2y ago
    This. We have a worked example for geologically stable carbon sequestration without any novel chemical bonding, and that's storing carbon in compounds that are mostly unhydrogenated carbon by mass, deep underground: Charcoal. If you aim to sequester carbon without some kind of reactant (and most reactants are incredibly energy intensive to make & stage, burning more CO2 than captured), you have to effectively make charcoal. Growing a forest, pyrolyzing it, and burying the charcoal, is the inverse process of coal mining, and is the default comparator on cost, effort, and materials for any sort of carbon sequestration scheme.
    - danbruc 2y ago
      There is not nearly enough available space on the surface of Earth to make any dent into the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over any relevant time frame. We burnt through millions of years of sequestrated carbon in a century and some, but we do not have millions of years to do the sequestration again.
      - OutOfHere 2y ago
        If we solve fusion, or even if we exploit space solar on a massive scale, we should in principle have all the energy we need to put the carbon back into charcoal.
        danbruc 2y ago
        Sure, with enough energy we can do whatever we want, but we just do not have enough clean energy, that is the very problem carbon capture is supposed to address.
        OutOfHere 2y ago
        It would be completely disingenuous to use carbon capture as an excuse to continue the use of fossil fuels. Firstly, it will be so price inefficient. Secondly, it delays the inevitable, meaning the transition to clean energy, as some European countries already have accomplished. The demand for carbon capture makes more sense after we have already transitioned to clean energy, as we can then begin to reverse the damage that excess CO2 and methane have been causing. The financial model for doing this is by a long-acting insurance firm that not only collects insurance but also uses the premium to preemptively take restorative actions.
        danbruc 2y ago
        Carbon capture is of course less efficient than not burning fossil fuels to begin with, so the first goal must be to no longer emit new carbon. Then it may make sense to capture some carbon and turn it into synthetic fuels for certain applications because of the energy density and ease of storage. Maybe even for plastics and similar stuff. After that, undoing a century of emissions, that is a monumental challenge. Depending on how exactly we want to store the carbon, we might need more or less the same amount of energy that we got out of fossil fuels over the last century. Double our renewable energy generation capacity and then use half of it for half a century - roughly taking into account the increase in emissions over the past century - to capture carbon.
Workaccount2 2y ago
The papers lead author stated that 200g of the material can absorb as much CO2 in a year as a tree.
- danbruc 2y ago
  Optimistically [1] 200 g can capture 250 kg carbon dioxide per year, at the expense of heating the material almost 28,000 times from ambient to 60°C. And that still leaves you with 139 m³ of carbon dioxide gas, what do you do with that? [1] 2.05 mmol/g at half capacity equals 45 mg/g per cycle, and ignoring heating and cooling times one can fit 27,976.6 cycles into a year. Overall that is 1.262 kg/g/y.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    Cool, we only produced 37 000 000 000 tonnes of co2 in the last 100 years
    - danbruc 2y ago
      That is last year alone. Over the last 100 years it is probably more like 50 times that.
      - lm28469 2y ago
        Indeed, that's per year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
- mapt 2y ago
  What is that supposed to mean? According to their calculations, they're getting 1-2mmol/g adsorption. That means 44-88g of CO2 captured per kilogram of adsorbent.
  - danans 2y ago
    My guess is that it means that the material can be reused by capturing/releasing/sequestering multiple times, and that number reflects how much C02 it can capture given how many cycles can be completed in one year.
lm28469 2y ago
> We need to pursue all available options simultaneously to effectively combat climate change. lol, all available options as long as we don't actually look at the root cause and just throw more money and tech at it in the hope it automagically stops hint: infinite growth in a finite system doesn't work PS: and if you care about results, we've been exploring every solution for quite some time now, you know after all our leaders get together in Paris or other fancy place and talk about clean solutions. Well we've been release more CO2 every year. The only time it dipped was during covid when ... you guessed it ... we had negative growth, aka degrowth. We never had so much sustainable energy production but we also never produced so much co2 and pollution
- weego 2y ago
  We can throw about causation arguments till the rivers dry up. Will it get us anywhere? Doing something will always win against doing nothing because we're fighting over who has the most virtuous opinion.
  - lm28469 2y ago
    > Doing something will always win against doing nothing Yeah, like we used to pray our gods for more rain, it certainly doesn't hurt, proving it is useful is much more difficult though. We focus on co2 because it's the only thing we can pretend to be able to tackle a little bit while ignoring the rest like ocean acidification, massive global collapse of wildlife, including insects, rainwater being unsafe to drink pretty much everywhere in the world, micro plastics polluting the entire planet and virtually every single living organism, PFAs, increase in chances of world wide simultaneous crop failure, &c. 99% of what we're doing is green washing or wishful thinking (or sinking, when it comes to co2), the truth is that we won't be able to sustain the western lifestyle much longer, especially not when China, India, and Africa are coming for their slice of the cake If you think 3000kg EVs transporting 80kg of meat and niche carbon sinking tech will save us I have a bridge to sell you.
- nozzlegear 2y ago
  Degrowth doesn't work either, it's not a solution and nobody will ever go for it. From the abstract of Reviewing studies of degrowth: Are claims matched by data, methods and policy analysis?: > (2) the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis; > (3) few studies use quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer ones use formal modelling; > (4) the first and second type tend to include small samples or focus on non-representative cases; > (5) most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies; > (6) of the few studies on public support, a majority concludes that degrowth strategies and policies are socially-politically infeasible; Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800924002210 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092...

