Opposing nuclear was the first catastrophic mistake environmentalists made, causing them to be a net negative overall in terms of climate change. Opposing carbon capture will be the next (and possibly last) one.
If you think climate change is a serious problem, then you need to put aside your moral beliefs and think like an engineer about solutions. There is no math that allows you to conserve/renewables your way to 2C while accommodating the expected growth in living standards in India, China, and Africa. And any strategy that doesn’t allow people in the developing world to dramatically increase their standard of living is a non-starter that will create billions of enemies for the environmental movement. India recently committed to go carbon neutral by 2070: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/developing-countries-.... That’s too late, and they won’t meet that anyway. The developed world needs to go carbon negative as fast as possible.
This is the most reasonable take. For some reason people in the West tend to ignore that 80% of the world is on the lower part of the exponential slope of progress, income, and demand for fossil fuel derived goods - and they are running up that slope at breakneck speed as a result of technological innovation.
Is the other 20% going to look down from our place of wealth and abundance - built on fossil fuels and countless externalities - and tell them that they have to achieve wealth and abundance through other means? It's ridiculous.
Sorry Sub-Saharan African, we have found that meat consumption is bad and therefore you can't do what we did, even though increased demand is a natural tendency as incomes rise.
All that cheap and dirty energy we used to make our infrastructure and grow GDP? You can't do it that way either. We made a big oopsie and have decided you have to do it through renewables and sustainable practices only.
By the way, are you interested in financing for this solar array? It's ok if you don't have the cash on hand, we'll just hold your highest quality farm-land as collateral.
We have to find ways to sequester. And we have to find ways to live in a warmer climate. It's the most probable outcome.
> We have to find ways to sequester. And we have to find ways to live in a warmer climate. It's the most probable outcome.
This is not the only conclusion from your excellent observation. Another conclusion could be that rich nations fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries without asking anything in return. I believe this is what the climate relief fund is about—as approved (albeit in a much too small scale) in last COP.
So far however rich nations are not only reluctant to fund infrastructure projects in other countries without anything in return—let alone green infrastructure projects—they are also reluctant to fund green infrastructure projects domestically (see e.g. Green New Deal in the US). The technology for mass carbon sequestration does not exist yet, and if it existed I bet it would follow the same prospects as current prospects of tackling the climate crisis. In short, they will not be built at the scale needed for any meaningful results.
This is often the case when you offer a technical solution to a societal or a political problem.
That case you made about meat consumption is actually very relatable as found in a few reports went viral in China, including this one by . Twenty years ago most rural living Chinese can't afford beef at all. Twenty years later they are able, and there are like 1 billion rural people become urban in 40 years I guess (plz check source), and developed countries are already mad about stuff they predicted to happen.
Trust fund solution is one helpful tool for this, yet uprising tension in India/US allies and China/Russia/Middle East/Pakistan make the plan definitely dead. It will soon to be another case of WWII U.N. that is controlled by U.S. and vetoed by U.S.S.R. for a billion times a year and not producing anything remotely close to a deal, or a compromise.
Also, solar array is tremendously expensive due to regional difference, just like battery, either rare metal or lithium.
And who exactly are going to be paying for these ruinously expensive nuclear power stations for the poorer countries? Is it you and rayiner? Or perhaps you want your government to fund it through increased taxes on you?
I'm sure you wouldn't want the poor countries to pay for it themselves.
Reality is geographically, poor global south likely to bear higher brunt of climate change, while many in northern regions will be net benefitiaries. But poverty immediately sucks more than climate change, hope is that development via whatever means will uplift more than a few degrees dooms. How many people in developed north would trade their inhospitable winters in heated homes for being impoverished in more fair weathered country. None, because they learned to live with the cold.
I don’t know if all you wrote about is going to be a problem in the way you see it. The developing world has jumped/skipped some of the development the west/rich nations experienced and just adapted the latest technology.
A good example of this is communication technology. In wealthy nations, there was all of this wired infrastructure put in place since the advent of the telegraph. In developing nations, they just skipped all of that and most people have cellphones. Maybe not iphones or even smartphones, but the banks they used developed robust texting protocols, from what I’ve read and heard about, where people could do banking transactions from something like those old nokia dumbphones.
A lot of these developing countries rely on China, maybe to the wests collective chagrin, and China has invested heavily in rail infrastructure in a lot of these countries, and, Chinese auto manufacturers are already producing tons of electric vehicles. Guess whose car companies are building auto factories in a lot of the developing world? And though they may not meet the safety and quality standards of wealthy countries, people in developing countries are just happy to get places quicker than by foot. I may not have listed everything that emits greenhouse gases and a suitable replacement but normalizing mass transit (I forgot to mention the electric buses I’ve read these developing countries are either ordering from china or building at home in Chinese factories), but these two… industries make up a significant chunk of problematic emissions.
What I think we may see in the west is active resistance to adapting new energy and normalizing greener behavior because of things like American exceptionalism. Also, these technologies are expensive to buy for many people even in the west (right, not most people here on hackernews), and its going to be prohibitively expensive for people in old housing stock to upgrade their property and municipalities to upgrade infrastructure. Tax rebates on $35,000 electric cars and heat pumps aren’t going to mean much to people relying on older family members for a roof over their head and can’t find jobs, especially if this whole ai thing takes off. There’s also significant and continual pushback from an people who seem determined to trash electric cars and such, and thats exacerbated by corporations acting bad faith to maximize profit (high efficiency appliances that barely make it through their standard warranty terms and subscription based car features come to mind.
So yeah, I think the developing world might be fine but its the wealthy nations who are going to screw themselves (and because of the US’ voracious consumption if everything), and maybe the rest of the world regardless of what steps the developing world takes.
The dog has been dirtying the kitchen floor for long enough already that we're also going to need that toothpick.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 fact sheet on carbon dioxide removal:
"Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) refers to technologies, practices, and approaches that remove and durably store carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. CDR is required to achieve global and national targets of net zero CO2 and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. CDR cannot substitute for immediate and deep emissions reductions, but it is part of all modelled scenarios that limit global warming to 2° or lower by 2100."
Let me play devils advocate though. Right now nuclear provides 10% of the world’s power. Now since it was first deployed in the 70’s there have been at least 3 major accidents I can think of: Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3 mile island. So that’s one every 15 years, roughly.
The naive math behind that suggests that if we were to increase the number of power plants by a factor of 10 to supply all the world’s power, we should expect the rate of accidents to increase proportionally. So that’s a Fukushima somewhere in the world every 1.5 years or 18 months. And a bad one of those accidents could spread radiation across an entire continent.
3 Mile Island: No one died, nothing of any significance happened. Clickbait from an era before clickbait was a thing.
Chernobyl: Irresponsible operation of obsolete, inherently-hazardous Soviet-era design. Not something that can ever happen again if some relatively-simple lessons are followed.
