While renewables capture an inexhaustible source of energy (Sun), fossil fuels rely on an inexhaustible source of money for them: subsidies. Fossil fuel companies can't survive without the hundreds of billions of subsidies every year[1]. They can capture more subsides for 'carbon capture', using the captured carbon to extract more oil.
This is how carbon capture is being used currently. However, I it's absolutely not the goal of legislation that funds carbon capture research - research that was lobbied for by environmental groups (not that big oil didn't lobby for it too). It's also not the goal of people I know who are working on carbon capture technology research. The goal is to reduce global atmospheric carbon levels. The problem is that doing that isn't technically or economically feasible at the moment.
If we could make carbon capture cheaper and more efficient (and that's a big if - it may not be possible, which is why research is needed), carbon could be permanently sequestered.
thelastgallon 3 days ago [-]
A ton of {coal,petroleum,natural gas} emits {2.6,2.75,3.2} tons of CO2. 8.5 billion tons of coal burnt every year. 4000 billion cubic meters of Natural gas/year (~3000 billion tons - gemini), Global oil production is 4.5 billion metric tons/year.
I don't see a reason to subsidize fossil fuels, release all this carbon, and then subsidize fossil fuels companies even more to capture something thats measured in parts per million.
We'd be better off not burning fossil fuels, we have the technology today. People are ok spending billions on carbon capture. But are against subsidizing EVs, ICE cars emit 1 ton of CO2 for every 2500 miles, every car emits 5 tons CO2/year. For a lifetime of 20 years, thats 100 tons of CO2. Why not fund EVs as carbon capture? Or is the only path forward to give money to fossil fuel companies?
Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year[1]. Thats the equivalent of 2000 EVs.
Electric Vehicles is a pretty broad subject. What absolutely must be well developed is the public transport, take Switzerland as an example.
Naturally, personal transports should be electrical, but even more important is to get people on trains.
The numbers don’t lie
thelastgallon 3 days ago [-]
Switzerland has 600 vehicles/1000 people, US has 900. Sure, its lower, but not significantly lower. US is 238 times larger and people live/commute farther. Public transit is better, but it won't work everywhere because of entrenched interests and strong resistance. It takes decades to do minor infrastructure projects, it will take centuries for US to have public transit that can work. Whats even better is walking/biking with no need of public transit infrastructure. While that hopefully, eventually happens, it is much easier to stop buying new gas cars. Nobody is saying sell your gas car rightaway and buy EVs. There are people buying new gas cars today, which will pollute and emit CO2 for the next 20 years. Instead of buying a gas car, why not buy an EV? And if you must have a gas car (which is understandable, it may not work for your specific use case), buy a used car. After all, whats the big difference between a 2023 ICE car vs 2024.
tticvs 3 days ago [-]
> While renewables capture an inexhaustible source of energy (Sun)
Fortunately that solar panels require no resources to create, require no maintenance, and take no subsidies to maintain as an industry!
paulryanrogers 1 days ago [-]
They weren't suggesting renewables are made of magic carbon-free fairy dust. Rather that their energy source is inexhaustible (relative to fossil fuels anyway).
cactusfrog 3 days ago [-]
Gas separation has many applications.
If Google developed an AI model for cancer detection in MRI scans, you wouldn’t claim that “AI is not for what people think it is for” because Google also uses AI models for advertising.
photochemsyn 3 days ago [-]
Those are all capturing CO2 from the waste gas stream at fossil-fueled power plants, so it's not really relevant to direct air capture of CO2 from the atmosphere.
One big problem with using fossil fuel exhaust as the input stream for productive chemistry is that there are lots of fuel contaminants - sulfur, etc. - that poison further chemical reactions on the CO2 stream, and stripping out the contaminants is just too expensive. While atmospheric CO2 has a big concentration step, it has the great benefit of not having that issue.
robertlagrant 3 days ago [-]
I'd love if things weren't so badly presented. Most of the subsidies are "implicit" - i.e. a tax break (not a real subsidy, just a funny money change) or a price cap (also not a subsidy, I believe). Without that, the actual subsidies were $1.5tn globally in 2022. I don't know how that's counted, but clearly the main reason fossil fuels are available, and people buy them despite high taxation on them, is that they're incredibly useful, and not because there's evil subsidisation of an otherwise-dying industry.
henry2023 3 days ago [-]
Tax breaks have a very real impact on the proliferation of technology and deployment of capital. I agree they are useful and the demand goes accordingly but why subsidize something that we as civilization want to move away from?
robertlagrant 3 days ago [-]
They can have an impact, just as not punching someone in the face can have a positive impact on them. I just wouldn't call it a subsidy when you're not taking someone's money.
lesuorac 2 days ago [-]
Regulations / taxes have an impact. The proliferation of SUVs has entire to do with regulation.
It's easier to meet emission standards for a "light truck" (actual category of a SUV) so car manufacturers are pumping out vehicles with a similar size / front grill angle / etc so that the vehicle is under that category. You might argue that people have a preference for SUVs over Sedans but also note how similar all the SUVs appear; the appearance is part of the light truck designation so even if consumer preference drove a larger car design, the regulation has driven its appearance.
---
That said, I think an additional gas tax that rose annually with the proceeds rebated on your tax return is one of the easy + effective solutions I've heard about. Doesn't apply repressively because at the end of the year they get the higher costs rebated but at the time of sale pushes people to buy non-petroleum alternatives as it's cheaper. Probably easier to just rebated it equally amoungst tax filers as opposed to a rebate and industrial use is going to dwarf consumer use so you'll personally still end out ahead.
henry2023 3 days ago [-]
I’m pretty sure you’d pay close to 85k for a 100k tax break on your income tax.
robertlagrant 2 days ago [-]
I would, but I still wouldn't call a tax break a subsidy, for the aforementioned reason.
schiffern 2 days ago [-]
>clearly the main reason fossil fuels are available, and people buy them despite high taxation on them, is that they're incredibly useful, and not because there's evil subsidisation
Laser-focusing down to only the "main" reason and ignoring all else will (as expected) miss the forest for the trees.
Subsidies still do cause people to consume more fossil fuels than they would otherwise, so the policy is encouraging pollution (AKA health injuries and deaths that industry shirks accountability for) rather than disincentivizing it.
Teever 3 days ago [-]
What would $1.5tn PER YEAR subsidies in renewables look like?
What would $1.5tn PER YEAR subsidies in renewables and a reduction of $1.5tn PER YEAR subisdies in O&G at the same time look like?
Think of these subsidies like compound interest, $1.5 trillion here, $15 trillion there.... it starts to add up.
thelastgallon 3 days ago [-]
To add to this excellent point, fossil fuels have enjoyed subsidies for ~100 years. Imagine the cumulative total of the money compounded!
robertlagrant 2 days ago [-]
> Imagine the cumulative total of the money compounded!
I mean, this is a crazy line of thinking. Without fossil fuels, what's considered valuable would still be "work life balance is slightly less time manually working on the farm" and "goods are the best stuff we can buy from people crafting the stuff within a 3 mile radius" and "education is what we can learn from the smartest person in the village".
If you want now but without fossil fuels, you have to use fossil fuels hard enough to invent the thing that replaces them.
karaterobot 3 days ago [-]
What is bad about injecting carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs? Is it just that it is benefiting bad companies directly, and only helping the planet as a side effect? The use of petroleum is not going away on the same timeline we need carbon to be removed from the atmosphere. We'll keep drilling for it regardless of whether carbon is sequestered as a side effect... so let's bury that carbon! I won't let my dislike of oil companies stand in the way of supporting the advancement of the technology.
dweinus 3 days ago [-]
Cool, but carbon capture from the air is at best a tiny fraction of the solutions we need. Right now our time is better spent on emissions reduction.
If the bathtub is overflowing you need to fix the broken tap and mop up the water that has already spilled.
Yes, if you are the only person in the house, prioritize the tap, but if someone else is working the leak, grab a mop right away!
Shrezzing 3 days ago [-]
For the metaphor to reflect reality, the oil & gas industry is walking around the house breaking more taps, while saying that they'll get round to inventing a mop in the next few years.
graemep 3 days ago [-]
> and mop up the water that has already spilled.
Not if the spilled water is running down the drain.
If we stopped our CO2 emissions and nothing else changed CO2 levels in the atmosphere would start falling immediately as photosynthesis would capture carbon faster than natural sources emit it.
darby_eight 3 days ago [-]
This metaphor would work a lot better if the tap were overflowing with cash.
llm_trw 3 days ago [-]
We have put enough CO2 in the atmosphere to melt the icecaps.
The only thing worth doing now is converting everything to nuclear so we can scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere before industrial society becomes impossible.
In short: even if we get the most fervent dreams of de-growth and live like cavewomen starting tomorrow we've still got a million years of global warming before we're back to pre-industrial levels.
sgu999 3 days ago [-]
> The only thing worth doing now is
Even if we were to not use a single drop of oil tomorrow and start putting nuclear powered fans to capture CO2 everywhere, the biodiversity would still be collapsing. Climate change is only a portion the problem of the destabilisation of our environment as a whole.
When need to reduce our energy consumption and our footprint on the environment. That means roughly less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and the very low-tech "more trees". "AI for Y" is just a distraction...
tticvs 3 days ago [-]
However it is not possible to support the human population without industrial society and its corresponding energy use.
schiffern 2 days ago [-]
"It is not possible to support the Rome city population without the empire and its corresponding technologies and institutions."
Same argument, but perhaps you now imagine a slightly different outcome.
The piece that "gives way" is (of course, as any historian or anthropologist will attest) that the population size...... fluctuates. Generally the process isn't too too fun for people who find themselves in those populations.
RayVR 3 days ago [-]
I can only assume you are living in a mud hut, with no personal transportation, and you walked to a public library to use their computer so you could make this comment.
Everyone wants to talk about reducing other people’s consumption.
Teever 3 days ago [-]
Can I ask you a question?
Out of all the countless times you've surely seen this particular argument play out on the internet, have you ever seen it go somewhere productive?
"Yet you participate in society, curious!" is not a productive response to the suggestion "We should improve society somewhat"
Either we do this voluntarily and as orderly as possible, or it just happens for us. Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness of the impending situation our species is going to be facing.
tticvs 3 days ago [-]
> Either we do this voluntarily and as orderly as possible, or it just happens for us. Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness of the impending situation our species is going to be facing.
