The US Has Big, New Plans To Pull CO2 Out of the Air (theverge.com) 156
Despite the efforts of delegates at this month's climate summit in Glasgow, the world is still careening toward potentially catastrophic levels of global warming. Now, some countries and corporations are turning to new technologies to pull carbon out of the air. From a report: Today, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced a bold new plan to make those technologies, called carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, cost-effective and scalable with the launch of a new "Carbon Negative Shot" initiative. Through this initiative, the agency seeks to bring the cost of CDR down dramatically this decade -- to less than $100 a ton -- so that it can be deployed at a big enough scale to remove "gigatons," or billions of tons, of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
That is a hell of a lot of CO2 pollution. Sequestering one gigaton of carbon dioxide would amount to removing the pollution of about 250 million vehicles -- the US's entire light-duty fleet -- in one year, according to the DOE. With CDR technologies still in pretty early stages of development, there are significant hurdles to overcome before the DOE can do so. CDR is a suite of strategies aimed at drawing down CO2 to keep it from trapping heat in the atmosphere. Nature can do some of that for us -- trees and plants pull CO2 out of the air. There's also "direct air capture" technology that mimics that process using carbon-sucking machines, but it has yet to be deployed at a large scale.
That is a hell of a lot of CO2 pollution. Sequestering one gigaton of carbon dioxide would amount to removing the pollution of about 250 million vehicles -- the US's entire light-duty fleet -- in one year, according to the DOE. With CDR technologies still in pretty early stages of development, there are significant hurdles to overcome before the DOE can do so. CDR is a suite of strategies aimed at drawing down CO2 to keep it from trapping heat in the atmosphere. Nature can do some of that for us -- trees and plants pull CO2 out of the air. There's also "direct air capture" technology that mimics that process using carbon-sucking machines, but it has yet to be deployed at a large scale.
Arguments from the future. (Score:2)
Imagine its the year 3,000.
Regular person - "I think its time to turn off these sequestration devices."
Politician - "Think of the jobs!"
Regular person - "But sir, the glaciers have reached the outer limits of Chicago."
Politician - "How will we fuel our jets if we aren't capturing CO2 and making jet fuel with it? No change is good change!"
Regular person - |facepalm|
--
Be happy for this moment. This moment is your life. - Omar Khayyam
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Imagine its the year 3,000.
Regular person - "I think its time to turn off these sequestration devices." Politician - "Think of the jobs!" Regular person - "But sir, the glaciers have reached the outer limits of Chicago." Politician - "How will we fuel our jets if we aren't capturing CO2 and making jet fuel with it? No change is good change!" Regular person - |facepalm|
Alternative Politician remark- "How are we going to stem off future incarnations of Global Warming without the Iceberg Maginot line?
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Covid analogy (Score:2)
Having a big climate conference and discussing greenhouse gas reduction/removal as the only solution, is like having a Covid-19 conference and discussing nothing but hand washing.
I am endlessly frustrated by the blinkered fixation on emissions reduction, to the exclusion of any other strategy.
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What other solution do you want them to consider?
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Planting trees. Trees sequester carbon from the air.
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Planting trees. Trees sequester carbon from the air.
There is nowhere near enough land available for tree planting to make a difference.
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Planting trees. Trees sequester carbon from the air.
There is nowhere near enough land available for tree planting to make a difference.
There used to be 6 Trillion trees. There are currently about 3Trillion trees (with the number apparently growing already). If we became more efficient in agriculture, for example by using more vegetable matter directly and fewer animals, and then used most of the land that the other three trillion trees used to grow on then we could get a noticable increase. Around 35 billion trees a year (according to a discussion had recently on Slashdot) would make a noteworthy difference. That's around 1% of the miss
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What other solution do you want them to consider?
Only solutions that embrace marxism :-)
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Re: Covid analogy (Score:2)
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Reduction is one solution, Removal is another and IS geo-engineering.
