I agree with the concern the author has about the perceived legitimacy of such a program but I don't agree with them overall. The main argument is that technology for direct air capture is going...
I agree with the concern the author has about the perceived legitimacy of such a program but I don't agree with them overall.
The main argument is that technology for direct air capture is going to evolve, we are nowhere near the theoretical limit. Having competition between vendors to remove carbon is going to let new approaches flourish. If the government decides up front to invest heavily in one particular approach we might be stuck with something that is a lot less viable.
A good example is the development of uranium enrichment under wartime conditions which led to the construction of the K-25 gas diffusion plant.
the construction of which was contracted out to J. A. Jones and the operation of which was contracted out to Union Carbide. Gas diffusion is much more expensive than the centrifuge method developed later and nobody would imagine building one today but enough capacity was built early on that these facilities served the commercial nuclear power industry at the beginning.
Another issue with carbon capture is that there is a strong case for capturing it at point sources such as chemical plants, oil refineries, power plants, and such and this is something that is best done by the factory. The government's plant to build a carbon capture network to accept CO2 from point sources from "refinery row" down South makes a lot of sense, it is a lot like the networks we already use to distribute oil and gas to those sites, the main issue is getting somebody to pay for it.
Another argument for that kind of operation being done by a private contractor is that the contractor can go bankrupt which provides a mechanism for shutting that kind of thing down if it goes nonviable, such as
and then there is somebody to sue, some possibility of reconstituting the operation on a new basis, etc. A government agency is way too likely to ask for mo' money and get it.
Fortunately we already have near-perfect carbon scrubbers that only occupy about 80 sq ft and cool the surface of that area. They require no external source of power and provide shelter for many....
Fortunately we already have near-perfect carbon scrubbers that only occupy about 80 sq ft and cool the surface of that area. They require no external source of power and provide shelter for many.
But we chop them down to make parking lots and build new factories because we don't want to spend the money to repair the old factories.
Every time I see 2 acres of grass kept alive by sprinklers without a tree among it I weep a little.
Trees are rad, but they're not the solution to this crisis. But they are part of it. Like economic growth, there is only so much that a finite system can contain, The same applies to our lovely...
Trees are rad, but they're not the solution to this crisis. But they are part of it.
Like economic growth, there is only so much that a finite system can contain, The same applies to our lovely trees. So, what we actually need is Systemic Change.
We need to get away from capitalism and everyone having to own one of everything sooner, rather than later.
I agree that systemic change is the best solution but planting trees is something we can do now that can make a difference and has no real barriers to entry.
I agree that systemic change is the best solution but planting trees is something we can do now that can make a difference and has no real barriers to entry.
I wondered how much energy we could save by shading single-family homes that are currently fully exposed to the sun in the northeast courtesy of stripping and not replacing trees. Some napkin...
I wondered how much energy we could save by shading single-family homes that are currently fully exposed to the sun in the northeast courtesy of stripping and not replacing trees. Some napkin math.
I've seen numbers as much as 35% reduction in cooling costs, which makes sense as on a hot, sunny day there can easily be a 20F difference between sun and shade. Lets guesstimate only say 20% cooling costs saved. A medium-large AC unit easily takes 1600 kwh to run monthly in the cooling season, translating to about 0.7 ton of emissions a month. 4 month cooling season means about 3 tons of CO2 per house. 20% savings by having a well placed shade tree means half a ton of CO2 prevented, annually, per home.
There are about 140 million homes in the USA. In my area, about 8/10 homes need a shade tree. If I assume I'm an anomaly and only 1/20 homes would benefit from a shade tree, that's 3,900,000 tons of CO2 prevented. Yes, planting 7 million trees is hard, but that work can be spread over 20 million people easy. The trees themselves would capture an additional 100,000 tons annually in their growth.
And that's not factoring how much could be saved by cooling commercial spaces, nor the cooling effect on the ground by properly shading asphalt.
