Is Carbon Capture Here? (nytimes.com) 188
"Is carbon capture here?" asks a headline from the New York Times.
A Swiss company named Climeworks "is operating a device in Iceland that sucks CO2 from the air and shoots it into the ground, where it turns into rock." [Stephan] Hitz and his small team of technicians are running Orca, the world's biggest commercial direct air capture (DAC) device, which in September began pulling carbon dioxide out of the air at a site 20 miles from the capital, Reykjavik.
As the wind stirred up clouds of steam billowing from the nearby Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, a gentle hum came from Orca, which resembles four massive air-conditioners, each the size of one shipping container sitting on top of another. Each container holds 12 large round fans powered by renewable electricity from the geothermal plant, which suck air into steel catchment boxes where carbon dioxide or CO2, the main greenhouse gas behind global warming, chemically bonds with a sandlike filtering substance.
When heat is applied to that filtering substance it releases the CO2, which is then mixed with water by an Icelandic company called Carbfix to create a drinkable fizzy water. Several other firms are striving to pull carbon from the air in the United States and elsewhere, but only here in the volcanic plateaus of Iceland is the CO2 being turned into that sparkling cocktail and injected several hundred meters down into basalt bedrock.
Carbfix has discovered that its CO2 mix will chemically react with basalt and turn to rock in just two or three years instead of the centuries that the mineralization process was believed to take, so it takes the CO2 that Climeworks' DAC captures and pumps it into the ground through wells protected from the harsh environment by steel igloos that could easily serve as props in a space movie. It is a permanent solution, unlike the planting of forests which can release their carbon by rotting, being cut down or burning in a warming planet. Even the CO2 that other firms are planning to inject into empty oil and gas fields could eventually leak out, some experts fear, but once carbon turns to rock it is not going anywhere.
Orca is billed as the world's first commercial DAC unit because the 4,000 metric tons of CO2 it can extract each year have been paid for by 8,000 people who have subscribed online to remove some carbon, and by firms including Stripe, Swiss Re, Audi and Microsoft. The rock band Coldplay recently joined those companies in paying Climeworks for voluntary carbon credits to offset some of their own emissions.
The firm hopes to one day turn a profit by getting its costs below the selling price of those credits.
Current cost: about $600 to $800 per metric ton.
A Swiss company named Climeworks "is operating a device in Iceland that sucks CO2 from the air and shoots it into the ground, where it turns into rock." [Stephan] Hitz and his small team of technicians are running Orca, the world's biggest commercial direct air capture (DAC) device, which in September began pulling carbon dioxide out of the air at a site 20 miles from the capital, Reykjavik.
As the wind stirred up clouds of steam billowing from the nearby Hellisheidi geothermal power plant, a gentle hum came from Orca, which resembles four massive air-conditioners, each the size of one shipping container sitting on top of another. Each container holds 12 large round fans powered by renewable electricity from the geothermal plant, which suck air into steel catchment boxes where carbon dioxide or CO2, the main greenhouse gas behind global warming, chemically bonds with a sandlike filtering substance.
When heat is applied to that filtering substance it releases the CO2, which is then mixed with water by an Icelandic company called Carbfix to create a drinkable fizzy water. Several other firms are striving to pull carbon from the air in the United States and elsewhere, but only here in the volcanic plateaus of Iceland is the CO2 being turned into that sparkling cocktail and injected several hundred meters down into basalt bedrock.
Carbfix has discovered that its CO2 mix will chemically react with basalt and turn to rock in just two or three years instead of the centuries that the mineralization process was believed to take, so it takes the CO2 that Climeworks' DAC captures and pumps it into the ground through wells protected from the harsh environment by steel igloos that could easily serve as props in a space movie. It is a permanent solution, unlike the planting of forests which can release their carbon by rotting, being cut down or burning in a warming planet. Even the CO2 that other firms are planning to inject into empty oil and gas fields could eventually leak out, some experts fear, but once carbon turns to rock it is not going anywhere.
Orca is billed as the world's first commercial DAC unit because the 4,000 metric tons of CO2 it can extract each year have been paid for by 8,000 people who have subscribed online to remove some carbon, and by firms including Stripe, Swiss Re, Audi and Microsoft. The rock band Coldplay recently joined those companies in paying Climeworks for voluntary carbon credits to offset some of their own emissions.
