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2.5% eh? We should all immediately stop flying... This is outrageous. Just imagine, 2.5%!! But on a more serious note, this article is again wrong, like so man

2.5% eh? We should all immediately stop flying... This is outrageous. Just imagine, 2.5%!! But on a more serious note, this article is again wrong, like so many others about climate change. Being a combination of clickbait and false assumptions, it fails to miss the point entirely that first, 2.5% are irrelevant, but also that it makes no sense whatsoever to tackle this now. The technology is just not there yet. What we urgently NEED to do is invest HUGE amounts of money into two key technologies. One is batteries. Make them as small, lightweight and efficient as possible. Pretty much everything depends on that and there has been no notable breakthrough in like forever... Without "super" batteries, we can kiss "preventing climate change" goodbye. Another one is sucking the carbon out of the atmosphere. And no, we DON'T need to reduce our carbon emission, one of the key mistakes people make when it comes to climate change. What we need to do is to suck out more than we put in. There is no way in hell that 200 countries in the world agree on being C02 neutral. The leading countries need to suck the shit back out, that is the only way forward. As for all the people who preach changing the entire world by reducing emissions... I mean, I get you are very naive, but seriously: It's not gonna happen. It is cute to have girl sail through the Atlantic to make so pep talk at congress. But it is also really meaningless. This is not the way the world will change. It never has. Politicians can't agree on the color of shit within their own country, not to mention between them. The only way to avoid catastrophe is to outpace climate change with innovation. The world is not going to sacrifice living standards until they all drown in their own filth.

