Now let's start charging $50 a ton to release CO2
The EU is charging ~ $47 (USD) per ton right now.
Are they spending the money on carbon capture?
A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
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Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
#252Useful conversion: At $47/ton, it costs $0.47/gallon of gasoline burnt to capture the CO2 the gasoline would release. This fact that you divide by 100 to go from ton of CO2 to gallon of gasoline equivalent is a useful coincidence. It also means that a dollar per gallon gasoline tax for carbon capture would be enough to make cars carbon negative (cars have a lot of embodied carbon; the factor of two covers that).
If you could attach that as a tax successfully to the cost of gas, you might have a beneficial side effect of reducing vehicle driving.
Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep. The weird thing is that their sigfig rules of thumb aren't particularly accurate and after any non-trivial operations (or more than a few operations) just give wrong results. Tracking precision through calculations requires interval arithmetic, which is a pretty big PITA and not frequently used. I think the sig figs cult comes out of mistaking a simplified lesson on precision for a useful practice.
Not sure exactly what you mean. It is well known that you should keep additional digits throughout the calculation and then drop non-significant ones for final results.
The number of digits out is only a simple function of the digits in if you're doing fairly trivial calculations.
Checkout https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interval_arithmetic for what it takes to monitor precision through complex calculations (in particular, see the bits about using the taylor expansions of non-trivial functions).
Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now most population models suggest we'll see growth flatten within decades, and peak within a century. It's not really an open question - it would take reversal of long lasting trends in large parts of the world to do more than at most delay the reversal.
The reversal analysis you've mentioned doesn't take into account (not in the forms I've seen) the presence of high fertility subpopulations that will come to dominate larger low fertility populations eventually and drag everyone's fertility rate back up.
There are no "high fertility subpopulations" that maintain fertility rate irrespective of external situations. Research on immigration for example consistently show that immigrant populations adapt to local fertility levels within 1-2 generations. If anything, increasing immigration to developed countries would likely accelerate the reversal of population growth because of this effect.
Furthermore, fertility drops as education increases and poverty decreases. This trend is consistent in every population where we can correlate economic development. E.g. here's the fertility rate for Niger [1], one of the poorest countries in the world. Even that has taken a sharp downturn as economic growth has started decoupling from uranium export (which previously dominated Niger's GDP, but provided very little benefit to the population).
Niger, incidentally, has the highest fertility rate in the world, and is one of only 10 remaining countries with fertility rate above 5.
As such such "high fertility subpopulations" are really high poverty, low education populations - currently countries categorised as "Least Developed Countries" by the UN have a fertility rate of 4. Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region of the world that remains above 4, but that too is dropping fast as most of the countries in the region are seeing solid economic growth.
As poverty drops and education increases, fertility rates are dropping across the board, just not at the same rate. But even sub-Saharan African is headed for reversal.
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right now most population models suggest we'll see growth flatten within decades, and peak within a century. It's not really an open question - it would take reversal of long lasting trends in large parts of the world to do more than at most delay the reversal.
> Right now most population models suggest we'll see growth flatten within decades, and peak within a century. We’re way off topic here but what the heck… in my entire life, I’ve not seen one single ‘population model’ play out accurately. We’ve seen dozens of popular ones that have failed to come true in the past century alone - what makes today’s different?
That fertility rates have been consistently dropping in line with recent models for a long time [1]. Global fertility rates are already below 2.4, with ~2.1 the replacement rate.
China is currently set to face a reversal somewhere from the middle of this decade to 1-2 decades away depending on who you believe. India is set to follow. Many smaller countries are also reversing around now, but those two for obvious reasons have a huge impact.
The last holdouts with high fertility are a handful of sub-Saharan states, with Niger by far the worst (Somalia second - the two are the only countries in the world left with fertility rates above 6), but even Niger is seeing fertility rates plummet as it's economic growth have sped up.