The firm hopes to one day turn a profit by getting its costs below the selling price of those credits.
Current cost: about $600 to $800 per metric ton.
Betteridge’s law of headlines (Score:5, Insightful)
so, no.
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however it won't stop cop26 recalcitrants from pretending to bluster their way out of emissions targets with the promise of gifting YOUR taxes to their pet projects.
Hail Mary.
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Last thing I heard, the law is not true, statistically, the answer is more yes than no.
I don’t see how that could possibly be true. Places with nothing of value to say abuse the pattern to drum up clicks that will be answered with a “no”. Places with something of value to say avoid the pattern to begin with because they have no need for it: they can simply make an assertion. And as more people have come to associate the pattern with poor editing and trashy journalism, reputable publications that actually make a point of seeking out sourced answered have eschewed it more and
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Statistics usually do not care about the reasoning behind it ;-)
Quite right! We should seek to understand them, rather than disregard them just because they don't make sense to us. That said, statistics that lack citation are subject to being questioned on the basis that they may have been misremembered, misunderstood, or otherwise misstated, and may well be disregarded entirely until/unless they can be backed up with data if they fly in the face of common sense or conventional wisdom.
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It feels like there could be an extension to Betteridge’s Law along the lines of “...and the attached article is almost certainly not worth your time.”
Re:Betteridge's law of headlines (Score:2)
Ran out of ideas after Plan A? (Score:2, Informative)
Emissions reduction/carbon capture is not going to solve global warming. Too little, too late, too expensive.
Time to come up with Plan B.
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> Time to come up with Plan B.
Abort the population?
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Best idea so far.
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You first!
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Add sulfur to jet fuel.
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https://archive.org/details/Fa... [archive.org]
Re:Ran out of ideas after Plan A? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The thing about that plan B is that it requires plan A to succeed anyway. The whole movement is so expensive that it basically can't be done. However, if you reduce CO2 output partially then it becomes possible but just hugely hugely expensive, much much more expensive than reducing carbon output. If you reduce that budget for movement by, say 10% and invest that money into reducing carbon output further then suddenly your CO2 output is much less and you have to move less and so on.
So, the most absolutel
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So Plan A on steroids.
Anyone got a Plan C?
Re: Ran out of ideas after Plan A? (Score:2)
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The problem with plan A is that it requires doing things now to avoid consequences in the future. The problem with plan B is that it requires doing even more things now to avoid consequences in the future.
So, plan C?
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The most important thing to do now is to get people to realize that everyday life is the problem. We're still operating with the belief we can pivot from fossil fuels to green energy while living like we do. A radical downsizing is in order. Sadly that's a very unpopular perspective and politicians don't get elected on unpopular platforms. So over the edge we go.
You can pry my 1/4lb cheeseburger from my cold, dead hands!
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So, more Plan A, just harder?
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"net zero" = Plan A, but with more commitment.
Let it go, please, and come up with other plans. You are fighting WWII with WWI trench warfare tactics.
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Also there is Plan C: massive reduction in global population. That one _will_ happen, even if Plan A or Plan B is implemented fast and decisively. The only question is whether it will be done in a controlled fashion or by way of a series of truly impressive catastrophes.
Given that the science on climate change was solid ca. 1985 and that not a lot has happened since then, my guess is neither Plan A nor Plan B will make it in time as the cretins that presume to "lead" the human race will keep dicking around
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Extinction - no. There is lots of land mass on earth's surface that is, now, too cold for humans to inhabit easily. IF the earth warms 4-5C, there will be a lot of disruption and suffering in some areas, some areas will become much more habitable, people will move around and humanity will survive.
Well, maybe. Or maybe not. "Moving around" is not so simple, because you actually need crops to grow sustainably were you move to and not decades later when the soil becomes usable for farming. The killer here is the speed of the change. The other killer is the loss of basically all industrial base when civilization collapses.
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As OP I'll call this Plan C. I think it merits consideration and is better than Plan B.
I'm still hoping for more plans, not just endless recycling variations of Plan A.
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And what is your alternative?
Have you seen the movie "Mad Max"?
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Every single thing you mention is an implementation of Plan A - reducing emissions. It is not going to reverse climate change.
You are not even trying.