That $2.5 billion in R&D money would probably better be spent giving away native saplings to anyone who asks...possibly even planting it for them.
When people mention institutional racism this is also one aspect of it no one mentions. They will cut down the trees in poor areas which means less to no shade which means hotter summers, higher...
When people mention institutional racism this is also one aspect of it no one mentions. They will cut down the trees in poor areas which means less to no shade which means hotter summers, higher electric bills and uglier urbanscapes. This article at NY Times has a visual map of the phenomenon. It isn't just relegated to Richmond either.
The frustration comes when people want to do something with that tree though. In the UK, we've got a lot of pavements (Sidewalks) that are lumpy, bumpy and seriously in need of fixing because of...
The frustration comes when people want to do something with that tree though.
In the UK, we've got a lot of pavements (Sidewalks) that are lumpy, bumpy and seriously in need of fixing because of tree roots destroying everything underneath. I cannot imagine that many folks are going to want tree roots growing through their foundations!
There are better ways to cool our homes, but we're not architecturally designing things for that. The UK is designed for a cooler climate and for good reason. It's bitterly cold over here in winter, but it's also a decent humidity almost all year round. Winter in the US seems to be extremely cold, and so your architecture can focus on that. The UK needs to be cooler and significantly wetter.
I agree, my point is industrial carbon scrubbers are the wrong direction there. Outside of improving ones at points of combustion that is. We've hit a point that we need to level off our...
I agree, my point is industrial carbon scrubbers are the wrong direction there. Outside of improving ones at points of combustion that is.
We've hit a point that we need to level off our technology development (specifically the push for perpetual growth and depending on breakthroughs for survival) and focus on equitable distribution of what we have now, worldwide.
I think that's too harsh. Running some numbers helps put things in perspective: some quick googling shows that a mature tree removes 48 pounds of CO2 per year, an evergreen tree lives 60-450...
I think that's too harsh. Running some numbers helps put things in perspective: some quick googling shows that a mature tree removes 48 pounds of CO2 per year, an evergreen tree lives 60-450 years, and a rough average price for a carbon offset is $5 per ton, which is about how much CO2 a tree would have removed over 200 years. So it may cost about $5 to make up the difference to the environment for removing that tree.
And that's the problem with the focus around capital. Are we seriously suggesting that a tree that could capture carbon for 400 years is worth $5? Especially since it requires 0 additional...
And that's the problem with the focus around capital. Are we seriously suggesting that a tree that could capture carbon for 400 years is worth $5? Especially since it requires 0 additional resources to maintain.
Deciduous trees in particular offset more carbon than just raw number from their growth. The can cool the houses near them while minimizing sun blockage in the winter, reducing the need for mechanized cooling. The life that lives in and around trees also capture carbon and fosters growth of other plants and fungus because the ground isn't being perpetually scorched by the sun. This creates living soil which captures more carbon, is more fertile, and retains water better. As a related aside, leaf removal from underneath trees is also one of the worst things you can do to them. Rotting trees on the ground also provide more food, shelter, and nutrients for other life.
What this tells me is that the price for a carbon offset is way too low. It means an American, the worst offenders, can offset their annual carbon footprint for the price of $80. The neighbor probably paid more to have the tree cut down. Rather than $5 a ton, it should be more like $5 a lb, or roughly $10,000. A tree costs a lot more than $5 to plant, especially factoring land costs, and takes years to get an ROI. Carbon offsets are supposed to be a punitive, not feelgood tithes to absolve guilt. That translates to roughly $5,000 offset per barrel of oil.
At $5/ton a for carbon offset, that's about $0.15/gallon of gas (assuming 32 gallons of gas/diesel from a barrel of crude and that a barrel of crude is about half ton of CO2 emissions). At $10,000/ton, That's $140 a gallon tax. Which, while outrageous at first sight, I think is much closer to the social cost of one gallon of gasoline than 15 cents. 15 cents is a rounding error on the price of gas. I'd bet a lot fewer people would complain about the electrification of cars and deployment of wind farms if it cost $1,500 to fill a gas tank. More realistically, a $5/gallon tax would be a good start.
