Plant a tree.
Better: protect a forest.
Most solutions to climate change are subtractive, not additive.
Personal CO2 Removal as a Service
61–70 of 93 posts
Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is addressed on the website. I think at scale afforestation becomes a very risky prospect financially and requires a much larger amount of land putting biodiversity at risk and infringing on agriculture as apposed to the proposed CO2 remove technology. The cited paper for this on their website is unfortunately paywalled but I would be really interested in finding out more about this.
Big brain time. Biodiversity isn’t at risk if you plant different kinds of trees in different places. You don’t need to build a massive forest in any given place. Simply rebuilding the forests we used to have would go a long way.
No one is advocating for stopping conservation efforts or reforestation. But we will need a combination of solutions in order to reverse existing damage and meet targets.
Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service
#63Can we destroy bitcoin first?? https://twitter.com/bascule/status/1234493080583143424?s=20 Bitcoin energy consumption hits a new all time high of nearly 9GW, comparable to Chile, a country with 18M people. Carbon footprint is ~37 Mt CO2 annually, about that of New Zealand. And yet it still does ~4 transactions per second...
Sure, as long as we're going to be even-handed about resource-wasting products rather than singling this one out. There are a billion things that produce no net social value but are ignored. And even if we did target Bitcoin, then -- like everything else -- it should be a matter of "are you paying your environmental cost? Cool, then carry on", not "hey I didn't like this for unrelated reasons, so this is my pretense…
I am paying my environmental footprint under the name of "US federal tax"
If you are expecting me to pay more, you have something else coming from your blindside.
Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
absolutely nothing. If the cost of carbon removal was 5$/ton, we wouldn't be having this climate change problem whatsoever.
In europe the carbon cost is EUR24/ton right now.
The quality of offsetting programs varies drastically. For example, if I just say I'm going to offset your emissions then do nothing, I can offer that service for $1EUR/ton. At the other end of the spectrum would be something like methane recapture tents over abandoned mines, where there is no risk of addition or gaming (because it costs so much to build mines in comparison to what this earns). And in the middle is something like planting trees. It's not clear where on the quality spectrum the program you're referring to is, but I would guess it is not going to be at the high end.
The other thing to keep in mind is that we are only looking at low-hanging fruit right now. That's actually one of the really appealing things about this climeworks idea. It can be scaled indefinitely. Carbon capture from mines and manure digesters can only scale so much, because there are only so many abandoned mines and only so much undigested animal manure.
Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
I flew from UK to Canada recently, and KLM was offering to "offset my CO2 emissions" for something stupid like $5. Surely....that's not actually a thing? What can they do for $5 that would offset so much CO2?
absolutely nothing. If the cost of carbon removal was 5$/ton, we wouldn't be having this climate change problem whatsoever.
If someone had a $5/ton carbon removal machine, they would be demonized as standing in the way of the policies that advocates want.
Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service
#66Plant a tree.
Trees that grow and die and decompose release their carbon back into the atmosphere. The only way to make tree-growing carbon negative* is to sequester the grown trees underground. *edited from “neutral”, sorry, typo
That argument gets brought up again and again, and is just wrong. Can't people see the basic contradiction in that reasoning? Trees have always died!
What matters with forest-based offsetting is the increase of forest biomass - the deaths of individual trees don't matter. If you grow a forest, the corresponding CO2 is offset for as long as the forest stays there.
Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
I flew from UK to Canada recently, and KLM was offering to "offset my CO2 emissions" for something stupid like $5. Surely....that's not actually a thing? What can they do for $5 that would offset so much CO2?
absolutely nothing. If the cost of carbon removal was 5$/ton, we wouldn't be having this climate change problem whatsoever.
Actually, you can buy carbon credits for less than that if you make bulk purchases. It's usually for preventing emissions from occurring rather than capturing carbon from the atmosphere.
But we couldn't keep this price so low if we scaled this to world emissions - the price of carbon offsetting is low now because we're still picking the low-hanging fruits of carbon offsetting.
Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service
#68Would be a good franchise. People probably prefer if CO2 was removed in their cities and not at some location kilometers away.
What for? the harm done by excess CO2 is global, not local.
CO2 is diffused across the whole world in a matter of months. Its climate-changing effect lasts much longer than that - decades to centuries.
Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service
#69Maybe I didn't read the site thoroughly enough but... how do we know that they are doing their part of the bargain? How do we/they measure how much carbon is effectively removed from the atmosphere?
I don't think it's technically hard on their end - we totally have the science required to estimate how much their process captures.
Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service
#70Plant a tree.
Trees require arable land. Trees require water and nutrients. Trees that aren't turned into treated lumber (to prevent decomposing) or buried return the carbon to the system when they die. Most interventions to plant them, water them, fertilize them, or store them at the end will use additional carbon-based energy and negate the benefit. They typically take 10 or 20 years to grow to consume the promised amount of carbon.
Trees are great, but they will not solve the climate issue alone and the notion that they can needs to be put away so that we can plan realistically.