megaremote 7y ago
Your idea is never change what we are doing? Crazy.
mveety 7y ago
Also if we suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere we could turn it into petrochemicals and fuel which would help with making existing things carbon neutral.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  That's the most viable path to sustainable aviation (rather than electrifying the fleet).
funklute 7y ago
Any time someone actually does the math on sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, it seemingly becomes clear that it is simply not scalable to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere. Have you done the math, and if so, why is everyone who comes to the aforementioned conclusion wrong?
- wallace_f 7y ago
  Don't do math, don't question the dogma, and don't bet against markets. Coastal florida prices are skyrocketing because underwater real estate is just gonna' be the new trend. And Holland is leading the world in supposed refugees of underwater refugees. I'm incapable of thinking for myself and believe everyhing I'm told. Let's go to war again in the Middle East! Better downvote this comment for offending your regurgitated ideologies.
  - funklute 7y ago
    I have no idea what you are trying to say with this...
    - wallace_f 7y ago
      Don't worry, someone replied with an entire comment of simple ad hominen attacks and you can conveniently lean on those to make you feel more comfortable in your worldviews.
  - pilsetnieks 7y ago
    Just so you know, I'm downvoting this comment instead for being an inane rant without presenting a rational argument.
    - wallace_f 7y ago
      Unfortunartely, becoming sloth is always easier than confronting reality unless you're forced not to.
SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
What if said super batteries and efficient sequestration never develop? Why isn't creating lower emission power supplies on your list? I understand that the batteries save green power for when it can't be produced, but if we could find other, better, low or zero emission power sources, wouldn't that be just as good? I'm just confused why those are the two must have technologies, which don't yet exist, and not others, which also have yet to exist on the scale we need.
- tick_tock_tick 7y ago
  Find other low or zero emission power sources is the same as "innovation is required to combat client change" as OP. Technically nuclear would be perfect but practically I fear that ship already sailed nothing else up an coming except maybe fusion has any potential as a real baseload powersource. Without another breakthrough in battery technology solar and wind will never be more than the token effort they are today.
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    I'm not laying that out as the better option, just that if we're going to create arbitrary lists of things that was solve climate change, I don't understand what the criteria was to make the cut or not, outside of one's own personal preference.
    - tick_tock_tick 7y ago
      Does it solve the problem is the cut and solar and wind don't make it right now.
- habnds 7y ago
  because that would require a change in personal behavior while the carbon sucking option means it's some scientist's problem and they have no personal responsibility
jcims 7y ago
What's the basic energy equation of sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere using state of the art today? In say megawatt hours per gigaton?
- umvi 7y ago
  > What's the basic energy equation of sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere using state of the art today? Current state-of-the-art has the following equation[1]: 6CO2 + 6H20 + (photons) → C6H12O6 + 6O2 (sorry, I couldn't help myself, the setup was too good) But seriously, I doubt we can beat plants in terms of carbon sequestration efficiency. [1] https://sciencing.com/photosynthesis-equation-6962557.html https://sciencing.com/photosynthesis-equation-6962557.html
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    But maybe we could beat the plants in efficiency per square meter. There's nothing saying we couldn't improve on density of matter that photosynthesizes, by e.g. packing the plant matter more tightly in artificial conditions. Nature tries to produce organisms that survive and reproduce. We now have a different set of constraints: we need something that can pull out carbon as efficiently as possible. If it can't self-reproduce, we can reproduce it in labs or factories. I feel (hope) there's plausible biology and engineering work to be done here.
    - umvi 7y ago
      I think the following would be a great start: - Stop destroying forests (such as Amazon) which are a huge carbon sink for cows which are a carbon source. - Build more buildings out of wood (wood buildings are carbon sinks) instead of concrete (carbon source) - All building lumber should be self-sustaining (i.e. replant trees you used to build) - Stop over fishing and allow oceans to grow unchecked (all living things sequester carbon while they are alive... the ocean is potentially the biggest carbon sink of all and could have several magnitudes more fish and plankton life sequestering billions of tons of carbon) - Supplement all of the above with man-made carbon sequestration tech
  - 7y ago
dkural 7y ago
On a per dollar basis, sucking carbon out is the most expensive option. Economics dictates that there is lower hanging fruit & best to prevent / reduce CO2 emissions at concentrated sources than to suck out it from an extremely dispersed atmosphere. You're fighting against basic entropy (entropy always wins).
- factsaresacred 7y ago
  In economic terms, it's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario. Self-interest and inertia wins. There's no way you're getting people to downgrade their present for some stranger's future without good incentives.
127 7y ago
>It's not gonna happen Not with that attitude. To elaborate: it's not black & white. You can definitely have a positive impact reducing emissions.
maximente 7y ago
yeah, betting on technology to solve immediate existential problems given minimal precedent isn't naive or anything. go ahead and post the projections on increased battery capacity, how we're going to find the rare earth material for constructing them all, and how clean tech will magically materialize that will not spike emissions while we build tons of magical unicorn stuff to save the world. you're the naive one, not whoever you're calling out here.
usaar333 7y ago
> The leading countries need to suck the shit back out, that is the only way forward Its almost certainly for the leading countries to cut emissions and coerce the noncompliers into compliance.
eanzenberg 7y ago
Plant trees
_Microft 7y ago
Here's two questions for you which are not hard to answer but, frankly, I do not expect to read the answers here. Why? Because it would show how utterly wrong the suggestion of carbon sequestration for solving this problem was. First: how much mass (i.e. kg or tons) of C0_2 is emitted per year? Second: what is the total mass of concrete produced per year worldwide? (This is only an exercise to give parent poster an idea of the scale btw)
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  Re your first question, quick googling suggests some 37 billion tons of CO₂ per year. So sure, that's a lot. But then again, not that lot. Instead of asking questions, why don't you tell us why we couldn't possibly sequester that much carbon annually? How big is the divide between what we could do and what needs to be done? (I must say the idea of sequestering carbon seems emotionally appealing to me because it turns the problem into something much more tangible. You're not going to get people to cut their CO₂ emissions enough to matter without pushing for a strong emission taxing (which I'm also a fan of). Lowering your living standards doesn't feel like it's accomplishing much vs. the pain involved. Sequestering CO₂ would turn the problem into a numbers game, "how many tons is our country pulling out of the atmosphere, and where do we throw the money to get that number up?".)
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    It seems to me like we need to do both: tax carbon (ideally globally, but even if half the developed countries do it, it's huge) AND use that tax money to work on research and deployment of carbon sequestration or carbon to fuel conversion.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      That's my current belief too.
