It's a pretty silly write-up. Yes, it's true that carbon capture is not easy, since we're emitting such a formidable amount of CO2, but what's the alternative? Even if we went down to net 0...
It's a pretty silly write-up.
Yes, it's true that carbon capture is not easy, since we're emitting such a formidable amount of CO2, but what's the alternative? Even if we went down to net 0 emissions tomorrow (which is completely impossible without carbon capture since certain processes inherently emit CO2, like the production of steel), we'd only stop the advance of climate change, not reverse it.
We need negative emissions to get out of this mess. The headline "Carbon capture cannot solve climate change" is like saying "a fan and a sun shade won't cool you down to 25C, so you might as well just stand in the sun". It's a ridiculous take. What's the point of the article? What's the alternative? How do you get CO2 out of the atmosphere?
Carbon capture does work, and it is an absolutely necessary step in halting, and hopefully eventually reversing, climate change. It's currently financially unviable, since it is always an added cost for the polluters. Of course it's not going to be economically profitable when they can just emit an infinite amount of CO2 for free. I know there are an increasing number of regulations in place in some countries, but it's still very very lenient and only limits the amount of CO2 they can emit and places nearly no pressure on capturing any of it.
As long as we keep emitting any amount of CO2, climate change is only going to get worse. Maybe not with the same velocity as it did these past 20 years, but it will get worse.
The point of the article, I think, is not to say that the principle of CCS is wrong, but that fossil fuel companies have been pushing it as a 'solution' to climate change, so we don't have to...
Exemplary
The point of the article, I think, is not to say that the principle of CCS is wrong, but that fossil fuel companies have been pushing it as a 'solution' to climate change, so we don't have to transition away from fossil fuels (or CO2 intensive processes). The fact is that that is plain wrong. CCS does not work today, many other solutions do, but they require us to transition away from fossil fuels.
Now, CCS after we are largely done with the energy transition? That is an enticing idea, but in the same way fusion research is important: it might help us in the future, but not today.
Btw, the fact that this discussion is confusing, is because CCS is a well-known fossil fuel industry decoy, here's a video on the subject: https://youtu.be/nJslrTT-Yhc
This is incorrect. There is no other solution. Everything else is a measure to slow the advance of climate change. Nothing, apart from carbon capture, can reverse it. If we transitioned to 100%...
many other solutions do, but they require us to transition away from fossil fuels.
This is incorrect. There is no other solution. Everything else is a measure to slow the advance of climate change. Nothing, apart from carbon capture, can reverse it. If we transitioned to 100% fusion energy, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would not change.
This is why the article is wrong. Carbon capture is a necessary part of every single complete solution
to climate change. It's certainly not the only measure, but it is unavoidable.
My problem with the article is that it paints carbon capture as this outlandish hoax, when it isn't. It may very well be true that companies try to hide behind carbon capture to justify their emissions, but that does not invalidate carbon capture as a whole.
Again, there's two parts to solving climate change: going net zero, and going negative carbon. Today, every dollar spent on CCS is a dollar better spent on reducing emissions. Claiming investing...
Again, there's two parts to solving climate change: going net zero, and going negative carbon. Today, every dollar spent on CCS is a dollar better spent on reducing emissions.
Claiming investing in CCS today is better than investing in any other solution like solar is incorrect.
I dont agree with that. Aside from asserting it up front, and circling back to it at the end, the article almost entirely focuses on saying CCS is infeasible, and not at all on establishing that...
I dont agree with that. Aside from asserting it up front, and circling back to it at the end, the article almost entirely focuses on saying CCS is infeasible, and not at all on establishing that this some kind of psy op by fossil fuel industries.
Yeah, I bet they do hype up carbon capture like its a big deal, but thats how companies talk about everything, they always oversell what theyre doing like its a big deal. Similarly, its not surprising that boosters of this technology dont focus on the downsides, because thats how advocating for things works.
My concern is that human capacity and resources are a zero sum game. We could put a lot of resources towards carbon capture, but a lot of those resources are drawn from the same pool as the ones...
My concern is that human capacity and resources are a zero sum game. We could put a lot of resources towards carbon capture, but a lot of those resources are drawn from the same pool as the ones used for building out renewables and reducing energy consumption (namely, political capital and public budgets). Every billion you spend on a carbon capture plant is a billion you're not spending on solar and wind farms, or energy research, or public transit infrastructure.
I don't know if tying the planets long term health to billions of square miles of industrial plants is a viable long term solution versus just reducing humanity's carbon output to a level that the planet can naturally absorb using its existing carbon cycle.
I think the point of the article is just that it can't and won't work. Asking for an alternative doesn't make much a difference to that. Now you can argue that it will work, but you better present...
I think the point of the article is just that it can't and won't work. Asking for an alternative doesn't make much a difference to that.
