Comment by zamfi
3 years ago
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.
From a purely rich western perspective it seems likely to me that OTHER people are going to pay much more than "the west" is going to: Wealth provides buffer against food shortages, lethal outdoor temperatures and sea level rise alike, and the regions that are going to suffer the most are also probably gonna be more like Bangladesh than Central Europe...
If your voters in general are not willing to pay the price for the damage they cause, what is a democracy supposed to do? Sad state of affairs.
> 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.
There will be better physical, chemical, environmental, cost, and overall economic advantages resulting from efforts at source reduction than air capture.
This will always be what matters when resources need to be deployed most efficiently for abatement.
When you do the math, unless resources become unlimited, source capture is the better use of limited infrastructure.
It's really kinda-sorta completely impossible to fool Mother Nature on things like this.
The problem is not enough effort is going into source removal since the responsible source would be the only one that would be facing the added cost above what they are doing now.
With remote air capture the much less efficient and costly process can be spread among huge numbers of different but smaller payers whether they know it or not.
If that makes significant progress occur sooner that should make DAC be good to go forward with in the short term, but eventually people will be able to do the math at scale and most will say WTF were we spinning our wheels so long for?