  - jandrewrogers 7y ago
    In principle, with extreme heroic effort, we could sequester 37 billion tons of CO2 per year, but we should be clear on just how extreme “extreme” is. Remember, every single part of the logistical supply chain would need to be scalable a million-fold the same way that the actual sequestration plant would need to be. There are two big practical engineering problems that have to be solved first, that have not been realistically addressed. First, we would need to double global electricity generation to a first approximation. The laws of thermodynamics make this non-negotiable. Very few power generation technologies not based on fossil fuels can scale like that. Nuclear power plants, realistically, and thousands of them in very short order. Second, the chemicals used in industrial sequestration produce hazardous byproducts on a scale similar to the CO2 being sequestered, byproducts like hydrochloric acid. Today, this is easy to handle because we produce truly trivial quantities of the chemicals required for sequestration. Not only is there no industrial capacity to produce the required chemicals, nor an obvious way to scale them, there is also no plan for disposing of the billions of tons of caustic chemicals that would be thrown off as a side-effect of their manufacture. It doesn’t do us any good to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere if we end up turning the planet into a superfund site. Nobody accounts for hazardous byproducts of the proposed technology supply chains, which will be produced on similar scales. As I’ve noted previously, we can reduce this to a much simpler sub-problem that is easy to reason about: what would be required to produce enough potassium hydroxide to sequester 37 billion tons of CO2 per year? All the required facts and figures are public knowledge and relatively basic science. The amount of electricity required per ton is widely documented, as are the chemical inputs and byproducts. And then, once you’ve realized the extent to which that asymptotically approaches impossible, do the same kinds of calculations on the upstream supply chain for the inputs to that process, which is also public information. It falls apart very, very quickly.
ScottBurson 7y ago
I don't know about carbon capture, but I do think we should be researching sulfur aerosols and iron fertilization. See Oliver Morton's excellent book The Planet Remade.
- jbattle 7y ago
  I'm betting on sulfur aerosols. The energy requirements are modest, the impact is apparently relatively reversible, the side effects seem less potentially catastrophic than iron fertilization. I look at the street outside my office and simply can't picture us deploying enough carbon capture machines to offset how much we're pumping into the air. I hope I'm wrong.
rb808 7y ago
I agree carbon sucking is the only thing that can put the greenhouse effect into reverse. But imagine if you could have an electricity powered machine that takes out C02 and turns it into solid dense carbon? That is pretty much the opposite of a coal burning power station. With today's technology it would be much simpler to reduce coal burning than taking C02 out of the air. BTW China alone is building a new coal-burning power station every two weeks. https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2019/03/28/china-new-coal-plants-2030-climate/ https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2019/03/28/china-new-coal-p...
Aloha 7y ago
This is what humanity does best, we innovate our way out of problems (often ones we created in the first place)
tunesmith 7y ago
Why are you arguing "A instead of B" when we can do "A and B"?
m4rtink 7y ago
Yeah, this seems to me like the only real no bloody solution of this problem. It basically boils down to energy - we need to have a lot more from sources that don't produce CO2 - likely massive solar or nuclear deployments. Once you have that, not just CO2 capture but many other similar problmes are quite easy to solve without having to put pressure on people to change the way of their live. You can even periodically turn part of the captured CO2 into jet fuel, effectively making all planes battery powered (with Earth's atmosphere being the battery).
andrepd 7y ago
What about fusion power? It's the dream energy source: the fuel is seawater, the waste is slightly lighter seawater. It seems the perfect target for a Manhattan project/moonshot sort of effort. Giving several teams with competing designs $100B each to develop and test their reactor, in parallel. The potential benefit of near-free clean energy is so absolutely world-changing that it seems worth it to spend on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars to develop it.
- dTal 7y ago
  >It seems the perfect target for a Manhattan project/moonshot sort of effort. It would be funny, if it weren't tragic, how "manhattan project" and "moonshot" are the bywords for absurdly expensive government projects. Both these things were peanuts compared to the staggering amounts that politicians routinely fart away on practically overnight whims, for dubious and very likely corrupt reasons: Manhattan project: $23 billion Trump's wall: $22 billion Moonshot: $288 billion 2008 bailouts: $700 billion All US fusion research investment ever: ~$30 billion Iraq war: $2 trillion
Vomzor 7y ago
Some links to prove carbon capture is not just some fairy tale. >A Canadian company, called Carbon Engineering, has published peer-reviewed findings, which show the process (carbon capture) can now be done for less than $100 per ton. This is a major improvement on current estimates of $600 per ton.[1] >In 2016, Hollub became the first female CEO of a major international oil company. ... Hollub’s leadership has brought about a change in thinking. She realized that the company’s carbon-capture expertise could be used not just to make profits for shareholders but also to do climate good. That’s why Hollub is confident that Oxy can become carbon neutral, and why she was sitting at a table in Edinburgh, Scotland in November 2018 with Carbon Engineering’s Oldham. As of this year, Carbon Engineering has raised about $100 million, including about $15 million of government funds. Carbon also counts oil major Chevron and mining giant BHP as investors[2] >Crystalline nets harvest water from desert air, turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel ... a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that he and his colleagues have created a solar-powered device that could provide water for millions in water-stressed regions. At its heart is a porous crystalline material, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), that acts like a sponge: It sucks water vapor out of air, even in the desert, and then releases it as liquid water. ... By mixing and matching the metals and linkers, researchers found they could tailor the pores to capture gas molecules, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2).[3] >Net Power, a startup that built the world’s first zero-emissions fossil-fuel power plant in Texas. Earlier this year, Net Power fired up a $150-million power plant that burns natural gas but has the ability to capture 100% of its carbon emissions.[4] [1] http://www.climateaction.org/news/breakthrough-made-in-lower-cost-carbon-capture-technology http://www.climateaction.org/news/breakthrough-made-in-lower... [2]https://qz.com/1638096/the-story-behind-the-worlds-first-large-direct-air-capture-plant/ https://qz.com/1638096/the-story-behind-the-worlds-first-lar... [3]https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/crystalline-nets-harvest-water-desert-air-turn-carbon-dioxide-liquid-fuel https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/crystalline-nets-har... [4]https://qz.com/1456378/occidental-petroleum-is-now-an-investor-in-net-power/ https://qz.com/1456378/occidental-petroleum-is-now-an-invest...
lutorm 7y ago
Given that switching to renewable energy is already becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels, while CCS is a pure cost, what makes you think a major investment in CCS is more likely than reducing emissions in the first place?
perfunctory 7y ago
> What we need to do is to suck out more than we put in. Doesn’t it violate the first law of thermodynamics or something like that?