Both reduction and removal are forms of geo-engineering, but there are other forms of geo-engineering that focus on mitigating the effects of the CO2, separate from engineering changes in CO2 levels.
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Both reduction and removal are forms of geo-engineering, but there are other forms of geo-engineering that focus on mitigating the effects of the CO2, separate from engineering changes in CO2 levels.
In science fiction, sure. However they don't actually work. For some reason, the conferences focus on the solutions which might actually work, most of which involve reducing the amount of fossil fuels we burn.
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Both reduction and removal are forms of geo-engineering, but there are other forms of geo-engineering that focus on mitigating the effects of the CO2, separate from engineering changes in CO2 levels.
In science fiction, sure. However they don't actually work.
That's a very strong claim. Do you have any evidence for it?
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That's a very strong claim. Do you have any evidence for it?
I have plenty of evidence. The lack of any evidence of success of each of these techniques. This is not a search for a bigfoot that might have been hiding in the forest and just not happen to be found. In order to work these techniques have to make major changes to the world of the kind that would be measurable and useful. So far, for example, Bill Gates proposed and even prototyped dumping salt water into the atmosphere. They had ideas about ships that would travel round the world doing this. Then peop
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To be fair, neither have you. I asked for constructive input and your low effort was a snarky comment. Well played, sir.
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What would be a reasonable amount ? Aren't the poor entitled that reasonable amount. Yet that reasonable amount times the number of poor people is still too much for the earth to provide.
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The problem is that poor people don't stay poor. As their living standards rise, so will their carbon emissions.
Many poor women want to have fewer children. If contraceptives are available, they will have the option of smaller family sizes.
A condom that prevents an unwanted pregnancy also prevents a lifetime of carbon emissions.
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Having a big climate conference and discussing greenhouse gas reduction/removal as the only solution, is like having a Covid-19 conference and discussing nothing but hand washing.
I am endlessly frustrated by the blinkered fixation on emissions reduction, to the exclusion of any other strategy.
Your frustration comes form your incompetence. Because that are the only things that can still work in time.
Re: Covid analogy (Score:2)
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At one time they tried to say just replacing 1 lightbulb with a high efficiency one would do it. They lied.
They most certainly did not say "that would do it". You're lying.
Re: Covid analogy (Score:2)
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Re: Covid analogy (Score:2)
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Having a big climate conference and discussing greenhouse gas reduction/removal as the only solution, is like having a Covid-19 conference and discussing nothing but hand washing.
I am endlessly frustrated by the blinkered fixation on emissions reduction, to the exclusion of any other strategy.
Your frustration comes form your incompetence. Because that are the only things that can still work in time.
The problem is that emissions reduction won't do the job, and no one who's studied the problem seriously claims that it can. The Paris Agreement was based on assumptions that we would not only reduce emissions but that we'd begin to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere. Both are needed to keep warming below 2C.
My opinion is that we're going to end up needing to do all of dramatically slashing emissions, implementing removal/sequestration, and geo-engineering to combat temperature rises if we're going to avoid l
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I agree that drastic, decisive measures over decades would be needed. We do not have the leadership or the supporting population that can make decisions like that and stick with them because far too few people are actually capable of understanding what is going on. For a comparably minor gain, the human race was willing to throw it all away.
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Um, what? You're complaining about being too focused on emissions reduction and *also* complaining about being too focused on sequestration?
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Reduction and sequestration are two sides of the same coin.
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Right! We should be concentrating on thinking positive instead!
Yeah, big plans, no execution (Score:2)
Typically US. All this will do is delay measures that actually help.
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Re: Yeah, big plans, no execution (Score:2)
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What measures do you think would actually help?
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere is a necessary part of any solution. A more urgent part is cutting emissions. There are other parts that are clear to me, but often the problem is clear and feasible solutions aren't. For reducing emissions we can use solar panels, wind farms, and lots of batteries. (Batteries in the most general sense of the term. For example I'm including pumping water up-hill and compressed air.) But how do we handle melting permafrost?