Now you can argue that it will work, but you better present some evidence. Personally l not totally convinced, like the land requirement are maybe not so bad if e.g. we cut meat entirely (l haven't checked), also the budget doesn't seem so crazy if we manage to agree to cut military budgets all together. The real issue is lack of political maturity to do any of this...
How do you define "will not work"? It will not solve climate change immediately by itself, since that ramp up in carbon capture is unfeasible. Other measures are needed. But in essence, removing...
How do you define "will not work"?
It will not solve climate change immediately by itself, since that ramp up in carbon capture is unfeasible. Other measures are needed.
But in essence, removing CO2 from the atmosphere and putting it somewhere else definitely does work in a sense that it has a positive effect. That effect may be borderline negligible as of right now, but it is still positive, so it does work.
It doesn't solve climate change, but dismissing it as "can't work, won't work" is ridiculous.
Any actual solution will have carbon capture as a neccessary component. We could go down to no emissions tommorrow or even two decades ago and still have to deal with the consequences for decades...
Any actual solution will have carbon capture as a neccessary component.
We could go down to no emissions tommorrow or even two decades ago and still have to deal with the consequences for decades to come in the best case.
Now maybe the article is simply trying to point that it is not a silver bullet that will work by itself, which I could agree with. But it goes about saying it in a pretty inflamatory way.
Of course carbon capture is not economical when we let companies externalize their costs.
It would work, but not as fast as we need it to (using current tech), and not if we’re still pumping carbon out of the ground. Assuming we stop pumping hydrocarbons we would need a relatively...
It would work, but not as fast as we need it to (using current tech), and not if we’re still pumping carbon out of the ground. Assuming we stop pumping hydrocarbons we would need a relatively small amount of carbon capture to reverse climate change. We’d just be reversing it very slowly. From that point it’s a matter of how much faster you want to finish the job.
Carbon capture is cope if someone tells you it allows us to continue pumping oil and natural gas out of the Earth. But if someone tells you with weary eyes that it will eventually put the carbon back where it belongs, believe them.
My suspicion is that a new energy source (fusion?) will be necessary to scrub the atmosphere. We have energy debt that is harder to pay off than it was to accrue. How do you pay off these debts? Get a bigger paycheck.
One major thing they don't cover in the article is the NET carbon they would capture. I'd imagine building all the infrastructure around carbon capture would emit more GHGs than the amount of...
One major thing they don't cover in the article is the NET carbon they would capture.
I'd imagine building all the infrastructure around carbon capture would emit more GHGs than the amount of carbon these systems would store.
Unless they can offset the embodied carbon along the entire process, and yield net negative overall, I don't see how any of these kinds of solutions are valuable/effective compared to simply reducing our use & reliance on fossil fuels.
It's possible for something to be an integral part of a solution that is exactly counter to the solution when championed by bad actors: Saving money, limit spending and getting more work, but...
It's possible for something to be an integral part of a solution that is exactly counter to the solution when championed by bad actors:
Saving money, limit spending and getting more work, but pushed by capitalists who also oppose living wages, collective bargaining, collude within industries, and hide salary information.
Good diet and exercise pushed by junk food companies who hire scientists to target addiction.
Self control and "play responsibly" pushed by gambling, tabocca liquor corporations that employ dark design strategies to target whales.
Building resilient energy grid, but pushed by oil and gas companies who want to sell energy to data centers.
Proper parenting when pushed by racists and supremacists and anti-choice people.
Everything good is used by people who mean harm. Carbon capture is a necessary part of the solution but, is aggressively pushed because it is profitable and allows for no limitation on emissions. In fact, this wonderful tech will be used to justify accelerating emission levels. No support unless emissions standards are upheld first: which we have not even pretended to try to do for 50 years
Great write-up by ProPublica on how Carbon Capture and Storage has been hailed by oil companies a solution to climate change, even though it has never proven to work in the real world.
Great write-up by ProPublica on how Carbon Capture and Storage has been hailed by oil companies a solution to climate change, even though it has never proven to work in the real world.
Obviously we have to stop putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. That's the priority. Even if it was somehow feasible to keep burning fossil fuel and capture its emissions, we will run out of...
Obviously we have to stop putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. That's the priority.
Even if it was somehow feasible to keep burning fossil fuel and capture its emissions, we will run out of fossil fuel eventually. The whole thing is a dead end.
There might be some future in creating synthetic hydrocarbon fuel for airplanes and such. Then we could harvest carbon for that fuel from the air and it would be a sustainable loop. But we would need a large carbon neutral power source to make the fuel. And it would be a tiny percentage of the carbon based fuel that humans use now.
But, no matter what, we still have to capture enough carbon from the atmosphere to get us back <280 ppm right? I don't think there is any way around that.