megaremote 7y ago

Your idea is never change what we are doing? Crazy.

mveety 7y ago

Also if we suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere we could turn it into petrochemicals and fuel which would help with making existing things carbon neutral.

sokoloff 7y ago
That's the most viable path to sustainable aviation (rather than electrifying the fleet).

funklute 7y ago

Any time someone actually does the math on sucking carbon out of the atmosphere, it seemingly becomes clear that it is simply not scalable to suck the carbon out of the atmosphere. Have you done the math, and if so, why is everyone who comes to the aforementioned conclusion wrong?

wallace_f 7y ago
Don't do math, don't question the dogma, and don't bet against markets. Coastal florida prices are skyrocketing because underwater real estate is just gonna' be the new trend. And Holland is leading the world in supposed refugees of underwater refugees. I'm incapable of thinking for myself and believe everyhing I'm told. Let's go to war again in the Middle East! Better downvote this comment for offending your regurgitated ideologies.
- funklute 7y ago
  I have no idea what you are trying to say with this...
  - wallace_f 7y ago
    Don't worry, someone replied with an entire comment of simple ad hominen attacks and you can conveniently lean on those to make you feel more comfortable in your worldviews.
- pilsetnieks 7y ago
  Just so you know, I'm downvoting this comment instead for being an inane rant without presenting a rational argument.
  - wallace_f 7y ago
    Unfortunartely, becoming sloth is always easier than confronting reality unless you're forced not to.