acc_297 2y ago

+ it can be worked out based on photosynthesis efficiency and available surface area that we would need ~4 earths of trees to handle current human CO2 production rate Planting trees is nice and should be done but isn’t a solution for drawdown

the-chitmonger 2y ago

Fully agree. In my college ecology course, my professor stressed that sequestration/capture, while not ideal, will likely be crucial as our production of greenhouse gases outpaces the rate of absorption by plant biomass and ocean algae.

OutOfHere 2y ago
Sequestration underground doesn't really work. It is based on lies. It will just bubble back up when the Earth's plates move. For capture to work, it has to be reacted with a stable absorber, so it cannot bubble back up into the atmosphere.
- mapt 2y ago
  This. We have a worked example for geologically stable carbon sequestration without any novel chemical bonding, and that's storing carbon in compounds that are mostly unhydrogenated carbon by mass, deep underground: Charcoal. If you aim to sequester carbon without some kind of reactant (and most reactants are incredibly energy intensive to make & stage, burning more CO2 than captured), you have to effectively make charcoal. Growing a forest, pyrolyzing it, and burying the charcoal, is the inverse process of coal mining, and is the default comparator on cost, effort, and materials for any sort of carbon sequestration scheme.
  - danbruc 2y ago
    There is not nearly enough available space on the surface of Earth to make any dent into the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over any relevant time frame. We burnt through millions of years of sequestrated carbon in a century and some, but we do not have millions of years to do the sequestration again.
    - OutOfHere 2y ago
      If we solve fusion, or even if we exploit space solar on a massive scale, we should in principle have all the energy we need to put the carbon back into charcoal.
      - danbruc 2y ago
        Sure, with enough energy we can do whatever we want, but we just do not have enough clean energy, that is the very problem carbon capture is supposed to address.
        OutOfHere 2y ago
        It would be completely disingenuous to use carbon capture as an excuse to continue the use of fossil fuels. Firstly, it will be so price inefficient. Secondly, it delays the inevitable, meaning the transition to clean energy, as some European countries already have accomplished. The demand for carbon capture makes more sense after we have already transitioned to clean energy, as we can then begin to reverse the damage that excess CO2 and methane have been causing. The financial model for doing this is by a long-acting insurance firm that not only collects insurance but also uses the premium to preemptively take restorative actions.
        danbruc 2y ago
        Carbon capture is of course less efficient than not burning fossil fuels to begin with, so the first goal must be to no longer emit new carbon. Then it may make sense to capture some carbon and turn it into synthetic fuels for certain applications because of the energy density and ease of storage. Maybe even for plastics and similar stuff. After that, undoing a century of emissions, that is a monumental challenge. Depending on how exactly we want to store the carbon, we might need more or less the same amount of energy that we got out of fossil fuels over the last century. Double our renewable energy generation capacity and then use half of it for half a century - roughly taking into account the increase in emissions over the past century - to capture carbon.

