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A big new facility built to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere opened up in Iceland. It's a stepping stone to bigger plans in the US.
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- The world's largest carbon removal plant is here, and bigger ones are on the way
- Authors
- Justine Calma
- Published
- May 8 2024
- Word count
- 661 words
I dunno, call me a skeptic, but the idea of a building a big facility to suck an invisible gas out of the air that's 'harming our environment' and labelled as "pollution" and then bottle some of it to feed it back to humans is already feeling disingenuous. But the fact that its supported by JPMorgan Chase, Microsoft, Stripe, and Shopify, among others just makes me think this is another iffy tech company that's going to sell 'carbon offset credits' to huge virtue signalling multinationals to abate their conscience while doing nearly nothing of true value. But it'll look good on the annual report for the shareholders and they can all feel more smug.
That feels like mysticizing chemicals too much, in the did you know everyone who drinks dihydrogen monoxide dies way. It’s not some crazy chemical, it’s just carbon dioxide. We know how it works. You exhale copious amounts of it everyday. It harms the environment because of the greenhouse effect, which is not going to do anything in your stomach.
I heard it as "everyone who breathes in dihydrogen monoxide dies" which I found really funny
Breathing a relatively small amount of DHMO can cause severe lung damage or death! And we ingest dozens of gallons of it a year 😱
My big beef is with calling it "pollution" which our Prime Minister very clearly does, in order to demonize it as some kind of dangerous chemical. It is not only the most common element for our own bodies (18%), it is essential for the growth of the plants that feed us and yes, we can drink it without harm because we breathe it in and out every day. So to call it "pollution" is disingenuous and ONLY applies to its proportion in the atmosphere at most.
And even then, yes, Im one of those people who does not fully buy into the "its killing our planet" narrative. Is it harmful in larger quantities in our atmosphere. Probably somewhat, yes. Is the harm caused by man made causes? Probably some of it, yes. Can we reverse it? Probably also yes, although I think the timeline is going to be a lot longer than the politicians like to pretend it will be.
Will this type of carbon capture plant help? Uh, Im highly doubtful.
Does this mean I have to pay a carbon tax and buy an EV and stop heating my house with the only cost effective fuel available in my region? Uh.... pretty skeptical on all of those. Most of our own premiers dont believe in the carbon tax is helpful. And I pay the carbon tax because I have no choice but do I think its clearing our atmosphere of carbon? Not a chance. And I already own an EV but I bought it because its damn fast and really fun to drive, had nothing to do with "saving the planet"
I dont think the politicians who are pushing the 'dying planet' narrative really believe it. If they ACTUALLY did, they would be encouraging everyone to buy recycled goods, they would be building local manufacturing and promoting growing our own food instead of shipping it 3000 miles from California to our local store. They would tell us to stop buying goods from Amazon, which flogs almost everything it has from China, the largest polluter in the world by far. But of course they wont. Because they're not serious and they dont actually believe we're facing an existential threat and they dont want to cut into all those sweet profits.
I don’t really follow why you “don’t buy into it”, then. It causes the greenhouse effect, and that causes warming. You don’t need to go further than that. There’s lots of gases that cause the greenhouse effect, it’s just that CO2 happens to be a common byproduct of both living creatures and reactions like burning.
Its the dystopian future I dont buy into. Maybe its because I live in cold Canada, where a little more warming is more than welcome. We hit -42c last winter and 40c in summer. If that goes up by an average of 3 degrees, thats fine. If more people want to move here because its very livable, fine, come on in, we're all immigrants in Canada (except for the indigenous people). And I say that as someone who had to evacuate their house for nearly two weeks last summer due to a wildfire that came within 30 ft of our house. Im not oblivious, but I dont believe its an existential threat. Weather gets wild, we deal with it.
That’s a very social media view of it, though. It’s not really about the direct effects of degrees of warming - and yes, its silly that “pro-global-warming-is-real” people post about it every time summer is hot - but the 2nd and third order effects.
There are numerous papers on how those degrees of warming will have huge, and mostly negative, effects on agriculture and animal husbandry. Even more so for ocean ecosystems. There’ll be more extreme weather patterns.
Do you not believe that this will happen, or that even after it happens it won’t matter all that much?