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Emissions reduction/carbon capture is not going to solve global warming. Too little, too late, too expensive.
Time to come up with Plan B.
If this tech works and can be feasibly scaled then it solves both global warming and ocean acidification. In fact, if it takes less energy to recapture a ton of CO2 than you get from burning the equivalent amount of fossil fuels we don't actually need to switch away from fossil fuels (though air pollution is still a big factor, especially for vehicles).
So realistically, something like this should probably be plan A. Of course, we don't really know if it will work or be scalable so we should continue with th
Cost is (Score:5, Informative)
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That is, as soon as they build the millions of machines required.
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Re: Cost is (Score:2)
Every machine that we use regularly has some issues with time, require maintenance, etc. Why should it be different here?
The money your are spending on them is not wasted, it is literally necessary to save our own existence and style of life...
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$ 2,160,000,000,000 ($2.16 trillion) per year, to neutralize current emissions.
Is that all?? We can do that. Sounds too cheap ... 50 billion tons/yr x $600 = $30 trillion. Nearly half of global GDP.
Sadly your maths is off.
Some costs will come down with scale, but is this based on incredibly cheap electricity in Iceland?
And how much of this suitable basalt is accessible?
Re:Cost is (Score:5, Informative)
Still at those levels you'd be getting the economies of scale so you could use the $100-$150. That's centred around 4.5 trillion. Or about 5.5% of GDP. Probably cheaper than adaptation (depending on how much you value the well-being of future generations), but a difficult sell as the cost of adaptation is mostly in developing countries who aren't going to be contributing much to the sequestration.
Judging from the fact that people die of starvation, and the world produces enough food, I'm going to predict that humans don't have access to an approach that could make that happen.
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And build enough power generation to keep 100,000,000 of them operating 24/7 in perpetuity.
And we'll actually need more than 100,000,000 of them, since they'll be down for maintenance some of the time....
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The problem is that co2 is the low energy product of metabolism. Of course it's going to take energy to turn it into something else. There's no way around that, anyone that thinks there is has just found a different source of energy to use.
I don't see why if we're going to be spending money, why not turn it into something useful? Like carbon and oxygen? We can use the carbon to build fuel, and release the oxygen into the atmosphere.
It's a bit like cracking water to make hydrogen and oxygen. It takes an
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There are plenty of efforts geared towards synthetic fuel production from atmospheric CO2. You could also use the product of CO2-capture (such as alkanes) for materials synthesis. Raw carbon capture just seems like a stupid idea overall.
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There are plenty of efforts geared towards synthetic fuel production from atmospheric CO2. You could also use the product of CO2-capture (such as alkanes) for materials synthesis. Raw carbon capture just seems like a stupid idea overall.
Well, apart from the obvious way to do it, which is to grow trees and then make buildings out of them [cnn.com]. I have serous doubts whether these carbon capture machines are close in terms of efficiency to trees.
Carbon capture mostly seems to be interesting because you can use the CO2 to help extract more fossil fuels. It's likely a bad idea and it definitely shouldn't be a priority, except in the rare cases where a coal power station can't be phased out within the next two years where it should be obligatory but
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I was more thinking of alkanes serving as a precursor for carbon nanotube manufacture.
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There are lots of proposals, and some operating plants, to do just that. Jet fuel is the usual thing. I think that's probably how airplanes will be powered in the future.
It would also be nice to take some of the carbon out of the atmosphere, rather than just cycling it around some more. Some of the jet fuel proposals suggest pumping excess back into the wells the original oil came out of.
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Yeah, CO2 sequestering is really dumb. We'll deplete the oxygen before put a dent in the carbon.
WTF? I have got to believe that the mod point this received was a +1 Funny, otherwise...
What does "deplete the oxygen" even mean? It's already bound to carbon - I'd have thought that it was fairly obvious from the chemical formula, CO2. Sequestering that would not change the amount of oxygen, O2, in the atmosphere one iota.
Now, sequestering it may not be sensible at present (it takes energy, energy that could be displacing carbon producing energy sources, for starters), but that's both debatable and a compl
Cost is irrelevant (Score:5, Insightful)
The excess CO2 accumulated in the atmosphere came from carbon which used to be sequestered underground in the form of coal, oil, and gas. But we burned it and released it into the atmosphere as CO2. Until it's sequestered again, we'll be stuck with the elevated atmospheric CO2 levels and the deleterious weather and temperature effects that causes. So until we're willing to pay the cost to sequester that excess CO2, we'll be stuck with the effects of global warming.