Fukushima: Irresponsible maintenance of plant operating well beyond its intended lifespan, which was irresponsibly constructed in a tsunami-prone seismic zone. This type of accident can and probably will happen again, precisely because of moratoriums on new plant construction.
One risk you didn't list but probably should have is reckless military attacks waged against installations such as Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. It's hard to safeguard a nuclear plant against a barbarian invasion. It may make sense to operate such plants under UN auspices, or otherwise guarantee their safety through multinational treaties with real enforcement behind them.
Experiments and development in the 1950s. First commercial plant in 58.
Further growth in 60s and 70s. Including deadly accidents like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 in 1961 - protests grew in 60s and 70s too.
Three Mile Island 1979.
Chernobyl 1986.
Fukushima 2011.
That 25-year gap between Chernobyl and Fukushima - and the extraordinary circumstances causing Fukushima vs the previous incidents - suggests that safety improved A LOT over the 60-odd years between 1958 and now.
Now do the same calculation for passenger aviation.
That's not how disasters work. They aren't independent variables, when they happen, you learn and change the way things work to prevent them from happening again.
I don't know of any environmentalists against the research. Most I've talked with are skeptical that this is viable given current technology and believe that we need to act as if this doesn't exist, but that's different than opposing the research.
If there is some sort of breakthrough, then that's fantastic!
I think there are other geoengineering techniques that environmentalists are against such as seeding with sulphur dioxide or trying to create a shade preventing sun rays from reaching earth, but the argument against carbon capture is only that it doesn't yet exist.
When someone says they're "green" but hard-core antinuclear I just stop listening after that. They have done almost zero research on the topic and have 99% likely just decided because someone told them it was bad. Nuclear is our only viable path if we plan on keeping a dependable power grid. Battery tech is not currently up to par with what we need to make wind and solar 100% solutions. We need at least a 10X increase in storage density and longevity for that. They should absolutely be part of the mix though as they're cheaper than nuclear per kW
I think nuclear, today, is a hardcore bad idea. Nuclear is showing no tangible signs of getting cheaper, and renewable and battery prices continue to fall.
"Carbon capture research" has been an excuse to divert funding away from renewables for 20+ years. It's hardly made a dent in emissions and it's unlikely to change any time soon.
By definition poor countries overtaken by fossil fuels industrialization cannot use nuclear power - the technical knowledge is not there, and even if it were the corruption would result in destruction of the facility.
Power from the sun is the ultimate end goal in the tech tree. We've just skipped over the middle part because it turns out that even the smartest nuclear builds are still stupid and incapable of accounting for natural disasters or human elements.
There was a recent pro-nuclear article posted here on HN which was authored by a fossil fuel lobbyist (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35658318). I know you are fishing for the opposite response, but it seems very likely at this point that the fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear propaganda.
Ever-growing armies of ever-better-paid administrators aren't going to magically pay for themselves. And a university won't be atop America's merciless academic pecking order for long if it's burdened with scruples about funding sources.
This comment is vague but it sounds like you're downplaying the seriousness of funding sources.
This isn't a paranoid conspiracy or dramatic judgement. Companies really do pay for particular research results that benefit them. This has been going on at least since gasoline had lead in it.
I think you might be misunderstanding the amount of distrust placed in the root comment. He's claiming the more prestigious a University is, the more likely they are to take unethical funding because increased funding leads to more prestige. It's an attack on the integrity of modern science as practiced by academia, not on a subset of studies.
the bigger issue you overlooked is the constant growth of bureaucratic overhead sucking up the watershed of resources and leaving only a trickle for the people actually putting together the curriculum, teaching and researching.
The administrators are useful to a point but they vastly overstate their importance and erode everything they touch overtime like a malignant cancer in a lot of organizations.
As cynical as we can count on these people to be - they're also smart enough to recognize that continually whoring themselves out to the highest bidder can, apart from undermining Stanford's integrity (which they obviously don't care about), also be detrimental to their bottom line in the longer run.
In fact this seems to be the only way they eventually learn:
In response, more than 800 people affiliated with the university have signed a letter calling for a funding ban, and some alumni say they won’t donate to their alma mater until it happens.
I find the notion donating to your alma mater kind of odd.
You don't donate money to the local McDonald's that made a burger for you do you?
I mean, you could but that's not something that's regularly done.
The service was provided and paid for and now there's some expectation to give more money after the fact?
"Helped shape" != "Dictated". It makes perfect sense to have industry members be a part of discussions about regulations and problems related to their industry. Industry members shouldn't be able to dictate the outcomes of those discussions, but they should certainly be able to participate in them.
Maybe Stanford was never really what their very active reputation management facility was pushing the last few facades? The school basically rode the Silicon Valley wave.
Nah. Funding research to show your business isn't a problem is shady. Funding research to solve the problem could be a good thing, depending what the find.
Can we stop the anti-sequestration movement? Let's just think about it for a second. How do we get to net zero if we account for lifetime emissions of energy sources? Even solar has lifetime emissions. You have to remove it from the atmosphere. (We'll ignore processes that can't be decarbonized, but that just adds to the problem)
So what do we know? We know that forests are hard to plant and that their early lifecycle is a carbon source. Still, we should plant trees. Ignoring this, US citizens alone would need to plant 500 trees per year to offset their current footprints[0]. That's 165 billion trees a year, and a densely packed forest has 4-6 sqft per tree. The US has just over a trillion square feet. You do the math. (even dramatic reductions in footprints don't solve this problem)
Okay, so trees aren't enough. Luckily we know land management is one of the best carbon sink techniques available. But we run into a similar problem, just with more efficiency than above. So what is the result? We have to use a variety of techniques, both natural and artificial, to scrub carbon from the air. Not to reach net negative (which should really be our goal), but just to even reach net zero! Yes, big oil is going to fund this. Why? Because when carbon taxes come in, they can keep their plants up by scrubbing a percentage of their carbon to match that tax. (They also want PR and this is cheap PR) If they somehow could scrub all the carbon (they won't), then what do we care? The goal is about carbon emissions, not source of energy. I just don't see them surviving, but of course they're going to try to hold on as long as they can instead of adapting and surviving. Their loss.
imo, as a global priority, reducing carbon seems like it should be a much lower priority compared to how hard its pushed.
incoming nuclear fusion would alleviate a ton of our carbon issues
if we use info from this wonderfully fleshed out cost-benefit analysis by bjorn lomborg i bet we could get the best of value out of our current fossil fuels while not impoverishing our children and grandchildren:
> reducing carbon seems like it should be a much lower priority compared to how hard its pushed
I'm not sure what you mean. The last 50 years (and even 5) have been far more bark than bite.
> incoming nuclear fusion would alleviate a ton of our carbon issues
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I worked on nuclear in a previous career and still have friends there, including fusion (including the big labs). Being bullish, fusion net gain is still 10 years away. It'll take decades to add to the energy portfolio after that. The case for fusion is worse than the case for fission. We should work on both, but we can't hold out for future technologies (we can say the same about storage). We needed to act decades ago, pushing it off by a few more decades is not going to solve the issue, it is repeating the same mistakes.