I think it's a pretty natural reaction against the relentless push of this false choice by people who cannot imagine a third way that actually makes life better.
Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness that there are other options besides enforced poverty.
llm_trw 3 days ago [-]
>Either we do this voluntarily and as orderly as possible, or it just happens for us. Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness of the impending situation our species is going to be facing.
Or we use the fact we can still run an industrial society to build CO2 scrubbers using nuclear energy to power them, keeping our improving our living standards while fixing our mistakes.
Teever 2 days ago [-]
Have you run the numbers on that?
It's quite likely to be a far better use of those resources to invest them in tree planting initiatives if your goal is to sequester carbon.
But if you want to satiate your techno-lust a technological solution to some of our climate problems may lie in the form of space based optical systems that reduce the amount of sunlight from falling on glaciers and the poles.
llm_trw 2 days ago [-]
Trees release carbon when they die.
The only solution is to green deserts, which you need nuclear power for water desalination to do.
schiffern 2 days ago [-]
> Trees release carbon when they die.
This simply opens a "hole" for new trees to grow up around them. It's not that any one tree holds carbon forever, it's that an acre of forest in dynamic equilibrium holds a lot more stored carbon.
When people suggest planting trees, the process isn't one-and-done. It's actually re-afforestation, where the land is permanently forested. Otherwise yes, if you cut down all the trees and then also prevent anything from growing back in its place, then of course you're undoing future benefits.
There is also 'mild' re-afforestation, where you simply increase the equilibrium amount of stored biomass in a landscape. You can plant 20-40 trees per acre in agricultural landscapes (this actually improves crop yield if you choose the right species, search for "farmer's trees"), or re-green suburbs that have lost their vegetation cover over time.
These projects are less stark than Atacama-desert-to-Amazon-rainforest, so many folks will neglect the possibility entirely and therefore conclude that "the only solution is to green deserts." :-\
--
It's also probably related to cultural biases that view deserts as useless, worthless, and most important uninhabitable spaces. However if you actually try to green a desert, you'll suddenly find lots of terribly inconvenient "desert people" actually do live there, and oppose you destroying their home and displacing them. See the real reason behind building "The Line" in Saudi Arabia.
hollerith 3 days ago [-]
It is fair to point out that people in the third world that already live on "less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and more trees" choose to ramp up their consumption of those things as soon as they can afford to. The Chinese for example probably have more cars per capita than the US did when its GDP per capita was what China's is now -- and mopeds and motorcycles (and bicycles if my hours spent watching Youtube videos of urban outdoor environments in China are any indication) are banned in the Tier 1 cities: to travel on the roads, you have to have a car or ride a bus -- and the privately-owned cars vastly outnumber the buses just like in any US city.
And the Chinese eat many times more meat than they used to.
It is fair to point those things out because it is evidence that living on "less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and more trees" really sucks and that it is possible for us to overdo our response to climate change and ocean acidification.
sgu999 3 days ago [-]
"less" doesn't mean "none", it's not hard to find plenty of evidence of better living standards without car dependency or smaller average houses compared to the US for instance. Active mobility is good for your health, so is a moderated consumption of meat. Lots of benefits to organizing society better while respecting the finiteness of all our resources.
It's always the same rhetoric with your kind, you pretend to fight for the poor, when all you really want is freedom to keep on grabbing as much as possible for yourselves.
Teever 3 days ago [-]
Fairness doesn't matter.
What does matter is that we make our best effort to mitigate the impending disaster to the human race and the ecosystem.
llm_trw 3 days ago [-]
A modest proposal.
Instead trying to keep the third world poor why don't we just nuke them?
This has the triple benefit of:
1). Reducing the total population.
2). Reducing CO2 production of the survivors.
3). Starting a nuclear winter.
It's just unethical to do anything else when faced with the impending disaster to the human race and the ecosystem.
sgu999 2 days ago [-]
You'd be better off nuking the rich, they are the ones who are actually producing the bulk of the CO2.
The debate on degrowth isn't whether a Somalian family should have access to a decent home, healthcare, clothing, enough food etc. The answer is a very obvious yes.
The debate is whether a middle class American family really should own 2 trucks, live in a 200sqm house and eat that much meat. But you always make it about the poor.
verelo 3 days ago [-]
Tell that to Alberta. Obsessed with rewriting this truth and positioning efforts to reverse the damage that’s been done in the search of short term profits.
cmrdporcupine 3 days ago [-]
Yep. Wind turbines are ugly and can't be built in scenic areas... but I spent my childhood in the foothills there canoe camping with my parents looking at clearcuts, cutlines, oil and gas installations everywhere. And "oil wells in a farm field with the mountains in the background" is a cliche photo/painting/emblem of Alberta since forever, because y'know, somehow an oil well installation is "nice" but a wind turbine is not.
Somehow natural gas flares and pulp mills are okay set against a scenic mountain valley, but a wind turbine is a blight.
These people are broken in the head.
(I live in Ontario these days, but right now in a hotel in Jasper after a day of spring skiing... it's painful to come back to this province sometimes.)
verelo 2 days ago [-]
My neighbour is also from the foothills and lives in Ontario now. One of my favourite people, something about the foothills…
Yeah it’s sad, and that’s an amazing point you make. It’s funny when i hear people complain about carbon tax, particularly from Alberta. You know what cuts the tax? Remove the carbon from the price of a kWh. But no, let’s burn coal and gas and have one of the highest carbon per kWh in the country and just complain instead.
Alberta: 778g / kWh
BC: 38.1g
MB: 25.7g
ON: 49.9
SK is just as bad as Alberta, and the territories but that’s mostly because of where they source their energy due to their remote location, not some political decision.
We just celebrated 10 years since the last coal power plant was closed in Ontario. Good riddance.
verelo 4 minutes ago [-]
Agreed. Air quality has improved so much since then too.
greenthrow 3 days ago [-]
Nuclear is way too slow and carbon intensive. Solar and wind with battery storage make way more sense from every rational angle. They are cheaper, they are faster, they have less embedded carbon, they have far less tosk, etc. Nuclear has been getting hyped and pushed hard by big money interests but the truth is its time has come and gone abd it no longer makes any aense.
llm_trw 3 days ago [-]
I've been hearing this for 20 years and I'll be hearing it until we die from global warming. The only thing that wind and solar have done is make the grid more unstable and make a lot of money for speculators on the power market.
There is a reason why every country which has reduced nuclear power has increased its green house gas emissions.
Retric 3 days ago [-]
In just 2023 China added 216 GW of solar capacity which directly offset ~500 TWh of coal power per year and absolutely dwarfing the rate not just China but the entire world is bring Nuclear power plants online per year.
Wind and solar have significantly reduced carbon emissions across most western countries. Nuclear doesn’t scale well due to capacity factor falling with daily and seasonal changes in demand. France sitting next to non nuclear Germany can have lots of nuclear but that’s little different that some US states having more nuclear while connected to other states with less. What matters is the overall grid not arbitrary map locations.
Storing or curtailing wind/solar simply costs less than nuclear at 50% capacity factor, so that’s the only way to make real progress.
mapt 3 days ago [-]
You've been hearing it for 50 years, and the project has been going on that long with regular improvements in cost and output.
Every country is different, but wind and solar have scaled from practically nothing ("proving viability") 20 years ago to a majority of new installs 10 years ago to a significant chunk of all generation now.
Wiping out already-built nuclear power is like junking your car two months into a 96-month loan because you don't like the gas bill. Just... why? Sunk costs have generated nearly-free returns. You're still going to pay those costs, in dollars and in CO2, whether you run a nuclear reaction or not. The worst-plausible-case-scenario meltdown has been substantially mitigated with the extant designs, and some of the new designs that are probably never getting built would be difficult to melt down even if you attempted it.
Shutting down existing plants as Germany did is a very different proposition than scaling up a nuclear buildout in 2024. Renewables and various grid improvements are just way cheaper and more justifiable in the short term, and have none of the baggage attached, and have none of the need for state support attached. It would take a gargantuan effort right now to mass-produce reactors cheaply enough that they could even begin to compete with renewables.
hackerlight 3 days ago [-]
Getting rid of nuclear is stupid but so is adding new nuclear. Firmed renewables with lithium ion batteries and pumped hydro makes the most financial sense since the 2020s, especially in the US which has less seasonal solar resources than Europe.
padjo 3 days ago [-]
I’d love to know how it’s possible to supply peak demand in the UK on a still day in January purely from renewables and storage. Especially if you consider that demand is also going to have to increase massively to decarbonise heating, transport etc
hackerlight 3 days ago [-]
Europe is more challenging than US due to lower average solar irradiance per sqm combined with more seasonal variability in solar availability. Probably overbuilding wind in diversified locations since the correlation drops off with the square of distance I believe. Denmark's grid would be a template of what to expect. Transmissions with neighbors would help a lot given the decorrelation.
chopin 2 days ago [-]
AFAIK Denmark has the highest electricity prices in Europe. I wouldn't take Denmark as template.
hackerlight 1 days ago [-]
This is extremely dishonest unless you carefully and methodically link that high cost to renewables. Iowa is a 60% wind grid with cheaper prices than the national average. Does that one data point make wind energy good, by your logic? This is a serious topic that deserves more than silly internet debate tactics.
Retric 3 days ago [-]
The short answer is trivially, but the longer answer is renewables include hydro and biomass not just wind both of which inherently provide long term storage. Having excess solar or wind on Monday means you curtail biomass and hydro for Tuesday. Excess power on Monday through Friday and you have a great deal ready to ramp op over the weekend. 0.01% edge cases don’t need to have anything special just as long as the general case is oversupply.
At the same time Solar is always going to produce some power and the more excess generation you have to charge batteries and curtail hydro etc the higher that minimum worst case generation becomes.
Net result is you don’t need to build some huge battery bank to store energy from sunny days in the summer, you just ‘over build’ cheap generation and eventually you have no need for seasonal storage.
greenthrow 3 days ago [-]
Solar still generates power on cold days. But also, wind and hydro work great even on cold days. And of couse, storage. C'mon. This is a solved issue. "Renewables don't work because it's cold/dark/etc." has been answered for decades.
user_7832 3 days ago [-]
> but so is adding new nuclear
Are you talking about the typical nuclear plant which is often bespoke, or also considering modular reactor units which have (finally!) seen recent development?