Even after we switch entirely to carbon neutral energy sources, we're still going to have to pay that sequestration cost eventually. So the cost doesn't matter because we have to pay to return to the way things were before global warming. The longer we delay the development of sequestration technologies, the longer the payback will take and the more expensive it will be (due to us continuing to suffer the effects of global warming for longer).
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Don't forget about the various natural carbon sinks [wikipedia.org]. CO2 is being absorbed by natural processes constantly, in particular by the oceans, and some fraction of this absorption is permanent (e.g. buried in the sea bed). We're overwhelming this process currently, but it's still ongoing.
We may well need artificial sequestration to avoid the worst effects, if it's cheap enough it could save us significant climate costs, and at scale it could certainly shorten the effects of our emissions, but all the carbon we've
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The so-called "carbon sinks" work... unfortunately, I'm not sure they work fast enough.
Also, some of those "carbon sinks" have their own issues (like increased acidity in the oceans, at least for a while).
There's also the danger of permafrost thawing, which could send a lot of methane into the atmosphere. The thawing risk (and the affected surfaces) increases with increased global temperature and the risk of wild temperature swings (which we've had aplenty during the last decade, and they seem to accelerate
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Sequestering from the atmosphere would help reduce excess CO2, but most of it is being done at CO2 emitters, i.e. fossil fuel burning power plants. It's a lot easier to capture CO2 at source than to recover it from the atmosphere.
Renewables proponents understand this perfectly well. We also understand that just recovering some of the CO2 emitted when burned doesn't account for the rest of the lifecycle - those fuels had to be extracted.
What we need to solve this is machines that can remove large quantities
Carbon Cycle (Score:2)
Even if we switched entirely to carbon-neutral energy sources immediately, that does nothing about all the excess CO2 already in the atmosphere.
Yes it would because of the carbon cycle [wikipedia.org]. Removal of a major source of CO2 emission could have quite a rapid effect on global CO2 levels given the amplitude of the annual oscillation in the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere.
We are still going to need carbon capture to achieve zero emissions in the medium term because there are some things, like flying, that we still have do not have the technology to let us avoid using fossil fuels but that will change given enough time.
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I think you may be off by a decimal place.
I get a cost $22,800,000,000,000 (23 trillion) *per year* (not including the cost of building the plant) give 38 billion tons of carbon and $600 (the low end).
Global GDP is about 87 trillion.
However, building these plants was also going to cost about 950 trillion in the last article I read.
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I think you may be off by a decimal place.
I get a cost $22,800,000,000,000 (23 trillion) *per year* (not including the cost of building the plant) give 38 billion tons of carbon and $600 (the low end).
Global GDP is about 87 trillion.
However, building these plants was also going to cost about 950 trillion in the last article I read.
And unless I'm off in my understandings, carbon credits would pay around 900B to 1.8T at current prices for that much carbon, assuming you could get that many credits.
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So are you saying we can achieve half of what we need if one single country stupid war mongering? Well fuck the human race is dumb*.
Note: Of course it's dumb, the fact we still rely on armies proves that we are collectively not an intelligent species.
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Lets break it down (in ballpark numbers, close enough for a rule of three): .5gWh electricity)
- 2.5gWh per ton of CO2 (2gWh thermal,
- 25 tons of water per ton of CO2
- Low price of $600, high of $1200. (Break even prices are assumed to be: $100-$150 )
- building cost of $10m-$15m
plans to capture 4000 tons/year
Emissions are in the ballpark of 30 000 million metric tons. (3e10)
(I'll be using TeraDollars, because billion/trillion gets confusing at 10^12)
thats 7-8 million such plants. -> $80x10^12 -- 80 TeraD
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That's pretty reasonable. It also sounds like a simple extrapolation of their fairly optimistic price estimates for a single plant, so it's probably not possible. There's only so much cheap and accessible carbonate, and even Iceland can run out of accessible geothermal power.