> fleshed out cost-benefit analysis
I wouldn't trust any of these. Zero of them. You need to have a pretty good understanding of these systems (highly complex) to even understand if the analyses are good. Every single one has a bias and is highly politicized. The more politicized a topic is, the higher level of expertise you need to understand who is telling the truth (politicization adds large amounts of noise).
> Bjorn Lomborg
Who is a political scientist. He isn't a climate scientist, nor even a scientist. Here's a rather well known scientist, Stefan Rahmstorf (studies physics of oceans) discussing Bjorn[0]. You can check Bjorn's scholar page[1] to even verify that he's not doing actual science bust just writing opinions with no supporting evidence. Please stop supporting hacks.
If we don’t reduce carbon emissions—heck if we don’t stop carbon emissions—there will be no future for our children and grandchildren to either prosper or impoverish in. Not reducing carbon means we are all going to die. The earth will heat 4-5 degrees. Human societies will not function as we know them today, governments will break down, wars will be fought, famines will linger. However much money fossil fuel gives us today will have no effect on that future, as we will all be dead.
nuclear fusion will be achieved but nobody question if it will be economically convenient, even with global carbon tax and esg frameworks. As today we are in the realm of hundreds of billions for "sperimental" fusion facility, just comparing to fission plant cost, they have balloned exponentially from sperimental phase decades ago
I think Big Oil is less Big Oil than it really is Big Energy.
Big Energy has the massive capital to deploy for green energy solutions that are viable and will provide a renewable path forward off of more polluting or non-renewable sources. Big Energy's product of choice is mainly petroleum derived currently. Due to sourcing and limitations though, this is a mostly finite resource that they would love to replace for more profit.
Profit will drive them to new sources. When you see Big Energy actually moving to these new sources at the mega-industrial scale and not PoCs, prototypes, but deploying tens of billions of dollars, is when the true revolution will happen.
If they are funding Stanford and other parts of Academia, then that is a good thing.
I'm not sure how mad to be about this. Honestly, at the moment I kinda think it's a good thing on balance.
I believe climate change is a huge, urgent concern. And I think it would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our risk mitigation portfolio. If fossil fuel companies, out of self-interest, want to support a legitimate research institution doing that, I'm not sure I should complain.
If Stanford starts spouting propaganda that we can procrastinate on getting off of fossil fuels because their carbon removal technology will solve everything, I will definitely condemn them mercilessly. I assume the fossil fuel companies are already spouting such propaganda or funding someone to do so, since they've been spouting anti-climate risk mitigation propaganda for decades, and I am already condemning them mercilessly for that anyway.
I actually think carbon removal could spur renewables development because in theory it's a flexible sink for spare power. Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few square miles of solar panels, and run it when the sun shines. We could get a lot of demand for solar panels out of this, and that will encourage the further development of commercial scaling up. And the more renewables scale up, the more I think fossil fuels will be squeezed out of existence because they won't be able to compete on price.
EDIT: I am open to the possibility that this is completely unrealistic and is just another distraction from the fossil fuel industry. But the arguments need to be made on technical grounds by knowledgeable people. Here is an interview by an expert making that argument: https://www.protocol.com/climate/carbon-dioxide-removal-cost...
> Yet ambition and momentum may not be enough to reach that milestone, according to Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer with MIT’s Energy Initiative. He’s been studying carbon capture for over 30 years (even writing a book about it in 2018) and is more skeptical given the capital costs to build CDR plants and the enormous amount of energy they need to run. He sat down with Protocol to talk about why he thinks $100 per ton is “pure fantasy.”
By the way, I really liked this quote, and I wish all the "we just need to"-ers would read it:
> When people think things are too easy, they won’t address the hard decisions, even though those hard decisions may end up with a better solution. At this point, I don’t know if liming the ocean is a great idea or not, but it has a lot of potential, and we have to look at things like that if we want to get to net zero. And people say capturing carbon dioxide from the air for $100 per ton will get us to net zero. But if it’s a fantasy, it’s not going to get us there.
I'm highly sceptical regarding ALL CO2 removal schemes that don't operate directly at a CO2 source, because I see absolutely NO WAY how they could ever be made cost effective:
CO2 concentration in air is less than 1g/m^3, meaning that you would have to pump like 10000 m^3 of air through your apparatus just to remove the CO2 from a single car travelling ~100km.
And this assumes 100% extraction efficiency which is not realistic at all.
So any climate plan that relies on large-scale CO2 removal from atmospheric air is probably a complete SCAM.
Also compare the cost difference between reducing emissions at the source by electrifying a vehicle with the effort required of extracting the CO2 from the air-- it is COMPLETELY obvious to me that even spending a dollar on CO2 removal is absolute LUNACY until all the cheap and easy options of reducing emissions have been exhausted.
Look, I think direct air capture (DAC) is as much “not the solution” as the next guy, but this kind of black-and-white thinking has no place in climate change mitigation.
Right now, DAC costs about $250-500/ton. The average passenger vehicle in the US emits 4.6 tons of CO2/year. You say it’s not cost-effective but you could literally charge every passenger vehicle user in the US $1-2000/year and use it for capture and eliminate the single largest source. That is the same order of magnitude as vehicle registration fees (though of course you’d want to make such a tax progressive, etc.), at least in California.
More importantly, DAC provides a major price signal for the cost of carbon emissions: if it costs $250/ton to get CO2 out of the atmosphere, it starts to make more sense to charge emitters $250/ton in advance to remove it — and if we implemented such a system, the market would likely respond very quickly with rapid reductions in carbon emissions. Oil and gas companies think it’s the solution? Great, they can pay $250/ton for it.
Instead we’re selling everyone individual shame about what are really societal decisions, telling them not to drive as much, be too cold/hot at home, and eat less beef — while letting producers largely off the hook. That’s the real lunacy here.
> So any climate plan that relies on large-scale CO2 removal from atmospheric air is probably a complete SCAM.
The "scam" language is interesting to me.
I often run into people who seem to think that advocates of carbon capture technology are somehow being intellectually dishonest and are not serious about climate change.
In fact I think there are a lot of people who are interested in carbon capture tech who just keep an open mind about it. Not all scientific advances are obvious early on.
I think we should avoid assuming that people who are promoting carbon capture research are speaking in bad faith. There are lots of people who genuinely believe the tech may mature to a point it is useful to the fight against climate change.
Just because the fossil fuel industry promotes it doesnt mean that everyone who promotes it is a shill for the fossil fuel industry.
It has been demonstrated repeatedly that the source of funding does implicitly bias research results.
But the bigger effect is the appearance of working on the solution is often used to prevent real mitigation efforts that are here and now, such as higher costs for CO2 emissions, reforming the carbon trading scheme, and investing in moving to more use of green electricity.