SketchySeaBeast 7y ago

What if said super batteries and efficient sequestration never develop? Why isn't creating lower emission power supplies on your list? I understand that the batteries save green power for when it can't be produced, but if we could find other, better, low or zero emission power sources, wouldn't that be just as good? I'm just confused why those are the two must have technologies, which don't yet exist, and not others, which also have yet to exist on the scale we need.

tick_tock_tick 7y ago
Find other low or zero emission power sources is the same as "innovation is required to combat client change" as OP. Technically nuclear would be perfect but practically I fear that ship already sailed nothing else up an coming except maybe fusion has any potential as a real baseload powersource. Without another breakthrough in battery technology solar and wind will never be more than the token effort they are today.
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  I'm not laying that out as the better option, just that if we're going to create arbitrary lists of things that was solve climate change, I don't understand what the criteria was to make the cut or not, outside of one's own personal preference.
  - tick_tock_tick 7y ago
    Does it solve the problem is the cut and solar and wind don't make it right now.
habnds 7y ago
because that would require a change in personal behavior while the carbon sucking option means it's some scientist's problem and they have no personal responsibility

jcims 7y ago

What's the basic energy equation of sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere using state of the art today? In say megawatt hours per gigaton?

umvi 7y ago
> What's the basic energy equation of sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere using state of the art today? Current state-of-the-art has the following equation[1]: 6CO2 + 6H20 + (photons) → C6H12O6 + 6O2 (sorry, I couldn't help myself, the setup was too good) But seriously, I doubt we can beat plants in terms of carbon sequestration efficiency. [1] https://sciencing.com/photosynthesis-equation-6962557.html https://sciencing.com/photosynthesis-equation-6962557.html
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  But maybe we could beat the plants in efficiency per square meter. There's nothing saying we couldn't improve on density of matter that photosynthesizes, by e.g. packing the plant matter more tightly in artificial conditions. Nature tries to produce organisms that survive and reproduce. We now have a different set of constraints: we need something that can pull out carbon as efficiently as possible. If it can't self-reproduce, we can reproduce it in labs or factories. I feel (hope) there's plausible biology and engineering work to be done here.
  - umvi 7y ago
    I think the following would be a great start: - Stop destroying forests (such as Amazon) which are a huge carbon sink for cows which are a carbon source. - Build more buildings out of wood (wood buildings are carbon sinks) instead of concrete (carbon source) - All building lumber should be self-sustaining (i.e. replant trees you used to build) - Stop over fishing and allow oceans to grow unchecked (all living things sequester carbon while they are alive... the ocean is potentially the biggest carbon sink of all and could have several magnitudes more fish and plankton life sequestering billions of tons of carbon) - Supplement all of the above with man-made carbon sequestration tech
- 7y ago

dkural 7y ago

On a per dollar basis, sucking carbon out is the most expensive option. Economics dictates that there is lower hanging fruit & best to prevent / reduce CO2 emissions at concentrated sources than to suck out it from an extremely dispersed atmosphere. You're fighting against basic entropy (entropy always wins).

factsaresacred 7y ago
In economic terms, it's a classic tragedy of the commons scenario. Self-interest and inertia wins. There's no way you're getting people to downgrade their present for some stranger's future without good incentives.

127 7y ago

>It's not gonna happen Not with that attitude. To elaborate: it's not black & white. You can definitely have a positive impact reducing emissions.

maximente 7y ago

yeah, betting on technology to solve immediate existential problems given minimal precedent isn't naive or anything. go ahead and post the projections on increased battery capacity, how we're going to find the rare earth material for constructing them all, and how clean tech will magically materialize that will not spike emissions while we build tons of magical unicorn stuff to save the world. you're the naive one, not whoever you're calling out here.

usaar333 7y ago

> The leading countries need to suck the shit back out, that is the only way forward Its almost certainly for the leading countries to cut emissions and coerce the noncompliers into compliance.

