Comment by civilized
3 years ago
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.
You could literally buy people electric cars at that pricepoint instead.
Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly in favor of taxing CO2 emission, but the problem IMO is that people in general would rather ruin the planet than pay a fair price for the damage that their emissions cause, purely because they are USED to pollute and consume for cheap.
If there was the necessary political will to pay, then I believe that carbon capture would basically not be used at all, because it is MUCH cheaper to just not emit the carbon in the first place...
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> you could literally charge every passenger vehicle user in the US $1-2000/year
Politically (and practically) infeasible. Most likely it would be done as a fuel tax, but it would need to be in the ballpark of $3/gallon which would be suicide for the politicans who impose it and unaffordable to many of the people who would be paying for it. A tax that can't be paid can't fund anything.
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> this kind of black-and-white thinking has no place in climate change mitigation.
This is not black-and-white thinking. He is pointing out that infeasible miracle cures are not the solution.
We need to focus on realistic possibilities, not Elon-Musk jesustech.
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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.
I'd not go so far and blame everyone involved in carbon capture tech; more specifically I thank that it CAN make sense if you're able to capture at the source (much higher concentration => less efficiency problems).
But I absolutely blame journalists and spokespersons that peddle this as some kind of viable technology when it's ABSOLUTELY not; this is similar to fusion tech, where people (sometimes deliberately!) create the impression that the technology could "solve" climate change and is just around the corner.
But in both cases no instance I've seen so far passes even a rudimentary smell test. If you have a novel method to catch CO2 from the air or are able to run your tokamak for 90s longer than that is awesome and interesting, but DONT run around and pretend to be heralding a scientific revolution in mainstream media (where both average reader and writer have an understanding of the subject and economics behind that is comparable with a average housecat).
I ABSOLUTELY blame people for doing that, and I consider it quite harmful because it creates the impression that there are some kinds of tech-based avenues out of climate change that never really existed at all, and this can even negatively impact decisions from policymakers.
Trees don't pump the air through their leaves, they let CO2 diffuse and blow in the wind.
Sure, but the amount of CO2 absorbed by a tree is measured in grams per day, which isn't really enough to even realistically offset the devices own carbon footprint, let alone start tackling other co2 sources.
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).
That is a very recent phenomenon. From 1958 until 2019 the US imported more than it exported, including during the Iraq War (both of them).
https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-...
That could flip at any moment based on the price of imported oil vs the cost of domestic production. The US is still very much "investing" in the military to ensure a stable source of energy (as well as other national interests).
You think the US bush and Bush senior administration would of given a thought about Iraq if it wasn’t an oil producing resource?
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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).
Kind of sounds amazing if we could pull it off (of course we can't) but imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one.
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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.
You mean you want quotes of people, who say climate change is not so bad, because we (will) have co2 removal tech?
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