Isn't carbon a useful element? Wouldn't it be better to spend the energy (from carbon neutral sources) to break CO2 apart, bringing oxygen levels back up at the same time.
Photosynthesis uses energy from the sun to break apart CO2 right? If we can figure out how to recreate that at massive scale we would have a dial we could turn that would draw down CO2 and leave us with more oxygen and stacks of solid carbon bricks or whatever that don't have to be pressurized and pumped into sketchy containment.
Then we just have to figure out how to mass produce carbon nanotube type structures and we could make a space elevator out of the extra carbon in the air.
That's a bit of fantasy, but it really seems like the problem isn't physics. It's human civilization getting its priorities straight and realizing we have to put significant resources into maintaining the atmosphere we live in.
It's a pretty silly write-up.
Yes, it's true that carbon capture is not easy, since we're emitting such a formidable amount of CO2, but what's the alternative? Even if we went down to net 0 emissions tomorrow (which is completely impossible without carbon capture since certain processes inherently emit CO2, like the production of steel), we'd only stop the advance of climate change, not reverse it.
We need negative emissions to get out of this mess. The headline "Carbon capture cannot solve climate change" is like saying "a fan and a sun shade won't cool you down to 25C, so you might as well just stand in the sun". It's a ridiculous take. What's the point of the article? What's the alternative? How do you get CO2 out of the atmosphere?
Carbon capture does work, and it is an absolutely necessary step in halting, and hopefully eventually reversing, climate change. It's currently financially unviable, since it is always an added cost for the polluters. Of course it's not going to be economically profitable when they can just emit an infinite amount of CO2 for free. I know there are an increasing number of regulations in place in some countries, but it's still very very lenient and only limits the amount of CO2 they can emit and places nearly no pressure on capturing any of it.
As long as we keep emitting any amount of CO2, climate change is only going to get worse. Maybe not with the same velocity as it did these past 20 years, but it will get worse.
That article is a sad joke.
The point of the article, I think, is not to say that the principle of CCS is wrong, but that fossil fuel companies have been pushing it as a 'solution' to climate change, so we don't have to transition away from fossil fuels (or CO2 intensive processes). The fact is that that is plain wrong. CCS does not work today, many other solutions do, but they require us to transition away from fossil fuels.
Now, CCS after we are largely done with the energy transition? That is an enticing idea, but in the same way fusion research is important: it might help us in the future, but not today.
Btw, the fact that this discussion is confusing, is because CCS is a well-known fossil fuel industry decoy, here's a video on the subject: https://youtu.be/nJslrTT-Yhc
This is incorrect. There is no other solution. Everything else is a measure to slow the advance of climate change. Nothing, apart from carbon capture, can reverse it. If we transitioned to 100% fusion energy, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere would not change.
This is why the article is wrong. Carbon capture is a necessary part of every single complete solution
to climate change. It's certainly not the only measure, but it is unavoidable.
My problem with the article is that it paints carbon capture as this outlandish hoax, when it isn't. It may very well be true that companies try to hide behind carbon capture to justify their emissions, but that does not invalidate carbon capture as a whole.
Again, there's two parts to solving climate change: going net zero, and going negative carbon. Today, every dollar spent on CCS is a dollar better spent on reducing emissions.
Claiming investing in CCS today is better than investing in any other solution like solar is incorrect.
I dont agree with that. Aside from asserting it up front, and circling back to it at the end, the article almost entirely focuses on saying CCS is infeasible, and not at all on establishing that this some kind of psy op by fossil fuel industries.
Yeah, I bet they do hype up carbon capture like its a big deal, but thats how companies talk about everything, they always oversell what theyre doing like its a big deal. Similarly, its not surprising that boosters of this technology dont focus on the downsides, because thats how advocating for things works.
That's grossly understating it. CCS is one of the best examples of fossil fuel lobbying and misdirection. For example: https://www.desmog.com/2024/10/07/uks-22-billion-carbon-capture-pledge-follows-surge-in-lobbying-by-fossil-fuel-industry-records-show/. 22 billion is a lot of money that could be used for solutions that are proven to help today. Instead it is used as an excuse to continue polluting.
Yeah maybe, I dont really care. Im just saying this article is not making that case, or at least is doing a poor job of it.
Best to focus on turning off the fire hose before getting out your teacup to start bailing…
My concern is that human capacity and resources are a zero sum game. We could put a lot of resources towards carbon capture, but a lot of those resources are drawn from the same pool as the ones used for building out renewables and reducing energy consumption (namely, political capital and public budgets). Every billion you spend on a carbon capture plant is a billion you're not spending on solar and wind farms, or energy research, or public transit infrastructure.