eanzenberg 7y ago

Plant trees

_Microft 7y ago

Here's two questions for you which are not hard to answer but, frankly, I do not expect to read the answers here. Why? Because it would show how utterly wrong the suggestion of carbon sequestration for solving this problem was. First: how much mass (i.e. kg or tons) of C0_2 is emitted per year? Second: what is the total mass of concrete produced per year worldwide? (This is only an exercise to give parent poster an idea of the scale btw)

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Re your first question, quick googling suggests some 37 billion tons of CO₂ per year. So sure, that's a lot. But then again, not that lot. Instead of asking questions, why don't you tell us why we couldn't possibly sequester that much carbon annually? How big is the divide between what we could do and what needs to be done? (I must say the idea of sequestering carbon seems emotionally appealing to me because it turns the problem into something much more tangible. You're not going to get people to cut their CO₂ emissions enough to matter without pushing for a strong emission taxing (which I'm also a fan of). Lowering your living standards doesn't feel like it's accomplishing much vs. the pain involved. Sequestering CO₂ would turn the problem into a numbers game, "how many tons is our country pulling out of the atmosphere, and where do we throw the money to get that number up?".)
- sokoloff 7y ago
  It seems to me like we need to do both: tax carbon (ideally globally, but even if half the developed countries do it, it's huge) AND use that tax money to work on research and deployment of carbon sequestration or carbon to fuel conversion.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    That's my current belief too.
- jandrewrogers 7y ago
  In principle, with extreme heroic effort, we could sequester 37 billion tons of CO2 per year, but we should be clear on just how extreme “extreme” is. Remember, every single part of the logistical supply chain would need to be scalable a million-fold the same way that the actual sequestration plant would need to be. There are two big practical engineering problems that have to be solved first, that have not been realistically addressed. First, we would need to double global electricity generation to a first approximation. The laws of thermodynamics make this non-negotiable. Very few power generation technologies not based on fossil fuels can scale like that. Nuclear power plants, realistically, and thousands of them in very short order. Second, the chemicals used in industrial sequestration produce hazardous byproducts on a scale similar to the CO2 being sequestered, byproducts like hydrochloric acid. Today, this is easy to handle because we produce truly trivial quantities of the chemicals required for sequestration. Not only is there no industrial capacity to produce the required chemicals, nor an obvious way to scale them, there is also no plan for disposing of the billions of tons of caustic chemicals that would be thrown off as a side-effect of their manufacture. It doesn’t do us any good to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere if we end up turning the planet into a superfund site. Nobody accounts for hazardous byproducts of the proposed technology supply chains, which will be produced on similar scales. As I’ve noted previously, we can reduce this to a much simpler sub-problem that is easy to reason about: what would be required to produce enough potassium hydroxide to sequester 37 billion tons of CO2 per year? All the required facts and figures are public knowledge and relatively basic science. The amount of electricity required per ton is widely documented, as are the chemical inputs and byproducts. And then, once you’ve realized the extent to which that asymptotically approaches impossible, do the same kinds of calculations on the upstream supply chain for the inputs to that process, which is also public information. It falls apart very, very quickly.

ScottBurson 7y ago

I don't know about carbon capture, but I do think we should be researching sulfur aerosols and iron fertilization. See Oliver Morton's excellent book The Planet Remade.

jbattle 7y ago
I'm betting on sulfur aerosols. The energy requirements are modest, the impact is apparently relatively reversible, the side effects seem less potentially catastrophic than iron fertilization. I look at the street outside my office and simply can't picture us deploying enough carbon capture machines to offset how much we're pumping into the air. I hope I'm wrong.

rb808 7y ago

I agree carbon sucking is the only thing that can put the greenhouse effect into reverse. But imagine if you could have an electricity powered machine that takes out C02 and turns it into solid dense carbon? That is pretty much the opposite of a coal burning power station. With today's technology it would be much simpler to reduce coal burning than taking C02 out of the air. BTW China alone is building a new coal-burning power station every two weeks. https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2019/03/28/china-new-coal-plants-2030-climate/ https://unearthed.greenpeace.org/2019/03/28/china-new-coal-p...

