4 ms·

(disclaimer that I manage a climate research group) Jacobson (first author) can be a little touchy about criticism against 100% renewables (litigious), but I t

(disclaimer that I manage a climate research group) Jacobson (first author) can be a little touchy about criticism against 100% renewables (litigious), but I think the paper presents a false dichotomy. Regardless of the conclusion, even if all energy infrastructure in the world fully decarbonized today, we are still on a path to high warming (in fact a large chunk of climate change is due to land use change and other factors). The IPCC (and most of the community) is pretty sure large scale carbon capture will be required under any future pathway to avoid catastrophic warming. This is a complex subject, with a lot of competing interests from parties that sometimes partially align with the science and sometimes do not. E.g. O&G companies like to push carbon capture because it plays well and potentially increases their longevity... But that doesn't mean the ideal outcome is to drop carbon capture as part of the toolkit.

derangedHorse 2y ago
I also think it's a useful tool, but the economics of carbon capture have to sustain the cost of developing these methods. Pointing consumerism in the right direction seems like the most effective way to drop carbon emissions from both a short and long term perspective. We need to "stop the bleed" before tackling anything else.
- chris_va 2y ago
  Pipelining is probably required, and there is no one magic solution here. It took solar 45 years to become low cost, and carbon capture will probably be just as difficult. If we did things one step at a time, carbon capture wouldn't be economical until ~2080, which is too late.
- criddell 2y ago
  > Pointing consumerism in the right direction How do you do that?
  - ghouse 2y ago
    Price signals. One approach would be a revenue-neutral carbon tax on extraction of sequestered carbon. And border carbon taxes for imports from countries who don't also have an internal carbon tax.
    - criddell 2y ago
      I don’t think something like that would ever fly in the US. In fact, the opposite is more likely. The drill-baby-drill mantra is going to push everything in exactly the opposite direction. I think any solution will have to come from industry, not government.
- sn9 2y ago
  That's the strategy of startups like Terraform [0][1] which use green energy production to synthesize carbon fuels using direct air capture, which are on track to be cheaper than fossil fuels without subsidies within the next few years (e.g., definitely this decade). This will both displace more expensive fossil fuels from the market while letting us leverage existing carbon fuel infrastructure. The profit motive creates a self-sustaining cycle of rapid expansion and iteration, which should drastically increase the efficiency per unit as well as the horizontal scale of DAC so that eventually we'll have exponentially more DAC installed and then you can decide what to do with all the excess carbon, sequestering it in whatever ways make sense. [0] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terraform-industries-whitepaper-2-0/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo... [1] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terraformer-environmental-calculus/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terrafo...
palata 2y ago
> we are still on a path to high warming Yes, and we are on a path with less energy. We like to talk about renewables and extrapolate from their evolution in a world that is mostly fossil-fueled. But the truth is that it's not clear at all that renewables can scale to replace the fossil fuels. Actually it seems like they can't, realistically, totally replace them. Instead of focusing on how to do carbon capture and keep living the way we are, we should focus on preparing society for the inevitable global-warming-in-a-world-with-less-energy. Which means we have to do less with less. AI is the exact opposite, so we are clearly accelerating in the other direction. Carbon capture is interesting research, but if feels like it assumes a world with more energy than today (because you need energy for the capture), and clean. We're most likely not going there in the timeline we are looking at (the problems have already started, we don't have 200 years to discover a new energy).
- fulafel 2y ago
  AI energy use is a possible future risk if not addressed, but a much bigger problem we have is the massive wasteful fossils use in electricity generation (used for non-IT things) and transport. We need to get everybody much below the Europe line here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita Tackling AI comes automatically from the required policy to rapidly ramp down fossils use. (For example cap-and-trade applied to electricity market transferring the emissions quota to electricity prices)
bobfromhuddle 2y ago
I work on decarbonising cement production, and the cement producers are betting _heavily_ on carbon capture as their "get out of jail free card". I think they're likely wrong, but - again - it's not like we can just stop making concrete: all the solar farms, wind farms, dams, and assorted infrastructure that we need to combat climate change will be made with concrete, and there is currently no viable zero carbon alternative. The grid is the easy bit, and will happen as a result of market forces, but those hard-to-abate sectors are really fricking hard.
- chris_va 2y ago
  Cement is actually great for renewable balancing, too. You can store high grade heat for calcination via grid load leveling (eg use curtailed solar, which sometimes the grid will pay you to take, to preheat rocks). This allows solar to scale up to a larger fraction of the grid, win win.
  - bobfromhuddle 2y ago
    Yes! Likewise for grinding: offload excess power to industrial plants so they can grind rocks when it's windy. If you look at the problem in the right way, a silo full of ground rock is just a battery.
    - themaninthedark 2y ago
      A rock grinder is a significant capital investment, who is going to want to purchase that and leave it idle for a windy day? What workforce is going to sign up for those jobs? "We will call you when the wind starts to blow, you need to be ready to start your shift within 30 minutes of the call."
- fulafel 2y ago
  Aren't there also carbon neutral ways to make cement/concrete?
  - bobfromhuddle 2y ago