If you could pay someone else $5 to plant a tree that will live for that time or otherwise remove the same amount of carbon that the tree would, then yes! There's no harm to CO2 levels in removing...
Are we seriously suggesting that a tree that could capture carbon for 400 years is worth $5?
If you could pay someone else $5 to plant a tree that will live for that time or otherwise remove the same amount of carbon that the tree would, then yes! There's no harm to CO2 levels in removing a tree if you add one or something equivalent elsewhere in its place.
I don't understand your last paragraph. A carbon offset's price isn't arbitrarily chosen to be punitive, it's the market price to get someone to cause a decrease of a certain amount of carbon. It's great if it's cheap because it means the environment can be helped more for less money.
Okay, researching things more, there are some potential complications around carbon offsets: they may work by compensating someone to avoid emitting a certain amount of CO2 rather than remove CO2 that's already in the air. So there's a benefit, but the price may represent the cost to make someone else less wasteful rather than the cost to undo the damage to the environment. In one way that's practically useful now, but it's very dependent on current practices. If everyone else was already at net zero, the cost would be higher. If we want to calculate the damage in that ideal world instead, maybe we need to look into the cost of carbon capture, not carbon offsets. A quick Google search says that the average price of carbon capture for a ton of CO2 is $50-$500, so that may or may not be a better number to have in mind here.
I had a minor revelation last night. Part of the push to remove trees from urban and suburban areas is that they grow too tall and interfere with power lines, sidewalks, and become fall risks in...
I had a minor revelation last night. Part of the push to remove trees from urban and suburban areas is that they grow too tall and interfere with power lines, sidewalks, and become fall risks in dense housing.
They are all legit concerns, some more than others, but we could solve a lot of them by running conduit along water mains to get rid of all the ugly wires everywhere. In my yard alone, I could plant 7 trees if not for the fact that Comcast ran a line diagonally across a large section of lawn and now its against the law to plant trees there.
Part of the answer is to plant street trees that grow in such a way that they don't cause trouble with power lines. My wife and I always seeing people who plant too many Colorado Blue Spruce too...
Part of the answer is to plant street trees that grow in such a way that they don't cause trouble with power lines.
My wife and I always seeing people who plant too many Colorado Blue Spruce too close together because they don't realize how big they get, they form a good privacy hedge in a few years but in a few decades they are dying because they are crowding each other out. If they are near the power lines they are making trouble at this point too.
For what it’s worth, at least locally, we sometimes run power and utilities lines through underground conduit for maintenance reasons anyways. They’re just more expensive and no one wants to foot...
For what it’s worth, at least locally, we sometimes run power and utilities lines through underground conduit for maintenance reasons anyways. They’re just more expensive and no one wants to foot the bill.
It’s a complex story. It is important to protect forests but this has to be justified on the basis of biodiversity and other benefits as opposed to offsetting carbon emissions. First,...
It’s a complex story. It is important to protect forests but this has to be justified on the basis of biodiversity and other benefits as opposed to offsetting carbon emissions.
First, “nature-based” carbon credits are broken because carbon has to be kept out of the atmosphere for 10,000 or so years. It’s not reasonable to offset something you do in 12 hours (a flight) for a permanent land use change that will last for longer than civilization has lasted.
Second it is difficult or impossible to measure the uptake of carbon when it is spread over a huge area: soil carbon is like “dark matter” in that it is fast but elusive and it is hard to know if “enhanced weathering” is working. I knew a person who went down to the Amazon to estimate what was happening with carbon these and it was a painstaking process of establishing a grid and measuring tree branches with calipers for years.