> lithium ion batteries... makes the most financial sense
Correct me if I'm wrong but li-ion is still cost prohibitive for large scale energy storage on the grid. Things like V2G etc can help but those are owned by the drivers/consumers and not the state/electricity corps.
ViewTrick1002 3 days ago [-]
Storage is at the point in the S-curve where it goes from nowhere to everywhere in just a couple of years.
Modular reactor units only cover the least expensive part of nuclear power plants. They still need fuel enrichment, cooling towers, turbines, complex plumbing, containment buildings, huge workforces, security perimeters, spent fuel pools, dry casks, etc.
People play on the words ‘reactor’ but modular reactors themselves don’t actually solve any pressing issues and at least currently just cost more.
pjc50 3 days ago [-]
This is the thing about nuclear: the promise of "cheap" power has been made since the 1960s, but very rarely delivered on, and it is not coming down yet, while everyone can see the massive cost collapse for renewables that has already happened and more reasonably project it into the future.
Modular units are firmly in the "I'll believe it when I see it, meanwhile keep the renewables building as fast as possible" category.
(also, everyone has forgotten about proliferation. The fighting around Zhaprozhia did remind a few people about the security risks, though)
user_7832 2 days ago [-]
> This is the thing about nuclear: the promise of "cheap" power has been made since the 1960s, but very rarely delivered on, and it is not coming down yet, while everyone can see the massive cost collapse for renewables that has already happened and more reasonably project it into the future.
Part of this is because of how absolutely f-ed up research in fission has been over the decades.
There is this graph if you can find it showing how much money was estimated to be spent on R&D, vs how much was actually spent. Basically by the 1980s or 90s, if investments were made, nuclear would've been much cheaper today. There's a bunch of things more, but it's not that nuclear is inherently expensive more than the fact that you need to spend money first to save it.
cableshaft 3 days ago [-]
It's a pretty large world. I'm okay with some entities putting time into making nuclear cheaper and more viable and adding a few new plants to add to our general power grid resilience. I think that could be worthwhile.
But yeah, the people who are trying to claim that nuclear is the only viable renewable energy solution to climate change haven't been paying attention to renewable energy advances in the past 10-15 years, and/or have been ignoring the massive budget and time overruns pretty much all nuclear plants have had in the past couple of decades, especially in developed nations that are trying to make sure they're built in a safe way.
llm_trw 3 days ago [-]
Again, I've been hearing that for 20 years and I'll be hearing it for 40 years until global warming knocks the internet off.
greenthrow 3 days ago [-]
You are choosing to completely ignore reality. Many entire countries are moving to entirely renewable. My home and EVs are powered almost entirely by our home solar and batteries, and I live in Michigan.
We would be powered 100% by solar but our laws here allow the utility to limit the size of our system.
hackerlight 3 days ago [-]
Sorry but you're stuck in the past and have failed to update with new information. Pull up a graph of renewables levelized cost of electricity, and lithium ion grid scale storage cost per kWh, over the last 20 years, and note change. Renewables are contributing massively today, look at ERCOT or CAISO today. CAISO has about 15 GWh of storage deployed already and will deploy more soon. It's not theoretical. And this contribution of renewable to the grid will grow exponentially as costs keep declining and funding keeps increasing. You were absolutely correct 20 years ago where renewables used to be more expensive and grid scale storage didn't exist, but costs have changed.
llm_trw 3 days ago [-]
I'm sure I'll be getting told the same thing in 20 years.
But please, tell me why the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to renewables.
hashmush 3 days ago [-]
Because Earth is not an isolated system.
malux85 3 days ago [-]
Both, in parallel, theres enough humans and resources to work on both
atoav 3 days ago [-]
I would generally agree with that statement. However in this case I disagree.
Why? Because I think carbon capture sells the idea that with the right technology we could just continue doing what we are doing. It is the equivalent of an obese person stuffing food in their mouth and telling you fat can always be surgically removed. Yeah sure it can, to some degree, but you do see how that doesn't fix the problem? Do you see how them saying that might in fact be worse than them saying nothing?
So in my mind carbon capture is something that we should work on if we are capable of the realization that the role it will play in fixing the problem is utterly insignificant. If you think it is the solution, carbon capture sells a false hope and prolongs the struggle — and at least where I am from proponents of carbon capture are the people who definitely don't want to reduce their CO2 output.
Pointing at some future technology instead of doing something now is actively harmful. And I am not sure the actual positive effect of such technology would outweigh the negative effect it has as an excuse to justify not doing what is necessary now.
rayiner 3 days ago [-]
> Because I think carbon capture sells the idea that with the right technology we could just continue doing what we are doing. It is the equivalent of an obese person stuffing food in their mouth and telling you fat can always be surgically removed. Yeah sure it can, to some degree, but you do see how that doesn't fix the problem? Do you see how them saying that might in fact be worse than them saying nothing?
What you’re overlooking is that we will keep doing whatever we’re doing, for the same reason telling people to diet and exercise isn’t doing jack shit for the obesity crisis. We need Ozempic for the climate. Because the only alternative is 4C of warming.
atoav 2 days ago [-]
Yeah, that would be very soothing would it? But every prediction by every scientist I read says that even if we did wonders with that technology and it works way better than expected and is way cheaper than expected it is too little too late.
So either we change our way or we deive ourself into climate extinction. Since profits and geostrategic advantage seem to be more important than the survival of the human race it will be the latter. And someone somewhere in 2050 will start the alibi-CO2-capture machine, that was built by a tiny fraction of the oil money from this year.
If this comes across as cynical that might be, because it is. Trusting on carbon capture technology despite the presence of evidence¹ that it won't do shit is something we cannot afford. Don't get me wrong, we should still research and fund it. But you don't want to be that politician that wants to keep no speed limits on highways "because future carbon capture technology will solve this".
No, future carbon capture technology won't solve this, it will solve a tiny fraction of this. Pretending that it will do more creates false hope and a distorted perception.
¹ see IPCC report: : "Even if realized at its full potential, CCS will only account for about 2.4% of the world’s carbon mitigation by 2030"
Teever 3 days ago [-]
If that's the case maybe we as a species should die? Or at least enough of the species that we change our behaviour for good?
It's unfortunate that the ecosystem has to suffer.
tticvs 3 days ago [-]
"The future looks somewhat difficult, better give up and go extinct"
Fortunately natural selection will remove this mindset eventually.
It's unfortunate that the species has to suffer it in the meantime.
Teever 3 days ago [-]
I never suggested that we should give up.
It may just be that this group of people isn't up to the challenge and, like you said, natural selection is necessary to produce a group that is up to the challenge.
Unfortunately that selection may come too late and much of the ecosystem may suffer for it.
tticvs 2 days ago [-]
> maybe we as a species should die?
Sounds a lot like giving up to me.
Wishing for human extinction makes you an enemy of all mankind btw
Teever 2 days ago [-]
No no no,
I'm saying that objectively maybe we should all die.
From a subjective perspective I'm going to keep fighting to the detriment of all the others around to the very bitter end and take down as many of them as I can, just like the real enemy of life that I am.
brigadier132 3 days ago [-]
Here's the problem with analogies
> you do see how that doesn't fix the problem
It literally does fix the problem.
atoav 2 days ago [-]
Analogies always require you to read them favourably or they fall appart. According to the IPCC report carbon capture at best would be able to reduce 2.4 percent of the global emissions by 2030. So to stay with our analogy, that would be like cutting the fat on a small part of your body and taking that as an excuse to eat on.
Unless we talk unicorn-pie-in-the-sky-fantasy-technology that can suck all carbon out off the air on the snip of a finger, any technology has to be measured within the bounds of its possibilities and not in fantasyland.
cactusfrog 3 days ago [-]
Should carbon capture should be worked in secret because mentioning it delivers false hope?
lordswork 3 days ago [-]
If we have fixed resources, how should they be allocated?
I'd argue for every million dollars towards reaching net zero emissions, we should maybe spend 1 dollar towards carbon capture, where we scale that investment up as we approach net zero emissions.
exyi 3 days ago [-]
If we have enough resources dedicated to this problem, why are we still burning coal/gas for power on sunny days? I'm definitely not against researching carbon capture, but it currently isn't the "the solution the planet desperately needs"
icegreentea2 3 days ago [-]
The resources going into carbon capture aren't the same resources going into renewable? The scale is also completely different.
Conversion of all carbon capture investment into more solar or wind capacity would not significantly move the needle on rate of renewable growth.
Effectively all carbon capture investment right now is basically in the pilot phase. Governments are sinking money into carbon capture for a broad range of reasons, including cynical (as a smokescreen to protect fossil fuel industries) to optimistic (we can start investing in the next step of net-zero since renewable trajectories look good) to being realistic hedges (they see the challenges in achieving net zero in certain fields like aviation, shipping, construction, and believe that carbon capture is what is necessary to achieve net-zero).
cheonic00193 3 days ago [-]
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CalRobert 3 days ago [-]
Why not?
AnthonyMouse 3 days ago [-]
Suppose you have any finite number of humans to work on the problem.
Emissions reductions can be achieved in known ways at some relatively modest cost, e.g. the difference in cost between using fossil fuels and using electric cars or renewable/nuclear generation methods, which are already very close together in price and could be made closer or even cause the alternatives to cost less through certain types of engineering R&D or reasonable regulatory changes, and not only lower emissions but lower energy costs.
Carbon capture requires a large amount of R&D which might not yield any useful results whatsoever, and if it did the result would be a reduction in cost from a level which is hopeless and preposterous to one where actually deploying it would still cost trillions of dollars in implementation and operating costs to have any meaningful effect, while producing no other economic value and almost certainly a vast amount of chemical waste.
The difference in cost effectiveness is so vast that the optimal allocation of finite resources to the latter could plausibly be zero.
