4 ms·

"No matter how you slice it, emissions reductions are more cost effective than removal." What about politically effective? You can start removing CO2 from the

"No matter how you slice it, emissions reductions are more cost effective than removal." What about politically effective? You can start removing CO2 from the air without coordinating your effort with all the industrial powers of the world. This is an invalid argument, in a world where China and the US are quickly becoming sworn enemies unlikely to agree on anything?

defrost 2y ago
Currently there is no actual means for net reduction via CO2 removal. Human activiy (the extraction and burning of fossil fuels) puts some 11 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. There's a lot of industrial activity required to move 11 billion tonne (and that in itself creates additional emission issues to circimvent). At this point in time the largest global project to sequester CO2 is adjacent to a SANTOS natural gas extraction project. * It's not yet working as planned. * Were it to work as planned the total CO2 sequestered would be a tiny portion of the amount required to be removed. * It's a "cheat" obfuscated by mirrors in any case - the CO2 planned to be sequestered is a small proportion of the CO2 released by the natural gas extraction project its part of.
- kragen 2y ago
  Right, although we do know how to scrub CO₂ from fossil-fuel power-plant flue gases, it eats up a substantial percentage of the energy produced by the power plant, as I explained in more detail in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424292. This makes the power plant economically uncompetitive with other plants in the same area burning the same fuel and using the same design, so it is only profitable in the presence of fairly stiff cap-and-trade pricing. But, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42423291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42423291, the price of renewable energy (in particular solar photovoltaic) is in free fall, which is suddenly making vast amounts of very cheap energy available. The biggest cost of even existing direct-air-capture technologies is energy, so cheaper energy makes them viable in cases where they weren't viable before. Probably those prices will continue to fall further. In short, we shouldn't be surprised that carbon capture hasn't taken off yet; we're still on the fossil side of the renewable energy transition.
  - kragen 2y ago
    Unfortunately it seems that robomartin is continuing to make many of the same incorrect claims in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42519616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42519616 as well as adding some new ones.
    - kragen 2y ago
      And in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42556904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42556904 he disappointingly repeated the false claim that I corrected at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424685 where he said, "A solar panel is only good for 15 to 25 years."
  - defrost 2y ago
    I'm not suprised, I have a very good idea about the sheer scale of industrial plant building that would be required to make a significant dent in our current consumption and emissions. The great unspoken catch to direct air capture technology as that develops is while it will (at sufficient scale) mitigate the extraction of "old" carbon from traditional fossil fuel deep earth operations it will likely serve to maintain the cycle of already extracted carbon in the air: (energy + air) -> fuel -> (carbon in air). Don't get me wrong, these are good steps forward, they're just not solutions unto themselves - we still as a species need to reduce the absolute amount of insulating material in the atmosphere. Currently we are not. When we do start to wind back the amount added, we have to keep winding it back by a few hundred billion tonne.
    - kragen 2y ago
      Correction to my sibling comment: we do have to keep winding it back by a few hundred billion tonnes. I had the wrong order of magnitude, and defrost had the right one. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439752 for details.
      - robomartin 2y ago

defrost 2y ago

Currently there is no actual means for net reduction via CO2 removal. Human activiy (the extraction and burning of fossil fuels) puts some 11 billion tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. There's a lot of industrial activity required to move 11 billion tonne (and that in itself creates additional emission issues to circimvent). At this point in time the largest global project to sequester CO2 is adjacent to a SANTOS natural gas extraction project. * It's not yet working as planned. * Were it to work as planned the total CO2 sequestered would be a tiny portion of the amount required to be removed. * It's a "cheat" obfuscated by mirrors in any case - the CO2 planned to be sequestered is a small proportion of the CO2 released by the natural gas extraction project its part of.

kragen 2y ago
Right, although we do know how to scrub CO₂ from fossil-fuel power-plant flue gases, it eats up a substantial percentage of the energy produced by the power plant, as I explained in more detail in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424292 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424292. This makes the power plant economically uncompetitive with other plants in the same area burning the same fuel and using the same design, so it is only profitable in the presence of fairly stiff cap-and-trade pricing. But, as I explained in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42423291 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42423291, the price of renewable energy (in particular solar photovoltaic) is in free fall, which is suddenly making vast amounts of very cheap energy available. The biggest cost of even existing direct-air-capture technologies is energy, so cheaper energy makes them viable in cases where they weren't viable before. Probably those prices will continue to fall further. In short, we shouldn't be surprised that carbon capture hasn't taken off yet; we're still on the fossil side of the renewable energy transition.
- kragen 2y ago
  Unfortunately it seems that robomartin is continuing to make many of the same incorrect claims in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42519616 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42519616 as well as adding some new ones.
  - kragen 2y ago
    And in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42556904 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42556904 he disappointingly repeated the false claim that I corrected at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424685 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42424685 where he said, "A solar panel is only good for 15 to 25 years."
- defrost 2y ago
  I'm not suprised, I have a very good idea about the sheer scale of industrial plant building that would be required to make a significant dent in our current consumption and emissions. The great unspoken catch to direct air capture technology as that develops is while it will (at sufficient scale) mitigate the extraction of "old" carbon from traditional fossil fuel deep earth operations it will likely serve to maintain the cycle of already extracted carbon in the air: (energy + air) -> fuel -> (carbon in air). Don't get me wrong, these are good steps forward, they're just not solutions unto themselves - we still as a species need to reduce the absolute amount of insulating material in the atmosphere. Currently we are not. When we do start to wind back the amount added, we have to keep winding it back by a few hundred billion tonne.
  - kragen 2y ago
    Correction to my sibling comment: we do have to keep winding it back by a few hundred billion tonnes. I had the wrong order of magnitude, and defrost had the right one. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439752 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42439752 for details.
    - robomartin 2y ago