Third, the kind of scheme is a hotbed for scams, here is one article on it,
but there are cases like the nature preserve in Pennsylvania that got credits although they had already made the decision to preserve land; look at some place like Indonesia and the story is always that some tropical gangsters came and cut down a forest they weren’t supposed to be cut and were never held accountable.
Fourth, planting a forest isn’t always the right path to ecological restoration, see
Contrast that to a DAC or BECCS system where you can really measure the gas going into a well. BECCS, like the liquid metal fast reactor, has a huge literature but very little implementation
and has a low-tech cousin which was used by indigenous people to transform land to farm in parts of the Amazon that are otherwise inhospitable (don’t do the latter at scale!)
The direct effect of BECCS is easily measurable but the indirect effects are not. It uses a lot of land, uses even more water, and will always be criticized for competing with food production.
As much as nature-based solutions appeal to people, DAC seems to be much more of a real solution.
Flights are so incredibly bad we should probably reconsider whether that should be something that is used outside of emergency situations. Biochar has a pretty natural creation process too: Forest...
Flights are so incredibly bad we should probably reconsider whether that should be something that is used outside of emergency situations.
Biochar has a pretty natural creation process too: Forest fires. They thin out forests leaving room for new growth.
And there's plenty of space for wilderness recapture in suburbia, without trying to force deserts to become forests ala greenwalls.
The propensity for scams is part of why I think carbon credits and offsets are a thing that just straight-up shouldn't exist. The way to handle reduction of fuel burning is rations and in turn reduction of extraction.
And according to this, the existing 27 DAC systems capture about 10,000 tons of carbon per year. The largest plant by Climeworks captures 900 tons. About 36,000 trees. Climeworks
state it costs about $500 per ton to capture, so about $18,000,000 annually. Or about 720 acres of forest. Which could also be translated to about 100 Walmart parking lots. There's 4,500+ Walmarts in the USA, and dozens of other similarly gigantic sprawling wastelands of asphalt. And those aren't even the easy targets... suburban homes with 1 acre lots and 2 trees could easily hold 5-10 more trees in them if not for the vanity of owning 1 acre of grass.
Are we really thinking that spending $18 million dollars annually is better than paying people $500 to plant a tree anywhere there is a 200 sqft of open space? Their annual rate of operation would let us double capacity for a few years, even if not all those trees survived.
DAC proponents believe that the cost and scale of the technology can vastly improve, as have photovoltaic cells. Probably the best case for DAC is not capturing the CO2 for disposal but to use it...
DAC proponents believe that the cost and scale of the technology can vastly improve, as have photovoltaic cells.
Probably the best case for DAC is not capturing the CO2 for disposal but to use it to make e-Fuels. Maybe the best scenario for e-Fuels right now is that the U.S. Navy would like to run a fuel synthesizer on a nuclear aircraft carrier where they are already paying a lot more for fuel. That aircraft carrier, on its own power, can travel at highway speeds for months and that is its protection against enemy air and missile attacks. If it doesn't have to slow down to take on aircraft fuel from a tender that is more time it can operate.
These guys want to produce cost-competitive carbon-neutral hydrocarbons and figure they can save the world through ruthless cost optimization while everybody else is arguing about the politics:
Their previous product is a data visualization product, Silk. Consider me skeptical that they can accomplish what Boeing, Lockheed, or General Dynamics cannot. I would be utterly shocked if Exxon...
Their previous product is a data visualization product, Silk.
Consider me skeptical that they can accomplish what Boeing, Lockheed, or General Dynamics cannot. I would be utterly shocked if Exxon wouldn't want to pull hydrocarbons out of the air rather than drilling out of the ground, especially as finding more oil is going to get ever more expensive.
I can say how you can see it that way, but I will say this guy who is involved with it https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/ has thought pretty hard about the problems of space industrialization and...