Go the tab for the subsection on transportation and you'll see they're working on ways to reduce emissions, too. They also provide the dashboard and tracker app for the Drawdown Georgia initiative, which was co-drafted by Georgia Tech and aims to eventually get to net zero emissions in the state.
janalsncm 3 days ago [-]
His calculations are based off present day capabilities. The point of R&D is to create new capabilities. Solar also used to be a lot more expensive than it is today.
curtisf 3 days ago [-]
No, it will _never_ be feasible to collect and transport any meaningful amount of carbon out of the atmosphere.
We emit 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.
That is more than 7x the amount of cement made each year (4.5 billion tons). More than 8x the amount of food that's made each year (about 4 billion tons). About 17x the amount of steel made each year (2 billion tons). About 60x the amount of plastic made each year (about 0.5 billion tons).
But carbon is completely worthless. We can't build a logistics pipeline dedicated solely to moving a worthless substance that is larger than the rest of human logistics combined.
AnthonyMouse 3 days ago [-]
The only plausible result would be something along the lines of a photosynthesis hack to produce synthetic wood at a faster rate than natural processes, which would then have a market value because you could make boxes and couches and houses out of it.
But then you could also use it as a renewable fuel and we'd be calling it biofuels instead of carbon capture.
user_7832 3 days ago [-]
That's a very good point: commercializing the products of CO2 capture. I wonder if bio-engineering photosynthesis to speed it up is moderately feasible.
>No, it will _never_ be feasible to collect and transport any meaningful amount of carbon out of the atmosphere.
This is obviously utterly false, given how much CO2 has been absorbed each year by current gen CO2 absorption technology.
>But carbon is completely worthless.
Current Gen carbon absorbers turn CO2 into some of the most useful materials on earth, like food, building materials and raw materials for oils and plastics. Much of the current world logistics is already dedicated to transporting their products.
oulipo 3 days ago [-]
Perhaps, yet today we have certainties (we know how to remove a big chunk of emissions by using politics, laws and economical incentives), and "bets" (science might help us remove carbon efficiently, or might not)
We need a balance between the two, as they are both important
But we shouldn't be "mere techno-optimists", we should also get behind true political, social and economical solutions to lowering our emissions, and fast
enriquto 3 days ago [-]
Carbon capture is obviously inconsequential; but it would seem that even emissions reduction is a useless endeavor, wouldn't it? All extracted carbon will be eventually burned. Burning it sooner or later it's not such a big deal. What we need to do, for a start, is to close the damn oil wells! Just stop unearthing millions of years worth of captured carbon and putting them back into the biosphere.
AnthonyMouse 3 days ago [-]
> All extracted carbon will be eventually burned.
Extraction operates on supply and demand. When people stop demanding it, they'll stop digging it out of the ground.
There are two ways to achieve this: 1) You make burning it more expensive (carbon tax). 2) You make alternatives to burning it cheaper.
You can do both at once. In fact you want to, because the first one gives the second one economies of scale and the second one reduces the economic impact of the first one.
Preventing extraction is pointless because it has the same effect as the first one except that instead of the money being collected as a tax that could be refunded to the population as a tax credit, it goes to the people who are still doing the remaining extraction. We could, however, stop subsidizing extraction.
exyi 3 days ago [-]
> Preventing extraction is pointless because it has the same effect as the first one
Yes, but it might raise oil prices, effectively making the carbon tax apply globally. Unless OPEC just compensates by increasing production. IMHO carbon tax indeed better tool for EU/US, given that most of oil production out of "our" control
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> Yes, but it might raise oil prices, effectively making the carbon tax apply globally.
Which major countries could already do through tariffs on any country not collecting it, without giving the money to OPEC.
mistrial9 2 days ago [-]
> might raise oil prices, effectively making the carbon tax apply globally
that statement upon examination does not pass scrutiny for weaslewords
sgu999 3 days ago [-]
> There are two ways to achieve this: 1) You make burning it more expensive (carbon tax). 2) You make alternatives to burning it cheaper.
A market that relies solely on prices as an incentive is unlikely to be the right tool for what's at stake. What would be the price of the natural habitat of the last wild elephants? A billion dollars? Let's hope Elon doesn't feel like building a gigafactory right there.
chpatrick 3 days ago [-]
There's always going to be a market with prices whether you like it or not. The only thing you can do is ensuring that the prices reflect the amount of damage to the environment.
sgu999 3 days ago [-]
You can have a market without relying solely on it, that's what we do for many things already. Driving everything through a market is quite a recent development. So no, it's not "the only you can do".
chpatrick 2 days ago [-]
I'm saying some form of market is inevitable, the best you can do is try to control it.
BurningFrog 3 days ago [-]
Strong disagreement!
Carbon capture is the only way to get back to pre industrial CO2 levels!
Even if/when we emit zero CO2, the elevated levels would remain for many centuries!
lordswork 3 days ago [-]
We need both, but reaching zero emissions is far more urgent and cost effective (by many orders of magnitude) right now.
darby_eight 3 days ago [-]
What happens if we can't find a carbon capture method that works efficiently and at scale? We need about a million better plans than that to maintain any sense of sanity.
constantcrying 2 days ago [-]
We already have carbon capture technology, which is deployed at mass scale and transforms carbon into some of the most useful resources on earth, like food, building materials, raw materials for fuels and plastics and much, much more. Given that this technology already is deployed over enormous stretches of the earth and that it actively benefits in its productivity from elevated levels of CO2 why not further that technology?
CO2 isn't some poison in the atmosphere, it needs to be there. The one thing under control of humans is what percentage of Carbon is in the atmosphere or bound in different forms.
The problem isn't too much CO2 in the atmosphere, it is that the amount of CO2 there can't be reabsorbed at a self regulating rate.
adgjlsfhk1 3 days ago [-]
the problem with carbon capture is that carbon capture with a grid that is over 10% fossil fuel is net negative. it's like fixing a broken tap by pointing a firehoze at it.
globalnode 3 days ago [-]
they wont give up on carbon capture fantasies because it means they can keep making buckets of money on free hydrocarbons...
rpmisms 3 days ago [-]
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input_sh 3 days ago [-]
Both of those emit much less CO2 per capita than the US.
Heck, if India emitted 7x as much per capita, they'd still emit less than the US does.
rpmisms 3 days ago [-]
That's simply false. China under-reports by a vast amount, so does India. Also completely discounting the shipping aspect, which embargos would fix.
input_sh 3 days ago [-]
Well luckily I didn't consult either China's or India's own figures, but EU's, which addresses these concerns.
> Bottom-up national emission inventories are therefore an essential component of reporting and tracking progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement. However, national inventory reports are not yet available for all countries and years. In addition, they are dependent on individual national reporting processes and methodological choices, they can present data gaps for specific sectors and currently, except for Annex I parties, there is no obligation to include long-term series of emissions up to the most recent year.
> The European Commission’s in-house Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR)7 offers an alternative to overcome these limitations and to complement national inventories and has the advantage of producing timely emission estimates that are comparable across countries.
> EDGAR relies on several sources of international statistics for the underpinning data. Foremost among these is the International Energy Agency (IEA). To harmonise global GHG emission estimates, this booklet incorporates IEA CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion sources named IEA-EDGAR CO2 emission dataset (v2), which are complemented with in-house EDGAR estimates for CH4, N2O and F-gas emissions.
I'm not super versed in international relations but I think the current accepted view is that embargoes are one of the first stages of war. Trade prevents war.
user_7832 3 days ago [-]
> That's simply false. China under-reports by a vast amount, so does India.
I can't comment on China but I highly suggest living for a month in an average Indian household if you have such delusions. (Yes, it's a delusion.)
An easy way for an economist sitting at home to realize the same is look at PPP & currency valuations. The rupee is fairly weak but has a better PPP value, suggesting labour-based goods/services are cheaper/more common than capital-based ones. Hence why you have say more call centres (human-intensive) than high-tech Silicon Valley startups - an iPhone is "cheap" in the US, an hour of labour is "cheap" in India. Hence consumption of goods by Indians is very limited esp compared to the US.
vasco 3 days ago [-]
If we still need to do things it's not solved, it's an idea!
padjo 3 days ago [-]
And accept the consequent reduction in living standards from no longer being able to offshore all you social and environmental externalities.
user_7832 3 days ago [-]
Could you explain how embargoing India/China would stop emissions? Do you think a government is going to stop all activities and shut off its power grid, killing goodness knows how many people because of an embargo, and that is helpful?
Your comment is not only possibly racist but also utterly devoid of any critical thinking or common knowledge in the domains of energy, industry, economics, public policy, or international relations, plus perhaps a whole lot of other fields. (If anyone wants to downvote - please also let me know your reasons, I'm happy to have my mind changed.)
janalsncm 3 days ago [-]
Really surprised to see so much cynicism about this. Discovering a chemical which can facilitate the reversal of climate change is vastly more useful than almost everything else those supercomputers would’ve been used for.
blackeyeblitzar 3 days ago [-]
One thing I worry about is that some chemical like this would be mass deployed without serious vetting of safety and long term effects. I agree it could be really useful. But it also seems like we only regulate harmful chemicals decades later once their true impact is obvious.
3 days ago [-]
aaron695 3 days ago [-]
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llm_trw 3 days ago [-]
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sa-code 3 days ago [-]
I would also like to add that adopting instead of having your own baby is the most effective way to save the planet
Al-Khwarizmi 3 days ago [-]
That kind of thing is often said, but it doesn't make much sense to me.
Preserving the planet is valuable insofar as there are people to enjoy it. Without people to experience it, it wouldn't matter much. Without any sentient being to experience it, it would matter (in my view) zero.
Thus, creating new people to experience it is necessary, if preserving the planet is going to be worth it at all.
Of course, one can argue that there are too many people and we need to make less, but I think there are lots of lifestyle changes that need to be made before something so radical even makes sense. I.e., don't think people should make less kids so that the ones that do get made can live in a suburb and drive a car everyday. That's getting the priorities totally wrong.
mym1990 3 days ago [-]
There is something to be said for leaving things in a good way without the expectation of anyone coming after you to enjoy it. There is still some order to the world and the universe without humans, to think that we are the center of it all is certainly one kind of philosophy, but not the only one.
smt88 3 days ago [-]
By this logic, a far better thing to do for the environment is to increase access to birth control and abortions.
