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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

#201

Post by nnq »

Look, it's cool that we consider all these fancy solutions, but we had and still have a more obvious solution of pricing-externalities into things - a proper carbon-tax and recycling-taxes for plastics high enough to make them undesirable, increase gas (and coal) prices enough to make electric everything look cheap and maybe even nuclear power look cheaper in the new comparison!

Stop pending the argument that "it's politically impossible / toxic / whatever / unenforceable etc.", that's a dumb argument.

Just take politics out of the equation! Or more precisely, take "democratic choice" out of this particular policy decision!

If countries amend their constitutions to disallow any party or individual not in support of this to even be part of any election, then this particular aspect would simply not appear in political campaigns. Have "dark room" deals in most countries of the world put this into place and move on.

And once the major international players are on board, for any country not playing the same game, just kindly point the missiles at them!

In the end, most national governments would approve of such taxation because they'll have the opportunity to formulate it in their own terms and slightly increase national budgets (maybe investing a bit more in the military and gaining an advantage over their neighbors that don't do it... ugly but any incentive in the right direction helps). And multinational corporations would also not mind it much if it's done across the board, without favoring anyone... and actually corporations could be "hired to enforce the tax" in more advanced schemas, offering opportunities to profit while punishing misbehaving countries.

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

#202

Post by cmrdporcupine »

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.

This has been the Canadian model and the Right has still weaponized the worst kind of vitriol against it (despite a carbon tax being the most market friendly mechanism).

Opponents of carbon tax and similar measures need to decide which they like less... some lost profits, an escalating carbon tax, and reshuffling their investment portfolios -- or food riots, mass migration, the massive resurgence of left wing populism, and even civil war, once the effects of climate change become intense and obvious to the populace.

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

#203

Post by nnq »

threeseed wrote: post #45
privateSFacct wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It only has to do it cheaply now because there is NO COST to putting CO2 into the air. Why are people surprised that if something is free (pumping CO2 into air) demand for it is high? You are telling me that doing a charge of let's say $10 - $100/ton of CO2 wouldn't have a DRAMATIC impact on emissions? Is $10 - $100/ton too little for a supposed climate emergency? There is so much funding and lawmaking and finger poi…

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…

> It has killed every government that even dared to discuss it. And politically it is utterly impossible to defend

Then pull it out of political discussion! We don't have political discussion about "how to hang people of color Q better" anywhere in the world (mostly) anymore because we've wrote it in the text of our f laws that violence and racial discrimination are forbidden! Not on the political menu anymore.

Same needs to happen with lots of stuff concerning climate, ecology, sustainability etc. - we need to restrict the political menu to only the right choices.

And use the states' monopoly on violence to enforce these choices.

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

#204

Post by cmrdporcupine »

pm90 wrote: post #125
akie wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to treat climate change like the existential crisis that it is, and start spending like we're at war. If we can drop 2000 billion dollars on war in Iraq, why can we not do the same for something actually worthwhile like ensuring that our children and grandchildren inherit a livable planet?

We can. However that would fundamentally shift the economy off fossil fuels which is one of the largest lobbying groups in Washington and specifically the GOP.

Judging from the tone and rhetoric of the so-called "left" in the US Democratic party, it isn't limited to the GOP by any means. Watching a few minutes (all I could stand) of the South Carolina debate last night was depressing.

History will not look kindly on this epoch.

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

#205

Post by yqx »

BurningFrog wrote: post #189
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…

I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. The atmospheric CO₂ rates come from burning too much fossil fuel. Not from people wanting things. If you consume and produce things in a way that doesn't release net CO₂, that is perfectly fine from a climate perspective, even if the products are meaningless artefacts of a materialistic life that will never make you happy. I understand the impulse toward a simpler, less materialistic…

Mass consumption and CO2 emissions aren't independent problems. It already is an insurmountable challenge to meet current energy demands with green energy. Producing things costs energy, energy costs CO2. Producing things in a carbon-neutral way still requires energy and that energy could have more usefully been spent to replace carbon non-neutral energy.

There needs to be a discussion about economic incentives. It's not people wanting things that is the problem. It's that it's easier and more profitable to produce short-lived crappy things that can be sold for cheap, because the environmental impact of the waste it generates (both CO2 and the actual crappy product itself) is not sufficiently factored into the price.

I would not be surprised if, in our current economic system, simply having more green energy available (or products produced without emitting CO2) is not going to solve anything. With almost 8 billion people on earth, we'll find ways to increase consumption and burn it.

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

#206

Post by tehjoker »

nnq wrote: post #201

Look, it's cool that we consider all these fancy solutions, but we had and still have a more obvious solution of pricing-externalities into things - a proper carbon-tax and recycling-taxes for plastics high enough to make them undesirable, increase gas (and coal) prices enough to make electric everything look cheap and maybe even nuclear power look cheaper in the new comparison! Stop pending the argument that "it's p…

"Just take politics out of the equation! Or more precisely, take "democratic choice" out of this particular policy decision!"

