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We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

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Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#151

Post by edanm »

philbarr wrote: post #129
acd wrote: post #120

We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due t…

How would this "circular sustainable economy" work? People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make. We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.

> People tend to think of there being only two versions of the economy available - the government tells us what stuff to make, or free markets determine what we make.

Then people are wrong. Almost no economy is purely one of the other - even the most "free market" economies have lots of government regulation, government spending makes up huge parts of their economy, etc.

> We would need a way of incentivising re-use, and of incentivising companies to make things re-usable. Currently the only way to make more money is to make and sell more stuff.

Totally doable in a completely free market way. You tax externalities.

This is basic stuff - economists generally agree that if you set up a carbon tax, people will use less carbon.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#152

Post by Fiahil »

Hermel wrote: post #102

I’m paying Climeworks 1000$ to remove a ton of CO2 every month. Not very cost effective, but a start.

You could also plant 100 trees every month for the same amount, and in 5 years you would have a small forest + removed 1079 tons of C02 instead of 60.

In 10 years, you would have 12000 trees and removed 4283 tons of C02 instead of 120.

Trees are not really the best carbon removal tool that one could hope for, but at least they're a decent comparison.

PS: Very approximate carbon removal per tree per year rate of 5.9kg. Bigger trees can remove more carbon (>22kg for a 10yo tree) and the tree species also have a role to play, but you get the point, climeworks effectiveness is extremely small and you're lighting piles of cash on fire.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#153

Post by lazyjones »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #28

What the article leaves to the conclusion is what needs to be stated up front and center: it's virtually impossible to do this efficiently, cheaply, or effectively because there's so little CO2 in the air, meaning a) adding even a little bit more greatly affects the CO2 levels b) with a global ppm of ~400, it basically means that you need to filter 2500 molecules of air to get a single molecule of CO2, and that's ass…

Plants can do it cheaply, why don't we just let them?

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#155

Post by 72deluxe »

acd wrote: post #120

We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due t…

How many of us have phones and laptops with batteries built into them?

Sadly there are no reasonable alternatives. We're funnelled into this mindset/system.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#156

Post by Ono-Sendai »

millstone wrote: post #36
maerF0x0 wrote: post #6

Why do we always phrase it as changing the climate instead of facing that it's an energy balance issue? Too much energy is entering the earth and getting trapped. We can solve it by letting less enter, or otherwise sinking some of it. Consider if we stored the excess energy as chemical energy? or reflected some fraction of the energy back out away from us? reducing consumption is a failing project and the greener tec…

"Energy balance" isn't the right diagnosis because the energy balance has not changed significantly: the sun is and has forever been the dominant energy source in climate terms. Broad-spectrum sunlight hits the earth, and is later emitted as infrared. CO2 is transparent to UV, but absorbs infrared. So global warming is a consequence of the fact that the major fossil fuel emission is opaque to a wavelength of light em…

It's absolutely an energy balance issue. The Earth is heating up, because it's radiating away less energy than its receiving.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#157

Post by clSTophEjUdRanu »

acd wrote: post #120

We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due t…

Fusion energy and CO2 removal are my bet.

The limitless consumerism isn't as bad if all the products were created with power from green alternatives.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#158

Post by specialist »

baq wrote: post #107
threeseed wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean a Carbon Tax ? The tax that applies to every single business, every single product, every single process, everything. The one that causes every single vested interest to come out of the woodwork and join together to make it politically toxic. We tried this in Australia. It has killed every government that even dared to discuss it. And politically it is utterly impossible to defend e.g. "Carbon tax that raise…

don't call it tax, call it carbon dividend and give the collected money away to citizens.

Squint a bit and Canada's carbon dividend looks like UBI.

Two birds, one stone.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#159

Post by lopmotr »

Phenix88be wrote: post #100

Article like this make me so depressed. The conclusion is always (from my point of vue) : we are fucked. We need a magic device that will remove gigatons of CO2 out of the atmosphere in less than 30 years and we need it to do it without using energy or consuming rare material. And you can't do much with CO2 at the end.

Before you get too worried, remember that positive stories about climate change are politically forbidden in most mainstream publications. You're only getting the gloomy side of it.

The harm it will do is still finite and not even really known. Maybe we can just suck it up and suffer the consequences? Do you have an idea of how bad it will really be? Worse than World War II? Worse than communism? Worse than the Spanish Flu? All that stuff happened in the same century and killed close to 10% of the earth's entire population! Yet somehow we're doing great.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#160

Post by chpill »

acd wrote: post #120

We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due t…

> The best thing I can think of then is to lower the temperature of the earth because then the oceans will act as a Co2 buffer sink.

If we had some other levers to cool down the earth, the CO2 in the atmosphere would not be such a big problem.

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