So. US $150 per ton, so $150B per gigaton. We must ultimately remove 1,000 gigatons of CO2, but we need to start with 10/year. Using this method will cost the world $1.5 trillion per year. That seems completely within our resources. What's stopping us?
Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
71–80 of 93 posts
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree and feel that it is you who are missing the point. While I agree removal of CO2 needs to be less expensive, we simply don't have an option right now. We do have an option to make it more expensive to pollute until we figure that out. Why do you directly relate carbon taxes to a reduction in living standards??
>We do have an option to make it more expensive to pollute until we figure that out I'm saying that option only exists on paper because invoking it in any capacity that actually imposes enough cost to make people reduce polluting by a meaningful amount is going to met with too big a backlash to be sustainable. >Why do you directly relate carbon taxes to a reduction in living standards?? Because anything that raises c…
Agree with you completely. A simplistic way of pointing this out is that EVERY tax and every cost regressively effects the poor more. If you are close to break-even, or you have negative surplus already, then additional cost is always worse for those who are worse off.
The alternative is to levy large taxes on corporations who pollute, that come only after payroll expense. Then, you could create a progressive deduction where pollution taxes were zero for low income earners, while after some threshold everyone was taxed for polluting.
It's unsatisfactory because the government hates earmarking specific income for specific outcomes and they much prefer the slush fund approach (for not entirely bad reasons). But, if pollution taxes specifically were spent on buying CO2 sequestration products which were deemed effective by the NSF or some other group, we might be able to create a non-regressive pollution tax to increase the net cost of polluting.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#73So. US $150 per ton, so $150B per gigaton. We must ultimately remove 1,000 gigatons of CO2, but we need to start with 10/year. Using this method will cost the world $1.5 trillion per year. That seems completely within our resources. What's stopping us?
I really wonder the same thing. I know I’m at a tail of the distribution, but I could see committing 150/mo of my own funds to sequestering co2.
I’ve heard it posited that for one or another reason climate change could create a dictatorial regime one or another way. I hope humanity figures out a way to pull our collective heads out of the sand and start doing stuff before anything like a dictator kicks up...
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#74I don't like those kind of projects because they sort of try to bank on the global warming problem with inventions and new things, except this doesn't work, because CO2 is just too hard to eliminate. It's the penultimate problem of industrialized capitalism: "we have a problem and we need to MAKE something new to solve this". But the problem was always the excess of industry in the first place. The solution is simple…
"the penultimate problem" you seem to think "penultimate" is a more grandiose way of saying "ultimate", but it's not. it means "second to last".
Well, "ultimate" means last. So it's really a way of saying "second most important", which I think could easily have been what they were going for there.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#7580 - 180 US$ 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.
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…
Demanding an increase in the cost of adding CO2 would be effective for the organizations and people in that jurisdiction as long as that rule lasts. It's a great stop-gap mechanism. But a technical solution to lower the cost of removing a ton of CO2 is superior to a political solution to raise the cost of adding a ton of CO2. It's better because it's a permanent step forwards, not one that has to be held on to, and it's better because it better aligns with everyone's incentives.
The political solution is vulnerable to changing societal and cultural winds. It takes constant expenditure of political fervor to maintain as a law, and is always vulnerable to a political competitor suggesting "...don't want to pay that $100USD/ton fee? Help me gain power and I'll help you gain money."
Once the technology exists to take the cost to remove it down by an order of magnitude, this effort no longer needs to be expended and the incentive to remove it no longer exists. Modern fuel-injected and turbocharged engines do not only have lower emissions, they are more powerful and require lower maintenance than carbureted big-block engines. And if you've driven a Tesla you know that a battery electric vehicle can be both better for the environment and a better car (for everything but extremely long-range journeys) than an internal-combustion vehicle. Similarly, Lets Encrypt making HTTPS as easy and as cheap as non-encrypted sites did far more to increase the number of secure websites than years of advocacy begging website owners to get certificates and browser vendors to increase the equivalent of fees.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
The price for a CO2 certificate is around 25€ per ton. The biggest problem is that lots of emission sources are still excluded from the CO2 trade and that businesses receive a certain amount of CO2 certificates for free. https://markets.businessinsider.com/commodities/co2-european...
The problem with CO2 certificates is that they aren't backed by anything. We had no priceable scalable means of removing CO2 from the atmosphere so those prices are arbitrary. If people were serious about using markets solve this problem the price of CO2 credits would reflect what it actually takes to remove that much CO2 from the atmosphere and they would be much more expensive. There would be companies forming just…
Carbon removal and prevention projects are certified. This creates a certificate which can then be sold on the market.
https://www.goldstandard.org/guided-tour/project-developers#...
When direct removal costs are below the price of the CER then that will become the primary way that certs are produced.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#77So. US $150 per ton, so $150B per gigaton. We must ultimately remove 1,000 gigatons of CO2, but we need to start with 10/year. Using this method will cost the world $1.5 trillion per year. That seems completely within our resources. What's stopping us?
I really wonder the same thing. I know I’m at a tail of the distribution, but I could see committing 150/mo of my own funds to sequestering co2. I’ve heard it posited that for one or another reason climate change could create a dictatorial regime one or another way. I hope humanity figures out a way to pull our collective heads out of the sand and start doing stuff before anything like a dictator kicks up...
To the GP asking what's stopping us: 150 usd per month is a quarter of average wage here.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#78Is 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…
It's not really a mystery, we could just bring co2 levels back in line what they were at the beginning of the 20th century. Hell, even the 1950's levels of CO2 would be great. But right now the carbon capture discussions are simply trying to avert disaster. None of the potential carbon capture solutions can remove so much carbon that we'll have to worry about removing too much co2.
> 1950's levels of CO2 would be great
In absolute terms, but we have a lot more people now. It looks like the US is already back at 1950's levels (per-capita).
https://eidclimate.org/u-s-per-capita-carbon-emissions-at-lo...
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not really a mystery, we could just bring co2 levels back in line what they were at the beginning of the 20th century. Hell, even the 1950's levels of CO2 would be great. But right now the carbon capture discussions are simply trying to avert disaster. None of the potential carbon capture solutions can remove so much carbon that we'll have to worry about removing too much co2.
> 1950's levels of CO2 would be great In absolute terms, but we have a lot more people now. It looks like the US is already back at 1950's levels (per-capita). https://eidclimate.org/u-s-per-capita-carbon-emissions-at-lo...
He means 1950s level of atmospheric CO2, not emissions.
Re: Potential large-scale CO2 removal via enhanced rock weathering with croplands
#80Earlier 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…
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