Trees? (Score:2)
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Re:Trees? (Score:5, Insightful)
You can burn the trees in a low-oxygen environment to create charcoal, which can then be buried. If left alone, in a million years it'll turn into coal. Though at that point you might as well just stop people from digging up coal in the first place and save all that effort.
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Why bury it? Charcoal will be super valuable as a renewable chemical reduction agent in the smelting industry.
Re: Trees? (Score:3)
Trees are not the problem, their cycle is essentially closed. Burning trees to capture other carbon requires (a) energy input, and (b) replacement trees, which is also energy-intensive.
So you need to get off the fossiles.in yhe first place. If you do that quickly, you can mostly stop there. If you don't, whatever else you do instead is not going to gelp.
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Re:Trees? (Score:5, Insightful)
The average tree will absorb around a tonne of CO2 over its life. We're emitting 35 billion tonnes of CO2 every single year. I'm sure you see the difficulty here.
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The average tree will absorb around a tonne of CO2 over its life. We're emitting 35 billion tonnes of CO2 every single year. I'm sure you see the difficulty here.
Not really, there are about 3 Trillion trees now. Adding a extra 35 Billion trees is only a 1% increase in the number of trees. Difficult, but if serious effort was put in to reafforest areas of desertification then it's quite likely it could be done in a way which worked well with the environment. Not doing it is a choice and a failure by humanity. Doing it partly would be a definite good start.
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You think we can plant an extra 35 billion trees every year? In areas that they can actually grow (it's being tried [wikipedia.org] but is not so easy [nature.com] in the desert), and without displacing cropland needed for food. And that's not accounting for the trees that will die or burn prematurely, or for the decades needed to mature, or of course for all the carbon that's released again when they rot.
Sure, any trees planted will help. Just not very much, compared to the scale of the problem. Far (far) easier to tackle the problem
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You think we can plant an extra 35 billion trees every year
We don't actually have to plant all of them. The great thing about trees is that, once there are a few in an area they will self-seed unless something stops them. More important is to provide protected areas where they can grow without e.g. being eaten by sheep. There were, apparently, originally about double the number of trees (6 Trillion or so) so the world has plenty more potential for trees.
without displacing cropland needed for food.
Efficient use of cropland and giving up large amounts is an absolutely crucial thing at this point. Things li
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Greatest need, deployment efficiency (Score:3)
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Who would do this "charging"? Who would be owed?
Also, what is ironic about volcanos emitting CO2 along with SO2?
Re: Greatest need, deployment efficiency (Score:2)
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volcanos emit CO2 along with SO2. Should the country that "owns" the volcano get charged for their CO2?
That's a good question, in a way, because it raises an interesting point about nationalism and private/public property ownership. But it's also a senseless question in another, since humans emit orders of magnitude more CO2 than volcanism, making it frankly a non-issue.
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There is no irony there because drawing the geothermal energy isn't going to reduce or increase the CO2 output of the volcano. It's going to emit roughly the same stuff no matter what you do. Therefore the only emissions you have to count are those of building and maintaining the plant. Those CAN be significant; for example at The Geysers near Calistoga the maintenance on the power plant there produced a superfund site nearby on Butts Canyon Rd. Some of the stuff that comes out of the vent is heavy metals a
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$600 per ton is WAY too expensive (Score:2)
"A typical passenger vehicle emits about 4.6 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year."
So, only $2,750 per year per vehicle! Plus, that is only the marginal cost and assumes the capture process is powered by 100% renewable energy!
"We're going to need a bigger boat ..."
Yee haaaaa! (Score:2)
From today on NPR: "My daughter is distraught on how to save the climate from global warming. I told her you can't save the planet but you could join an organization focused on one thing."
"We're composting."
"Us, too!"
Doing a great job breaking down waste into carbon dioxide to release into the atmosphere, due to left over innumeracy about running out of landfill space, from the 1970s.
Re:Yee haaaaa! (Score:5, Insightful)
From today on NPR: "My daughter is distraught on how to save the climate from global warming. I told her you can't save the planet but you could join an organization focused on one thing."
"We're composting."
"Us, too!"
Doing a great job breaking down waste into carbon dioxide to release into the atmosphere, due to left over innumeracy about running out of landfill space, from the 1970s.