Raising a child costs hundreds of thousands or millions. Preventing an accidental pregnancy can cost under a dollar.
esalman 3 days ago [-]
You probably need to study birth control in context of the collapsing economies of countries like Japan, Korea and China
kajecounterhack 3 days ago [-]
Are you insinuating that accidental and unwanted pregnancies would help their plight?
esalman 3 days ago [-]
I'm saying that having less children is not necessarily good for the environment.
kajecounterhack 1 days ago [-]
Do you mean economy? Your comment doesn’t mention the environment.
OP: “preventing unwanted pregnancies is good for environment” (because humans have big carbon footprint)
You: “having fewer children is bad: see these economies”
This reads as criticism of birth control and the viability of population reduction as an environmental strategy. But:
1. Do unwanted children typically contribute positively to GDP? Isn’t reducing that terrible situation just a win on all fronts?
2. How is collapsing population in developed countries related to the OP’s suggestion of widespread birth control? Are they really that related?
3. How is having fewer kids bad for environment? Afaict it is unambiguously good for that.
smt88 3 days ago [-]
Why?
smt88 3 days ago [-]
How are those countries' collapsing economies harming the environment?
Also why would I want to fix an economy using unwanted children?
pinkmuffinere 3 days ago [-]
I’ve never even heard this mentioned as an environmental choice. It strikes me as very strange that this would be the _most effective_ choice we can make — do you have some sources?
photonthug 3 days ago [-]
If you’re receptive to any kind of argument about reducing consumption, then how could you ignore an argument about reducing consumers?
People that want others to do things like avoid plastic straws but themselves have 2.5 unadopted kids per household are obviously being somewhat hypocritical
AnthonyMouse 3 days ago [-]
It is clearly possible to operate at the level of zero carbon emissions. People did it for thousands of years before the industrial revolution and modern technology runs just fine on renewable or nuclear energy.
Since the emissions per person can be zero, any level of emissions reduction can be achieved with any number of people, you just need more emissions reductions per person when you have more people. "We should have both more emissions reductions and more people" is thereby an entirely consistent position.
More than that, emissions reductions generally require R&D and have some economic cost, but an aging population is economically weaker and has fewer resources to spare. Meanwhile older people who aren't going to live much longer and have no descendants have less incentive to care about what happens in the future and spend those scarce resources on things like emissions reductions. People having more kids avoids that death spiral.
Also, I mean, who are we trying to save the world for?
photonthug 3 days ago [-]
It sounds like you’re in favor of change via top down regulations, so you’re not arguing for bottom up reduction of consumption. My point is, people who do argue for reducing consumption must consider the fact that consumption hinges on consumers, so either they should adopt or they have rejected their own premises
I personally take the view that policing individual consumption is meaningless, but I still notice the doublethink required for those that have that view to rationalize their choices to not adopt.
> who are we saving the world for?
The future, regardless of whether those people are genetically derived from our selves. Having your own children is often viewed as a selfless act, which is weird, because if you do that when you could adopt an orphan, and if we’re being honest, then it’s one of the most selfish things you can do.
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
> It sounds like you’re in favor of change via top down regulations, so you’re not arguing for bottom up reduction of consumption.
It could be achieved either way. If you want to e.g. replace gasoline cars with electric cars, you could have some kind of government incentives, or you as an individual could just choose to buy an electric car and put solar panels on your roof to charge it.
> people who do argue for reducing consumption must consider the fact that consumption hinges on consumers
But it doesn't. The rate of consumption is number of consumers times consumption per consumer. You can increase number of consumers while reducing consumption per consumer and end up with a net reduction, as long as the latter is larger. Since consumption per person can get arbitrarily close to zero, it's entirely consistent to want to get there that way than by reducing the population, which has all kinds of terrible consequences.
> Having your own children is often viewed as a selfless act, which is weird
It costs a significant amount of money and primarily benefits someone else (the child). You have to forego a lot of luxury vacations and early retirement to pay for books and food and college.
> if you do that when you could adopt an orphan
The fertility rate is below the population-replacement rate. That includes the orphans. If the fertility rate was only the orphans, it would be far lower than it even is already and we would be completely screwed. Not only that, by your logic the orphans' parents are selfish too, but then who is it that you think should be having kids if the human race is not to go extinct?
ryanjshaw 3 days ago [-]
> My point is, people who do argue for reducing consumption must consider the fact that consumption hinges on consumers, so either they should adopt or they have rejected their own premises
This argument is absurd and naive. Mass murder and your suicide would also reduce consumers. Clearly there are other factors to consider over and above the raw numbers, many of which are cultural and subjective.
photonthug 3 days ago [-]
Don’t put words in my mouth. I’m pretty much in favor of do no harm, which certainly excludes advocating or enacting murder or suicide.
Do no harm also means, if you think consumption is harmful then you do need to avoid opting into creating maybe 50-100 Years of extra consumption per child just for the satisfaction of knowing your genes will be doing the consumption.
Are there ever acceptable cultural or subjective reasons to excuse “rules for thee but not for me”?
agent008t 3 days ago [-]
Can the whole supply chain of modern technology operate with zero carbon emissions?
AnthonyMouse 1 days ago [-]
In terms of energy, certainly. Generate electricity with non-carbon sources, then use electricity. The main difficulty would be aviation, because current batteries are too heavy, but there you could use biofuels until someone comes up with something better.
You're left with things like concrete that emit CO2 from something other than burning fossil fuels. But none of those things are strictly required. There are alternatives to them with various trade offs. Some that are essentially a drop-in replacement, basically different kinds of cement that don't emit CO2, others that operate differently but get you the same result, like using entirely different building materials. The main reason these aren't already used is cost, but that doesn't mean you can't pay the cost, it just means nobody is going to do it voluntarily. It also doesn't mean that no one could come up with some new alternative with a lower cost going forward -- that sort of thing happens all the time.
zekrioca 3 days ago [-]
Not entirely, but a considerable portion can. However, the modern supply chain has to be fully tracked down first, to uncover exactly where most emissions are coming from, and then focus on understanding how to decarbonise those sectors as much as possible.
jabradoodle 2 days ago [-]
Avoiding single use items that pollute the environment for hundreds or thousands of years is rational whether you want children or not.
Of course using a plastic straw isn't what got us into this mess and small individual choices like that won't save us.
leononame 3 days ago [-]
Adopting is a multi-year, sometimes decade-long process where you have to fill out lots of paperwork before you're even considered. It's no wonder that it's not most people's choice. That stuff can really grind you down
monktastic1 3 days ago [-]
Why not nuking the whole planet, so that nobody is left? Or maybe you want some people remaining to enjoy it, in which case why not your progeny instead of others?
I find this whole line of thought fraught. Some assumption somewhere went wrong.
tdb7893 3 days ago [-]
Realistically the lowest carbon emissions would be to just die
dyauspitr 3 days ago [-]
Not really, it’s probably going fully vegetarian and stopping cattle farming but we all know we’re not going to do that.
pawelmurias 3 days ago [-]
Meat production takes like 15%. This would just reverse global warming.
photochemsyn 3 days ago [-]
This is about developing metal-organic materials that absorb CO2 under one set of conditions and release it under a different set of conditions. The whole goal here is to generate a stream of 100% pure CO2 starting with ~400 ppm CO2 - meaning if you want 1 liter of pure CO2 at room temperature and pressure, you need to process a minimum of 2500 liters of air - and likely quite a bit more as you are not going to be 100% efficient.
Making this work is all about minimizing the energy (and thus economic) cost of this first step. Then you need to reduce (add hydrogen and remove oxygen) the CO2 and start building other products - methanol, long-chain hydrocarbons, etc. (that's shipping and jet/rocket fuel, respectively). But why stop there? If you want long-term stable materials, converting the CO2 into carbon fiber is a good option - more sci-fi is a diamond endpoint, which takes a lot of energy, but has many uses.
This will have minimal effect on atmospheric CO2 unless fossil fuel extraction and combustion is eliminated from the energy mix - but it does point to how human civilization can do material and fuel production without having to mine carbon from the earth or cut down forests. In the long run, this is the only plausible option.
0xDEADFED5 3 days ago [-]
comments on carbon capture are short-sighted, imo. this is a method using SOA technology to accelerate research into metal-organic frameworks. this is pretty cool science even if carbon capture never turns out to be feasible.
11101010001100 3 days ago [-]
Cool. I see what you did there.
cactusfrog 3 days ago [-]
Yeah. One application that I’ve heard is retrofitting indoor animal farms to capture methane and reduce methane emissions.
araes 3 days ago [-]
No comment on the CO2 uses, just seems like something's going on with Meta / FB lately. Who releases a framework/demo where you click the "Download ODAC23 Data" [1] or "Try ODAC ML Models" [2] links and get "404 - page not found"? Georgia Tech? They're supposedly 3rd worldwide in Business Analytics. Releasing a press release with 404's everywhere's not great "analytics".
Did somebody even look at this stuff before writing their press release? It's not like it's much link following to click "The project, named OpenDAC" and then find out it's all a bunch of dead links.
anuroopsriram 8 hours ago [-]
Hi: I'm one of the authors of the OpenDAC paper. Our Github repo has been going through significant restructuring and it looks like the files were moved after the press release went out. Here are the updated links:
“running quantum chemistry computations on the inputs provided by the Georgia Tech team. These calculations used about 400 million CPU hours”
Not sure bragging about high energy consumption helps their argument as much as they think.
smt88 3 days ago [-]
I'm happier to see these CPU-hours go to a boondoggle climate project than to ChatGPT writing people's emails for them.
kfrzcode 3 days ago [-]
It would be supremely excellent if these companies embraced the Hedera Hashgraph as a truly sustainable, net-zero (or net-negative) approach to their carbon capture tokenization efforts:
I find that it's usually folly to speak in absolutes, but in this case I feel confident in stating:
The only carbon capture which will ever scale as well as we need it to scale, is carbon capture which creates carbon-based products cheaper than current fossil-fuel methods.
There is a company working on that, there should be a dozen.
In terms of CCS, we're probably better off reducing emissions AND capping methane emissions (MethaneSAT just launched). IIRC, CCS needs to be around 4% of the solution.
idrathernot 2 days ago [-]
Let’s just ban all manufacturing, commerce and transportation in western countries while we all try to breathe less. That’s the only way win the war on carbon.
freddealmeida 3 days ago [-]
Trees are great for carbon capture.
