31–40 of 347 posts
I thought a recent study showed the most effective/cheap method of reducing CO2 was very simple: plant a lot of trees. Like, really.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
More importantly, having an actual price tag on removing carbon from the atmosphere would allow carbon markets to finally work. Assuming there is enough political will to properly monitor and tax CO2 emissions worldwide, which is a huge ask. A lot of companies and countries will be tempted to lie because it will make their products more competitive.
Cant we see this from space? Estimate the amount of co2 coming from each country that way and send them a bill every year. My first thought was “that’s where auditing and bureaucracy come in” but maybe satellites are a better way
> 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…
That's just for carbon neutrality. We have put 2 teratons of carbon into the atmosphere since industrialization.
Yes we probably don't need to remove all of that, but at least 1 teraton is probably a very good idea, by trees, olivine, seeding oceans, pumping into the ground (which I think eventually comes back out.
This is kind of like the mainstream reporting on the budget deficit, which always concentrates on the YEARLY deficit (2.77 trillion) versus 129 trillion overall.
The solution will be economic.
Want to replace fossil fuels with cleaner energy sources? It won't happen until those alternatives are cheaper.
When energy is sufficiently cheap or the byproducts are sufficiently valuable, that's when carbon extraction from the atmosphere will make sense.
I've seen some ideas for this. One is to use renewable energy to extract CO2 from the atmosphere and turn it into gasoline. That's actually not that hard. It's just chemistry after all. Alternatives are things like graphene.
There are places in the world where this could make sense. A given area might be remote such that building pipes of delivering such fuel is cost-prohibitive. Likewise, the cost of extending an electric grid might be too high. Or it simply may not be feasible because of politics.
This can negate the disadvantage solar and wind have in being variable power output and/or simply using a hydrocarbon fuel as a means of storing excess energy.
This would technically be carbon neutral not carbon negative but it'd be a start.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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-...
Which gives an estimate of 2.6% of global GDP in 2100.
The one you mention seems to be in the same ballpark: assuming 2% growth, in 2070 global GDP will probably be somewhere around 220T, so 5.4/220 = 2.4%.
At 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…
There is an economical advantage to reducing CO2 from the environment. It gives you an environment that humans can thrive in (by way of being an environment that the current food chain can thrive in). It’s hard to consider investing in the future when you think it might be apocalyptical. Easier if you think there is a future for humanity.