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Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

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Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#81

Post by philshem »

valw wrote: post #66
philshem wrote: post #12

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

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.

We have burnt through hundreds of millions of years of fossil fuels (aka trees) in the past couple centuries. How can we regrow that “forest” one time and make a dent in carbon emissions?

Edit: I’d be happy to proven wrong, I just can’t imagine how if we increased the today’s biomass by an incredible percent, it would come close to the amount of carbon stored over millions of years.

Edit 2: 1.2 trillion trees would cancel out 10 years of human CO2 emissions. The planet currently has 3 trillion trees https://e360.yale.edu/digest/planting-1-2-trillion-trees-cou...

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#82

Post by arnoooooo »

mszcz wrote: post #79
gambiting wrote: post #28

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?

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

1 ton is for one passenger (yes, flying is a climate catastrophy). So the 1k USD is for one passenger.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#83

Post by m0zg »

tantalor wrote: post #7
PaulHoule wrote: post #3

If I calculate that right, it is about $1100 a ton. I just gave a presentation on BECCS w/ Brazilian Ethanol which comes out closer to $30. I haven't put it up, but here is one of the papers I based it on https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030626191...

TerraPass offers $10/ton https://www.terrapass.com/product/productindividuals-familie...

I spot checked some of the projects they list, and not one has any estimates of how much greenhouse gas reduction is attributable to TerraPass investment. Nor is the investment amount or percentage is shown. From which I conclude that TerraPass is a scam.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#84

Post by TeMPOraL »

SilasX wrote: post #78
TeMPOraL wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 s…

> 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.

I feel it would significantly slow its growth, perhaps making it not worth the while relative to alternative solutions.

Also, the way I understand it, PoW has its growth limited only by a) how fast can you provision the hardware, and b) how much energy you can throw at it. I worry that we'll never arrive at the point of having clean energy too cheap to meter, if we have a black hole fueled by pure, refined greed, which can suck all the energy surplus pretty much instantly.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#85

Post by valw »

philshem wrote: post #81
valw wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We have burnt through hundreds of millions of years of fossil fuels (aka trees) in the past couple centuries. How can we regrow that “forest” one time and make a dent in carbon emissions? Edit: I’d be happy to proven wrong, I just can’t imagine how if we increased the today’s biomass by an incredible percent, it would come close to the amount of carbon stored over millions of years. Edit 2: 1.2 trillion trees would c…

I was just refuting the incorrect statement: "The only way to make tree-growing carbon negative* is to sequester the grown trees underground."

It would indeed be foolish to believe we can halt climate change just by growing trees. But AFOLU is part of the toolkit we need to use (the most important tool in this toolkit is sobriety).

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#86

Post by SilasX »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #84
SilasX wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 s…

> 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. I feel it would significantly slow its growth, perhaps making it not worth the while relative to alternative solutions. Also, the way I understand it, PoW has its growth limited only…

Mining expenditures are limited by the benefits relative to the cost. Increasingly expensive mining is added until the expected revenues of bitcoins sold don't make up for them. At the moment right now, more mining could come online, but isn't taken online because it wouldn't pay for itself.

If energy becomes more expensive -- say, by pricing in the externalities of some energy sources -- that decreases the equilibrium expenditure, because marginal mining can't pay for itself anymore.

The concept of "pricing out miners" doesn't even make sense to begin with. Miners are competing with other miners (including malicious ones). Any resource constraint affects all of them; it can't make all of them give up. To the extent that other coins become popular, that (again) just prices out marginal miners.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#87

Post by dwild »

valw wrote: post #75
dwild wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' br…

> There are also forest protection projects

Same constraint as planting tree... at one point there's no more forest to protect (or the cost of protecting one just increase). It will just get more expensive.

> energy transition projects

This one is interesting, again, will just get more expensive with time, but that one I never seen any project that allow to buy carbon credit for theses kinds of projects.

> AFAIK, the most promising CCS technology consist of burning biomass in power plants, and then using geological confinement of the sequestered carbon.

Where can I offset my CO2 emission that way?

I don't care about investing in a solution that has no future. If what I pay for it means that it will just make the next ton more expensive, when it's already hard to make people pay for it already, I'm not for that solution.

Sure that one is 100x more expensive, but the cost can only go down with scale, and if it doesn't, well it will just push other technological solution to be developed because it's a proof there's money in sustainable solutions.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#88

Post by valw »

dwild wrote: post #87
valw wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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' br…

> There are also forest protection projects Same constraint as planting tree... at one point there's no more forest to protect (or the cost of protecting one just increase). It will just get more expensive. > energy transition projects This one is interesting, again, will just get more expensive with time, but that one I never seen any project that allow to buy carbon credit for theses kinds of projects. > AFAIK, the…

> This one is interesting, again, will just get more expensive with time, but that one I never seen any project that allow to buy carbon credit for theses kinds of projects.

And yet Gold Standard reports renewable energy projects are a high share of their pipeline: https://www.goldstandard.org/sites/default/files/documents/m...

> Where can I offset my CO2 emission that way?

That's still at an experimental stage AFAIK (like most CCS technology), so unfortunately not yet available for such purposes.

> I don't care about investing in a solution that has no future. If what I pay for it means that it will just make the next ton more expensive, when it's already hard to make people pay for it already, I'm not for that solution.

A more optimistic way to look at it is as such: if we commit to offsetting our emissions by buying carbon credits, rising prices will pressure us towards reducing our emissions.

That's where we want to be headed, because there is NO future where emissions remain high and are totally offset.

I would encourage you to rethink your approach as follows: invest in the transition, not in the destination.

> Sure that one is 100x more expensive, but the cost can only go down with scale, and if it doesn't, well it will just push other technological solution to be developed because it's a proof there's money in sustainable solutions.

What makes you so sure that ClimeWork's solution can scale better? Their solution requires huge energy expenditures, and its not like we have a lot of geologically favourable sites for their solution.

If you want long-term innovation, why not fund general CCS research instead? It's much more likely to yield impactful and well-thought solutions.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#89

Post by Supermancho »

SilasX wrote: post #65
Tuxer wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That doesn't make sense. Wouldn't that even be a boon? You would end up with less resistance by those who proclaim doom by empirical evidence, as a provided solution theoretically would exist.

Re: Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

#90

Post by SilasX »

Supermancho wrote: post #89
SilasX wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If someone had a $5/ton carbon removal machine, they would be demonized as standing in the way of the policies that advocates want.

That doesn't make sense. Wouldn't that even be a boon? You would end up with less resistance by those who proclaim doom by empirical evidence, as a provided solution theoretically would exist.

If you actually care about an actual threat, yes, that would be awesome. My point is that the most vocal advocates aren't that, that they want restrictions on fossil fuels regardless of AGW and this is just the latest pretense, so they have to demonize any easy way out.
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