derangedHorse 2y ago

I also think it's a useful tool, but the economics of carbon capture have to sustain the cost of developing these methods. Pointing consumerism in the right direction seems like the most effective way to drop carbon emissions from both a short and long term perspective. We need to "stop the bleed" before tackling anything else.

chris_va 2y ago
Pipelining is probably required, and there is no one magic solution here. It took solar 45 years to become low cost, and carbon capture will probably be just as difficult. If we did things one step at a time, carbon capture wouldn't be economical until ~2080, which is too late.
criddell 2y ago
> Pointing consumerism in the right direction How do you do that?
- ghouse 2y ago
  Price signals. One approach would be a revenue-neutral carbon tax on extraction of sequestered carbon. And border carbon taxes for imports from countries who don't also have an internal carbon tax.
  - criddell 2y ago
    I don’t think something like that would ever fly in the US. In fact, the opposite is more likely. The drill-baby-drill mantra is going to push everything in exactly the opposite direction. I think any solution will have to come from industry, not government.
sn9 2y ago
That's the strategy of startups like Terraform [0][1] which use green energy production to synthesize carbon fuels using direct air capture, which are on track to be cheaper than fossil fuels without subsidies within the next few years (e.g., definitely this decade). This will both displace more expensive fossil fuels from the market while letting us leverage existing carbon fuel infrastructure. The profit motive creates a self-sustaining cycle of rapid expansion and iteration, which should drastically increase the efficiency per unit as well as the horizontal scale of DAC so that eventually we'll have exponentially more DAC installed and then you can decide what to do with all the excess carbon, sequestering it in whatever ways make sense. [0] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terraform-industries-whitepaper-2-0/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo... [1] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terraformer-environmental-calculus/ https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terrafo...

palata 2y ago

> we are still on a path to high warming Yes, and we are on a path with less energy. We like to talk about renewables and extrapolate from their evolution in a world that is mostly fossil-fueled. But the truth is that it's not clear at all that renewables can scale to replace the fossil fuels. Actually it seems like they can't, realistically, totally replace them. Instead of focusing on how to do carbon capture and keep living the way we are, we should focus on preparing society for the inevitable global-warming-in-a-world-with-less-energy. Which means we have to do less with less. AI is the exact opposite, so we are clearly accelerating in the other direction. Carbon capture is interesting research, but if feels like it assumes a world with more energy than today (because you need energy for the capture), and clean. We're most likely not going there in the timeline we are looking at (the problems have already started, we don't have 200 years to discover a new energy).

fulafel 2y ago
AI energy use is a possible future risk if not addressed, but a much bigger problem we have is the massive wasteful fossils use in electricity generation (used for non-IT things) and transport. We need to get everybody much below the Europe line here: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/co-emissions-per-capita Tackling AI comes automatically from the required policy to rapidly ramp down fossils use. (For example cap-and-trade applied to electricity market transferring the emissions quota to electricity prices)

bobfromhuddle 2y ago

I work on decarbonising cement production, and the cement producers are betting _heavily_ on carbon capture as their "get out of jail free card". I think they're likely wrong, but - again - it's not like we can just stop making concrete: all the solar farms, wind farms, dams, and assorted infrastructure that we need to combat climate change will be made with concrete, and there is currently no viable zero carbon alternative. The grid is the easy bit, and will happen as a result of market forces, but those hard-to-abate sectors are really fricking hard.

chris_va 2y ago
Cement is actually great for renewable balancing, too. You can store high grade heat for calcination via grid load leveling (eg use curtailed solar, which sometimes the grid will pay you to take, to preheat rocks). This allows solar to scale up to a larger fraction of the grid, win win.
- bobfromhuddle 2y ago
  Yes! Likewise for grinding: offload excess power to industrial plants so they can grind rocks when it's windy. If you look at the problem in the right way, a silo full of ground rock is just a battery.
  - themaninthedark 2y ago
    A rock grinder is a significant capital investment, who is going to want to purchase that and leave it idle for a windy day? What workforce is going to sign up for those jobs? "We will call you when the wind starts to blow, you need to be ready to start your shift within 30 minutes of the call."
fulafel 2y ago
Aren't there also carbon neutral ways to make cement/concrete?
- bobfromhuddle 2y ago