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The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

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Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#71

Post by smallerfish »

bluejekyll wrote: post #70
smallerfish wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's say you jam your trees in at 40 foot spacing (you want large mature trees) - that gives you 27 trees per acre. Assuming your math is right, and we need 42,000 mature trees per year capturing carbon, that means we need 1,555 newly planted acres of trees _per year_ to match this plant (and, there will be 25-30 years before the first batch to be planted actually matches in terms of capture). So you have a small pr…

27 trees per acre is a low number, and based on my own experience with land returned to a forest with decent canopy, the 150 trees per acre is not unreasonable. That said, even with my estimates you’re correct that this is a lot of land, but I wanted to quickly put it into perspective. We are losing forests all over the planet, and this can also help understand the impact of that. Also, the labor you mention is proba…

No doubt we need to get deforestration under control. I'm just trying to point out that "just plant trees" is not a sufficient answer to climate change by itself. It helps, certainly.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#72

Post by exabrial »

This is infinitely dumb. We’re burning carbon to pull some out of the atmosphere… the energy used to power this plant would be better spent just powering the grid and would have an actual positive impact.

People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#73

Post by Bluestrike2 »

bluejekyll wrote: post #66

I keep thinking about why we’re going through this effort rather that using trees, which can also be harvested for lumber and the sequester that carbon in construction. My super rough math, from quick Google searches, this unit 1,000 tons per year. A mature tree is estimated to capture 48 pounds per year. That would be about 42,000 trees. At roughly, 100-200 trees per acre. Let’s just say 150, so that’s 280 acres of…

It isn't really viable as a carbon capture measure, and there's been a lot of research in recent years to show that decades of tree planting campaigns across the world have very often failed outright or--in some cases--been a net negative to communities, ecosystems and forest coverage, and/or atmospheric carbon levels.

Saplings are cheap. That's why planting trees is such an appealing "solution." All of the math is based on the assumption that the saplings survive until they can mature and start sucking in carbon. Most don't; one study found mean mortality rates of 44% after five years over 176 sites in tropical and sub-tropical Asia[0]. A Turkish effort saw over 90% of 11 million trees dead in under a year.[1] Other studies have found similarly horrible numbers, and that's not including the other ways[2] such projects can fail: degradation of grassland ecosystems that were already highly effective carbon sinks[3], decreased biodiversity, increased fire risks with non-native saplings, cultural and economic losses, etc.

There are wildly successful reforestation projects, but they take considerably more investment, local community support, and active long-term monitoring and intervention.[4] All of which undercut what originally made mass tree planting so appealing as a climate solution: the seemingly cheap cost.

We absolutely need to plant trees, both in urban environments because the quality of life benefits of urban trees are so numerous that it's an absolute no-brainer and as part of wider reforestation efforts, but it's never going to be a silver bullet for climate change. It's just one of many, many things we need to do.

0. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2021.009...

1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/30/most-of-11m-tr...

2. https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22679378/tree-planting-for...

3. https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22662490/grasslands-better...

4. https://www.science.org/content/article/reforestation-means-...

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#74

Post by JumpCrisscross »

dottjt wrote: post #35
s1artibartfast wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's silly. That's like condemning logic or mathematics. If you want future viability, you can ask if there is a cheap way or an expensive way to get what you want. That's economics. It says nothing about what your goal is.

You're forgetting a key factor though: politics. What you're arguing is a rational idea of economics that doesn't exist. Instead, we have this bastard version influenced by politics, which in practice, cares nothing of the key objectives which concern future viability. Instead, we get this thing that demands infinite growth and consumption. That's modern economics and it's destroying us.

> we get this thing that demands infinite growth and consumption. That's modern economics

This is a stylised misinterpretation of economics.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#75

Post by iforgotpassword »

exabrial wrote: post #72

This is infinitely dumb. We’re burning carbon to pull some out of the atmosphere… the energy used to power this plant would be better spent just powering the grid and would have an actual positive impact. People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something.

Of course, because tech and hype, woohoo. Never mind forests or even better swamps capture carbon "for free".

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#76

Post by JumpCrisscross »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #47
sspiff wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an extremely sad point of view. Of course humans can accomplish things that are not economically viable. Perhaps it's become harder in our current society, but many great projects of man were economic folly. To give one admittedly a little cliche example, landing on the moon never made any economic sense.

That's not what I'm talking about. Pretend getting to the moon would have cost a quadrillion dollars. We wouldn't have been able to do it.

> Pretend getting to the moon would have cost a quadrillion dollars. We wouldn't have been able to do it.

This is a statement of reality, not economic system. A society that decided to divert resources, today, to building a Dyson sphere on Alpha Centauri would fail, irrespective of economic system, because the goal demands more resources than it can sustainably divert.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#77

Post by JumpCrisscross »

depereo wrote: post #13
anovikov wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another yardstick, it will cost about 2x the annual world GDP to mitigate all emissions this way. With normal amortisation rates and operating costs, it will be about 1.5x-2x more than entire energy expenditure worldwide. I wonder if this is simply a scheme to siphon public money. What a good catch for Fox News! Of course, if $100 per ton ever becomes a reality, then it's just 3% of world GDP and is probably affor…

If we have additional costs in the economy that just means GDP increases by that amount. You could also phrase this as 'global GDP would triple from this initiative'. GDP is a silly measurement.

> You could also phrase this as 'global GDP would triple from this initiative'

No, you couldn’t, not in real terms.

Let’s suppose a government diverted 2x GDP to this proposal. It can’t tax 200% of output—it must print money. G goes to 2x prior-year GDP. Pretty much immediately, every other component collapses to zero (besides expectations, the government is basically seizing all base metals production and transportation and labor) amidst hyperinflation. Which makes your real G, and GDP, lower than before.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#78

Post by JumpCrisscross »

iforgotpassword wrote: post #75
exabrial wrote: post #72

This is infinitely dumb. We’re burning carbon to pull some out of the atmosphere… the energy used to power this plant would be better spent just powering the grid and would have an actual positive impact. People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something.

Of course, because tech and hype, woohoo. Never mind forests or even better swamps capture carbon "for free".

> Never mind forests or even better swamps capture carbon "for free"

They’ve also been releasing it back into the atmosphere for free since the end of the Carboniferous.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#79

Post by JumpCrisscross »

exabrial wrote: post #72

This is infinitely dumb. We’re burning carbon to pull some out of the atmosphere… the energy used to power this plant would be better spent just powering the grid and would have an actual positive impact. People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something.

> People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something

In the same way we celebrate EV and PV production, even though those may still be carbon-positive at the outset. Especially when they were still in prototyping.

Re: The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

#80

Post by RetroTechie »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #64
kajaktum wrote: post #37

How does carbon capture help? Wouldn't it need to be stored somewhere? What happens if the storage leaks? People say that trees is a bad solution because the carbon is still there. This is even worse than trees. Trees at least looks good.

We're emitting around 40 billion tonnes of CO2 per year on this planet. This removes 1000. We need another 40 million or so of these facilities to take out what we emit. And mind you, what we emit, is still growing, by about 300M tonne per year. So, at best you could say that this slows down this growth by a tiny meaningless percentage. At this scale, it's a cynical form of green washing that is so futile that it's n…

Worse: this type of greenwashing gives businesses (and politics) an excuse to do even less about the actual problem.

Direct-air carbon capture is (at best) about as useful as re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic.

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