We spend on the order of $900B a year on the military. Imagine if $100B a year, every year, was spent instead on beefing up the power grid, investing in efficient long-haul power distribution, investing even more in solar/wind/nukes. With less need to strong arm the world to ensure access to oil, it could pay for itself in less military intervention. Obviously, there are many political reasons why even $1 reduction in the military budget is difficult to accomplish, but that is only an indication of how much the government is beholden to the military/industrial complex.
We don’t need to strong arm the world to access oil, we are a net exporter of oil. There’s lots of bad things to say about our foreign policy, but the idea that it’s about oil should have died with the Iraq War (where we spent trillions of dollars but didn’t get any oil).
"It would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our climate change portfolio"
Planting trees and establishing more forests is a already working technology with lots of other nice side effects, while I see the "artificial carbon removal" tech often just used as a excuse to not do anything now at all and wait for the magic game changer.
"Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few square miles of solar panels, and run it when the sun shines."
And I totally like anything related to this, but as long as we build new coal plants, building this would be just symbolic.
So first I would use the desert solar power for actually powering the grid, removing the need for coal.
Planting trees is not really viable to deal with CO2 emissions on any significant scale.
Assuming a tree absorbs around 20kg of CO2/year, you'd need to plant 250 trees per year (!!) for every single passenger vehicle (~5tons of CO2/year).
And the problem does not stop there-- these numbers only work for the first 20 or so years of tree growth, and afterwards you have to seal you trees (under high pressure to turn them into hydrocarbons? :P) or plant even more trees to compensate for older trees decomposing (releasing CO2).
Regarding the trees, I hope they research that claim!
Regarding the concept that it's a distraction, I think that's folk behavioral psychology with an unhealthy dash of moralism. It needs to be substantiated with evidence before I take it seriously. We are talking about a real carbon mitigation research avenue that could have real benefits.
There is a potentially valid criticism here since this is ultimately about what the school (with its tremendous resources) is choosing to focus its efforts on. Stanford's previous global climate and energy project was famously funded by oil companies (though I suspect this was mostly a PR thing for them in previous decades), so this is not surprising. But should their priorities be those of the school?
Also some interesting things happening behind the scenes where they are clearly keeping faculty from certain 'troublesome' departments out of the process.. but that's not really unusual in the university context.
On the flip side, I think folks are also over-estimating the importance of corporate sources of funding here. The real reason for this focus is on government funding and resources on this topic that the school will want to tap into.
reading tea-leaves -- there is a behind-the-scenes split on how to proceed, on several fronts. The EU and India proposed directly to include IPCC language about "transitioning to 100% non-fossil fuel" and the USA + friends cancelled that in committee. While lots of ordinary educated people support energy change, you can see from the rhetoric and the stalling that what that "change" is, is not agreed upon. Stanford University, with regular funding from the Oil and Gas giants, are in a position to effect the spin and secrecy around these very public changes.
For example in 2023, the long-term investment and planning to replace Soviet-era oil and gas infrastructure in the Baltics with USA led oil and gas infrastructure in the Baltics is not publicly discussed; plans for control of shipping channels in the Arctic Circle area are not publicly discussed in the USA; changes to the USA grid to accomodate plural energy sources are not publicly discussed. An oil and gas-funded institute at Stanford is in a position to affect all of those. Multiple former US State Department executive leaders are active at Stanford right now.
If one simply gasified wood to run generators, then buried the residual charcoal to make tera preta, every kilowatt used to generate electricity would sequester a significant amount of carbon with minimal change to current infrastructure. One could use it first in disaster relief where there are a lot of downed trees anyway, then move to a fast-growing crop like hemp or bamboo. All that would be needed is more widely available wood gasifiers. Anyone want to invest in a company doing that?
The output of commercial scale wood gassification plants is not charcoal? It's ash. The whole point of wood gassification is complete combustion, so turning as much of the carbon into combustible fuel as possible.
The article is interesting but technically weak. If we focus on the process of generating a stream of pure CO2 from the atmosphere (where CO2 is at ~420 parts per million at present), things become a bit more clear.
Note first that the global biosphere is capturing CO2 into organic molecules at about 15 times the rate that fossil fuel consumption dumps geologically stable carbon deposits into the atmosphere. However, almost all of this biological carbon is respired back into the atmosphere by microbes, fungi, insects and animals who use the material as a food source. The reason atmospheric CO2 is rising is that the biosphere doesn't have the capacity to absorb the added CO2. Keep in mind that plant growth is a quite slow process compared to industrial activity.
So let's say we generate a stream of pure CO2 from the atmosphere - but how? If we got the electricity to do this (for pumping air over CO2 filters etc.) from fossil fuels, it's a futile cycle. The energy source has to be fossil-free for this to make sense as a CO2 extraction process.
Now, the oil industry has mostly been using their CO2 streams for enhanced oilfield recovery, i.e. they pump the CO2 down into the wells and it comes back out carrying the dregs of the oil with it. When processed into fuel, the injected CO2 goes back into the atmosphere.
Another use of a pure CO2 stream is to jack greenhouse CO2 up to ~1000 ppm, which has a significant effect on plant growth rates under controlled nutrient conditions. Most of the CO2 is released back into the atmosphere as well.
In terms of storing the CO2 in some stable form, this is rather energy-intensive. The two options that make the most sense are carbon fiber materials and diamond, the latter being harder to make (but very cool and sci-fi, enter the Diamond Age). Other options like making limestone (CaCO3) are tricky (where do you get all the calcium from). These are the only long-term removal options that make sense.
Claims that pumping CO2 down wells is a good idea for long-term storage are fraudulent. Claims that coal can be burned and used for electricity while capturing all the CO2 by the above process are fraudulent. The DOE public-private programs like FutureGen that promoted this were fraudulent, to the tune of billions of dollars of fraud.
The other option for captured CO2 is to use it make methane and jet fuel, for long-distance air travel, rocketry, maybe global shipping. Here we have zero effect on atmospheric CO2 content as what comes out goes back in. This is comparable to biosphere activity, i.e. it's steady-state. Costs for this process might be 10X that for current fossil fuel production, but it's the long-term fuel solution. Given the high costs, electric vehicles form most local transportation will be far more efficient.
I think that covers all the technological bases, anyway.
Opposing nuclear was the first catastrophic mistake environmentalists made, causing them to be a net negative overall in terms of climate change. Opposing carbon capture will be the next (and possibly last) one.
If you think climate change is a serious problem, then you need to put aside your moral beliefs and think like an engineer about solutions. There is no math that allows you to conserve/renewables your way to 2C while accommodating the expected growth in living standards in India, China, and Africa. And any strategy that doesn’t allow people in the developing world to dramatically increase their standard of living is a non-starter that will create billions of enemies for the environmental movement. India recently committed to go carbon neutral by 2070: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/developing-countries-.... That’s too late, and they won’t meet that anyway. The developed world needs to go carbon negative as fast as possible.
This is the most reasonable take. For some reason people in the West tend to ignore that 80% of the world is on the lower part of the exponential slope of progress, income, and demand for fossil fuel derived goods - and they are running up that slope at breakneck speed as a result of technological innovation.