I believe we can and do adapt as humans to anything and everything thrown at us. There are millions of people who live in Dubai where most people would agree that living in a place that hits 49c is incompatible with human life. I live where it hit -42 in winter and the windchill and thermal loss will kill you in minutes if you are not protected. Also crazy and most people dont want to live here either. So more people will have to learn to live with extremes. We'll adapt. There may be more extreme weather. We'll adapt. More heat, more cold, more storms, we'll adapt. It may be uncomfortable more times a year, but its not going to wipe out the planet.
Edit: I honestly believe the constant drumbeat of a dystopian climate disaster around the corner is doing far more to damage the mental health and future of young people than any actual change in climate. Add onto that the very real disaster of social media and there are young people killing themselves because they believe they have no future, no hope. THAT'S a very real and indefensible disaster that's killing people NOW, not 50 or 100 or 1000 years from now.
I think that's hyperfixating on first order effects, again, namely the raw temperature increase. Yes, people can deal with 3c higher daily temperatures. But that can knock the yield rate for wheat farming in a region down by 30-40%. It's much harder to deal with having 30-40% less food.
We can already see that from Russia's invasion in Ukraine, where much of the global south depended on cheap grain exports from Ukraine. It can be hard to imagine in calorie dense Canada or US, but food insecurity is still a thing.
And yes, people can adapt. But adaption has a price. Emitting less carbon has a price (partially reflected in those carbon-based taxes you were talking about). Based on our calculations, emitting less carbon cost less than the adaptions we'll have to make. It only makes sense, then, no?
I think that overly hysterical climate discourse isn't a positive, but it's hard to compare the two in magnitude, let alone say that the former is doing "more damage".
There's a small chance that you, living in Canada where the only possible mass undesirable migration is from the wealthiest nation in the world, will only experience a severe increase in prices and a drop in your quality of life, sure. I assume Canada is self-sufficient in food if need be.
Most people however are horrified at the thought of hundreds of millions dying for no good reason. There are countries where not everything is air conditioned where the wet bulb temperatures will make living impossible. There are poor countries that will simply be unable to afford food if global food production drops. There are countries that will not have water if extensive droughts happen.
And people don't just sit quietly in a corner, accept their fate and just die. People go to war and people migrate. The EU is struggling to handle the current, completely manageable migration waves. When those become tens of millions each year you'll either see mass murder or the collapse of major western countries and a huge rise in ultra-fascist ideologies. When one country has water but their neighbour doesn't, there will be a war.
Sure "the planet" won't "die". Sure humanity will survive. Humanity will even survive a global nuclear war. But that's kind of a moot point, unless we've completely given up on saving modern society and millions if not billions of people.
I guess the difference is that I dont believe that hundreds of millions will die. I dont believe any place will become unlivable. Uncomfortable maybe, more dangerous at times, but not unlivable. I dont buy the dystopian narrative because Ive seen it and heard it many times already in my life time and the message always turned out to be WAY overblown.
Food production drops are already a problem but the world doesnt have a food production problem, we have a food distribution problem. Will it get worse? Maybe. But if we aren't doing all we can to send food to hungry nations NOW what will change in 50 years?
These changes in climate will happen over decades. Maybe longer. Plenty of time for people to make a plan and decide what to do if they run out of water or food (ironically our own well quit working this week). But the greens/politicians are trying to tell me that not heating my house with natural gas, the only viable and affordable way to heat a house in western Canada, is going to save people several thousand miles away in 50 or 100 years, MAYBE? I got things to fix today, I need heat for 8 months of the year including today, there's no bandwidth left for 50 years from now even if I did believe it was an "emergency"
Meanwhile Canada emits 1.8% of the worlds GHG. So even if I believed it, the message is mostly irrelevant. NOTHING I do is going to make a spit of difference to the climate or to those people. The Carbon Tax is a money grab and trying to spend our way into lower emissions by creating more EVs and more heat pumps is just another money grab. If someone is going to make a difference it would be to shut down China, the worlds most serious emitter. Funny though, there are no climate protesters gluing themselves to artwork in China.
While I could follow your previous points and still see where you’re coming from with them, I sorta have to “draw a line” at this part now.