The estimates varies massively based on various scenarios. E.g. on a current trajectory, China will see its population halve by 2100. It's likely you'll see the Chinese government do a lot to prevent the decline from being that steep because it will be an economic nightmare to manage, and so we can't assume the trajectories will remain unchanged.
But nobody is actively trying to get much above-replacement fertility rates, so any political interference is likely to moderate delay the peak not prevent it.
Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your counter-argument is about semantics. Logically, it only reinforces my argument. Unless you're suggesting that global warming is natural and not caused by humans... If you agree that 'artificial selection' can work quickly (as scientific evidence suggests) and you believe that humans are the main driver of climate change (as is the consensus among climate scientists). Then my proposition that evolution can work v…
Wow what a watertight argument. The key is the word "can" - which you interpret to mean "extremely likely", and I interpret to mean "extremely unlikely". Other than that, we agree.
At a global scale, even things that are extremely unlikely tend to occur. Because there is so much going on in parallel, it's like the lottery; it's extremely unlikely to win the lottery but play it 1 million times a minute and it becomes very likely.
Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why the Democrats, in particular, don't turn this into political hay: it's literally the perfect counter to the coal issue. 1. Olivine is plentiful, everywhere, including as the tailings from huge defunct coal mines; 2. All of the mining & transportation infrastructure is already in mining country; 3. Mining country is desperate for solid, dependable blue collar work; and, 4. Mining country already has e…
1. The tech isn't ready to deploy. 2. There are hardly any Democrat leaders left who care about or can talk to blue collar workers.
> The tech isn't ready to deploy
What makes you say this? All they have to do is grind up olivine and dump it in parts of the ocean with high vorticity like unused shores.
Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
#258Alright HN domain experts. I’m prepared. What’s the rub?
It’s only practical on mixtures with high co2 gas concentrations
Such as flue gases from fertiliser, cement, steel and power plants ... which make up a sizeable chunk of our emissions.
We should be targeting CO2 capture at point-sources wherever possible. Why wait until it's diffused into the atmosphere before trying to capture it?
Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like with every other solution, under the current political and economic systems, there's no incentive to scale it up quickly enough to make a dent in global warming and it will just live in small local prototypes and in the dreams of techno-solutionists.
I think the bigger gotcha with carbon capture is it sustains the quid pro quo that climate change is the biggest threat to unchecked energy consumption growth. Behind climate change, there's also biodiversity collapse, ocean fish depletion, and that's gonna ruin the food system billions of people depend on, way before they see the benefits of globalisation.
Consumption is the underlying driver but emissions is definitely the biggest 'base' threat.
Acidification (from CO2) and temperature (from CO2) rise would continue to lead to collapses of fish stocks even if we stopped trawling the oceans.
Re: A CO2 capture solvent with exceptionally low total costs of capture
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
Asbestos, AB somehow managed to get over their pride and stop fighting to continue mining asbestos. They’re still proud of the history and hard work that their town represents, but nobody there thinks it would be a better world if they were still digging asbestos out of the ground. (Heck, they finally renamed the town, too. It’s “Val-des-Sources” now.) How the townsfolk there transitioned into that “doing it historic…
Wasn't that brought on by a precipitous fall in demand. I doubt the asbestos miners had any choice in the matter. In case of coal, there's still _some_ demand though it's on the decline.
I think of that as the climate crisis's Prisoner's Dilemma: it's individually advantageous for countries to ignore carbon caps.
If carbon-heavy power generation didn't also emit particulate pollution, we probably wouldn't have a chance in hell. But thankfully, renewables and electric vehicle are also a solution to the pollution problem in many high-population areas.
But afaik, this will be the first time we're asking entire countries to forgoe huge things in their immediate best interest, in pursuit of a greater good.
The Montreal Protocol didn't touch as huge of a part of the economy, and nuclear weapons are their own ball of thistles.
Removing lead from gasoline is probably the nearest analog, although with a much lower adoption burden.