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Here is the case for carbon capture: - Even if CO₂ production ends today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for at least many centuries. The only way to get

Here is the case for carbon capture: - Even if CO₂ production ends today, the elevated CO₂ levels will remain for at least many centuries. The only way to get back to normal levels is some form of carbon capture. - Anyone can do carbon capture anywhere. You don't need to make the whole planet agree to and implement some treaty. Just put up some solar cells and pump the captured CO₂ underground. The costs need to go down a few orders of magnitude, but I see no fundamental reason why that would be impossible

jandrewrogers 2y ago
The scale of carbon capture required to make a meaningful difference implies vast industrial infrastructure and natural resource extraction that currently doesn’t exist. The carbon footprint of developing that would be enormous and require many decades to construct at a minimum. There is a good argument that the ROI and environmental destruction is not worth it.
- marcosdumay 2y ago
  You mean to say that to make a new industry people will have to build something new? Or are you saying that the size of "all industries" will need to increase? Because... where do you think the carbon has come from?
  - jandrewrogers 2y ago
    People truly do not appreciate the industrial scale required to sequester the 100 gigatons per year required to start materially reducing atmospheric CO2. Entirely unprecedented, humans have never built anything like it. When I put on my very dusty chemical engineering hat, it would take decades just to build adequate supply chains for such an endeavor, assuming we waived all environmental review, never mind actually building the thing. Most people are not familiar with industrial processes. They have no idea how unfathomably large the scale being proposed is. In computer science terms, it is like saying “we are going to scale Postgres to a zettabyte sized tables with a billion concurrent transactions”. It might be possible in some kind of in theory sense but no one knows how to reduce that idea to a real system.
    - ianburrell 2y ago
      The projections include a lot less carbon capture than 100 GT/yr. The 2C projections include 1000 GT for whole century. There is research that 600 GT is the most feasible. It would be infeasible to capture all of emissions, but would be feasible to replace emissions, and then use green energy to capture some of it. BTW, I like rock weathering as option for carbon capture. Crush olivine rock and dump it in the sea. That would be huge scale, but we know how to do mining, crushing, and shipping on large scale.
      - jandrewrogers 2y ago
        New emissions are on the scale of several tens of gigatons per year and we have a century of accumulation at those kinds of rates to remove. I am not sanguine about the timelines. The term “large scale” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. We are talking about something qualitatively higher scale than the largest “large scale” projects. We don’t have orders of magnitude of extra capacity anywhere in our existing supply chains, never mind across all of it that would be necessary for such an endeavor. This would all have to be built, and building that has its own supply chains that need to scale to an extreme. It will create severe resource pressures very far removed from the actual carbon capture. It is a “for want of a nail” kind of situation. This is also economically non-productive. We can’t divert enough expertise, manpower, and minerals from the normal economy to make it plausible. We are a very long way from having the kind of automation that would let us work around this issue. I am interested in viable solutions but the impossibility of scaling this particular solution is kind of basic industrial engineering. It is hard to explain where the resources will come from.
- BurningFrog 2y ago
  If there is a big carbon footprint for developing technology that erases carbon footprints, that's a problem that solves itself.
- ianburrell 2y ago
  We would do the carbon capture after nearly all of the fossil fuels have been replaced. Like putting carbon capture on power plant doesn't make sense, running carbon capture with fossil fuels doesn't make sense. Which means we have a few decades before need to do it, but it is worth researching now. It will take thousands of years for the elevated CO2 to return to normal. Once we stop producing CO2, the temperature will keep rising for decades. We need to do carbon capture to keep it stable. The projections for 2C include carbon capture.

jandrewrogers 2y ago

The scale of carbon capture required to make a meaningful difference implies vast industrial infrastructure and natural resource extraction that currently doesn’t exist. The carbon footprint of developing that would be enormous and require many decades to construct at a minimum. There is a good argument that the ROI and environmental destruction is not worth it.

marcosdumay 2y ago
You mean to say that to make a new industry people will have to build something new? Or are you saying that the size of "all industries" will need to increase? Because... where do you think the carbon has come from?
- jandrewrogers 2y ago
  People truly do not appreciate the industrial scale required to sequester the 100 gigatons per year required to start materially reducing atmospheric CO2. Entirely unprecedented, humans have never built anything like it. When I put on my very dusty chemical engineering hat, it would take decades just to build adequate supply chains for such an endeavor, assuming we waived all environmental review, never mind actually building the thing. Most people are not familiar with industrial processes. They have no idea how unfathomably large the scale being proposed is. In computer science terms, it is like saying “we are going to scale Postgres to a zettabyte sized tables with a billion concurrent transactions”. It might be possible in some kind of in theory sense but no one knows how to reduce that idea to a real system.
  - ianburrell 2y ago
    The projections include a lot less carbon capture than 100 GT/yr. The 2C projections include 1000 GT for whole century. There is research that 600 GT is the most feasible. It would be infeasible to capture all of emissions, but would be feasible to replace emissions, and then use green energy to capture some of it. BTW, I like rock weathering as option for carbon capture. Crush olivine rock and dump it in the sea. That would be huge scale, but we know how to do mining, crushing, and shipping on large scale.
    - jandrewrogers 2y ago
      New emissions are on the scale of several tens of gigatons per year and we have a century of accumulation at those kinds of rates to remove. I am not sanguine about the timelines. The term “large scale” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. We are talking about something qualitatively higher scale than the largest “large scale” projects. We don’t have orders of magnitude of extra capacity anywhere in our existing supply chains, never mind across all of it that would be necessary for such an endeavor. This would all have to be built, and building that has its own supply chains that need to scale to an extreme. It will create severe resource pressures very far removed from the actual carbon capture. It is a “for want of a nail” kind of situation. This is also economically non-productive. We can’t divert enough expertise, manpower, and minerals from the normal economy to make it plausible. We are a very long way from having the kind of automation that would let us work around this issue. I am interested in viable solutions but the impossibility of scaling this particular solution is kind of basic industrial engineering. It is hard to explain where the resources will come from.
BurningFrog 2y ago
If there is a big carbon footprint for developing technology that erases carbon footprints, that's a problem that solves itself.
ianburrell 2y ago
We would do the carbon capture after nearly all of the fossil fuels have been replaced. Like putting carbon capture on power plant doesn't make sense, running carbon capture with fossil fuels doesn't make sense. Which means we have a few decades before need to do it, but it is worth researching now. It will take thousands of years for the elevated CO2 to return to normal. Once we stop producing CO2, the temperature will keep rising for decades. We need to do carbon capture to keep it stable. The projections for 2C include carbon capture.