Iraq/Afghanistan and Pakistan, or at least regions of them, are both borderline unlivable already, the former due to temps of over ≈53°C (125°F) heat and the latter due to flood danger on a scale that’s hard to imagine. 33 million people and 10% of the country’s land not potentially, but affected in an event that has already occurred, let alone future risks? If this were happening in Europe, I guarantee you’d hear about the search for solutions in the news on a weekly basis. Hell, here in Germany a flood that, while much, much weaker, still catastrophic, was topic of national debate for like a year.
Now, you might argue these are cherry-picked examples. And to a certain extent they are, surely. Not that this does not or will not ever happen in South-East Asia as well, for example, but the reason I picked them is because of an at least to me easy-to-understand consequence. If either of these nations truly become uninhabitable (in the sense that the vast majority of their areas are), there will be migration streams in the tens, if not hundreds of millions of people, understandably so. This to me is not a question of debate, maybe of timing. People will leave an area before they die there, so if or when this is happening is purely a function of how bad their climate is getting, and not about to what extent your view on the world is through a “doomer” lens.
And at least some of them’ll head to Europe, at which point the continent, if it’s still peaceful, will fall apart – as a reminder: we pretended to not be able to cope with <10 million Syrian refugees in 2015.
Californian wildfires and Floridian… sinking are perhaps more widely known examples. From what I can tell, we can already notice parts of these areas becoming unlivable due to prohibitively high house insurance costs. That’d be a more or less direct effect of climate change and an example for how it could become visible in a “Western” society, even if you don’t subscribe to the idea that natural disasters occurring in themselves is a danger or possibility at all for some regions.
I agree however that this is an issue. The problem here isn’t personal “failure” of some sorts, of course not. Governments need to ensure they gather climate funds from parties which can afford to do so.
They wont all come to Europe. Here in Canada we are already experiencing mass migration from South Asia and up til now, most people have welcomed it. But its a bit too fast. We have grown from a country of 33M to 40M in only a few years and our gov is allowing 1M new immigrants a year. The biggest problem is having enough housing. We DO have the land, a lot of Canada is wide open prairie and we are very sparsely populated on the whole, but we cant build housing fast enough to house everyone.
The pressure is on and things are changing and we are adapting - just this last week Calgary, Alberta held a 10 day long meeting after the city council proposed that ALL city lots can now be rezoned to house up to 12 housing units instead of just one. Of course that has ticked off many people who greatly value their home and their neighborhood as it is, but its one of the changes thats likely to be inevitable, no matter the strength of the protest against it.
I'm not familiar with what's going on in Canada. Is anything stopping you from continuing to heat your house with natural gas?
I'd like to install a mini-split system, which would provide both heating and cooling, but we will probably still be on natural gas for a while, at least as backup.
The folks working on carbon capture aren't hurting anyone. It seems like an interesting technical challenge.
Nothing stopping us from heating with nat gas yet but the Liberal gov plan is to keep raising the Carbon Tax to the point that it becomes so expensive to do so, that people would rather choose alternatives, like a mini split system for heating. The problem is, there arent any mini splits that are efficient when the temps get down to -40 so you have to install both a mini split AND a nat gas furnace as a back up for the really cold days. Which makes it prohibitively expensive and kind of pointless when you could just use a furnace in the first place.
We've put in a catalytic wood stove and have been burning hard woods for this last winter so our furnace has only kicked in about 40% as much as the year before but thats not easy to do if you live in the city.
Well one of the points is that yeah people's plan will be to migrate and that's going to be catastrophic.
It's one thing not to trust governments and corporations and quite another to make the leap to assuming that everything is fine. Besides, the corporations' stance for decades has been to doubt climate change even exists. That this is now an untenable position for them should already be ringing alarm bells.
At the end of the day I'm not an expert and if their global consensus cannot sway your opinion I'm certainly not able to. I hope you are right and nothing much happens.
If a several-kilometer-wide asteroid were heading toward Earth right now, would we be able to adapt to that?
Well, the worst of the change hasn't come yet. We're scared more of what will happen in the future than of what is happening right now.
