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Greenland stops oil and gas exploration – natural resources minister Naaja Nathanielsen said the environment and climatic impacts had been assessed as being too high
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- Title
- Greenland stops oil and gas exploration, climate costs 'too high' | DW | 16.07.2021
- Authors
- Deutsche Welle (www.dw.com)
- Published
- Nov 7 2017
- Word count
- 753 words
It sometimes surprises me that we don't see more ecoterrorism, especially considering both the magnitude of the problem, and the efficacy of attacking infrastructure rather than people.
I'm not necessarily advocating it or saying that it's a magic bullet, I'm just saying I'm surprised it's not more common. But I think you're catastrophizing a bit to think that increased sabotage of polluting infrastructure would lead to the rapid collapse of civilization. Regarding scale, I'm not asking, "why has nobody immediately and simultaneously destroyed all fossil fuel infrastructure", I'm asking, "why has practically nobody destroyed or disrupted any fossil fuel infrastructure for environmental reasons"? Why hasn't there been a persistent low grade sabotage campaign that makes the infrastructure not impossible, but expensive to run and insure? Why was that recent pipeline attack just some mouthbreathers wanting a pittance of bitcoin, when there's much bigger motivations for doing such, in spite of the dangers that you outlined?
And we absolutely do have all the technologies for carbon negative civilization right now, because we're worried about net emissions and not just process emissions. Direct air capture of CO2 costs a few hundred dollars a ton with the approximately zero economies of scale we have right now. Even with no reduction in emissions and no reduction in costs, we could run a fleet of carbon sequestration facilities that captured all current carbon emissions for a few trillion dollars. Not chump change, but small compared to the benefits we've reaped from industrializing, a single digit percentage of global GDP, and if paid for by equivalent carbon taxes, a quick route off the stuff. We don't do it now because nobody really cares all that much.
Direct-air capture seems to be having a moment, but most new energy technologies that get a bit of press don't go anywhere, so the outside view is still "it probably won't scale for one reason or another."
I hope they beat the odds.
I mean, the technology is clearly there, it isn't a complicated process. The reason it's not going anywhere at present is because our market economies insist it must be profitable to sequester carbon in its own right rather than accepting it as a cost of doing business, so you get ludicrous schemes like selling the carbon dioxide to be used in industrial processes, including fossil fuel extraction, which so totally defeats the point that it isn't even tragically funny. Carbon sequestration will never accomplish anything unless it's state funded or mandated.
Solar and wind are also simple conceptually. After all, wind power has been around since ancient times. But if you follow what's going on in these industries, there is a lot of technological improvement involved. Many improvements have been tried and lost out to cheaper alternatives.
I suspect the same is true of carbon sequestration, that there's a learning curve and more to it than we think, and technological improvements matter. So, while I'm no expert, I'm not impressed when someone says there's nothing to it.
I would make the same argument for solar and wind actually: there's nothing but the economics of power storage and land use keeping solar and wind from being the primary power sources of civilization. Technologically, it's been feasible for decades, if not longer. The substantial improvements made in the interim haven't been about making it possible where it wasn't before, they've been about making it cheaper than fossil energy because regardless of what's possible, as a society we've decided to largely offload energy policy decisions to the mindless paperclip maximizer of the market.
EDIT: Also as an addendum, "carbon capture is easy" wasn't exactly my intended takeaway. What I'm getting at is more, carbon capture is very promising technology, with multiple pilot plants using varied techniques that have no evident technical hurdles to overcome that, nevertheless, will never be put to productive use by market forces alone.
You're talking as if money and prices were just a way of keeping score. If it were just a game then I could see ignoring it.
But to a first approximation, more expensive things have a larger environmental footprint. They require more expensive tooling and materials, and more labor. So I don't think environmentalists should be ignoring the costs of proposed new technologies.
(Of course, prices would be very different if all environmental impacts were priced in, but I expect that expensive new technologies would still be expensive.)
Price does carry some useful information of course, which is why I used a ballpark figure for the price of carbon sequestration in the first place, to give a rough feel for the amount of effort required. But economies of scale make things quite complicated; if solar power had been heavily invested in fifty years ago due to the promise of the technology, regardless of lack of immediate profitability, prices would have fallen quickly as the technology was developed, refined, made more commonplace for tinkerers to tinker with and so on. Basically, I think it's entirely possible to "force" a technological tipping point, given the societal will. The main point that I am trying and apparently failing to make is that the hegemony of the simple price mechanism driving our energy market is garbage at incentivizing the construction of rational, responsible, and sustainable infrastructure, and we'd do better to take a more directed approach to our development, considering a much wider range of factors, whether that's through externality pricing or direct economic planning.
I do think that government leadership can push technologies faster than they would happen otherwise. I’m thinking of German subsidies for solar energy, for example. Or take the development of new vaccines.
It seems a bit much to say we already have the technologies though? There is a learning curve and it takes years, sometimes. How open are the people running pilot projects about the challenges they’re facing?
I would be in favor of more money going into developing carbon sequestration and the $100 million X prize seems like a good start.
And yes, it should have been done years ago. But I don’t know the technology well enough to say how long ago such a contest would have been effective.
Continuing to burn carbon is going to destroy modern civilization, and we're about out of time. We already have every scrap of technology we need to transition to being carbon negative, what's missing are strong enough incentives. Fossil fuel infrastructure becoming uninsurable due to activism, or so expensive to insure that it's uncompetitive, is a hell of an incentive.