Aloha 7y ago

This is what humanity does best, we innovate our way out of problems (often ones we created in the first place)

tunesmith 7y ago

Why are you arguing "A instead of B" when we can do "A and B"?

m4rtink 7y ago

Yeah, this seems to me like the only real no bloody solution of this problem. It basically boils down to energy - we need to have a lot more from sources that don't produce CO2 - likely massive solar or nuclear deployments. Once you have that, not just CO2 capture but many other similar problmes are quite easy to solve without having to put pressure on people to change the way of their live. You can even periodically turn part of the captured CO2 into jet fuel, effectively making all planes battery powered (with Earth's atmosphere being the battery).

andrepd 7y ago

What about fusion power? It's the dream energy source: the fuel is seawater, the waste is slightly lighter seawater. It seems the perfect target for a Manhattan project/moonshot sort of effort. Giving several teams with competing designs $100B each to develop and test their reactor, in parallel. The potential benefit of near-free clean energy is so absolutely world-changing that it seems worth it to spend on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars to develop it.

dTal 7y ago
>It seems the perfect target for a Manhattan project/moonshot sort of effort. It would be funny, if it weren't tragic, how "manhattan project" and "moonshot" are the bywords for absurdly expensive government projects. Both these things were peanuts compared to the staggering amounts that politicians routinely fart away on practically overnight whims, for dubious and very likely corrupt reasons: Manhattan project: $23 billion Trump's wall: $22 billion Moonshot: $288 billion 2008 bailouts: $700 billion All US fusion research investment ever: ~$30 billion Iraq war: $2 trillion

Vomzor 7y ago

Some links to prove carbon capture is not just some fairy tale. >A Canadian company, called Carbon Engineering, has published peer-reviewed findings, which show the process (carbon capture) can now be done for less than $100 per ton. This is a major improvement on current estimates of $600 per ton.[1] >In 2016, Hollub became the first female CEO of a major international oil company. ... Hollub’s leadership has brought about a change in thinking. She realized that the company’s carbon-capture expertise could be used not just to make profits for shareholders but also to do climate good. That’s why Hollub is confident that Oxy can become carbon neutral, and why she was sitting at a table in Edinburgh, Scotland in November 2018 with Carbon Engineering’s Oldham. As of this year, Carbon Engineering has raised about $100 million, including about $15 million of government funds. Carbon also counts oil major Chevron and mining giant BHP as investors[2] >Crystalline nets harvest water from desert air, turn carbon dioxide into liquid fuel ... a chemist at the University of California, Berkeley, reported that he and his colleagues have created a solar-powered device that could provide water for millions in water-stressed regions. At its heart is a porous crystalline material, known as a metal-organic framework (MOF), that acts like a sponge: It sucks water vapor out of air, even in the desert, and then releases it as liquid water. ... By mixing and matching the metals and linkers, researchers found they could tailor the pores to capture gas molecules, such as water vapor and carbon dioxide (CO2).[3] >Net Power, a startup that built the world’s first zero-emissions fossil-fuel power plant in Texas. Earlier this year, Net Power fired up a $150-million power plant that burns natural gas but has the ability to capture 100% of its carbon emissions.[4] [1] http://www.climateaction.org/news/breakthrough-made-in-lower-cost-carbon-capture-technology http://www.climateaction.org/news/breakthrough-made-in-lower... [2]https://qz.com/1638096/the-story-behind-the-worlds-first-large-direct-air-capture-plant/ https://qz.com/1638096/the-story-behind-the-worlds-first-lar... [3]https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/crystalline-nets-harvest-water-desert-air-turn-carbon-dioxide-liquid-fuel https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/crystalline-nets-har... [4]https://qz.com/1456378/occidental-petroleum-is-now-an-investor-in-net-power/ https://qz.com/1456378/occidental-petroleum-is-now-an-invest...

lutorm 7y ago

Given that switching to renewable energy is already becoming cost-competitive with fossil fuels, while CCS is a pure cost, what makes you think a major investment in CCS is more likely than reducing emissions in the first place?

perfunctory 7y ago

> What we need to do is to suck out more than we put in. Doesn’t it violate the first law of thermodynamics or something like that?