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Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

climeworks.shop

71–80 of 93 posts

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#71
post #50

If you want make your money work against climate change, I wouldn't recommend this service - it's simply not competitive compared to voluntary carbon markets, in which well-certified projects can offset a teqCO2 for less than 10 USD (that's 100 times more efficient carbon offsetting than ClimeWorks, for high-end projects), and do so with additional co-benefits in terms of biodiversity and livelihood of local communit…

Why not both?

Planting tree is nice, but theses solutions you give have limits, which will only make the cost higher. This is a technological solution, sure it has limits too, but its cost will only go down by being done more efficiently and at one point, we will need to do theses things too, thus the sooner we reach lower price, the better we will be.

As you said, it's 100x more expensive, thus no industrial client will consider this solution yet, but you can afford it. Be the first stone that allow them to become 50x more expensive, etc...

Being client to them show also that we are ready to put money where our mouth are. That push toward more investment in theses spheres because there's money in the game. Investing into planting trees at 1/100 the cost... well except exploiting even more cheap labor... there's no money to be made.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#72
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

We use trees though. We build all kinds of things with them. Granted I would rather see native revegitation, often not great for building with depending on where you live. But given the circumstances and timescales involved, planting trees may give us some buffer time in the form of an initial dip in carbon.

Trees can be one element of many to mitigate emissions, but too often trees are bandied about as a complete solution, and it's greenwashing that distracts from the true scope of the problem at hand.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#73

If I've calculated correctly, this service costs $1100 per ton. A flight from New York to London emits about 1 ton of co2. The site talks about averages, but averages can be deceiving. Most people don't fly, and those that fly fly a lot. If you fly, you should probably try to overshot the average (by a lot) when you offset.

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?

Examples: forest protection programs in low-wage countries, investing in renewable energy on high-carbon-intensity grids, distributing enhanced ovens to reduce wood consumption...

Carbon offsetting is cheap currently, but won't always stay so, getting more expensive as we exhaust the low-hanging fruits.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It takes years for a tree to grow and decades, possibly hundreds of years for a tree to decompose in its entirety through natural processes (that is, after possibly decades of life). It is a viable solution. Edit: if anyone disagrees look up about the Carboniferous period

The Carboniferous period stored that much carbon because the microbes at the time were unable to break down wood[1]. So yes, everyone should read about the Carboniferous period in detail to understand just how many millions of years of stored carbon in ancient plant material we're recklessly blowing out into the atmosphere all at once.

1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#75
post #71
post #50

If you want make your money work against climate change, I wouldn't recommend this service - it's simply not competitive compared to voluntary carbon markets, in which well-certified projects can offset a teqCO2 for less than 10 USD (that's 100 times more efficient carbon offsetting than ClimeWorks, for high-end projects), and do so with additional co-benefits in terms of biodiversity and livelihood of local communit…

Why not both? Planting tree is nice, but theses solutions you give have limits, which will only make the cost higher. This is a technological solution, sure it has limits too, but its cost will only go down by being done more efficiently and at one point, we will need to do theses things too, thus the sooner we reach lower price, the better we will be. As you said, it's 100x more expensive, thus no industrial client…

There's a common misconception that voluntary carbon market projects solely consist of planting trees - that's not the case. There are also forest protection projects, energy transition projects, and so on. ClimeWorks' project could be certified as well... but then carbon credit buyers would realize it's just less effective than the alternatives. I guess that's why ClimeWorks's go-to-market strategy is 'high-tech' branding: they go after technology lovers rather rather than informed investors.

Also see what I mentioned about CCS. AFAIK, the most promising CCS technology consist of burning biomass in power plants, and then using geological confinement of the sequestered carbon. The reason it's more effective, as I mentioned, is because the carbon is captured where its concentration is high - less entropy to fight.

It's absolutely true that current offsetting methodologies won't always stay so cheap - and as prices rise, new innovative methodologies will develop. Buying carbon credits is not an impediment to innovation; but it has the advantage of rewarding projects for being efficient, rather than "technologically cool".

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#76
post #54

Can 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…

> There are a billion things that produce no net social value but are ignored.

Was going to reply "name three", but I see you covered that in your other post - well, two out of three; "Ferraris for show-off producers in LA, or Hello Kitty backpacks".

But those other things don't have a superlinear growth in energy consumption baked into the fundamentals of operation. A Hello Kitty backpack doesn't need schoolchildren to keep burning electricity just to secure its contents.

Most things are O(n) - O(n log n) in energy use to general utility provided, and top out at some point. Proof of Work chains need that just to keep the network working, regardless of any utility provided on top (which arguably is near-zero for any legitimate use case).

But I agree with the general point - pricing in full externalities of energy use would go a long way towards fixing things, including Bitcoin's existence.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#77
post #49

Earlier 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?

when was that ?

Last week.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#78
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> There are a billion things that produce no net social value but are ignored. Was going to reply "name three", but I see you covered that in your other post - well, two out of three; "Ferraris for show-off producers in LA, or Hello Kitty backpacks". But those other things don't have a superlinear growth in energy consumption baked into the fundamentals of operation. A Hello Kitty backpack doesn't need schoolchildren…

>But those other things don't have a superlinear growth in energy consumption baked into the fundamentals of operation. A Hello Kitty backpack doesn't need schoolchildren to keep burning electricity just to secure its contents.

Unrestricted social signaling games absolutely have runaway costs and zero net social benefits; if we're going to address those, we're right back to "charge for externalities", which was the solution anyway, and completely unspecific to Bitcoin.

Edit:

>But I agree with the general point - pricing in full externalities of energy use would go a long way towards fixing things, including Bitcoin's existence.

Why do you say that? it would just change the total equilibrium expenditure on mining, not render it pointless, since the blockchain just has too be too expensive to attack, and the same constraints would apply to attackers and miners.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#79

If I've calculated correctly, this service costs $1100 per ton. A flight from New York to London emits about 1 ton of co2. The site talks about averages, but averages can be deceiving. Most people don't fly, and those that fly fly a lot. If you fly, you should probably try to overshot the average (by a lot) when you offset.

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?

If there were 200 passengers on that flight then $5 per passenger neatly comes down to 1k USD as mentioned above.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#80
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It takes years for a tree to grow and decades, possibly hundreds of years for a tree to decompose in its entirety through natural processes (that is, after possibly decades of life). It is a viable solution. Edit: if anyone disagrees look up about the Carboniferous period

The Carboniferous period stored that much carbon because the microbes at the time were unable to break down wood[1]. So yes, everyone should read about the Carboniferous period in detail to understand just how many millions of years of stored carbon in ancient plant material we're recklessly blowing out into the atmosphere all at once. 1. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/phenomena/2016/01...

Yes, and trees still take a lot of time to decompose

> The computer model calculates that the “residence times” (how long a tree will take to completely decompose) for conifer species range from 57 to 124 years, while hardwood species are typically around on the forest floor for 46 to 71 years

(I'll stand corrected on the hundreds of years, but it's still a long time)

https://northernwoodlands.org/knots_and_bolts/tree-falls-in-...

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