We need to stop callin it “climate change” and start calling it ”climate crisis”.
The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
111–120 of 147 posts
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not objectively true, as plants and even rocks grab CO2 out of the air pretty efficiently. From a thermodynamics standpoint, you can burn fossil fuels at 50-70% efficient (50% is not uncommon), and the actual theoretical lower bound of CO2 direct air capture is ~20 kJ/mol,[0] or about 1.7MJ/kg of elemental carbon, compared to 33MJ/kg for burning elemental carbon (same as high grade coal). (Burning methane is even bet…
> Burning methane is even better Actually, burning is probably the best way to deal with any excess methane. Methane has a significantly higher warming potential than CO2 does. So if there's any methane we're venting into the atmosphere, we should burn it to convert it into CO2. Bonus points if you can use the generated energy to capture the CO2 as well.
From what I can see, yes, methane is abstractly a worse greenhouse gas. However its absorption band is within that of water vapor. Since water vapor is plentiful around the blue marble, methane doesn’t really cause any problems.
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#113Not a word about the most effective, cheapest strategy: reduce emissions? Most Americans could reduce their emissions by 75% while improving their standard of living by buying less junk, wearing a sweater in the winter, eating more healthy, and other low hanging fruit that will make them more active, healthy, connected to their communities, etc. Reduce consumption by half. There, I just saved us $300 million. How is…
Jimmy Carter tried this and got vilified for it. You don't get into positions of power by telling Americans how to do more with less. You get there by telling Americans "More, more, always more, more for you. More, more, more. I promise."
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#114Carbon capture is the dumbest and most expensive way to move forward. It would be cheaper to just turn every coal plant into a solar farm then it would be to capture the carbon out of the air so why even bother. Oh yeah, corporate interests.
True. Especially if nature already has the best direct carbon capture technology since hundreds millions of years for free: trees!
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#115I'm not sure if this article hammers home the key point: extracting carbon from the air always takes more energy that was gained by burning the fossil fuel to make that carbon. This is inevitable due to the entropy cost of de-mixing CO2 from the air, and from the limited efficiencies of thermal power generation (~33-40% for a coal power plant, perhaps 20% in an internal combustion engine), and limited efficiency of t…
Not objectively true, as plants and even rocks grab CO2 out of the air pretty efficiently. From a thermodynamics standpoint, you can burn fossil fuels at 50-70% efficient (50% is not uncommon), and the actual theoretical lower bound of CO2 direct air capture is ~20 kJ/mol,[0] or about 1.7MJ/kg of elemental carbon, compared to 33MJ/kg for burning elemental carbon (same as high grade coal). (Burning methane is even bet…
'Populist jerks' meaning people who are democratic?
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#116I'm not sure if this article hammers home the key point: extracting carbon from the air always takes more energy that was gained by burning the fossil fuel to make that carbon. This is inevitable due to the entropy cost of de-mixing CO2 from the air, and from the limited efficiencies of thermal power generation (~33-40% for a coal power plant, perhaps 20% in an internal combustion engine), and limited efficiency of t…
> So it only makes sense to spend energy on sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere, once you've already de-carbonised everything which you possibly can. Not necessarily. I'm thinking of cold polar winters with no wind and no sun, people burning fossil fuels to stay warm. Meanwhile in deserts solar panels powering carbon capture machines to reverse the greenhouse gases back again. Maybe even the carbon capture creates synt…
Yeah, you can basically use the atmosphere as a chemical battery.
Also, a better example than heating homes with coal is aircraft. Long distance air plane travel is so far only doable via fossil fuels due to their energy density. And while you can run a electric line to a house and heat it with electricity, this is not possible for long range aircraft.
So the idea is you use hydrocarbons to run aircraft and then capture the CO2 produced and turn it into more hydrocarbons to run your airplanes. This of course requires clean energy source to work, but is perfectly doable. :)
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#117I'm not sure if this article hammers home the key point: extracting carbon from the air always takes more energy that was gained by burning the fossil fuel to make that carbon. This is inevitable due to the entropy cost of de-mixing CO2 from the air, and from the limited efficiencies of thermal power generation (~33-40% for a coal power plant, perhaps 20% in an internal combustion engine), and limited efficiency of t…
Here's my vote for planting more trees and especially letting older forests grow and thrive.
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#118I've been interested in these types of technologies lateley. > that many people are extremely pessimistic about climate change. They can’t imagine any solution – often, they become mesmerized by what appears to be an insoluble collective action problem – and fall into fatalistic despair. More and more, I find this description matches my thoughts on climate change. I'm really beginning to think the problem might requi…
We are geoengineering already, so we are going to have to deliberately geoengineer our way out of the problem.
Re: The impact of direct air carbon capture on climate change
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
TIL. Now we just need to execute the second part of his plan to capture the carbon from the energy produced
Or capture the methane, upgrade it and run generators/cars/busses of it. It's existing tech https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biogas
Why bother for landfills?
If the landfill can generate electricity that would otherwise be generated, it will convert the CH4 more efficiently than a bus and you don't expand energy upgrading it.
You can power the bus with the already high quality CH4 you extracted from the ground that you would have otherwise burned in to generate the electricity.