BurningFrog 3 days ago [-]
They take up a lot of space at scale though.
salynchnew 3 days ago [-]
Most tree planting efforts fail, as they ignore a lot of implementation/maintenance details and result in lots of dead trees.
Mass tree planting is like doing a massive, massive migration. You can't just stick seedlings in the ground arbitrarily and expect a stand of trees to sustain itself 'cause "nature"... the successful processes like the Miyawaki method require planning, community investment, sustained work for ~5 years, etc.
After the trees have grown, you need to harvest them and - somehow - make sure they don't rot and return the CO2 to the atmosphere.
Finding space for that is what I mean by "take up space at scale".
dyauspitr 3 days ago [-]
Carbon capture is so dumb. Just do the effective things like building out massive renewable energy generation like in China and India, phase out coal and oil, improve/install heat pumps, top down changes to phase out the use of plastic and reuse more containers like milk, soda etc like we did in the past, make nuclear plants, come up with cheap, safe lab grown meat etc.
> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
llm_trw 3 days ago [-]
I'm happy that they are wasting their money then.
dyauspitr 3 days ago [-]
It’s growing cells, you can bet your ass it’s going to happen sooner or later. It’s also definitely going to be cheaper than raising a whole cow by a mile.
yfw 3 days ago [-]
Bet. $100 if in 5 years you can get a lab grown steak in the supermarket for cheaper than cow steak.
Growing tissues with vasculature is vastly different from cell cultures
dyauspitr 3 days ago [-]
It doesn’t necessarily need to have vasculature for a lot of cases. Sausages, nuggets, bologna, any kind of processed meat like product.
For steaks, the timeline is definitely longer than 5 years.
coldpie 3 days ago [-]
Five years is pretty aggressive, but I feel like 10-20 is realistic. Just in time for those fusion plants to be coming online ;)
> in the supermarket for cheaper than cow steak
OK, but only if we agree to include subsidies and externalized costs in the price.
llm_trw 3 days ago [-]
Bet. $10,000 you won't be able to buy one for the same cost as a regular stake.
I'm happy to put my real name and money in an escrow account to the first person who wants to take the bet against me.
icodesoimgenius 3 days ago [-]
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Rendered at 13:31:26 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Out of the 27 commercially operational CCS projects worldwide, 21 inject carbon dioxide into oil reservoirs to force out petroleum: https://www.landclimate.org/what-is-happening-with-carbon-ca...
While renewables capture an inexhaustible source of energy (Sun), fossil fuels rely on an inexhaustible source of money for them: subsidies. Fossil fuel companies can't survive without the hundreds of billions of subsidies every year[1]. They can capture more subsides for 'carbon capture', using the captured carbon to extract more oil.
Exxon bets carbon will be the new oil: https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb...
[1]Global Fossil Fuel Subsidies Reached $7 Trillion in 2022, an All-Time High: https://e360.yale.edu/digest/fossil-fuel-subsidies-2022
If we could make carbon capture cheaper and more efficient (and that's a big if - it may not be possible, which is why research is needed), carbon could be permanently sequestered.
I don't see a reason to subsidize fossil fuels, release all this carbon, and then subsidize fossil fuels companies even more to capture something thats measured in parts per million.
And all this to waste 67% to 75% of energy. See Rejected energy: https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/sites/flowcharts/files/2023-10/U...
We'd be better off not burning fossil fuels, we have the technology today. People are ok spending billions on carbon capture. But are against subsidizing EVs, ICE cars emit 1 ton of CO2 for every 2500 miles, every car emits 5 tons CO2/year. For a lifetime of 20 years, thats 100 tons of CO2. Why not fund EVs as carbon capture? Or is the only path forward to give money to fossil fuel companies?
Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year[1]. Thats the equivalent of 2000 EVs.
[1]https://www.iea.org/energy-system/carbon-capture-utilisation...
Naturally, personal transports should be electrical, but even more important is to get people on trains.
The numbers don’t lie
Fortunately that solar panels require no resources to create, require no maintenance, and take no subsidies to maintain as an industry!
If Google developed an AI model for cancer detection in MRI scans, you wouldn’t claim that “AI is not for what people think it is for” because Google also uses AI models for advertising.
One big problem with using fossil fuel exhaust as the input stream for productive chemistry is that there are lots of fuel contaminants - sulfur, etc. - that poison further chemical reactions on the CO2 stream, and stripping out the contaminants is just too expensive. While atmospheric CO2 has a big concentration step, it has the great benefit of not having that issue.
It's easier to meet emission standards for a "light truck" (actual category of a SUV) so car manufacturers are pumping out vehicles with a similar size / front grill angle / etc so that the vehicle is under that category. You might argue that people have a preference for SUVs over Sedans but also note how similar all the SUVs appear; the appearance is part of the light truck designation so even if consumer preference drove a larger car design, the regulation has driven its appearance.
---
That said, I think an additional gas tax that rose annually with the proceeds rebated on your tax return is one of the easy + effective solutions I've heard about. Doesn't apply repressively because at the end of the year they get the higher costs rebated but at the time of sale pushes people to buy non-petroleum alternatives as it's cheaper. Probably easier to just rebated it equally amoungst tax filers as opposed to a rebate and industrial use is going to dwarf consumer use so you'll personally still end out ahead.
Laser-focusing down to only the "main" reason and ignoring all else will (as expected) miss the forest for the trees.
Subsidies still do cause people to consume more fossil fuels than they would otherwise, so the policy is encouraging pollution (AKA health injuries and deaths that industry shirks accountability for) rather than disincentivizing it.
What would $1.5tn PER YEAR subsidies in renewables and a reduction of $1.5tn PER YEAR subisdies in O&G at the same time look like?
Think of these subsidies like compound interest, $1.5 trillion here, $15 trillion there.... it starts to add up.
I mean, this is a crazy line of thinking. Without fossil fuels, what's considered valuable would still be "work life balance is slightly less time manually working on the farm" and "goods are the best stuff we can buy from people crafting the stuff within a 3 mile radius" and "education is what we can learn from the smartest person in the village".
If you want now but without fossil fuels, you have to use fossil fuels hard enough to invent the thing that replaces them.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00953-x
Yes, if you are the only person in the house, prioritize the tap, but if someone else is working the leak, grab a mop right away!
Not if the spilled water is running down the drain.
If we stopped our CO2 emissions and nothing else changed CO2 levels in the atmosphere would start falling immediately as photosynthesis would capture carbon faster than natural sources emit it.
The only thing worth doing now is converting everything to nuclear so we can scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere before industrial society becomes impossible.
In short: even if we get the most fervent dreams of de-growth and live like cavewomen starting tomorrow we've still got a million years of global warming before we're back to pre-industrial levels.
Even if we were to not use a single drop of oil tomorrow and start putting nuclear powered fans to capture CO2 everywhere, the biodiversity would still be collapsing. Climate change is only a portion the problem of the destabilisation of our environment as a whole.
When need to reduce our energy consumption and our footprint on the environment. That means roughly less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and the very low-tech "more trees". "AI for Y" is just a distraction...
Same argument, but perhaps you now imagine a slightly different outcome.
The piece that "gives way" is (of course, as any historian or anthropologist will attest) that the population size...... fluctuates. Generally the process isn't too too fun for people who find themselves in those populations.
Everyone wants to talk about reducing other people’s consumption.
Out of all the countless times you've surely seen this particular argument play out on the internet, have you ever seen it go somewhere productive?
"Yet you participate in society, curious!" is not a productive response to the suggestion "We should improve society somewhat"
Either we do this voluntarily and as orderly as possible, or it just happens for us. Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness of the impending situation our species is going to be facing.
I think it's a pretty natural reaction against the relentless push of this false choice by people who cannot imagine a third way that actually makes life better.
Your response seems to indicate a complete unawareness that there are other options besides enforced poverty.
Or we use the fact we can still run an industrial society to build CO2 scrubbers using nuclear energy to power them, keeping our improving our living standards while fixing our mistakes.
It's quite likely to be a far better use of those resources to invest them in tree planting initiatives if your goal is to sequester carbon.
But if you want to satiate your techno-lust a technological solution to some of our climate problems may lie in the form of space based optical systems that reduce the amount of sunlight from falling on glaciers and the poles.
The only solution is to green deserts, which you need nuclear power for water desalination to do.
This simply opens a "hole" for new trees to grow up around them. It's not that any one tree holds carbon forever, it's that an acre of forest in dynamic equilibrium holds a lot more stored carbon.
When people suggest planting trees, the process isn't one-and-done. It's actually re-afforestation, where the land is permanently forested. Otherwise yes, if you cut down all the trees and then also prevent anything from growing back in its place, then of course you're undoing future benefits.
There is also 'mild' re-afforestation, where you simply increase the equilibrium amount of stored biomass in a landscape. You can plant 20-40 trees per acre in agricultural landscapes (this actually improves crop yield if you choose the right species, search for "farmer's trees"), or re-green suburbs that have lost their vegetation cover over time.
These projects are less stark than Atacama-desert-to-Amazon-rainforest, so many folks will neglect the possibility entirely and therefore conclude that "the only solution is to green deserts." :-\
--
It's also probably related to cultural biases that view deserts as useless, worthless, and most important uninhabitable spaces. However if you actually try to green a desert, you'll suddenly find lots of terribly inconvenient "desert people" actually do live there, and oppose you destroying their home and displacing them. See the real reason behind building "The Line" in Saudi Arabia.
And the Chinese eat many times more meat than they used to.
It is fair to point those things out because it is evidence that living on "less cars, smaller homes, less concrete, less meat, less gadgets and more trees" really sucks and that it is possible for us to overdo our response to climate change and ocean acidification.
It's always the same rhetoric with your kind, you pretend to fight for the poor, when all you really want is freedom to keep on grabbing as much as possible for yourselves.
What does matter is that we make our best effort to mitigate the impending disaster to the human race and the ecosystem.
Instead trying to keep the third world poor why don't we just nuke them?
This has the triple benefit of:
1). Reducing the total population.
2). Reducing CO2 production of the survivors.
3). Starting a nuclear winter.