And there's the difference. You can SEE an asteroid. You can accurately plot its path. You can observe its approach and imminent collision. It doesnt take faith to believe that a massive object hurtling in a direct path toward the earth is going to cause massive destruction and only the wilfully blind would question that.
None of that is true of climate change. Its a scientific theory based on scientific models that may or may not prove to be accurate and its extremely slow moving and difficult to observe and you have to have a significant amount of faith in the scientists and their prognostication. Thus my skepticism.
This is a weird direction to go in. Your original argument was, essentially, that we shouldn't worry too much about climate change, since we can science our way out of anything. I countered with an example showing that we cannot, in fact, science our way out of anything. Now you're saying that we shouldn't worry about climate change because, hey, who even knows if climate science is real?
To be blunt, you come across as someone who 1. is not well-versed in the science, and 2. simply doesn't want to believe in the likelihood of dangerous climate change.
Faith—and it is just faith—in humanity's ability to science its way out of climate change is in contradiction to skepticism of climate science. Climate science is based on the same underlying principles as other sciences, and shares methods with them. Unless you have done serious research, I doubt that you have any legitimate reason to be skeptical of climate science in particular. It smacks of motivated reasoning.
I am a layperson, so I can't claim to understand the climate models very well. Here's something I do understand pretty well, though: throughout the fossil record, significant and rapid changes in the climate, and in atmospheric CO2 concentrations in particular, are always accompanied by waves of extinctions. Changes in atmospheric CO2 are thought to have played a role in all of the "big 5" mass extinction events except for the one that was caused by a several-kilometer-wide asteroid; in particular, global warming due to increased CO2 was a primary driver of extinction in the most severe mass extinction event ever, at the end of the Permian, in which at least 70% of all species on the planet went extinct. We are releasing CO2 at a faster rate than during the most severe extinction in the history of the planet. I don't know how it's possible to not be alarmed at that thought.
Also, the fact that the scientists who do the most work with this data—climate scientists, yes, but also biologists, ecologists, oceanographers, etc.—are all themselves talking about how scared and depressed they are should tell you that this isn't some kind of deliberate propaganda being foisted on young people (to what end? funded by whom?). The people who know the most are among the most alarmed. We should be paying attention.
How exactly does your response relate to whether or not we can adapt to such a situation?
If so many people didn't show a complete disregard and lack of concern for the situation, both on a personal level and on a societal level, maybe the feeling would be less despair and instead more unity against a common threat.
Not that I'm that young nor much on social media, but if I'm genuinely worried about something, backed by an overwhelming scientific consensus of reputable studies, people lackadaisically saying "it's fine don't worry about it" and "I just think the scientists are wrong" don't exactly help.
Yes, the dose makes the poison. But also, the dose makes the poison. Salt is natural and we can eat it, even need to do so to survive. But if the salt content of all fresh water started rising, approaching oceanic levels because of human activities, I sure would think it fair to say it was being polluted.
I understand a lot of the skepticism and honestly the commentary on a lot of the voluntary carbon offsets credits pretty on the money. I think there are two things happening at the same time. 1. We have a real crisis on our hands, and 2. the usual players are putting in enough capital to control the narrative, derail real change, and get a nice PR perk. Kind of similar to how rainforest offsets ended up being largely bunk. I think that's the big fear, if you put money towards conferences, agencies, and NGOs you get to control the narrative. Like COP 27 being chaired by an oil executive.
I think it's more likely they believe in it but assume they can escape it. Kind of like the tech bros making bunkers in New Zealand. I think counter to what most folks believe, this is a crisis for the poor. There will be parts of the world that will be just fine, and like other crisis, the wealthy rarely have to sacrifice luxuries when the rest of us do. So yeah, most people in power and most people with money will live life similar to today. Folks in the tropics? They're fucked. The fish will follow the cooler waters closer to the poles. For most countries though, we'll be ok, just a bit shittier. We'll have fire season like we do across the American West. We'll squabble more amongst states for the fewer water resources and limit new housing development without water credits, exacerbating the housing crisis. I'm sure Bayer and Monsanto will develop draught resistant crops and Cargill (and their leased, debt stricken "small farmers" will grow them for us). I'm confident we'll be the same with less nature, more generic food, and larger companies controlling stakes because of how much it'll cost to overcome the issues on water/heat. The folks here that shop at Amazon, hang out inside, eat at the Cheese Cake Factory, and blast AC will pretty much live life unaltered. They just aren't the majority of the folks on earth.
