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Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

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Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#11

Post by civilized »

hutzlibu wrote: post #10
civilized wrote: post #7

I'm not sure how mad to be about this. Honestly, at the moment I kinda think it's a good thing on balance. I believe climate change is a huge, urgent concern. And I think it would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our risk mitigation portfolio. If fossil fuel companies, out of self-interest, want to support a legitimate research institution doing that, I'm not sure I should complain. If Stanford…

"It would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our climate change portfolio" Planting trees and establishing more forests is a already working technology with lots of other nice side effects, while I see the "artificial carbon removal" tech often just used as a excuse to not do anything now at all and wait for the magic game changer. "Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few s…

Regarding the trees, I hope they research that claim!

Regarding the concept that it's a distraction, I think that's folk behavioral psychology with an unhealthy dash of moralism. It needs to be substantiated with evidence before I take it seriously. We are talking about a real carbon mitigation research avenue that could have real benefits.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#12

Post by hutzlibu »

civilized wrote: post #11
hutzlibu wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our climate change portfolio" Planting trees and establishing more forests is a already working technology with lots of other nice side effects, while I see the "artificial carbon removal" tech often just used as a excuse to not do anything now at all and wait for the magic game changer. "Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few s…

Regarding the trees, I hope they research that claim! Regarding the concept that it's a distraction, I think that's folk behavioral psychology with an unhealthy dash of moralism. It needs to be substantiated with evidence before I take it seriously. We are talking about a real carbon mitigation research avenue that could have real benefits.

You mean you want quotes of people, who say climate change is not so bad, because we (will) have co2 removal tech?

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#13

Post by civilized »

hutzlibu wrote: post #12
civilized wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding the trees, I hope they research that claim! Regarding the concept that it's a distraction, I think that's folk behavioral psychology with an unhealthy dash of moralism. It needs to be substantiated with evidence before I take it seriously. We are talking about a real carbon mitigation research avenue that could have real benefits.

You mean you want quotes of people, who say climate change is not so bad, because we (will) have co2 removal tech?

I want evidence that there are people who wave away climate change because of proposed future CO2 removal tech, who would not wave away climate change if we stopped all research on CO2 removal tech.

I'm not trying to impose an impossible standard here. If you can show examples of something like this happening in contexts other than climate change, I'm open to that. What I don't accept is mere folk behavioral psychology speculation driving what an entire civilization does to mitigate a massive risk.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#14

Post by myrmidon »

civilized wrote: post #7

I'm not sure how mad to be about this. Honestly, at the moment I kinda think it's a good thing on balance. I believe climate change is a huge, urgent concern. And I think it would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our risk mitigation portfolio. If fossil fuel companies, out of self-interest, want to support a legitimate research institution doing that, I'm not sure I should complain. If Stanford…

I'm highly sceptical regarding ALL CO2 removal schemes that don't operate directly at a CO2 source, because I see absolutely NO WAY how they could ever be made cost effective:

CO2 concentration in air is less than 1g/m^3, meaning that you would have to pump like 10000 m^3 of air through your apparatus just to remove the CO2 from a single car travelling ~100km.

And this assumes 100% extraction efficiency which is not realistic at all.

So any climate plan that relies on large-scale CO2 removal from atmospheric air is probably a complete SCAM.

Also compare the cost difference between reducing emissions at the source by electrifying a vehicle with the effort required of extracting the CO2 from the air-- it is COMPLETELY obvious to me that even spending a dollar on CO2 removal is absolute LUNACY until all the cheap and easy options of reducing emissions have been exhausted.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#15

Post by cultofmetatron »

warent wrote: post #4
bell-cot wrote: post #3

Ever-growing armies of ever-better-paid administrators aren't going to magically pay for themselves. And a university won't be atop America's merciless academic pecking order for long if it's burdened with scruples about funding sources.

