Comment by myrmidon
3 years ago
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...
Yes, gas cars would disappear very quickly at that rate of carbon taxation.
"People in general" would absolutely use non-planet-ruining versions of basically anything, the problem is getting there -- most people do not even think about the polluting effects of every item they buy, and could not even if they wanted to given supply chain complexity.
Unfortunately these decisions are made for them, largely by the realities of economics and policy: when you have the option to pay to internalize the external cost of travel yourself, most people don't -- why would they? No one wants to act alone to hold that bag, that's literally one of the main reasons for policy: to engage in group action for group advantage where individual action is a competitive disadvantage.
Redistributive taxes on carbon emissions are likely something many people would support -- were it not for concerted efforts to the contrary by individuals and industries that stand to lose stature as a result. But on carbon capture: there will absolutely continue to be near- and medium-term use cases where burning petroleum products and then capturing the CO2 later is the most cost-effective approach. (Or vice versa, via synfuels.) There will still be a carbon cycle, and we will still want to have many levers on it.
> 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.
Of course a literal tax is politically infeasible, not least because we're not at all serious about actually internalizing the currently-external cost of carbon.
But it's a mistake to consider a tax as something we can't afford because we are already incurring this tax bill by emitting the carbon in the first place. Whether we pay now to reduce the carbon or later to reduce the carbon and mitigate impacts, we will all be paying.
And I agree: imposing this tax today as a flat "usage" tax would be political suicide, but we have many levers that are far more equitable -- tax-and-dividend programs in particular have a lot of history.
1 reply →
> 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.
No one thinks infeasible miracle cures are the solution, so he's doing much more than "pointing that out": he's making an argument about the infeasibility of carbon capture.
In particular, he's saying it's impossible to capture enough carbon at scale in a cost-effective manner, so therefore we should not even be looking at this option until we've exhausted the alternatives. But he's wrong: it's not impossible, it's merely expensive, and anyway we should be pursuing all possible remedies in parallel, not dismissing something as infeasible because someone's armchair analysis makes it look like a scam to them.
What we need are people trying both likely and unlikely solutions, not knee-jerk gatekeeping from randoms on the internet.
1 reply →
> 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.