I think what's really being lost are the things that make our world special. We're losing biodiversity and tangibly it just means you less birds, flowers, and things like that. The fish I catch when I go out fishing now are a fraction of the size they were 50 years ago, which were a fraction of the size of the fish 50 years about that. And there are less of them. When I go into the woods, it's rare to see a bear or fox or wolf. That didn't used to be true. We have Point Lobos State Park a few miles away from us and without the name I never would have guessed we used to have wolves here! We have already lost so much of the natural world and we're on a fast track to lose more. Hell in the last decade we've pretty much seen the Western coastline of the US decimate by warm waters. And kids in 2050 will think it's normal. Sliding baseline is a bitch. Selfishly I think that's my biggest qualm.
I appreciate your rational and well thought out points and to me, they seem accurate.
I'll be curious to see if the biodiversity part is true. We beside thousands of acres of gov land and walk a trail to a nearby river pretty much daily. It is not at all unusual to see deer, moose, grouse, mice, hawks, song birds and the occasional black bear. There are grizzly here too but we dont go out if they've been spotted in the area. But we've only lived here about 12 years and so far havent noticed any change in the numbers. Time will tell.
I get where you're coming from, but a pollutant is "A foreign substance that makes something dirty, or impure, especially waste from human activities." CO2 is being added to the environment by human activities. CO2 is often a byproduct, or waste product, of a chemical reaction (or thermo-chemical reaction, or ... etc.). It sorta fits every part of the definition of pollutant no matter how you cut it. I don't think that's the hill I'd die on, especially in a renewed time of people talking about doing cleanses to flush toxins out of their body or not eating anything with a chemical in it they can't pronounce.
Also, climate change solutions aren't being pushed from the top-down. It's a bottom-up kinda thing, because politicians are always skeptical of "fringe ideas" and "minority views" and that stuff. But as you've noticed, some politicians have bothered to do some reading of reports that weren't commissioned by government agencies. You'll also notice that there are some people in government who aren't fans of telling people how to live their lives directly -- they're not telling people or businesses how to build, what to build, or why to build in environmentally friendly ways. They're not telling people what cars to buy or to purchase power from a specific source, but they are incentivizing those ideas. In fact, I can think of only one group that's telling people what drugs and vaccines not to take and that women shouldn't have control of their bodies and that they should live in a constant paralysis of fear of China/minorities/otherness.
Carbon capture is going to be needed on a massive scale if we ever want to stop using fossil fuels. Because even if we stop burning gasoline and diesel tomorrow, massive demand will remain for oil. It will remain in the form of plastics and other synthetic materials. There's a lot you can do with these materials that you simply can't do with anything else. I'm glad we no longer live in a world of cloth IV lines.
Now, oil boosters like to cite this fact as a reason we shouldn't seriously consider banning drilling for oil. Whenever someone proposes it, some edge lord will say, "but actually, what about plastic? We need oil for plastic."
The truth is we don't. We've had a century to perfect organic chemistry. And we've become VERY good at manipulating hydrocarbon chains. We can produce all the synthetic materials we need from atmospheric carbon.
In fact, this is a quite scalable way of paying for mass-scale carbon sequestration. Pass a law saying, "in 2030, 1% of plastic must be derived from atmospheric carbon." Then, slowly raise that number to 100%. Once all the plastic is atmospherically derived, give up on the flawed idea of plastic recycling. Instead, encourage placing it in big landfills. You now have now found a way to pay for mass scale carbon capture and storage. This will likely drive the price of plastic up a bit, but we can make due with more expensive plastic. There are some cases we use it for where it is irreplaceable. But there are many others where it's used not because it's the best choice, but simply because it's the cheapest choice.
Just to reinforce the idea of usage of atmospheric carbon a bit, it’s the backbone of any serious plan for long-term human presence on Mars since there’s copious amounts of readily available CO₂ in the Martian atmosphere but absolutely no oil. If we’re capable of manufacturing things like plastics from CO₂ in such an extreme environment as Mars, there’s no reason we can’t do it much more easily on Earth too.