What composting avoids is the methane that comes from rotting in landfills. Methane is a much stronger greenhouse gas than CO2 so this is a major benefit. The compost is then a part of a proper CO2 cycle in that it helps plants grow which will then absorb more CO2 than the compost released (you mostly use small proportions of compost mixed with other soil) and so overall the whole thing will be CO2 negative.
So the people on NPR were right, it turns out. Are you going to apologise for misunderstanding and thinking this was related to space in landfills?
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Getting to 'zero' carbon emissions is hyperbole (we have to breathe, after all), and composting I would think wouldn't go beyond the normal cycle (you are composting food scraps and paper products, all coming from things that are inherently growing).
However, if you landfill that product depriving the decomp environment of adequate oxygen, then you don't get CO2, you get methane, which is far far worse than CO2.
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My point is that composting is, like respiration, releasing carbon from sources that historically are naturally captured as fast as we would release carbon, so long as they get to decompose in the open air instead of burying them only for them to release methane instead of CO2..
The issue is not with composting things that grow as fast as we consume them, but with massive accumulation and continued release of carbon that had been sequestered as petroleum and such. So talking about non-fossil-fuel carbon is l
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The plot for Netflix Japan is Sinking (Score:2)
This is literally the plot for Japan is sinking. A "revolutionary carbon neutral" aka carbon capture initiative is used in Japan called "COMS".
It liquifies carbon dioxide and injects it into the ground where they get the oil from allowing Japan to be carbon neutral.
But it turns out to be BS because it increases the occurrence of "Slow slip" when two terrestrial plates come together, one drops beneath the other. The plot is that the increased ocean weight due to polar ice caps melting and more garbage in th
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If all the ice we have on the planet will melt, the ocean will rise about 200 - 300 meters (make it yards - basically the same).
Perhaps you want to look on a map how high Japan is ...
This could be done anywhere however (Score:2)
Doen't have to be either-or. This could be set up on the middle of the sahara desert and powered by solar during the day. Don't get many trees growing there. Though atm its a proof of concept and needs to be massively scaled up to be any use.
Too easy to game the system with "carbon capture" (Score:2)
I can see big petroleum companies claiming "Carbon Capture" credits by pumping co2 below ground , and just running a pipe a few miles away where it comes right back up. I would not trust any third world country to even attempt that sophisticated a scheme either.
Unfortunately avoidance or immediately solidifying and visible validation will be feasible.
Carbon capture has always been here (Score:2)
It used to be called "plants".
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It used to be called "plants".
It did.
But then we went and put out far more CO2 than the plants could absorb. And the CO2 levels skyrocketed...
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Use more plants.
Oh wait, we're chopping them down to make room for some industrial plants instead. Some of them will probably be doing some carbon capturing. A lot more expensive and way less efficient, of course, but hey, it's good for business.
Duplicate posts (Score:2)
Cost is high, but... (Score:3)
The World Currently emits... (Score:2)
The world currently emits about 38 billion tons of CO2 a year.
So this would be $30,400 billion to get rid of one year's worth.
Plants (Score:2)
Stop destroying forests, grasslands
Same Way as Before -- Bury Living Matter (Score:3)
This isn't hard.
1. Grow Trees. Trees clean the air while they're alive. They capture the carbon in their wood.
2. Cut down the trees and bury them deep in caves. Coal mines would be perfect for many reasons.
3. Left the dead trees alone.
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It goes into the ground and then turns into rock. It is not intended for drinking.
Basalt, not People (Score:2)
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How about taxing per baby instead of giving tax breaks per baby.
It seems simple. The real challenge will be getting voters to swallow a proposal like that. "OMG that candidate is anti-family!!!"
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The Baby does not produce CO2.
It is the idiotic parents or the idiotic "society" the parents live in.
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The Baby does not produce CO2.
If your baby doesn't respire what you have is a doll, not a baby.
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The global fertility rate is 2.3. Back in 1990 it was 3.2. So as you can see it's been falling steadily, and has been for decades in fact.
2.1 is zero population growth (some people die before reproducing).
The reason population continues to increase at the current pace is mostly down to people living longer. That will level off. At the current rate we will reach a stable 10-11 billion people, with most of the increase in Africa. That is sustainable as long as we all adopt more sustainable lifestyles, but tha
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We probably need 1.2 or so for a few decades to get to a reasonable stable state again.