I don't know if tying the planets long term health to billions of square miles of industrial plants is a viable long term solution versus just reducing humanity's carbon output to a level that the planet can naturally absorb using its existing carbon cycle.
I think the point of the article is just that it can't and won't work. Asking for an alternative doesn't make much a difference to that.
Now you can argue that it will work, but you better present some evidence. Personally l not totally convinced, like the land requirement are maybe not so bad if e.g. we cut meat entirely (l haven't checked), also the budget doesn't seem so crazy if we manage to agree to cut military budgets all together. The real issue is lack of political maturity to do any of this...
How do you define "will not work"?
It will not solve climate change immediately by itself, since that ramp up in carbon capture is unfeasible. Other measures are needed.
But in essence, removing CO2 from the atmosphere and putting it somewhere else definitely does work in a sense that it has a positive effect. That effect may be borderline negligible as of right now, but it is still positive, so it does work.
It doesn't solve climate change, but dismissing it as "can't work, won't work" is ridiculous.
Any actual solution will have carbon capture as a neccessary component.
We could go down to no emissions tommorrow or even two decades ago and still have to deal with the consequences for decades to come in the best case.
Now maybe the article is simply trying to point that it is not a silver bullet that will work by itself, which I could agree with. But it goes about saying it in a pretty inflamatory way.
Of course carbon capture is not economical when we let companies externalize their costs.
It would work, but not as fast as we need it to (using current tech), and not if we’re still pumping carbon out of the ground. Assuming we stop pumping hydrocarbons we would need a relatively small amount of carbon capture to reverse climate change. We’d just be reversing it very slowly. From that point it’s a matter of how much faster you want to finish the job.
Carbon capture is cope if someone tells you it allows us to continue pumping oil and natural gas out of the Earth. But if someone tells you with weary eyes that it will eventually put the carbon back where it belongs, believe them.
My suspicion is that a new energy source (fusion?) will be necessary to scrub the atmosphere. We have energy debt that is harder to pay off than it was to accrue. How do you pay off these debts? Get a bigger paycheck.
I dont like this scrolling format where you see 2 sentences at a time.
One major thing they don't cover in the article is the NET carbon they would capture.
I'd imagine building all the infrastructure around carbon capture would emit more GHGs than the amount of carbon these systems would store.
Unless they can offset the embodied carbon along the entire process, and yield net negative overall, I don't see how any of these kinds of solutions are valuable/effective compared to simply reducing our use & reliance on fossil fuels.
It's possible for something to be an integral part of a solution that is exactly counter to the solution when championed by bad actors:
Saving money, limit spending and getting more work, but pushed by capitalists who also oppose living wages, collective bargaining, collude within industries, and hide salary information.
Good diet and exercise pushed by junk food companies who hire scientists to target addiction.
Self control and "play responsibly" pushed by gambling, tabocca liquor corporations that employ dark design strategies to target whales.
Building resilient energy grid, but pushed by oil and gas companies who want to sell energy to data centers.
Proper parenting when pushed by racists and supremacists and anti-choice people.
Everything good is used by people who mean harm. Carbon capture is a necessary part of the solution but, is aggressively pushed because it is profitable and allows for no limitation on emissions. In fact, this wonderful tech will be used to justify accelerating emission levels. No support unless emissions standards are upheld first: which we have not even pretended to try to do for 50 years
Great write-up by ProPublica on how Carbon Capture and Storage has been hailed by oil companies a solution to climate change, even though it has never proven to work in the real world.
Obviously we have to stop putting more CO2 into the atmosphere. That's the priority.
Even if it was somehow feasible to keep burning fossil fuel and capture its emissions, we will run out of fossil fuel eventually. The whole thing is a dead end.
There might be some future in creating synthetic hydrocarbon fuel for airplanes and such. Then we could harvest carbon for that fuel from the air and it would be a sustainable loop. But we would need a large carbon neutral power source to make the fuel. And it would be a tiny percentage of the carbon based fuel that humans use now.
But, no matter what, we still have to capture enough carbon from the atmosphere to get us back <280 ppm right? I don't think there is any way around that.
Isn't carbon a useful element? Wouldn't it be better to spend the energy (from carbon neutral sources) to break CO2 apart, bringing oxygen levels back up at the same time.
Photosynthesis uses energy from the sun to break apart CO2 right? If we can figure out how to recreate that at massive scale we would have a dial we could turn that would draw down CO2 and leave us with more oxygen and stacks of solid carbon bricks or whatever that don't have to be pressurized and pumped into sketchy containment.
Then we just have to figure out how to mass produce carbon nanotube type structures and we could make a space elevator out of the extra carbon in the air.
That's a bit of fantasy, but it really seems like the problem isn't physics. It's human civilization getting its priorities straight and realizing we have to put significant resources into maintaining the atmosphere we live in.