I can say how you can see it that way, but I will say this guy who is involved with it
has thought pretty hard about the problems of space industrialization and in particular he comes across as having his feet on the ground and has debunked numerous ideas that are popular among space colonization and science fiction fans. He is by no means a consistent optimist, see
The thing is that he thinks it is possible but within constraints that are pretty tough. I think of the old O'Neill colony ideas with vast airspaces that would require huge amounts of nitrogen...
The thing is that he thinks it is possible but within constraints that are pretty tough.
I think of the old O'Neill colony ideas with vast airspaces that would require huge amounts of nitrogen which are definitely not available on the moon.
Mars colonization doesn't look as impossible, though probably the best scheme that's been considered is
which, like a lot of Casey's writings, really destroys many of the alternatives that people have thought about. That Ceres scheme in particular could build a larger habitat than the Earth and would be a possible jumping off point to a civilization that could exploit outer solar system and interstellar bodies.
I'm not sure I agree with that. I think the best of all worlds would be if tax money seeded research into how recovered carbon could be a profitable commodity, then let the private sector knock...
carbon capture technology needs to be a state-run public service.
I'm not sure I agree with that.
I think the best of all worlds would be if tax money seeded research into how recovered carbon could be a profitable commodity, then let the private sector knock themselves out finding ways to get carbon out of the air.
I agree with the concern the author has about the perceived legitimacy of such a program but I don't agree with them overall.
The main argument is that technology for direct air capture is going to evolve, we are nowhere near the theoretical limit. Having competition between vendors to remove carbon is going to let new approaches flourish. If the government decides up front to invest heavily in one particular approach we might be stuck with something that is a lot less viable.
A good example is the development of uranium enrichment under wartime conditions which led to the construction of the K-25 gas diffusion plant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-25
the construction of which was contracted out to J. A. Jones and the operation of which was contracted out to Union Carbide. Gas diffusion is much more expensive than the centrifuge method developed later and nobody would imagine building one today but enough capacity was built early on that these facilities served the commercial nuclear power industry at the beginning.
Another issue with carbon capture is that there is a strong case for capturing it at point sources such as chemical plants, oil refineries, power plants, and such and this is something that is best done by the factory. The government's plant to build a carbon capture network to accept CO2 from point sources from "refinery row" down South makes a lot of sense, it is a lot like the networks we already use to distribute oil and gas to those sites, the main issue is getting somebody to pay for it.
Another argument for that kind of operation being done by a private contractor is that the contractor can go bankrupt which provides a mechanism for shutting that kind of thing down if it goes nonviable, such as
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nukegate_scandal
and then there is somebody to sue, some possibility of reconstituting the operation on a new basis, etc. A government agency is way too likely to ask for mo' money and get it.
Fortunately we already have near-perfect carbon scrubbers that only occupy about 80 sq ft and cool the surface of that area. They require no external source of power and provide shelter for many.
But we chop them down to make parking lots and build new factories because we don't want to spend the money to repair the old factories.
Every time I see 2 acres of grass kept alive by sprinklers without a tree among it I weep a little.
Trees are rad, but they're not the solution to this crisis. But they are part of it.
Like economic growth, there is only so much that a finite system can contain, The same applies to our lovely trees. So, what we actually need is Systemic Change.
We need to get away from capitalism and everyone having to own one of everything sooner, rather than later.
I agree that systemic change is the best solution but planting trees is something we can do now that can make a difference and has no real barriers to entry.
Oh entirely. Everyone loves trees.
It's just the sheer amount of them that we'd need to plant! The whole re-wilding concept is fantastic for this.
I wondered how much energy we could save by shading single-family homes that are currently fully exposed to the sun in the northeast courtesy of stripping and not replacing trees. Some napkin math.
I've seen numbers as much as 35% reduction in cooling costs, which makes sense as on a hot, sunny day there can easily be a 20F difference between sun and shade. Lets guesstimate only say 20% cooling costs saved. A medium-large AC unit easily takes 1600 kwh to run monthly in the cooling season, translating to about 0.7 ton of emissions a month. 4 month cooling season means about 3 tons of CO2 per house. 20% savings by having a well placed shade tree means half a ton of CO2 prevented, annually, per home.