Is the other 20% going to look down from our place of wealth and abundance - built on fossil fuels and countless externalities - and tell them that they have to achieve wealth and abundance through other means? It's ridiculous.
Sorry Sub-Saharan African, we have found that meat consumption is bad and therefore you can't do what we did, even though increased demand is a natural tendency as incomes rise.
All that cheap and dirty energy we used to make our infrastructure and grow GDP? You can't do it that way either. We made a big oopsie and have decided you have to do it through renewables and sustainable practices only.
By the way, are you interested in financing for this solar array? It's ok if you don't have the cash on hand, we'll just hold your highest quality farm-land as collateral.
We have to find ways to sequester. And we have to find ways to live in a warmer climate. It's the most probable outcome.
> We have to find ways to sequester. And we have to find ways to live in a warmer climate. It's the most probable outcome.
This is not the only conclusion from your excellent observation. Another conclusion could be that rich nations fund green infrastructure projects in poorer countries without asking anything in return. I believe this is what the climate relief fund is about—as approved (albeit in a much too small scale) in last COP.
So far however rich nations are not only reluctant to fund infrastructure projects in other countries without anything in return—let alone green infrastructure projects—they are also reluctant to fund green infrastructure projects domestically (see e.g. Green New Deal in the US). The technology for mass carbon sequestration does not exist yet, and if it existed I bet it would follow the same prospects as current prospects of tackling the climate crisis. In short, they will not be built at the scale needed for any meaningful results.
This is often the case when you offer a technical solution to a societal or a political problem.
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That case you made about meat consumption is actually very relatable as found in a few reports went viral in China, including this one by . Twenty years ago most rural living Chinese can't afford beef at all. Twenty years later they are able, and there are like 1 billion rural people become urban in 40 years I guess (plz check source), and developed countries are already mad about stuff they predicted to happen. Trust fund solution is one helpful tool for this, yet uprising tension in India/US allies and China/Russia/Middle East/Pakistan make the plan definitely dead. It will soon to be another case of WWII U.N. that is controlled by U.S. and vetoed by U.S.S.R. for a billion times a year and not producing anything remotely close to a deal, or a compromise. Also, solar array is tremendously expensive due to regional difference, just like battery, either rare metal or lithium.
And who exactly are going to be paying for these ruinously expensive nuclear power stations for the poorer countries? Is it you and rayiner? Or perhaps you want your government to fund it through increased taxes on you?
I'm sure you wouldn't want the poor countries to pay for it themselves.
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Reality is geographically, poor global south likely to bear higher brunt of climate change, while many in northern regions will be net benefitiaries. But poverty immediately sucks more than climate change, hope is that development via whatever means will uplift more than a few degrees dooms. How many people in developed north would trade their inhospitable winters in heated homes for being impoverished in more fair weathered country. None, because they learned to live with the cold.
I don’t know if all you wrote about is going to be a problem in the way you see it. The developing world has jumped/skipped some of the development the west/rich nations experienced and just adapted the latest technology.
A good example of this is communication technology. In wealthy nations, there was all of this wired infrastructure put in place since the advent of the telegraph. In developing nations, they just skipped all of that and most people have cellphones. Maybe not iphones or even smartphones, but the banks they used developed robust texting protocols, from what I’ve read and heard about, where people could do banking transactions from something like those old nokia dumbphones.
A lot of these developing countries rely on China, maybe to the wests collective chagrin, and China has invested heavily in rail infrastructure in a lot of these countries, and, Chinese auto manufacturers are already producing tons of electric vehicles. Guess whose car companies are building auto factories in a lot of the developing world? And though they may not meet the safety and quality standards of wealthy countries, people in developing countries are just happy to get places quicker than by foot. I may not have listed everything that emits greenhouse gases and a suitable replacement but normalizing mass transit (I forgot to mention the electric buses I’ve read these developing countries are either ordering from china or building at home in Chinese factories), but these two… industries make up a significant chunk of problematic emissions.
What I think we may see in the west is active resistance to adapting new energy and normalizing greener behavior because of things like American exceptionalism. Also, these technologies are expensive to buy for many people even in the west (right, not most people here on hackernews), and its going to be prohibitively expensive for people in old housing stock to upgrade their property and municipalities to upgrade infrastructure. Tax rebates on $35,000 electric cars and heat pumps aren’t going to mean much to people relying on older family members for a roof over their head and can’t find jobs, especially if this whole ai thing takes off. There’s also significant and continual pushback from an people who seem determined to trash electric cars and such, and thats exacerbated by corporations acting bad faith to maximize profit (high efficiency appliances that barely make it through their standard warranty terms and subscription based car features come to mind.
So yeah, I think the developing world might be fine but its the wealthy nations who are going to screw themselves (and because of the US’ voracious consumption if everything), and maybe the rest of the world regardless of what steps the developing world takes.
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Carbon capture is cleaning up dog shit in the kitchen with a toothpick instead of training it to go outside.
The dog has been dirtying the kitchen floor for long enough already that we're also going to need that toothpick.
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change AR6 fact sheet on carbon dioxide removal:
"Carbon dioxide removal (CDR) refers to technologies, practices, and approaches that remove and durably store carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere. CDR is required to achieve global and national targets of net zero CO2 and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. CDR cannot substitute for immediate and deep emissions reductions, but it is part of all modelled scenarios that limit global warming to 2° or lower by 2100."
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/downloads/outreach/IPCC_A...
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Let me play devils advocate though. Right now nuclear provides 10% of the world’s power. Now since it was first deployed in the 70’s there have been at least 3 major accidents I can think of: Fukushima, Chernobyl, and 3 mile island. So that’s one every 15 years, roughly.
The naive math behind that suggests that if we were to increase the number of power plants by a factor of 10 to supply all the world’s power, we should expect the rate of accidents to increase proportionally. So that’s a Fukushima somewhere in the world every 1.5 years or 18 months. And a bad one of those accidents could spread radiation across an entire continent.
Changes the risk/reward calculation, doesn’t it?
3 Mile Island: No one died, nothing of any significance happened. Clickbait from an era before clickbait was a thing.
Chernobyl: Irresponsible operation of obsolete, inherently-hazardous Soviet-era design. Not something that can ever happen again if some relatively-simple lessons are followed.
Fukushima: Irresponsible maintenance of plant operating well beyond its intended lifespan, which was irresponsibly constructed in a tsunami-prone seismic zone. This type of accident can and probably will happen again, precisely because of moratoriums on new plant construction.
One risk you didn't list but probably should have is reckless military attacks waged against installations such as Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine. It's hard to safeguard a nuclear plant against a barbarian invasion. It may make sense to operate such plants under UN auspices, or otherwise guarantee their safety through multinational treaties with real enforcement behind them.
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The odds definitely aren't that straightforward.
Experiments and development in the 1950s. First commercial plant in 58.