Workaccount2 2y ago

The papers lead author stated that 200g of the material can absorb as much CO2 in a year as a tree.

danbruc 2y ago
Optimistically [1] 200 g can capture 250 kg carbon dioxide per year, at the expense of heating the material almost 28,000 times from ambient to 60°C. And that still leaves you with 139 m³ of carbon dioxide gas, what do you do with that? [1] 2.05 mmol/g at half capacity equals 45 mg/g per cycle, and ignoring heating and cooling times one can fit 27,976.6 cycles into a year. Overall that is 1.262 kg/g/y.
- lm28469 2y ago
  Cool, we only produced 37 000 000 000 tonnes of co2 in the last 100 years
  - danbruc 2y ago
    That is last year alone. Over the last 100 years it is probably more like 50 times that.
    - lm28469 2y ago
      Indeed, that's per year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
mapt 2y ago
What is that supposed to mean? According to their calculations, they're getting 1-2mmol/g adsorption. That means 44-88g of CO2 captured per kilogram of adsorbent.
- danans 2y ago
  My guess is that it means that the material can be reused by capturing/releasing/sequestering multiple times, and that number reflects how much C02 it can capture given how many cycles can be completed in one year.

lm28469 2y ago

> We need to pursue all available options simultaneously to effectively combat climate change. lol, all available options as long as we don't actually look at the root cause and just throw more money and tech at it in the hope it automagically stops hint: infinite growth in a finite system doesn't work PS: and if you care about results, we've been exploring every solution for quite some time now, you know after all our leaders get together in Paris or other fancy place and talk about clean solutions. Well we've been release more CO2 every year. The only time it dipped was during covid when ... you guessed it ... we had negative growth, aka degrowth. We never had so much sustainable energy production but we also never produced so much co2 and pollution

weego 2y ago
We can throw about causation arguments till the rivers dry up. Will it get us anywhere? Doing something will always win against doing nothing because we're fighting over who has the most virtuous opinion.
- lm28469 2y ago
  > Doing something will always win against doing nothing Yeah, like we used to pray our gods for more rain, it certainly doesn't hurt, proving it is useful is much more difficult though. We focus on co2 because it's the only thing we can pretend to be able to tackle a little bit while ignoring the rest like ocean acidification, massive global collapse of wildlife, including insects, rainwater being unsafe to drink pretty much everywhere in the world, micro plastics polluting the entire planet and virtually every single living organism, PFAs, increase in chances of world wide simultaneous crop failure, &c. 99% of what we're doing is green washing or wishful thinking (or sinking, when it comes to co2), the truth is that we won't be able to sustain the western lifestyle much longer, especially not when China, India, and Africa are coming for their slice of the cake If you think 3000kg EVs transporting 80kg of meat and niche carbon sinking tech will save us I have a bridge to sell you.
nozzlegear 2y ago
Degrowth doesn't work either, it's not a solution and nobody will ever go for it. From the abstract of Reviewing studies of degrowth: Are claims matched by data, methods and policy analysis?: > (2) the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis; > (3) few studies use quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer ones use formal modelling; > (4) the first and second type tend to include small samples or focus on non-representative cases; > (5) most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies; > (6) of the few studies on public support, a majority concludes that degrowth strategies and policies are socially-politically infeasible; Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800924002210 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092...