There are about 140 million homes in the USA. In my area, about 8/10 homes need a shade tree. If I assume I'm an anomaly and only 1/20 homes would benefit from a shade tree, that's 3,900,000 tons of CO2 prevented. Yes, planting 7 million trees is hard, but that work can be spread over 20 million people easy. The trees themselves would capture an additional 100,000 tons annually in their growth.
And that's not factoring how much could be saved by cooling commercial spaces, nor the cooling effect on the ground by properly shading asphalt.
That $2.5 billion in R&D money would probably better be spent giving away native saplings to anyone who asks...possibly even planting it for them.
When people mention institutional racism this is also one aspect of it no one mentions. They will cut down the trees in poor areas which means less to no shade which means hotter summers, higher electric bills and uglier urbanscapes. This article at NY Times has a visual map of the phenomenon. It isn't just relegated to Richmond either.
The frustration comes when people want to do something with that tree though.
In the UK, we've got a lot of pavements (Sidewalks) that are lumpy, bumpy and seriously in need of fixing because of tree roots destroying everything underneath. I cannot imagine that many folks are going to want tree roots growing through their foundations!
There are better ways to cool our homes, but we're not architecturally designing things for that. The UK is designed for a cooler climate and for good reason. It's bitterly cold over here in winter, but it's also a decent humidity almost all year round. Winter in the US seems to be extremely cold, and so your architecture can focus on that. The UK needs to be cooler and significantly wetter.
It's a pain in the arse, I tell you.
I'd kill for more trees on streets mind you.
I agree, my point is industrial carbon scrubbers are the wrong direction there. Outside of improving ones at points of combustion that is.
We've hit a point that we need to level off our technology development (specifically the push for perpetual growth and depending on breakthroughs for survival) and focus on equitable distribution of what we have now, worldwide.
I think that's too harsh. Running some numbers helps put things in perspective: some quick googling shows that a mature tree removes 48 pounds of CO2 per year, an evergreen tree lives 60-450 years, and a rough average price for a carbon offset is $5 per ton, which is about how much CO2 a tree would have removed over 200 years. So it may cost about $5 to make up the difference to the environment for removing that tree.
And that's the problem with the focus around capital. Are we seriously suggesting that a tree that could capture carbon for 400 years is worth $5? Especially since it requires 0 additional resources to maintain.
Deciduous trees in particular offset more carbon than just raw number from their growth. The can cool the houses near them while minimizing sun blockage in the winter, reducing the need for mechanized cooling. The life that lives in and around trees also capture carbon and fosters growth of other plants and fungus because the ground isn't being perpetually scorched by the sun. This creates living soil which captures more carbon, is more fertile, and retains water better. As a related aside, leaf removal from underneath trees is also one of the worst things you can do to them. Rotting trees on the ground also provide more food, shelter, and nutrients for other life.
What this tells me is that the price for a carbon offset is way too low. It means an American, the worst offenders, can offset their annual carbon footprint for the price of $80. The neighbor probably paid more to have the tree cut down. Rather than $5 a ton, it should be more like $5 a lb, or roughly $10,000. A tree costs a lot more than $5 to plant, especially factoring land costs, and takes years to get an ROI. Carbon offsets are supposed to be a punitive, not feelgood tithes to absolve guilt. That translates to roughly $5,000 offset per barrel of oil.
At $5/ton a for carbon offset, that's about $0.15/gallon of gas (assuming 32 gallons of gas/diesel from a barrel of crude and that a barrel of crude is about half ton of CO2 emissions). At $10,000/ton, That's $140 a gallon tax. Which, while outrageous at first sight, I think is much closer to the social cost of one gallon of gasoline than 15 cents. 15 cents is a rounding error on the price of gas. I'd bet a lot fewer people would complain about the electrification of cars and deployment of wind farms if it cost $1,500 to fill a gas tank. More realistically, a $5/gallon tax would be a good start.
