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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

#21

Post by peteradio »

myrmidon wrote: post #17
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…

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 the…

Kind of sounds amazing if we could pull it off (of course we can't) but imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one.

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

#22

Post by whatshisface »

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…

Trees don't pump the air through their leaves, they let CO2 diffuse and blow in the wind.

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

#23

Post by the88doctor »

"Helped shape" != "Dictated". It makes perfect sense to have industry members be a part of discussions about regulations and problems related to their industry. Industry members shouldn't be able to dictate the outcomes of those discussions, but they should certainly be able to participate in them.

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

#24

Post by marricks »

the88doctor wrote: post #23

"Helped shape" != "Dictated". It makes perfect sense to have industry members be a part of discussions about regulations and problems related to their industry. Industry members shouldn't be able to dictate the outcomes of those discussions, but they should certainly be able to participate in them.

I don’t think is one of those cases where it’s helpful to have everyone “have a seat at the table.”

The oil industry would make more money than anyone else at that table and have outsized influence.

They also have a history of misleading the public and outright lying about climate change.

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

#25

Post by hutzlibu »

peteradio wrote: post #21
myrmidon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 the…

Kind of sounds amazing if we could pull it off (of course we can't) but imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one.

"imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one."

That's how the world looked like, before humans chopped or burned them down and let cattle, goats and sheep prevented new forests from growing again.

Reforesting at least parts of that back, would capture significant amounts of CO2. No matter that a old tree composes at some point, because at the same time another tree growing where the old one stood, will compensate that.

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

#26

Post by rayiner »

tasty_freeze wrote: post #18
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…

We don’t need to strong arm the world to access oil, we are a net exporter of oil. There’s lots of bad things to say about our foreign policy, but the idea that it’s about oil should have died with the Iraq War (where we spent trillions of dollars but didn’t get any oil).

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

#27

Post by rayiner »

Opposing nuclear was the first catastrophic mistake environmentalists made, causing them to be a net negative overall in terms of climate change. Opposing carbon capture will be the next (and possibly last) one.

If you think climate change is a serious problem, then you need to put aside your moral beliefs and think like an engineer about solutions. There is no math that allows you to conserve/renewables your way to 2C while accommodating the expected growth in living standards in India, China, and Africa. And any strategy that doesn’t allow people in the developing world to dramatically increase their standard of living is a non-starter that will create billions of enemies for the environmental movement. India recently committed to go carbon neutral by 2070: https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/developing-countries-.... That’s too late, and they won’t meet that anyway. The developed world needs to go carbon negative as fast as possible.

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

#28

Post by zamfi »

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…

Look, I think direct air capture (DAC) is as much “not the solution” as the next guy, but this kind of black-and-white thinking has no place in climate change mitigation.

Right now, DAC costs about $250-500/ton. The average passenger vehicle in the US emits 4.6 tons of CO2/year. You say it’s not cost-effective but you could literally charge every passenger vehicle user in the US $1-2000/year and use it for capture and eliminate the single largest source. That is the same order of magnitude as vehicle registration fees (though of course you’d want to make such a tax progressive, etc.), at least in California.

More importantly, DAC provides a major price signal for the cost of carbon emissions: if it costs $250/ton to get CO2 out of the atmosphere, it starts to make more sense to charge emitters $250/ton in advance to remove it — and if we implemented such a system, the market would likely respond very quickly with rapid reductions in carbon emissions. Oil and gas companies think it’s the solution? Great, they can pay $250/ton for it.

Instead we’re selling everyone individual shame about what are really societal decisions, telling them not to drive as much, be too cold/hot at home, and eat less beef — while letting producers largely off the hook. That’s the real lunacy here.

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

#30

Post by htag »

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.

I think you might be misunderstanding the amount of distrust placed in the root comment. He's claiming the more prestigious a University is, the more likely they are to take unethical funding because increased funding leads to more prestige. It's an attack on the integrity of modern science as practiced by academia, not on a subset of studies.
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