I liked where you were going until you got to "Pass a law".
With governments largely captured/run by the rich, how do we reliably pass these laws and then raise these limits? It's easy to say that we should elect better governments but hard to do when most of our choices are in the pocket of moneyed interests.
Civil protests used to mean something. At least in the United States, I'm not sure that they've had any meaningful impact in 50+ years.
I mean, what's the alternative? We get out the dynamite and start blowing up pipelines and oil refineries? We run adds encouraging mass shooters to target oil companies instead of elementary schools? We just start taking old-timey mob justice on oil executives? Outside the political process and civil protest, there really aren't many options available outside of violence. If that's the alternative you want to go for, good luck. I mean we may very well end up at that point. If governments don't act, it's only a matter of time til people start taking more direct action. But I'll operate under the assumption we can handle things peacefully.
Though, I do lean in the more pessimistic direction myself, based primarily on the observed progress we've seen so far. And as dark as it sounds, I would actually discourage young people today from going into the oil industry. On the current track, we're looking at a +3C world by the end of the century. It is not an exaggeration to say that that would literally kill billions.
Imagine what a world like that would be like politically. Imagine the rage and thirst for revenge the people then would feel. I don't think that it's at all unreasonable that we'll end up adding "ecocide" to the list of crimes against humanity, right up there with genocide. I think the people currently running the oil companies will be dead before things get that bad. But a person just graduating high school today might live long enough to see that day. They might end up like those old Nazi camp guards that were tried in their 90s for crimes committed in their teenage years. But I could totally see any survivors of the fossil fuel companies being brought up on charges of ecocide, in a trial held on a barge, floating above where The Hague used to be. Those joining the fossil fuel sector today may legitimately find themselves one day facing charges for crimes against humanity.
That doesn't necessarily mean any human will be hurt. I don't see it as a violence so much as life saving.
But otherwise I grudgingly agree.... we will only be able to agree on spending and building and capitalising our way out of this
Radical does not necessarily mean violent. But we do need the billionaire class to feel the pain they're causing somehow.
If they're all living in bunkers, they already know the score. They're not—yet. Though there's that particularly famous one in Hawaii...
I don't think we need to be fatalistic. There are plenty of provinces and countries that have passed laws which are having a positive impact. Canada has a carbon tax for example.
We need China, the USA, and India if we're going to make more than a dent.
I mean the US did pass a big climate bill, and things have been improving under Biden in the US: https://www.americanprogress.org/article/the-biden-administration-has-taken-more-climate-action-than-any-other-in-history/
China...could be worse. At the very least, they're leading the world in solar panel production.
Proof is in the pudding. Let's see what happens to pollution in the US. The increase in data centers doesn't bode well for this. Generative AI eats unfortunate amounts of power.
As for China, good. But they're still the net worst polluter on the planet, IIRC. The US is worse per capita.
This seems massively ineffective, and possibly a complete waste of time. I propose we build less stuff instead and focus on protecting nature while punishing companies that are actively destroying the environment and producing no public good.
I mean, proposal rejected. Now what?
The only way we are going to achieve any kind of good outcome is through a multi pronged approach. Developing countries will, somewhat rightfully, reject any kind of plan that proposes to keep them in a third world condition.
The health of the earth and it's inhabitants will continue to degrade at an increasing rate. We can't just keep mass producing crap we don't need, made out of crap that is harmful to us and the environment and expect any other result.
It's pretty clear what is causing climate change, and we need to stop doing that.
I really think you shouldn't be so quick to dismiss my proposal, it's a good one!
Here’s the thing: it’s not me rejecting your proposal, it’s the overwhelming majority of the population of the planet.
We can, and we will, at least within the time frame where we have a chance of mitigating climate change. That’s a constraint in the system that we need to address and not pretend that it doesn’t exist.
Well, I've actually only just proposed it here, so I don't think you can even know that the majority of the planet rejects it? You don't speak for everyone.
Is there any evidence we can? Or you just have faith in the current systems and technology? Because there is very much evidence that our current practices are causing this whole thing. We can actually have a meaningful impact by actively reducing and eliminating the practices known to be causing the climate crisis. It might not be an easy solution, and a lot of people are going to need convincing, but it's the only viable option we currently have.
