Comment by thelastgallon
7 hours ago
Scientists and economists are dime a dozen, they have to sing for their supper. For a few thousands dollars, scientists have written about benefits of smoking, lead is a gift from God, and tens of thousands of toxic substances, food additives, etc.
Carbon capture is fraud. You can EASILY stop carbon emissions by switching to EVs, which are cheaper to buy and operate. Instead Govts want to spend trillions on top the $7T dollars/year subsidies to help oil companies recover more oil.
The COP summits are held in fossil fuel countries and discuss carbon capture.
Shell Is Looking Forward The fossil-fuel companies expect to profit from climate change. I went to a private planning meeting and took notes: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50044917. The book is Merchants of Doubt.
> Carbon capture is fraud.
Planting and growing trees is a form of carbon capture and it is one that has worked in Earth's history to bring CO2 levels down over the last millions of years from 7000ppm during the Cambrian Age to less than 700ppm.
You already know why that’s a confusing argument because you included the time scale yourself, but to say the obvious: I think we probably need to go a bit faster than “millions of years”.
It took nature millions of years to go from 7000ppm to under 700ppm. But we are talking a diff of only about 100ppm. Not cutting down the rainforest or raising a forest of that scale in some desert does seem like a positive contribution.
Another good idea would be to mandate working from home for everyone that reasonably can do so. During Covid I've only measured about 300ppm as the bottom baseline, while nowadays I do not measure lower than 400ppm. (Co2 measuring devices are fairly cheap and good to have in your office, as high Co2 affects your ability to think clearly. Without opening a window and having just one person inside Co2 easily climbs to about 3000ppm within a few hours just from your breathing.)
Planting trees as "carbon offsets" has been a hugely profitable rort
The idea that we can lock up land, forever, planted in trees to offset our consumption is blissfully naive
In New Zealand large swatches of land are being taken out of production, for a onetime big payment
It neglects two things:
1. Trees burn. Forests left untended for years choke with fuel and then catastrophically burn releasing all that carbon
2. We need the land. Future generations, this generation in a few years, will not be sympathetic to the vast swatches of unproductive land (that due to 1. above create costs)
We must stop producing carbon. It will mean many obscenely rich will be downgraded to wealthy. And the prospect of that is enough to burn the world
To capture 10% of daily emissions we need to plant like 20 million trees per day.
EVs don't "easily stop" emissions in the US, since the American grid today is powered about 43% by natural gas and 15% by coal. Converting those sources has to happen too.
> Converting those sources has to happen too.
True, but the overall carbon reduction in owning an EV over its lifetime is still leagues lower; "Production-weighted average carbon footprints are 183 g CO2e/mi for BEVs; 351 g CO2e/mi for PHEVs; 445 g CO2e/mi for HEVs; and 521 g CO2e/mi for ICEVs." from [0] which does take into account the carbon-emitting percentage of the electrical grid.
Also, see Figure 4[1] in the study which states "Results demonstrate that, even under unfavorable conditions, BEVs still have a 30% lower life cycle carbon footprint."
0: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-025-00032-4
1: https://www.nature.com/articles/s44458-025-00032-4/figures/4
Yes
Emissions displacement is healthier for where humans actually live, but they do also reduce emissions over their lifetime. you and others can work on improving that further at the other parts of the stack
The claim was that EVs "stop" emissions and I believe we've corrected that. At no point did I claim EVs don't reduce emissions.
Thanks for the tip on what to work on. You too can work on other parts of the stack. And you can even improve the "vehicle" end of the stack, to which it sounds like you confine your actions, by moving around less, and when moving around, not hauling one or two tons of "car" with you. This can be accomplished by, for example, moving close to work (or only working close to home), living only in areas with good public transit, and/or bicycling everywhere -- all of which I did for 30 years, so I know it's possible. (edit: saved a bunch of money too)
And once we can get Trump and the Republicans, who have been consistently, aggressively, and in some cases fighting against both profitability and common sense, squashing attempts to solarize and trying to bring back the dirtiest coal they can, out of office, that will become much, much easier.
Solar panels are now vastly cheaper and more effective than they were even a few years ago. Replacing the whole US grid won't happen overnight, but once the government is actually expending effort to move in that direction, rather than clawing in the other direction by its fingernails, it will move fairly quickly.