This comment is vague but it sounds like you're downplaying the seriousness of funding sources. This isn't a paranoid conspiracy or dramatic judgement. Companies really do pay for particular research results that benefit them. This has been going on at least since gasoline had lead in it.

the bigger issue you overlooked is the constant growth of bureaucratic overhead sucking up the watershed of resources and leaving only a trickle for the people actually putting together the curriculum, teaching and researching.

The administrators are useful to a point but they vastly overstate their importance and erode everything they touch overtime like a malignant cancer in a lot of organizations.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#16

Post by [deleted] »

warent wrote: post #4
bell-cot wrote: post #3

Ever-growing armies of ever-better-paid administrators aren't going to magically pay for themselves. And a university won't be atop America's merciless academic pecking order for long if it's burdened with scruples about funding sources.

This comment is vague but it sounds like you're downplaying the seriousness of funding sources. This isn't a paranoid conspiracy or dramatic judgement. Companies really do pay for particular research results that benefit them. This has been going on at least since gasoline had lead in it.

[deleted]

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#17

Post by myrmidon »

hutzlibu wrote: post #10
civilized wrote: post #7

I'm not sure how mad to be about this. Honestly, at the moment I kinda think it's a good thing on balance. I believe climate change is a huge, urgent concern. And I think it would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our risk mitigation portfolio. If fossil fuel companies, out of self-interest, want to support a legitimate research institution doing that, I'm not sure I should complain. If Stanford…

"It would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our climate change portfolio" Planting trees and establishing more forests is a already working technology with lots of other nice side effects, while I see the "artificial carbon removal" tech often just used as a excuse to not do anything now at all and wait for the magic game changer. "Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few s…

Planting trees is not really viable to deal with CO2 emissions on any significant scale.

Assuming a tree absorbs around 20kg of CO2/year, you'd need to plant 250 trees per year (!!) for every single passenger vehicle (~5tons of CO2/year).

And the problem does not stop there-- these numbers only work for the first 20 or so years of tree growth, and afterwards you have to seal you trees (under high pressure to turn them into hydrocarbons? :P) or plant even more trees to compensate for older trees decomposing (releasing CO2).

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#18

Post by tasty_freeze »

civilized wrote: post #7

I'm not sure how mad to be about this. Honestly, at the moment I kinda think it's a good thing on balance. I believe climate change is a huge, urgent concern. And I think it would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our risk mitigation portfolio. If fossil fuel companies, out of self-interest, want to support a legitimate research institution doing that, I'm not sure I should complain. If Stanford…

It has been demonstrated repeatedly that the source of funding does implicitly bias research results.

But the bigger effect is the appearance of working on the solution is often used to prevent real mitigation efforts that are here and now, such as higher costs for CO2 emissions, reforming the carbon trading scheme, and investing in moving to more use of green electricity.

We spend on the order of $900B a year on the military. Imagine if $100B a year, every year, was spent instead on beefing up the power grid, investing in efficient long-haul power distribution, investing even more in solar/wind/nukes. With less need to strong arm the world to ensure access to oil, it could pay for itself in less military intervention. Obviously, there are many political reasons why even $1 reduction in the military budget is difficult to accomplish, but that is only an indication of how much the government is beholden to the military/industrial complex.

Re: Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus

#20

Post by [deleted] »

myrmidon wrote: post #14
civilized wrote: post #7

I'm not sure how mad to be about this. Honestly, at the moment I kinda think it's a good thing on balance. I believe climate change is a huge, urgent concern. And I think it would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our risk mitigation portfolio. If fossil fuel companies, out of self-interest, want to support a legitimate research institution doing that, I'm not sure I should complain. If Stanford…

I'm highly sceptical regarding ALL CO2 removal schemes that don't operate directly at a CO2 source, because I see absolutely NO WAY how they could ever be made cost effective: CO2 concentration in air is less than 1g/m^3, meaning that you would have to pump like 10000 m^3 of air through your apparatus just to remove the CO2 from a single car travelling ~100km. And this assumes 100% extraction efficiency which is not…

[deleted]
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