I don't need to, the evidence is already here.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/annual-co2-emissions-per-country
That graph speaks louder than any opinion poll, because it avoids what people wish and cuts through to what people are doing. Yes, developing nations will suffer from climate change. But, they want the same standard of living as we have in the west and that's the larger driver in actual behaviour.
You've entirely misread my statement. What I am asserting that we can and will do, is "keep mass producing crap we don't need, made out of crap that is harmful to us and the environment."
I'm so confused as to what you are getting at then. I stand behind what I have said.
Humanity is going to continue generating colossal amounts of CO2. Any plan to mitigate catastrophe needs to account for that. Carbon capture is going to be a necessary component of any successful strategy because people suck.
I think that's ultimately where the disagreement is.
The regulation needs to take place at the point of production rather than after the fact. That means either a more-planned economy that just straight-up bans bad goods (plastic packaging for misc consumer goods for example) and imposes heavy taxes to account for all of the externalities (carbon footprint, energy consumption, toxicity) for the entire lifecycle of the good from extraction to disposal.
One simple one that jumps to my mind is that any good that can be packaged in a less-wasteful way must be. Eliminating arbitrary market segmentation (we don't need 500 sizes of soda containers) paves the way for standardizing reuse of packaging.
Another way to improve the situation is something I touched on in another thread, and that’s the incredible amount of low-hanging fruit in commercial aviation.
People aren’t going to stop flying, especially in large countries with bad rail coverage like the US, but it would be relatively simple to cut a large amount of waste out of the system. Tons of flights take inefficient routes because some airports are much cheaper to fly out of or connect through, for example (particularly for international flights) and some airlines are using much more inefficient planes than others are. Just addressing those two things (the former easier than the latter) would likely bring down aviation emissions by a double-digit percentage.
Sure, we should try to do that but we also have to be cognizant that in many countries that won't happen. China and India will be relentlessly increasing CO2 production for the foreseeable future.
Even in America, consider that 58% of Republicans say the country should prioritize expanding exploration and production of oil, coal and natural gas.
Look at what is on the table from a Trump presidency on this front:
We can't put all our eggs in the policy basket. Other strategies are going to be necessary, and carbon capture is one of those strategies.
These are a waste of time and in some cases are funded by oil and gas to pretend they're doing something about CO2. These plants capture a negligible amount of CO2, take a lot of resources, to build and run, and generally suck ass.
We don't need technological innovation to solve the climate crisis. We just need to reduce our carbon usage and increase our carbon capture. The second of which can be done by de-developing land, supporting local ecosystems, reducing land for animal's and their feed (promoting veganisms/reduced meat consumption), reverse soil erosion by requiring permaculture farming practices.
In general nature is great at capturing carbon and we should support that as much as possible instead of focusing on these direct carbon capture ideas that show no evidence of affordably working at any significant scale.
So from the horse's mouth, it has a nameplate capacity of 36,000 tons removal per year. In order for it to be a net positive, it must capture more carbon than it uses in a year. Otherwise, the energy it uses would have been better spent on literally anything else. Numbers below are USA-centric as that's the data I know how to find.
According to the EPA, for estimation purposes, each kwh of electricity uses (including line losses) is approximately 0.000417 metric tons of CO2.
So this Mammoth facility needs to use less than 86,330,935 kwh annually to break-even. Numbers on that seem hard to come by, but are super critical to seeing if this tech is remotely worth it. How about it Climeworks? Care to share your meter readings for the good of advancement? Prove us skeptics wrong and show how efficiently you're trapping that CO2. My money is on 'we hide how much energy we need by building green energy to power it.' And that's a net loss since that green power could be used to replace non-green power at this phase.
However, there are many easier wins we could make. We could ban all tobacco production. In 2018, 766,000,000 kwh was used for tobacco manufacturing. The carbon savings from eliminating the energy use would be equivalent to building almost 9 of these Mammoth facilities at 100% of their nameplate capacity with the simple stroke of a pen (yes not just 1 person but also not inventing new technology). With the added bonus of eliminating an industry that is actively harmful to everyone.