If you could pay someone else $5 to plant a tree that will live for that time or otherwise remove the same amount of carbon that the tree would, then yes! There's no harm to CO2 levels in removing a tree if you add one or something equivalent elsewhere in its place.
I don't understand your last paragraph. A carbon offset's price isn't arbitrarily chosen to be punitive, it's the market price to get someone to cause a decrease of a certain amount of carbon. It's great if it's cheap because it means the environment can be helped more for less money.
Okay, researching things more, there are some potential complications around carbon offsets: they may work by compensating someone to avoid emitting a certain amount of CO2 rather than remove CO2 that's already in the air. So there's a benefit, but the price may represent the cost to make someone else less wasteful rather than the cost to undo the damage to the environment. In one way that's practically useful now, but it's very dependent on current practices. If everyone else was already at net zero, the cost would be higher. If we want to calculate the damage in that ideal world instead, maybe we need to look into the cost of carbon capture, not carbon offsets. A quick Google search says that the average price of carbon capture for a ton of CO2 is $50-$500, so that may or may not be a better number to have in mind here.
I had a minor revelation last night. Part of the push to remove trees from urban and suburban areas is that they grow too tall and interfere with power lines, sidewalks, and become fall risks in dense housing.
They are all legit concerns, some more than others, but we could solve a lot of them by running conduit along water mains to get rid of all the ugly wires everywhere. In my yard alone, I could plant 7 trees if not for the fact that Comcast ran a line diagonally across a large section of lawn and now its against the law to plant trees there.
Part of the answer is to plant street trees that grow in such a way that they don't cause trouble with power lines.
My wife and I always seeing people who plant too many Colorado Blue Spruce too close together because they don't realize how big they get, they form a good privacy hedge in a few years but in a few decades they are dying because they are crowding each other out. If they are near the power lines they are making trouble at this point too.
See
https://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/gardens-gardening/your-garden/help-for-the-home-gardener/advice-tips-resources/visual-guides/trees-to-plant-under-power-lines
For what it’s worth, at least locally, we sometimes run power and utilities lines through underground conduit for maintenance reasons anyways. They’re just more expensive and no one wants to foot the bill.
It’s a complex story. It is important to protect forests but this has to be justified on the basis of biodiversity and other benefits as opposed to offsetting carbon emissions.
First, “nature-based” carbon credits are broken because carbon has to be kept out of the atmosphere for 10,000 or so years. It’s not reasonable to offset something you do in 12 hours (a flight) for a permanent land use change that will last for longer than civilization has lasted.
Second it is difficult or impossible to measure the uptake of carbon when it is spread over a huge area: soil carbon is like “dark matter” in that it is fast but elusive and it is hard to know if “enhanced weathering” is working. I knew a person who went down to the Amazon to estimate what was happening with carbon these and it was a painstaking process of establishing a grid and measuring tree branches with calipers for years.
Third, the kind of scheme is a hotbed for scams, here is one article on it,
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/mar/10/biggest-carbon-credit-certifier-replace-rainforest-offsets-scheme-verra-aoe
but there are cases like the nature preserve in Pennsylvania that got credits although they had already made the decision to preserve land; look at some place like Indonesia and the story is always that some tropical gangsters came and cut down a forest they weren’t supposed to be cut and were never held accountable.
Fourth, planting a forest isn’t always the right path to ecological restoration, see
https://knowablemagazine.org/article/society/2023/abandon-idea-great-green-walls
Contrast that to a DAC or BECCS system where you can really measure the gas going into a well. BECCS, like the liquid metal fast reactor, has a huge literature but very little implementation
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_and_storage
and has a low-tech cousin which was used by indigenous people to transform land to farm in parts of the Amazon that are otherwise inhospitable (don’t do the latter at scale!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochar
The direct effect of BECCS is easily measurable but the indirect effects are not. It uses a lot of land, uses even more water, and will always be criticized for competing with food production.
