Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet I see carbon capture being a top pick in discussions about effective altruism and by the clean air task force. I believe their reasoning is that for the amount of money invested, it remains one of the most efficient investment to decarbonize. I don't know what to do with that information.
Presumably because getting the world to stop burning fossil fuels is an enormous effort, which we're not doing an especially good job of, so far. Carbon capture isn't practical yet either (opinions differ on if it ever can be, and there certainly are some big problems to overcome), but that might still make it easier to pull off than ceasing our CO2-producing ways.
Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂
161–168 of 168 posts
Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
We created this problem by using energy and energy is the way back out of the problem. Energy released by burning one barrel of oil: ~6 GJ. Total number of barrels consumed per year: ~100M Total energy per year: 6 * 10^17 J Solar flux on 10^17 J/s or 3 * 10^24 if we had a machine that could convert CO2 -> Carbon in some stable form, we would need to use 10^-7 of the earth's solar flux. At a very high level such a mac…
> I never understand the hysteria over this topic. It seems to be a gross mix of a few things: -Most people are simply incapable of doing this type of analysis. They hear that "the sky is falling, and the only way out is to perpetually give up our comforts and live shittier lives", and they believe it. -People get really hung up on forcing their personal "correct" way of doing things on everyone else. Whatever their…
There are correct ways that are correct because they're effective and incorrect ways that aren't. Those ways should be imposed on people in tragedy of the commons type market failures. It follows from the social contract.
Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Slow is debatable, it’s something like 3 orders of magnitude faster than all the current artificial carbon sequestration systems in operation right now combined .
A sizeable fraction of the atmospheric carbon only gets sequestered by geological processes that take thousands of years. Comparing it to the basically nonexistent artificial sequestration is not very helpful.
Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It’s basically only there to postpone legislature and offload the cost to tax payers while keeping private profits high. Not just taxpayers, every living thing has to endure the increasing effect of failed climate preservation. As we have seen there's not really enough taxpayers to make a difference, what's more effective would be voters but there's even far less of them since voting is prohibited most places and pr…
I’m very confused here, did you accidentally respond to the wrong comment? But that’s unlikely too, as you even quoted me… I disagree with none of your points. The only reason I can imagine for your comment is that you've misunderstood there term green washing perhaps? This is it's official definition: > Greenwashing, also called "green sheen", is a form of advertising or marketing spin in which green PR and green ma…
I see the $200 Million as token support for a misguided effort that is being given a spin as something more effective than it really is.
The climate cost to society has always been offloaded primarily because it was not accounted for financially.
What better PR than to put (a little bit of) their money where their mouth is by supporting Climeworks, no deceptive advertising campaign necessary, just that level of spin at this point.
Climeworks seems to be saying foremost exactly what JPMorgan wants them to say, more convincingly than JPMorgan could say for itself.
>the energy spent capturing the CO2 is quite significant, so it's not even certain that their CO2 contribution is subtractive at the end.
You seemed to have grasped this more so than others.
Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂
#165Climate scientist David Ho has a good thread on CDR: https://mastodon.world/@davidho/109511745525784891 It's hard for people to visualize removing tons or billions of tons of #carbon #dioxide (CO₂). I propose we talked about CO₂ #removal (CDR) like a #time #machine (e.g., this machine will take us back 5 minutes). For example: Q: How far back in time does planting 100 million #trees take us? A: If one mature tree tak…
Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Their plant is in Iceland and runs on geothermal
Geothermal is not good for global warming bc it is an additional source of energy which would normally be contained. The sun gives such amount of wattage and the earth can give so much wattage back to the universe. Nuclear, geothermal and fusion is stored energy like fossil fuel which adds to the heat in the atmosphere. Today that only amounts to 5% of global warming but if it's the only source of energy it could add…
Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Also what's the carbon waste that this generates? Is there a synergistic use for it? I've wondered the same about these carbon capture plants. Is this literally just elemental carbon in some kind of dust/sand at the end of the day? Could this be a raw material input for carbon fiber production?
Elemental carbon is a valuable industrial material -- and even low-quality carbon, like "carbon black" soot, ain't cheap! Nah, separating carbon from oxygen in CO2 and CO is too expensive and energetically demanding. To simplify things a little bit, what they do here is inject CO2 into water at high pressure, which results in highly acidic H2CO3. They then pump H2CO3 into basalt rock, which chemically reacts with the…
Re: Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
>Somehow, I get a sense that the governing bodies are going to cause far more harm to people than the climate change. That sense is called "your priors." This is a very simple, mostly linear switch on top of very very very complex systems, ie CO2 concentration. Your argument is basically "we broke it, but if we fix it it will be more broken" and there's just no evidence for that, just speculation. As long as other ba…
> That sense is called "your priors." I have my priors & you have yours. "Your priors" seems to be that funneling money to large institutions fixes our problems. My prior is that funneling money to large institutions creates corruption & misaligned incentives. History has shown that large institutions which have utopian ideals make dreadful mistakes often based on a silver bullet mentality. If only we kill all of the…