This is such a scary sentence! The problem of climate change has been cause precisely by a lack of democracy. The military, the large oil refiners, the design of our infrastructure has been deeply affected by corporate priorities at the expense of a manipulated populace. We have climate denial in the US in large part because of corporate propaganda (and the fact that if people's oil sector jobs disappear there's no organized democratic approach to help them, they're at the mercy of the private sector).

Furthermore, real democracy would include all the people affected by climate change that didn't cause it! The people of the Marshal islands should certainly have a say in how we approach this problem. Saying we don't need democracy is an extremely America centric approach.

In the circles I'm in, we talk a lot about eco-facsism, which is the way the ecological crisis will be used to promote fascist policies with a green tinge. These include blaming immigrants, cracking down on poor people, and denying democracy in favor of the technocratic actors who caused the problem in the first place.

We need the opposite! We need complete renewal of democracy and democratic practice in order to solve these problems. This idea scares the powerful because solving this crisis necessarily requires democratic control of major parts of the economy, which is a threat to the existing beneficiaries of the economic system.

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

#207

Post by petre »

snaptravisty wrote: post #82
petre wrote: post #47

Just pump air into ponds of algae/kelp or grow Azolla on the surface. Feed it with fertilizer runoff that's otherwise thrown into the rivers, seas, oceans. No need to build expensive solutions to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

that sounds like an expensive solution. I can't napkin math any of this since I don't know how much CO2 you could extract along with the other engineering and logistical problems: * which areas are suitable * how much energy is required * how much area of land is required. I hesitate to give credibility to any answer that starts with 'just... [do this thing]'. If you have any references I'd be curious to learn more

http://theazollafoundation.org/azollas-uses/as-a-co2-sequest...

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

#208

Post by sime2009 »

taneq wrote: post #85
ttul wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you can capture the CO2 using transient power from wind or solar and use it to make a synthetic fuel, then you have a potentially viable option. Carbon Engineering in Squamish BC is doing this for $100 a tonne. Their synthetic fuel costs about $2/L to make - still too expensive, but not if the carbon price rises to about $100/T.

That’s way better than I thought it would be, aren’t some European countries fairly close to that mark?

This morning I paid about 1.68 euro/L as a consumer for plain gas/petrol here in the Netherlands.

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

#209

Post by paulcarroty »

tjr225 wrote: post #181
ed_balls wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> lasts a life time. This won't change much. Nobody will work on Pentium II, drive a gas guzzler or get a low resolution MRI. It's hard to regulate such stuff. You can only improve it a bit e.g. mandatory 3-year warranty with an option to extend it to 6 years. While buying the consumer would see the price for each warranty length.

Nobody needs to work on a Pentium II- though I think we could probably find a lot of applications for really old CPUs. The main issue is how much power they consume. My 2013 MacBook Pro retina started having weird, annoying keyboard issues. I could spend 600$ to get it repaired or 1000$ to get a newer, refurbished macbook. However I'm finding a hand me down 2009 MacBook is working just fine after putting an ssd in it…

Not a mac user, but fixing keyboard issues for $600 sounds crazy.

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

#210

Post by nnq »

tehjoker wrote: post #206
nnq wrote: post #201

Look, it's cool that we consider all these fancy solutions, but we had and still have a more obvious solution of pricing-externalities into things - a proper carbon-tax and recycling-taxes for plastics high enough to make them undesirable, increase gas (and coal) prices enough to make electric everything look cheap and maybe even nuclear power look cheaper in the new comparison! Stop pending the argument that "it's p…

"Just take politics out of the equation! Or more precisely, take "democratic choice" out of this particular policy decision!" This is such a scary sentence! The problem of climate change has been cause precisely by a lack of democracy. The military, the large oil refiners, the design of our infrastructure has been deeply affected by corporate priorities at the expense of a manipulated populace. We have climate denial…

You don't have "democratic choice" for "how to better improve effectiveness of racial segregation", or how to better "discipline unruly women"... we know that some things like discrimination and violence are BAD, so we've written into law that they are not allowed.

In all the civilized world we've taken certain really BAD options off-the-political-democratic-choice menu, because we don't want them to even be considered!

Maybe we can do the same with things that are are really bad for the environment, like not having eco-externalities priced into things! This can be done without killing democracy as a whole. You cut a finger to save the whole organism! Maybe we should start seeing the environment as an extension of our bodies and treat violence against it similarly to how we treat physical violence - take it off the f menu!

Not doing this would only make things worse and, yeah, sooner or later some "(pseudo)eco-fascist" group would spring up and find groups to blame (for the f-up resulting from people not acting because they couldn't find a democratically-acceptable solution) and manage to sell hate well enough to get in power. And at that point everyone will be double-screwed: you'll have wrecked environment + "eco"-fascists!

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