As much as nature-based solutions appeal to people, DAC seems to be much more of a real solution.
Flights are so incredibly bad we should probably reconsider whether that should be something that is used outside of emergency situations.
Biochar has a pretty natural creation process too: Forest fires. They thin out forests leaving room for new growth.
And there's plenty of space for wilderness recapture in suburbia, without trying to force deserts to become forests ala greenwalls.
The propensity for scams is part of why I think carbon credits and offsets are a thing that just straight-up shouldn't exist. The way to handle reduction of fuel burning is rations and in turn reduction of extraction.
And according to this, the existing 27 DAC systems capture about 10,000 tons of carbon per year. The largest plant by Climeworks captures 900 tons. About 36,000 trees. Climeworks
state it costs about $500 per ton to capture, so about $18,000,000 annually. Or about 720 acres of forest. Which could also be translated to about 100 Walmart parking lots. There's 4,500+ Walmarts in the USA, and dozens of other similarly gigantic sprawling wastelands of asphalt. And those aren't even the easy targets... suburban homes with 1 acre lots and 2 trees could easily hold 5-10 more trees in them if not for the vanity of owning 1 acre of grass.
Are we really thinking that spending $18 million dollars annually is better than paying people $500 to plant a tree anywhere there is a 200 sqft of open space? Their annual rate of operation would let us double capacity for a few years, even if not all those trees survived.
Edit: Fixed math, I missed a decimal in there.
DAC proponents believe that the cost and scale of the technology can vastly improve, as have photovoltaic cells.
Probably the best case for DAC is not capturing the CO2 for disposal but to use it to make e-Fuels. Maybe the best scenario for e-Fuels right now is that the U.S. Navy would like to run a fuel synthesizer on a nuclear aircraft carrier where they are already paying a lot more for fuel. That aircraft carrier, on its own power, can travel at highway speeds for months and that is its protection against enemy air and missile attacks. If it doesn't have to slow down to take on aircraft fuel from a tender that is more time it can operate.
These guys want to produce cost-competitive carbon-neutral hydrocarbons and figure they can save the world through ruthless cost optimization while everybody else is arguing about the politics:
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/
Their previous product is a data visualization product, Silk.
Consider me skeptical that they can accomplish what Boeing, Lockheed, or General Dynamics cannot. I would be utterly shocked if Exxon wouldn't want to pull hydrocarbons out of the air rather than drilling out of the ground, especially as finding more oil is going to get ever more expensive.
I can say how you can see it that way, but I will say this guy who is involved with it
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/
has thought pretty hard about the problems of space industrialization and in particular he comes across as having his feet on the ground and has debunked numerous ideas that are popular among space colonization and science fiction fans. He is by no means a consistent optimist, see
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2022/10/11/why-high-speed-rail-hasnt-caught-on/
and
https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2019/10/02/there-are-no-gas-stations-in-space/
To be fair, space colonization fans are pretty easy to debunk. :)
The thing is that he thinks it is possible but within constraints that are pretty tough.
I think of the old O'Neill colony ideas with vast airspaces that would require huge amounts of nitrogen which are definitely not available on the moon.
Mars colonization doesn't look as impossible, though probably the best scheme that's been considered is
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2011.07487.pdf
which, like a lot of Casey's writings, really destroys many of the alternatives that people have thought about. That Ceres scheme in particular could build a larger habitat than the Earth and would be a possible jumping off point to a civilization that could exploit outer solar system and interstellar bodies.
I'm not sure I agree with that.
I think the best of all worlds would be if tax money seeded research into how recovered carbon could be a profitable commodity, then let the private sector knock themselves out finding ways to get carbon out of the air.