Further growth in 60s and 70s. Including deadly accidents like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SL-1 in 1961 - protests grew in 60s and 70s too.
Three Mile Island 1979.
Chernobyl 1986.
Fukushima 2011.
That 25-year gap between Chernobyl and Fukushima - and the extraordinary circumstances causing Fukushima vs the previous incidents - suggests that safety improved A LOT over the 60-odd years between 1958 and now.
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Now do the same calculation for passenger aviation.
That's not how disasters work. They aren't independent variables, when they happen, you learn and change the way things work to prevent them from happening again.
I don't know of any environmentalists against the research. Most I've talked with are skeptical that this is viable given current technology and believe that we need to act as if this doesn't exist, but that's different than opposing the research.
If there is some sort of breakthrough, then that's fantastic!
I think there are other geoengineering techniques that environmentalists are against such as seeding with sulphur dioxide or trying to create a shade preventing sun rays from reaching earth, but the argument against carbon capture is only that it doesn't yet exist.
When someone says they're "green" but hard-core antinuclear I just stop listening after that. They have done almost zero research on the topic and have 99% likely just decided because someone told them it was bad. Nuclear is our only viable path if we plan on keeping a dependable power grid. Battery tech is not currently up to par with what we need to make wind and solar 100% solutions. We need at least a 10X increase in storage density and longevity for that. They should absolutely be part of the mix though as they're cheaper than nuclear per kW
I think nuclear, today, is a hardcore bad idea. Nuclear is showing no tangible signs of getting cheaper, and renewable and battery prices continue to fall.
"Carbon capture research" has been an excuse to divert funding away from renewables for 20+ years. It's hardly made a dent in emissions and it's unlikely to change any time soon.
By definition poor countries overtaken by fossil fuels industrialization cannot use nuclear power - the technical knowledge is not there, and even if it were the corruption would result in destruction of the facility.
Power from the sun is the ultimate end goal in the tech tree. We've just skipped over the middle part because it turns out that even the smartest nuclear builds are still stupid and incapable of accounting for natural disasters or human elements.
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There was a recent pro-nuclear article posted here on HN which was authored by a fossil fuel lobbyist (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35658318). I know you are fishing for the opposite response, but it seems very likely at this point that the fossil fuel industry is funding pro-nuclear propaganda.
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Ever-growing armies of ever-better-paid administrators aren't going to magically pay for themselves. And a university won't be atop America's merciless academic pecking order for long if it's burdened with scruples about funding sources.
This comment is vague but it sounds like you're downplaying the seriousness of funding sources.
This isn't a paranoid conspiracy or dramatic judgement. Companies really do pay for particular research results that benefit them. This has been going on at least since gasoline had lead in it.
I think you might be misunderstanding the amount of distrust placed in the root comment. He's claiming the more prestigious a University is, the more likely they are to take unethical funding because increased funding leads to more prestige. It's an attack on the integrity of modern science as practiced by academia, not on a subset of studies.
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the bigger issue you overlooked is the constant growth of bureaucratic overhead sucking up the watershed of resources and leaving only a trickle for the people actually putting together the curriculum, teaching and researching.
The administrators are useful to a point but they vastly overstate their importance and erode everything they touch overtime like a malignant cancer in a lot of organizations.
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What's the equivalent of "/s" for bitter cynicism?
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I think you misread them
As cynical as we can count on these people to be - they're also smart enough to recognize that continually whoring themselves out to the highest bidder can, apart from undermining Stanford's integrity (which they obviously don't care about), also be detrimental to their bottom line in the longer run.
In fact this seems to be the only way they eventually learn:
In response, more than 800 people affiliated with the university have signed a letter calling for a funding ban, and some alumni say they won’t donate to their alma mater until it happens.
https://stanforddaily.com/2022/11/30/from-the-community-we-r...
I find the notion donating to your alma mater kind of odd. You don't donate money to the local McDonald's that made a burger for you do you? I mean, you could but that's not something that's regularly done.
The service was provided and paid for and now there's some expectation to give more money after the fact?
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Fun fact: Josiah Stanford was the first person to establish commercial petroleum production in California: http://www.sjvgeology.org/old_stuff/tunnels.html
"Helped shape" != "Dictated". It makes perfect sense to have industry members be a part of discussions about regulations and problems related to their industry. Industry members shouldn't be able to dictate the outcomes of those discussions, but they should certainly be able to participate in them.
I don’t think is one of those cases where it’s helpful to have everyone “have a seat at the table.”
The oil industry would make more money than anyone else at that table and have outsized influence.
They also have a history of misleading the public and outright lying about climate change.
Stanford really taking a reputational hit these days. That's some shady business that.
Maybe Stanford was never really what their very active reputation management facility was pushing the last few facades? The school basically rode the Silicon Valley wave.
Nah. Funding research to show your business isn't a problem is shady. Funding research to solve the problem could be a good thing, depending what the find.
Trusting the results is basically impossible now though. Even if they’re solution focused, you don’t know if they were adjusted in scale.
Can we stop the anti-sequestration movement? Let's just think about it for a second. How do we get to net zero if we account for lifetime emissions of energy sources? Even solar has lifetime emissions. You have to remove it from the atmosphere. (We'll ignore processes that can't be decarbonized, but that just adds to the problem)
So what do we know? We know that forests are hard to plant and that their early lifecycle is a carbon source. Still, we should plant trees. Ignoring this, US citizens alone would need to plant 500 trees per year to offset their current footprints[0]. That's 165 billion trees a year, and a densely packed forest has 4-6 sqft per tree. The US has just over a trillion square feet. You do the math. (even dramatic reductions in footprints don't solve this problem)
Okay, so trees aren't enough. Luckily we know land management is one of the best carbon sink techniques available. But we run into a similar problem, just with more efficiency than above. So what is the result? We have to use a variety of techniques, both natural and artificial, to scrub carbon from the air. Not to reach net negative (which should really be our goal), but just to even reach net zero! Yes, big oil is going to fund this. Why? Because when carbon taxes come in, they can keep their plants up by scrubbing a percentage of their carbon to match that tax. (They also want PR and this is cheap PR) If they somehow could scrub all the carbon (they won't), then what do we care? The goal is about carbon emissions, not source of energy. I just don't see them surviving, but of course they're going to try to hold on as long as they can instead of adapting and surviving. Their loss.
[0] https://8billiontrees.com/carbon-offsets-credits/reduce-co2-...
imo, as a global priority, reducing carbon seems like it should be a much lower priority compared to how hard its pushed.
incoming nuclear fusion would alleviate a ton of our carbon issues
if we use info from this wonderfully fleshed out cost-benefit analysis by bjorn lomborg i bet we could get the best of value out of our current fossil fuels while not impoverishing our children and grandchildren:
https://i.imgur.com/1vklbRo.png
> reducing carbon seems like it should be a much lower priority compared to how hard its pushed
I'm not sure what you mean. The last 50 years (and even 5) have been far more bark than bite.
