Anything to avoid changing the status quo to reduce emissions. Honestly embarrassing.
How do you expect humanity to get to pre-industrial revolution carbon dioxide levels without atmospheric extraction?
U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
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Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#22> The Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Earthshot seeks to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 a tonne by the end of the decade At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary…
5% is still much higher than the costs of climate change for at least a century (at least if you believe the IPCC projections).
I'm not sure which projections you're referring to, but researchers at UCL concluded:
"the damage costs caused by climate change will reach $5.4 trillion a year by 2070, and $31 trillion a year by 2200"
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/energy/news/2020/oct/cdp-and-...
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#23Wouldn't it be more efficient to remove CO2 from the sea where it has been accumulating as the oceans act as sinks for atmospheric pollutants and ocean acidification is actually more of a problem in the short term?
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Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#24Wouldn't it be more efficient to remove CO2 from the sea where it has been accumulating as the oceans act as sinks for atmospheric pollutants and ocean acidification is actually more of a problem in the short term?
Been a while since I read up on this, but I think the problem is the energy cost of extracting CO2 from sea water makes it a wash at least in terms of CO2 reduction.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#25Wouldn't it be more efficient to remove CO2 from the sea where it has been accumulating as the oceans act as sinks for atmospheric pollutants and ocean acidification is actually more of a problem in the short term?
I had this thought too, an aqueous solution feels like it ought to be much easier to do chemistry with. But I haven’t heard of anyone working on it.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#26At a first read, this is great, because it's apolitical. It's about innovation, and is positive, I.e. doing something instead of telling people not to do something. For once this seems like something a government should be doing. I'm almost suspicious I missed something.
> At a first read, this is great, because it's apolitical.
This is a strange statement to make about DAC. Once you think about what that means there's a lot of thorny political issues.
Removing carbon from the air to store it permanently does not give you anything economically. Someone's going to have to have to pay for it. Is that people who made their wealth based on fossil fuels? People who emit most or who did so in the past? Or everyone?
Don't get me wrong: I'm all in favor of supporting development of this tech. But there are complicated political questions to be answered. Framing this as "apolitical" is probably not going to help.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#27I do worry about the oversight and auditing of such metrics. The article does refer to the problem of "I planted X trees therefore I removed Y carbon", when that is true only under particular conditions.
I guess you need to plant X trees, wait Y years for them to accumulate Z carbon and then bury all the trees M meters underground to stay there forever.
A forest will only grow as a carbon sink on the century timescale, which is the window in which we irreversibly enter headlong into the anthropocene or mitigate our global anthopogenic effects. We don't have to plan for burying them.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#28Anything to avoid changing the status quo to reduce emissions. Honestly embarrassing.
There is no way to fix this problem without carbon removal, even if emissions go to zero today.
Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#29Re: U.S. sets goal to drive down cost of removing CO2 from atmosphere
#30> The Department of Energy's Carbon Negative Earthshot seeks to slash the cost of carbon removal to $100 a tonne by the end of the decade At 40 gigatonnes a year, that would be $4 trillion, which is about 5% of Gross World Product.[0] It's probably still cheaper to avoid emitting the CO2 in the first place, but that does put an upper bound on the cost of reaching net zero. Of course, no one wants to take a voluntary…
5% is still much higher than the costs of climate change for at least a century (at least if you believe the IPCC projections).
>at least if you believe the IPCC projection
Maybe you shouldn't. The IPCC does good work, but their predictions are conservative and imperfect, and they mostly ignore tail risks. Up until 2012 they predicted that arctic summer sea ice would last until the 2050s, and now it's estimated to be gone by the 2030s.