It's just unethical to do anything else when faced with the impending disaster to the human race and the ecosystem.
The debate on degrowth isn't whether a Somalian family should have access to a decent home, healthcare, clothing, enough food etc. The answer is a very obvious yes.
The debate is whether a middle class American family really should own 2 trucks, live in a 200sqm house and eat that much meat. But you always make it about the poor.
Somehow natural gas flares and pulp mills are okay set against a scenic mountain valley, but a wind turbine is a blight.
These people are broken in the head.
(I live in Ontario these days, but right now in a hotel in Jasper after a day of spring skiing... it's painful to come back to this province sometimes.)
Yeah it’s sad, and that’s an amazing point you make. It’s funny when i hear people complain about carbon tax, particularly from Alberta. You know what cuts the tax? Remove the carbon from the price of a kWh. But no, let’s burn coal and gas and have one of the highest carbon per kWh in the country and just complain instead.
Alberta: 778g / kWh BC: 38.1g MB: 25.7g ON: 49.9
SK is just as bad as Alberta, and the territories but that’s mostly because of where they source their energy due to their remote location, not some political decision.
https://www.canada.ca/en/environment-climate-change/services...
There is a reason why every country which has reduced nuclear power has increased its green house gas emissions.
Wind and solar have significantly reduced carbon emissions across most western countries. Nuclear doesn’t scale well due to capacity factor falling with daily and seasonal changes in demand. France sitting next to non nuclear Germany can have lots of nuclear but that’s little different that some US states having more nuclear while connected to other states with less. What matters is the overall grid not arbitrary map locations.
Storing or curtailing wind/solar simply costs less than nuclear at 50% capacity factor, so that’s the only way to make real progress.
Every country is different, but wind and solar have scaled from practically nothing ("proving viability") 20 years ago to a majority of new installs 10 years ago to a significant chunk of all generation now.
Wiping out already-built nuclear power is like junking your car two months into a 96-month loan because you don't like the gas bill. Just... why? Sunk costs have generated nearly-free returns. You're still going to pay those costs, in dollars and in CO2, whether you run a nuclear reaction or not. The worst-plausible-case-scenario meltdown has been substantially mitigated with the extant designs, and some of the new designs that are probably never getting built would be difficult to melt down even if you attempted it.
Shutting down existing plants as Germany did is a very different proposition than scaling up a nuclear buildout in 2024. Renewables and various grid improvements are just way cheaper and more justifiable in the short term, and have none of the baggage attached, and have none of the need for state support attached. It would take a gargantuan effort right now to mass-produce reactors cheaply enough that they could even begin to compete with renewables.
At the same time Solar is always going to produce some power and the more excess generation you have to charge batteries and curtail hydro etc the higher that minimum worst case generation becomes.
Net result is you don’t need to build some huge battery bank to store energy from sunny days in the summer, you just ‘over build’ cheap generation and eventually you have no need for seasonal storage.
Are you talking about the typical nuclear plant which is often bespoke, or also considering modular reactor units which have (finally!) seen recent development?
> lithium ion batteries... makes the most financial sense
Correct me if I'm wrong but li-ion is still cost prohibitive for large scale energy storage on the grid. Things like V2G etc can help but those are owned by the drivers/consumers and not the state/electricity corps.
https://reneweconomy.com.au/batteries-smash-more-records-as-...
People play on the words ‘reactor’ but modular reactors themselves don’t actually solve any pressing issues and at least currently just cost more.
Modular units are firmly in the "I'll believe it when I see it, meanwhile keep the renewables building as fast as possible" category.
(also, everyone has forgotten about proliferation. The fighting around Zhaprozhia did remind a few people about the security risks, though)
Part of this is because of how absolutely f-ed up research in fission has been over the decades.
There is this graph if you can find it showing how much money was estimated to be spent on R&D, vs how much was actually spent. Basically by the 1980s or 90s, if investments were made, nuclear would've been much cheaper today. There's a bunch of things more, but it's not that nuclear is inherently expensive more than the fact that you need to spend money first to save it.
But yeah, the people who are trying to claim that nuclear is the only viable renewable energy solution to climate change haven't been paying attention to renewable energy advances in the past 10-15 years, and/or have been ignoring the massive budget and time overruns pretty much all nuclear plants have had in the past couple of decades, especially in developed nations that are trying to make sure they're built in a safe way.
We would be powered 100% by solar but our laws here allow the utility to limit the size of our system.
But please, tell me why the laws of thermodynamics don't apply to renewables.
Why? Because I think carbon capture sells the idea that with the right technology we could just continue doing what we are doing. It is the equivalent of an obese person stuffing food in their mouth and telling you fat can always be surgically removed. Yeah sure it can, to some degree, but you do see how that doesn't fix the problem? Do you see how them saying that might in fact be worse than them saying nothing?
So in my mind carbon capture is something that we should work on if we are capable of the realization that the role it will play in fixing the problem is utterly insignificant. If you think it is the solution, carbon capture sells a false hope and prolongs the struggle — and at least where I am from proponents of carbon capture are the people who definitely don't want to reduce their CO2 output.
Pointing at some future technology instead of doing something now is actively harmful. And I am not sure the actual positive effect of such technology would outweigh the negative effect it has as an excuse to justify not doing what is necessary now.
What you’re overlooking is that we will keep doing whatever we’re doing, for the same reason telling people to diet and exercise isn’t doing jack shit for the obesity crisis. We need Ozempic for the climate. Because the only alternative is 4C of warming.
So either we change our way or we deive ourself into climate extinction. Since profits and geostrategic advantage seem to be more important than the survival of the human race it will be the latter. And someone somewhere in 2050 will start the alibi-CO2-capture machine, that was built by a tiny fraction of the oil money from this year.
If this comes across as cynical that might be, because it is. Trusting on carbon capture technology despite the presence of evidence¹ that it won't do shit is something we cannot afford. Don't get me wrong, we should still research and fund it. But you don't want to be that politician that wants to keep no speed limits on highways "because future carbon capture technology will solve this".
No, future carbon capture technology won't solve this, it will solve a tiny fraction of this. Pretending that it will do more creates false hope and a distorted perception.
¹ see IPCC report: : "Even if realized at its full potential, CCS will only account for about 2.4% of the world’s carbon mitigation by 2030"
It's unfortunate that the ecosystem has to suffer.
Fortunately natural selection will remove this mindset eventually.
It's unfortunate that the species has to suffer it in the meantime.
It may just be that this group of people isn't up to the challenge and, like you said, natural selection is necessary to produce a group that is up to the challenge.
Unfortunately that selection may come too late and much of the ecosystem may suffer for it.
Sounds a lot like giving up to me.
Wishing for human extinction makes you an enemy of all mankind btw
I'm saying that objectively maybe we should all die.
From a subjective perspective I'm going to keep fighting to the detriment of all the others around to the very bitter end and take down as many of them as I can, just like the real enemy of life that I am.
> you do see how that doesn't fix the problem
It literally does fix the problem.
Unless we talk unicorn-pie-in-the-sky-fantasy-technology that can suck all carbon out off the air on the snip of a finger, any technology has to be measured within the bounds of its possibilities and not in fantasyland.
I'd argue for every million dollars towards reaching net zero emissions, we should maybe spend 1 dollar towards carbon capture, where we scale that investment up as we approach net zero emissions.
Bloomberg says global investment in carbon capture in 2022 was like $6.4 billion (https://about.bnef.com/blog/carbon-capture-investment-hits-r...).
Bloomberg also says that global renewable investment in the first 6 months of 2023 was $358 billion (https://about.bnef.com/blog/renewable-energy-investment-hits...)
Conversion of all carbon capture investment into more solar or wind capacity would not significantly move the needle on rate of renewable growth.
Effectively all carbon capture investment right now is basically in the pilot phase. Governments are sinking money into carbon capture for a broad range of reasons, including cynical (as a smokescreen to protect fossil fuel industries) to optimistic (we can start investing in the next step of net-zero since renewable trajectories look good) to being realistic hedges (they see the challenges in achieving net zero in certain fields like aviation, shipping, construction, and believe that carbon capture is what is necessary to achieve net-zero).
Emissions reductions can be achieved in known ways at some relatively modest cost, e.g. the difference in cost between using fossil fuels and using electric cars or renewable/nuclear generation methods, which are already very close together in price and could be made closer or even cause the alternatives to cost less through certain types of engineering R&D or reasonable regulatory changes, and not only lower emissions but lower energy costs.
Carbon capture requires a large amount of R&D which might not yield any useful results whatsoever, and if it did the result would be a reduction in cost from a level which is hopeless and preposterous to one where actually deploying it would still cost trillions of dollars in implementation and operating costs to have any meaningful effect, while producing no other economic value and almost certainly a vast amount of chemical waste.
The difference in cost effectiveness is so vast that the optimal allocation of finite resources to the latter could plausibly be zero.
Go the tab for the subsection on transportation and you'll see they're working on ways to reduce emissions, too. They also provide the dashboard and tracker app for the Drawdown Georgia initiative, which was co-drafted by Georgia Tech and aims to eventually get to net zero emissions in the state.
We emit 35 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year.
That is more than 7x the amount of cement made each year (4.5 billion tons). More than 8x the amount of food that's made each year (about 4 billion tons). About 17x the amount of steel made each year (2 billion tons). About 60x the amount of plastic made each year (about 0.5 billion tons).
But carbon is completely worthless. We can't build a logistics pipeline dedicated solely to moving a worthless substance that is larger than the rest of human logistics combined.
But then you could also use it as a renewable fuel and we'd be calling it biofuels instead of carbon capture.
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terraform-indu...
This is obviously utterly false, given how much CO2 has been absorbed each year by current gen CO2 absorption technology.
>But carbon is completely worthless.
Current Gen carbon absorbers turn CO2 into some of the most useful materials on earth, like food, building materials and raw materials for oils and plastics. Much of the current world logistics is already dedicated to transporting their products.
We need a balance between the two, as they are both important
But we shouldn't be "mere techno-optimists", we should also get behind true political, social and economical solutions to lowering our emissions, and fast
Extraction operates on supply and demand. When people stop demanding it, they'll stop digging it out of the ground.
There are two ways to achieve this: 1) You make burning it more expensive (carbon tax). 2) You make alternatives to burning it cheaper.