> incoming nuclear fusion would alleviate a ton of our carbon issues
A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. I worked on nuclear in a previous career and still have friends there, including fusion (including the big labs). Being bullish, fusion net gain is still 10 years away. It'll take decades to add to the energy portfolio after that. The case for fusion is worse than the case for fission. We should work on both, but we can't hold out for future technologies (we can say the same about storage). We needed to act decades ago, pushing it off by a few more decades is not going to solve the issue, it is repeating the same mistakes.
> fleshed out cost-benefit analysis
I wouldn't trust any of these. Zero of them. You need to have a pretty good understanding of these systems (highly complex) to even understand if the analyses are good. Every single one has a bias and is highly politicized. The more politicized a topic is, the higher level of expertise you need to understand who is telling the truth (politicization adds large amounts of noise).
> Bjorn Lomborg
Who is a political scientist. He isn't a climate scientist, nor even a scientist. Here's a rather well known scientist, Stefan Rahmstorf (studies physics of oceans) discussing Bjorn[0]. You can check Bjorn's scholar page[1] to even verify that he's not doing actual science bust just writing opinions with no supporting evidence. Please stop supporting hacks.
[0] https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2015/08/bjorn...
[1] https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=HUMF5c0AAAAJ
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If we don’t reduce carbon emissions—heck if we don’t stop carbon emissions—there will be no future for our children and grandchildren to either prosper or impoverish in. Not reducing carbon means we are all going to die. The earth will heat 4-5 degrees. Human societies will not function as we know them today, governments will break down, wars will be fought, famines will linger. However much money fossil fuel gives us today will have no effect on that future, as we will all be dead.
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nuclear fusion will be achieved but nobody question if it will be economically convenient, even with global carbon tax and esg frameworks. As today we are in the realm of hundreds of billions for "sperimental" fusion facility, just comparing to fission plant cost, they have balloned exponentially from sperimental phase decades ago
I think Big Oil is less Big Oil than it really is Big Energy.
Big Energy has the massive capital to deploy for green energy solutions that are viable and will provide a renewable path forward off of more polluting or non-renewable sources. Big Energy's product of choice is mainly petroleum derived currently. Due to sourcing and limitations though, this is a mostly finite resource that they would love to replace for more profit.
Profit will drive them to new sources. When you see Big Energy actually moving to these new sources at the mega-industrial scale and not PoCs, prototypes, but deploying tens of billions of dollars, is when the true revolution will happen.
If they are funding Stanford and other parts of Academia, then that is a good thing.
https://archive.ph/m5Ebq
I'm not sure how mad to be about this. Honestly, at the moment I kinda think it's a good thing on balance.
I believe climate change is a huge, urgent concern. And I think it would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our risk mitigation portfolio. If fossil fuel companies, out of self-interest, want to support a legitimate research institution doing that, I'm not sure I should complain.
If Stanford starts spouting propaganda that we can procrastinate on getting off of fossil fuels because their carbon removal technology will solve everything, I will definitely condemn them mercilessly. I assume the fossil fuel companies are already spouting such propaganda or funding someone to do so, since they've been spouting anti-climate risk mitigation propaganda for decades, and I am already condemning them mercilessly for that anyway.
I actually think carbon removal could spur renewables development because in theory it's a flexible sink for spare power. Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few square miles of solar panels, and run it when the sun shines. We could get a lot of demand for solar panels out of this, and that will encourage the further development of commercial scaling up. And the more renewables scale up, the more I think fossil fuels will be squeezed out of existence because they won't be able to compete on price.
EDIT: I am open to the possibility that this is completely unrealistic and is just another distraction from the fossil fuel industry. But the arguments need to be made on technical grounds by knowledgeable people. Here is an interview by an expert making that argument: https://www.protocol.com/climate/carbon-dioxide-removal-cost...
> Yet ambition and momentum may not be enough to reach that milestone, according to Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer with MIT’s Energy Initiative. He’s been studying carbon capture for over 30 years (even writing a book about it in 2018) and is more skeptical given the capital costs to build CDR plants and the enormous amount of energy they need to run. He sat down with Protocol to talk about why he thinks $100 per ton is “pure fantasy.”
By the way, I really liked this quote, and I wish all the "we just need to"-ers would read it:
> When people think things are too easy, they won’t address the hard decisions, even though those hard decisions may end up with a better solution. At this point, I don’t know if liming the ocean is a great idea or not, but it has a lot of potential, and we have to look at things like that if we want to get to net zero. And people say capturing carbon dioxide from the air for $100 per ton will get us to net zero. But if it’s a fantasy, it’s not going to get us there.
I'm highly sceptical regarding ALL CO2 removal schemes that don't operate directly at a CO2 source, because I see absolutely NO WAY how they could ever be made cost effective:
CO2 concentration in air is less than 1g/m^3, meaning that you would have to pump like 10000 m^3 of air through your apparatus just to remove the CO2 from a single car travelling ~100km.
And this assumes 100% extraction efficiency which is not realistic at all.
So any climate plan that relies on large-scale CO2 removal from atmospheric air is probably a complete SCAM.
Also compare the cost difference between reducing emissions at the source by electrifying a vehicle with the effort required of extracting the CO2 from the air-- it is COMPLETELY obvious to me that even spending a dollar on CO2 removal is absolute LUNACY until all the cheap and easy options of reducing emissions have been exhausted.
Look, I think direct air capture (DAC) is as much “not the solution” as the next guy, but this kind of black-and-white thinking has no place in climate change mitigation.
Right now, DAC costs about $250-500/ton. The average passenger vehicle in the US emits 4.6 tons of CO2/year. You say it’s not cost-effective but you could literally charge every passenger vehicle user in the US $1-2000/year and use it for capture and eliminate the single largest source. That is the same order of magnitude as vehicle registration fees (though of course you’d want to make such a tax progressive, etc.), at least in California.
More importantly, DAC provides a major price signal for the cost of carbon emissions: if it costs $250/ton to get CO2 out of the atmosphere, it starts to make more sense to charge emitters $250/ton in advance to remove it — and if we implemented such a system, the market would likely respond very quickly with rapid reductions in carbon emissions. Oil and gas companies think it’s the solution? Great, they can pay $250/ton for it.
Instead we’re selling everyone individual shame about what are really societal decisions, telling them not to drive as much, be too cold/hot at home, and eat less beef — while letting producers largely off the hook. That’s the real lunacy here.
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> So any climate plan that relies on large-scale CO2 removal from atmospheric air is probably a complete SCAM.
The "scam" language is interesting to me.
I often run into people who seem to think that advocates of carbon capture technology are somehow being intellectually dishonest and are not serious about climate change.
In fact I think there are a lot of people who are interested in carbon capture tech who just keep an open mind about it. Not all scientific advances are obvious early on.
I think we should avoid assuming that people who are promoting carbon capture research are speaking in bad faith. There are lots of people who genuinely believe the tech may mature to a point it is useful to the fight against climate change.