Edit: Paging @unkz so they understand what will change my mind. Climeworks needs to show their detailed energy consumption figures for me to trust its not just smoke and mirrors greenwashing.
They're pretty up front about their metrics.
https://www.carbonbrief.org/swiss-company-hoping-capture-1-global-co2-emissions-2025/
So for pure electrical consumption, that would be 18,000,000 kwh, with an additional 90,000,000 kwh of waste heat consumption (it is attached to a municipal incinerator for that), for a total of 108,000,000 kwh. Their target is ~64,800,000 kwh total consumption, but I can't say how much of that efficiency gain would be on the electrical side and how much on the waste heat side.
This isn't an easier win. It's actually impossible. No major government is going to do this.
But setting that aside, let’s imagine it is politically feasible to globally ban tobacco. Sure, let’s do it — why would that preclude also doing DAC? Can we as a society of 8 billion people not walk and chew bubble gum at the same time?
I wonder if we could run our nuclear power plants sized for peak load instead of base load and divert the excess power to carbon sequestration to balance the grid.
Clarify? Most U.S. nuclear plants are run at full power already, due to the operational and cost efficiencies of doing so.
Yes, but (my understanding is) the nuclear power capacity in the grid targets base load, not peak load. In other words, the amount of power from slow-reacting systems like nuclear and coal targets the lowest demand, not the highest. The gap between base and peak (which varies over a day as demand changes) is taken up by faster-reacting systems.
My point was that if we want clean electric power and to offset carbon emissions, we could have nuclear power capacity that exceeds peak demand in the grid -- all the power would be 0 carbon emitting. Instead of adjusting generation to meet demand like we do now, we could adjust the demand to meet the generation, with the extra demand supplied by carbon capture systems.
Those numbers are for the smaller plant, so let's roll with that ideal target for the optimistic view, presuming this is also attached to a waste incinerator. 64,800 MWh consumed to provide 86,300 MWh worth of benefit. So that means the net benefit is 21,000 MWh, or roughly 9,000 tons of carbon (assuming theoretical max capture), or roughly 25% of the nameplate value...assuming max output. If we use the current numbers, that means we're at a net loss of 9,000 tons of carbon. Sure, it helps that they're using waste heat from an incinerator, but we've been using waste heat from incinerators to generate electricity for years...unless this is a supplement to that, it's almost certainly a net loss. Incinerators provide about 2.4% of the EU's electricity. Although there's discussion about eliminating it because it too produces CO2. So if they can't piggyback on the CO2-producing incinerators, the numbers get nasty-looking quick. "We generated 45,000 tons of CO2 in order to capture 36,000 tons of CO2" takes a lot of the magic out of it.
And a key quote from that article:
Yes......and in order for direct capture to make sense we must have already replaced all CO2-producing electric generation with green generation. I'll grant that in some hypothetical future where we're producing more green energy than we can possibly consume that these carbon capture devices could be useful. But that kind of capacity is almost certainly a pipe dream....based on history we'll use every ounce of energy capacity we build and then some.
We banned production and consumption of Cocaine and Heroin in the USA, did we not? Is tobacco really that far-fetched? No reason it would need to be globally banned...this was just USA production numbers after all. Ban production in the USA, ban commercial importing, allow for personal imports and ownership. Heck, tobacco smokers are at an all-time low...strike while the iron is hot, so to speak.
This is a technology under development, so I don’t know why we would be judging it based on its current state of development. The target is net positive and it should be achievable.
There are other factors here too. Treating the heat (which is by far the greatest energy input) as interchangeable with electricity is incorrect. That heat capture is going to be pretty close to maximally efficient, since it’s actually used as heat.
Compare that to the high inefficiency of converting incinerator waste heat to electricity — it’s on the order of 19-26%.
I don’t know where this leap of logic occurs.
Yes. We are in the process of legalizing marijuana smoking throughout the whole of the US. There’s even significant progress in making cocaine and heroin legal in many jurisdictions. There’s no universe where politicians decide that smoking marijuana is legal and smoking cigarettes isn’t.
People don’t want this:
https://news.gallup.com/poll/1717/tobacco-smoking.aspx
That’s an impossible bar to clear.
I am quite sceptical, but we need all the help we can get.