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Am I missing something? I see two comments?
Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
61–70 of 93 posts
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Correctly pricing in the negative externalities of burning fossil fuels is what will help us shift away from fossil fuels. And if people are gonna be upset about a decrease in standard of living because they can't buy gas guzzling cars anymore or air travel is more expensive, they're really not going to like the drop in standard of living from climate change. Coastal flooding and storm surge is already destroying bil…
You are missing the point. The fact that we are headed toward refugee crisis and Miami being underwater doesn't change the incentives and game theory aspect of it. If emissions are expensive to remove and there is no way to globally ensure that nearly everybody pays for their emissions then nobody is going to pay for any of their emissions and will just invest in mitigating the problems locally even if that's not the…
> Any country that tries to make its people pay the actual cost of their emissions without the rest of the world doing the same will quickly see regime change because people aren't gonna waste a bunch of resources pissing in the wind like that.
Yes it is the classic tragedy of the commons scenario, and frequently that is the argument brought up whenever countries talk about climate change action. "Why should I reduce my emissions if China/India/United States doesn't". That is certainly a hurdle to correctly pricing CO2 emissions but I don't know that the hurdle is insurmountable or that that the hurdle won't get lower with time. We've seen a lot more popular support behind climate change action in just the last 2 or 3 years. Even then, in order for us to meet the challenge we have to start making the argument to people that we can either experience temporary discomfort now, or massive misery in the future. I think the average person really doesn't grasp the severity of the threat, so it makes it very difficult for them to make that value judgement.
> If emission are cheap to remove then it's going to be easier to get everyone to pay and the fact that some "emissions havens" won't pay will be a non issue because picking up the slack will be cheap enough. In order to tax emissions at what it costs to dispose of them the cost of disposing of them needs to be cheaper.
Clearly we should be pursuing carbon sequestration technology and trying to find ways to make it cheaper.
Maybe right now, today, pricing in the full cost of carbon removal in a fossil fuels tax wouldn't be economically viable. But at the very least, we should be pricing in some significant portion of it if possible. That is a political question that will have to be played out in countries across the globe.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#63Is there any research on what the ideal co2 level is? I’m on the climate change team of course but is there a risk we overshoot and bring co2 too low? I’d just say we should know what we’re aiming for. I guess plants like some amount of extra co2 so we’d think about that. Should we also have some kind of buffer between a future ice age? Don’t get me wrong, I think bring the co2 level close to zero is a viable argumen…
> is there a risk we overshoot and bring co2 too low? I had to laugh really hard at this one. Sorry.
Would you still be laughing if plants die off from lack of co2 and we stave?
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then let's raise the cost of adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere. We have been encouraging pollution since it's cheaper to just dump it than to reduce their production significantly or invest in capturing it. If the cost to remove it is $80-$100 USD, then that should be the cost of adding it. We should start demanding they either pay the costs associated with someone else having to deal with it, or reduce how much…
>Then let's raise the cost of adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere. >If the cost to remove it is $80-$100 USD, then that should be the cost of adding it. We should start demanding they either pay the costs associated with someone else having to deal with it, or reduce how much they dump into the air in the first place. This works until all the people who have enough trouble achieving a decent standard of living vote…
Making emitting CO2 more expensive leads directly to releasing less CO2 for a given standard of living. If you 10x the cost of coal, that's not going to 10x the cost of electricity, people are just going to switch over to a different energy source. Likewise for large scale industrial processes and transportation.
Further, most technologies that reduce CO2 emmissions do so by being more efficient, which reduces long term costs and leads to better productivity. The creation and installation of these replacements creates high paying jobs and stimulates the economy. Incentivising the adoption of these technologies allows them to be produced at larger scales which in turn drops their price, leading to wider scale adoption. Preventing catastrophic climate change of course has its own immense benefits to standards of living.
Indeed, a high tax due to a high cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere creates an enormous incentive for those who can not abandon their polluting methods to invest in the developments of better sequestering technologies. Waiting for the technology to just magically appear as a prerequisite for incentivizing its deployment is dumb.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#65Is there any research on what the ideal co2 level is? I’m on the climate change team of course but is there a risk we overshoot and bring co2 too low? I’d just say we should know what we’re aiming for. I guess plants like some amount of extra co2 so we’d think about that. Should we also have some kind of buffer between a future ice age? Don’t get me wrong, I think bring the co2 level close to zero is a viable argumen…
We have CO2 measurements going back to 1960 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeling_Curve Just going back to the CO2 level of 15 years ago " would be equivalent to the stone in 165,000 Empire State buildings or 66,000 Great Pyramids of Giza...a cost of $28 trillion for the United States, about $90,000 per individual" so there's no chance we'll accidentally remove too much! Source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/arti…
fwiw, this assumes a $500 price per ton to remove the carbon. Currently it sounds like several different technologies think they might be able to get it below $100/ton, which would significantly improve the cost outlook.
Though, you are completely right, even then it's still far too expensive to accidentally remove way too much.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
Then let's raise the cost of adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere. We have been encouraging pollution since it's cheaper to just dump it than to reduce their production significantly or invest in capturing it. If the cost to remove it is $80-$100 USD, then that should be the cost of adding it. We should start demanding they either pay the costs associated with someone else having to deal with it, or reduce how much…
>Then let's raise the cost of adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere. >If the cost to remove it is $80-$100 USD, then that should be the cost of adding it. We should start demanding they either pay the costs associated with someone else having to deal with it, or reduce how much they dump into the air in the first place. This works until all the people who have enough trouble achieving a decent standard of living vote…
That's the real problem with any policies that would actually significantly fight climate change: our unequal society has people who would be disproportionately impacted by increased prices and laws against carbon emissions.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
> is there a risk we overshoot and bring co2 too low? I had to laugh really hard at this one. Sorry.
Would you still be laughing if plants die off from lack of co2 and we stave?
I can't imagine what should happen for us to overshoot the co2 level and make it too low. We can't even slow down the increase of the global emissions, let alone freeze them at the current level, let alone reduce them to zero - which is the goal (I am talking about the emissions, not the concentration in the atmosphere). After the emissions are down to net zero, we need to start removing excess co2 from the atmosphere.
So what is the risk of overshooting and bringing co2 level down too much? I think there is a higher risk of the universe spontaneously disintegrating before that happens.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you still be laughing if plants die off from lack of co2 and we stave?
I can't imagine what should happen for us to overshoot the co2 level and make it too low. We can't even slow down the increase of the global emissions, let alone freeze them at the current level, let alone reduce them to zero - which is the goal (I am talking about the emissions, not the concentration in the atmosphere). After the emissions are down to net zero, we need to start removing excess co2 from the atmospher…
Have you seen the movie Snowpiercer?
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#6980 - 180 US$ for the removal of a ton of CO2 is far more than the cost of adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere (in Germany, currently around 10€/ton, I believe). In principle, removing a ton of CO2 needs to be cheaper than the cost of adding a ton of CO2.
I agree with you. But I wish we could get our shit together, decide that maybe this is a problem out of scope of the economy and we should solve it with the tools we have regardless of cost. Print some money to pay for it, push the cost downstream through inflation, doesn't matter the mechanism. The work needs to be done either way, but we should start now.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't imagine what should happen for us to overshoot the co2 level and make it too low. We can't even slow down the increase of the global emissions, let alone freeze them at the current level, let alone reduce them to zero - which is the goal (I am talking about the emissions, not the concentration in the atmosphere). After the emissions are down to net zero, we need to start removing excess co2 from the atmospher…
Have you seen the movie Snowpiercer?
That’s a movie. You know, fiction.