Just because the fossil fuel industry promotes it doesnt mean that everyone who promotes it is a shill for the fossil fuel industry.
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Trees don't pump the air through their leaves, they let CO2 diffuse and blow in the wind.
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It has been demonstrated repeatedly that the source of funding does implicitly bias research results.
But the bigger effect is the appearance of working on the solution is often used to prevent real mitigation efforts that are here and now, such as higher costs for CO2 emissions, reforming the carbon trading scheme, and investing in moving to more use of green electricity.
We spend on the order of $900B a year on the military. Imagine if $100B a year, every year, was spent instead on beefing up the power grid, investing in efficient long-haul power distribution, investing even more in solar/wind/nukes. With less need to strong arm the world to ensure access to oil, it could pay for itself in less military intervention. Obviously, there are many political reasons why even $1 reduction in the military budget is difficult to accomplish, but that is only an indication of how much the government is beholden to the military/industrial complex.
We don’t need to strong arm the world to access oil, we are a net exporter of oil. There’s lots of bad things to say about our foreign policy, but the idea that it’s about oil should have died with the Iraq War (where we spent trillions of dollars but didn’t get any oil).
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"It would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our climate change portfolio"
Planting trees and establishing more forests is a already working technology with lots of other nice side effects, while I see the "artificial carbon removal" tech often just used as a excuse to not do anything now at all and wait for the magic game changer.
"Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few square miles of solar panels, and run it when the sun shines."
And I totally like anything related to this, but as long as we build new coal plants, building this would be just symbolic.
So first I would use the desert solar power for actually powering the grid, removing the need for coal.
The fact you were downvoted is pretty good evidence that we'll commit a mass extinction on par with the great oxygenation, denying it the whole way.
Planting trees is not really viable to deal with CO2 emissions on any significant scale.
Assuming a tree absorbs around 20kg of CO2/year, you'd need to plant 250 trees per year (!!) for every single passenger vehicle (~5tons of CO2/year).
And the problem does not stop there-- these numbers only work for the first 20 or so years of tree growth, and afterwards you have to seal you trees (under high pressure to turn them into hydrocarbons? :P) or plant even more trees to compensate for older trees decomposing (releasing CO2).
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Regarding the trees, I hope they research that claim!
Regarding the concept that it's a distraction, I think that's folk behavioral psychology with an unhealthy dash of moralism. It needs to be substantiated with evidence before I take it seriously. We are talking about a real carbon mitigation research avenue that could have real benefits.
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There is a potentially valid criticism here since this is ultimately about what the school (with its tremendous resources) is choosing to focus its efforts on. Stanford's previous global climate and energy project was famously funded by oil companies (though I suspect this was mostly a PR thing for them in previous decades), so this is not surprising. But should their priorities be those of the school?
Also some interesting things happening behind the scenes where they are clearly keeping faculty from certain 'troublesome' departments out of the process.. but that's not really unusual in the university context.
On the flip side, I think folks are also over-estimating the importance of corporate sources of funding here. The real reason for this focus is on government funding and resources on this topic that the school will want to tap into.
reading tea-leaves -- there is a behind-the-scenes split on how to proceed, on several fronts. The EU and India proposed directly to include IPCC language about "transitioning to 100% non-fossil fuel" and the USA + friends cancelled that in committee. While lots of ordinary educated people support energy change, you can see from the rhetoric and the stalling that what that "change" is, is not agreed upon. Stanford University, with regular funding from the Oil and Gas giants, are in a position to effect the spin and secrecy around these very public changes.
For example in 2023, the long-term investment and planning to replace Soviet-era oil and gas infrastructure in the Baltics with USA led oil and gas infrastructure in the Baltics is not publicly discussed; plans for control of shipping channels in the Arctic Circle area are not publicly discussed in the USA; changes to the USA grid to accomodate plural energy sources are not publicly discussed. An oil and gas-funded institute at Stanford is in a position to affect all of those. Multiple former US State Department executive leaders are active at Stanford right now.
If one simply gasified wood to run generators, then buried the residual charcoal to make tera preta, every kilowatt used to generate electricity would sequester a significant amount of carbon with minimal change to current infrastructure. One could use it first in disaster relief where there are a lot of downed trees anyway, then move to a fast-growing crop like hemp or bamboo. All that would be needed is more widely available wood gasifiers. Anyone want to invest in a company doing that?
The output of commercial scale wood gassification plants is not charcoal? It's ash. The whole point of wood gassification is complete combustion, so turning as much of the carbon into combustible fuel as possible.
Is anyone else not seeing the article text? (Firefox fwiw)
The article is interesting but technically weak. If we focus on the process of generating a stream of pure CO2 from the atmosphere (where CO2 is at ~420 parts per million at present), things become a bit more clear.
Note first that the global biosphere is capturing CO2 into organic molecules at about 15 times the rate that fossil fuel consumption dumps geologically stable carbon deposits into the atmosphere. However, almost all of this biological carbon is respired back into the atmosphere by microbes, fungi, insects and animals who use the material as a food source. The reason atmospheric CO2 is rising is that the biosphere doesn't have the capacity to absorb the added CO2. Keep in mind that plant growth is a quite slow process compared to industrial activity.
So let's say we generate a stream of pure CO2 from the atmosphere - but how? If we got the electricity to do this (for pumping air over CO2 filters etc.) from fossil fuels, it's a futile cycle. The energy source has to be fossil-free for this to make sense as a CO2 extraction process.
Now, the oil industry has mostly been using their CO2 streams for enhanced oilfield recovery, i.e. they pump the CO2 down into the wells and it comes back out carrying the dregs of the oil with it. When processed into fuel, the injected CO2 goes back into the atmosphere.
Another use of a pure CO2 stream is to jack greenhouse CO2 up to ~1000 ppm, which has a significant effect on plant growth rates under controlled nutrient conditions. Most of the CO2 is released back into the atmosphere as well.
In terms of storing the CO2 in some stable form, this is rather energy-intensive. The two options that make the most sense are carbon fiber materials and diamond, the latter being harder to make (but very cool and sci-fi, enter the Diamond Age). Other options like making limestone (CaCO3) are tricky (where do you get all the calcium from). These are the only long-term removal options that make sense.
Claims that pumping CO2 down wells is a good idea for long-term storage are fraudulent. Claims that coal can be burned and used for electricity while capturing all the CO2 by the above process are fraudulent. The DOE public-private programs like FutureGen that promoted this were fraudulent, to the tune of billions of dollars of fraud.
The other option for captured CO2 is to use it make methane and jet fuel, for long-distance air travel, rocketry, maybe global shipping. Here we have zero effect on atmospheric CO2 content as what comes out goes back in. This is comparable to biosphere activity, i.e. it's steady-state. Costs for this process might be 10X that for current fossil fuel production, but it's the long-term fuel solution. Given the high costs, electric vehicles form most local transportation will be far more efficient.
I think that covers all the technological bases, anyway.