You can do both at once. In fact you want to, because the first one gives the second one economies of scale and the second one reduces the economic impact of the first one.
Preventing extraction is pointless because it has the same effect as the first one except that instead of the money being collected as a tax that could be refunded to the population as a tax credit, it goes to the people who are still doing the remaining extraction. We could, however, stop subsidizing extraction.
Yes, but it might raise oil prices, effectively making the carbon tax apply globally. Unless OPEC just compensates by increasing production. IMHO carbon tax indeed better tool for EU/US, given that most of oil production out of "our" control
Which major countries could already do through tariffs on any country not collecting it, without giving the money to OPEC.
that statement upon examination does not pass scrutiny for weaslewords
A market that relies solely on prices as an incentive is unlikely to be the right tool for what's at stake. What would be the price of the natural habitat of the last wild elephants? A billion dollars? Let's hope Elon doesn't feel like building a gigafactory right there.
Carbon capture is the only way to get back to pre industrial CO2 levels!
Even if/when we emit zero CO2, the elevated levels would remain for many centuries!
CO2 isn't some poison in the atmosphere, it needs to be there. The one thing under control of humans is what percentage of Carbon is in the atmosphere or bound in different forms.
The problem isn't too much CO2 in the atmosphere, it is that the amount of CO2 there can't be reabsorbed at a self regulating rate.
Heck, if India emitted 7x as much per capita, they'd still emit less than the US does.
> Bottom-up national emission inventories are therefore an essential component of reporting and tracking progress towards the goals of the Paris Agreement. However, national inventory reports are not yet available for all countries and years. In addition, they are dependent on individual national reporting processes and methodological choices, they can present data gaps for specific sectors and currently, except for Annex I parties, there is no obligation to include long-term series of emissions up to the most recent year.
> The European Commission’s in-house Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR)7 offers an alternative to overcome these limitations and to complement national inventories and has the advantage of producing timely emission estimates that are comparable across countries.
> EDGAR relies on several sources of international statistics for the underpinning data. Foremost among these is the International Energy Agency (IEA). To harmonise global GHG emission estimates, this booklet incorporates IEA CO2 emissions from fossil fuel combustion sources named IEA-EDGAR CO2 emission dataset (v2), which are complemented with in-house EDGAR estimates for CH4, N2O and F-gas emissions.
PDF: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/booklet/GHG_emissions_of_all_...
I can't comment on China but I highly suggest living for a month in an average Indian household if you have such delusions. (Yes, it's a delusion.)
An easy way for an economist sitting at home to realize the same is look at PPP & currency valuations. The rupee is fairly weak but has a better PPP value, suggesting labour-based goods/services are cheaper/more common than capital-based ones. Hence why you have say more call centres (human-intensive) than high-tech Silicon Valley startups - an iPhone is "cheap" in the US, an hour of labour is "cheap" in India. Hence consumption of goods by Indians is very limited esp compared to the US.
Your comment is not only possibly racist but also utterly devoid of any critical thinking or common knowledge in the domains of energy, industry, economics, public policy, or international relations, plus perhaps a whole lot of other fields. (If anyone wants to downvote - please also let me know your reasons, I'm happy to have my mind changed.)
Preserving the planet is valuable insofar as there are people to enjoy it. Without people to experience it, it wouldn't matter much. Without any sentient being to experience it, it would matter (in my view) zero.
Thus, creating new people to experience it is necessary, if preserving the planet is going to be worth it at all.
Of course, one can argue that there are too many people and we need to make less, but I think there are lots of lifestyle changes that need to be made before something so radical even makes sense. I.e., don't think people should make less kids so that the ones that do get made can live in a suburb and drive a car everyday. That's getting the priorities totally wrong.
Raising a child costs hundreds of thousands or millions. Preventing an accidental pregnancy can cost under a dollar.
OP: “preventing unwanted pregnancies is good for environment” (because humans have big carbon footprint)
You: “having fewer children is bad: see these economies”
This reads as criticism of birth control and the viability of population reduction as an environmental strategy. But:
1. Do unwanted children typically contribute positively to GDP? Isn’t reducing that terrible situation just a win on all fronts?
2. How is collapsing population in developed countries related to the OP’s suggestion of widespread birth control? Are they really that related?
3. How is having fewer kids bad for environment? Afaict it is unambiguously good for that.
Also why would I want to fix an economy using unwanted children?
People that want others to do things like avoid plastic straws but themselves have 2.5 unadopted kids per household are obviously being somewhat hypocritical
Since the emissions per person can be zero, any level of emissions reduction can be achieved with any number of people, you just need more emissions reductions per person when you have more people. "We should have both more emissions reductions and more people" is thereby an entirely consistent position.
More than that, emissions reductions generally require R&D and have some economic cost, but an aging population is economically weaker and has fewer resources to spare. Meanwhile older people who aren't going to live much longer and have no descendants have less incentive to care about what happens in the future and spend those scarce resources on things like emissions reductions. People having more kids avoids that death spiral.
Also, I mean, who are we trying to save the world for?
I personally take the view that policing individual consumption is meaningless, but I still notice the doublethink required for those that have that view to rationalize their choices to not adopt.
> who are we saving the world for?
The future, regardless of whether those people are genetically derived from our selves. Having your own children is often viewed as a selfless act, which is weird, because if you do that when you could adopt an orphan, and if we’re being honest, then it’s one of the most selfish things you can do.
It could be achieved either way. If you want to e.g. replace gasoline cars with electric cars, you could have some kind of government incentives, or you as an individual could just choose to buy an electric car and put solar panels on your roof to charge it.
> people who do argue for reducing consumption must consider the fact that consumption hinges on consumers
But it doesn't. The rate of consumption is number of consumers times consumption per consumer. You can increase number of consumers while reducing consumption per consumer and end up with a net reduction, as long as the latter is larger. Since consumption per person can get arbitrarily close to zero, it's entirely consistent to want to get there that way than by reducing the population, which has all kinds of terrible consequences.
> Having your own children is often viewed as a selfless act, which is weird
It costs a significant amount of money and primarily benefits someone else (the child). You have to forego a lot of luxury vacations and early retirement to pay for books and food and college.
> if you do that when you could adopt an orphan
The fertility rate is below the population-replacement rate. That includes the orphans. If the fertility rate was only the orphans, it would be far lower than it even is already and we would be completely screwed. Not only that, by your logic the orphans' parents are selfish too, but then who is it that you think should be having kids if the human race is not to go extinct?
This argument is absurd and naive. Mass murder and your suicide would also reduce consumers. Clearly there are other factors to consider over and above the raw numbers, many of which are cultural and subjective.
Do no harm also means, if you think consumption is harmful then you do need to avoid opting into creating maybe 50-100 Years of extra consumption per child just for the satisfaction of knowing your genes will be doing the consumption.
Are there ever acceptable cultural or subjective reasons to excuse “rules for thee but not for me”?
You're left with things like concrete that emit CO2 from something other than burning fossil fuels. But none of those things are strictly required. There are alternatives to them with various trade offs. Some that are essentially a drop-in replacement, basically different kinds of cement that don't emit CO2, others that operate differently but get you the same result, like using entirely different building materials. The main reason these aren't already used is cost, but that doesn't mean you can't pay the cost, it just means nobody is going to do it voluntarily. It also doesn't mean that no one could come up with some new alternative with a lower cost going forward -- that sort of thing happens all the time.
Of course using a plastic straw isn't what got us into this mess and small individual choices like that won't save us.
I find this whole line of thought fraught. Some assumption somewhere went wrong.
Making this work is all about minimizing the energy (and thus economic) cost of this first step. Then you need to reduce (add hydrogen and remove oxygen) the CO2 and start building other products - methanol, long-chain hydrocarbons, etc. (that's shipping and jet/rocket fuel, respectively). But why stop there? If you want long-term stable materials, converting the CO2 into carbon fiber is a good option - more sci-fi is a diamond endpoint, which takes a lot of energy, but has many uses.
This will have minimal effect on atmospheric CO2 unless fossil fuel extraction and combustion is eliminated from the energy mix - but it does point to how human civilization can do material and fuel production without having to mine carbon from the earth or cut down forests. In the long run, this is the only plausible option.
[1] https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/DATAS...
[2] https://github.com/Open-Catalyst-Project/ocp/blob/main/MODEL...
Did somebody even look at this stuff before writing their press release? It's not like it's much link following to click "The project, named OpenDAC" and then find out it's all a bunch of dead links.
- https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/datasets/od...
- https://open-catalyst-project.github.io/ocp/core/models.html...
We'll update the links in the release ASAP. -AS
Not sure bragging about high energy consumption helps their argument as much as they think.
https://hedera.com/learning/sustainability
The only carbon capture which will ever scale as well as we need it to scale, is carbon capture which creates carbon-based products cheaper than current fossil-fuel methods.
There is a company working on that, there should be a dozen.
Terraform Industries: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39922006
Interviews with CEO: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39923611
https://ieefa.org/resources/carbon-capture-crux-lessons-lear...
Mass tree planting is like doing a massive, massive migration. You can't just stick seedlings in the ground arbitrarily and expect a stand of trees to sustain itself 'cause "nature"... the successful processes like the Miyawaki method require planning, community investment, sustained work for ~5 years, etc.
https://daily.jstor.org/the-miyawaki-method-a-better-way-to-...
After the trees have grown, you need to harvest them and - somehow - make sure they don't rot and return the CO2 to the atmosphere.
Finding space for that is what I mean by "take up space at scale".
> Humbird likened the process of researching the report to encountering an impenetrable “Wall of No”—his term for the barriers in thermodynamics, cell metabolism, bioreactor design, ingredient costs, facility construction, and other factors that will need to be overcome before cultivated protein can be produced cheaply enough to displace traditional meat.
> “And it’s a fractal no,” he told me. “You see the big no, but every big no is made up of a hundred little nos.”
Growing tissues with vasculature is vastly different from cell cultures
For steaks, the timeline is definitely longer than 5 years.
> in the supermarket for cheaper than cow steak
OK, but only if we agree to include subsidies and externalized costs in the price.
I'm happy to put my real name and money in an escrow account to the first person who wants to take the bet against me.