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Oh, it is a measure that would be critically needed. I just do not think the US is doing any more than announcing grand plans here. Plans alone do not a solution make.
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A very valid point.
OTOH, solar power has been ramping up, albeit too slowly. And storage is still a problem.
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A very valid point.
OTOH, solar power has been ramping up, albeit too slowly. And storage is still a problem.
Oh, there are moves in the right direction. 35 years ago (when the Science was really solid) the speed would even have been adequate. Not today.
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We *know* various ways to store power, but we don't have them built at the required capacity, so it's a problem. It requires investment and maintenance, and choice between various alternatives, different of which are better at different locations.
FWIW, pumping water uphill is one of the better storage techniques, but it requries an uphill location to pump the water to. If you have to build a water tower then it's a lot less attractive.
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Nah. We can use the same means of storage that have long been used to back up coal and nuclear. [wikipedia.org]
Problem with that is that it takes a lot of time to build and it needs hills. Starting on this decisively 30 years ago would have been entirely fine, but today it will likely take too long to get to useful capacity.
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Not compared to building new nuclear power plants, which take at least a couple of decades apiece. And despite all the FUD thrown at wind and solar on "baseload power", nothing is as reliably unreliable as nuclear power plants, which go down for weeks or months at a time for refueling/maintenance.
Indeed. Nuclear is about the most crappy and useless way to generate power available. You need at lest 30% of the grid to be non-nuclear in order to even make it stable. It is exceptionally expensive, unreliable, takes forever to install and the waste problem is _still_ unsolved. Those in favor of nuclear power are fanatics. There is no other explanation.
The storage problem has to be solved. But pumped storage is not an option in a lot of places and it takes to long to establish to be the only solution of t
Millions of sites requried. (Score:5, Informative)
I certainly hope they find a way to do this accomplish this monumental task because with current our technology it will require about 2.7 million direct air capture sites to pull a single gigaton of CO2 out of the air. Humans are currently emitting 35GT of CO2 per year, so I would describe our situation as "entirely fucked" and nobody can seemed to be bothered to do a damn thing to reduce how much they pollute. Meanwhile politicians can seem to find a spine to implement and CO2/GHG emission tax and the public can't even be bothered to vote for... anything.
We're screwed and everyone is indifferent with excuses that simply aren't going to matter. The laws of nature just don't care about excuses or intentions. We're screwed and 95% of people are just twiddling their thumbs.
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By the time it gets really bad on earth...I'll have been well into my dirt nap and not really caring.
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oh noes. the sky is falling. in 200 years.
in the meantime, all of us will be long since dead.
Well, yeah, that's the problem. It seems you can boil any species of frog to death, simply by turning up the heat slowly enough that no individual frog notices much difference over the course of his own lifetime. Future generations of frogs will note that the water is warm, and just assume it had always been that way, right up until the final generation that dies from overheating.
Once would have hoped that humans were smart enough to be able to handle this sort of challenge, but apparently not. :(
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Once would have hoped that humans were smart enough to be able to handle this sort of challenge, but apparently not. :(
It's not a matter of intellect nor is it a lack of wisdom because we know how to fix this problem and we know that it should be done. Humanity (as a whole) is too selfish and egocentric to make any kind of sacrifice to fight a threat that they fail to perceive as a serious threat. Hell, we have fools that won't even get a vaccine because of this very problem.
I think there is a certain level of abstract thinking that is required to extrapolate and thus comprehend the level of danger that we as a species ar
How much CO2 will be produced... (Score:2)
...generating the energy to run the machine that pulls CO2 out of the air?
Hilarious (Score:2)
First: how are we doing on big projects in the US, lately? Don't we announce a moonshot about every 10 years? Mars? Some space-bullshit conveniently projected to be delivered...just past the horizon of the current president.
Second: what - precisely - has the Dept of Energy done for the last 44 years?
Created in 1977, they've accomplished basically fuckall since then. National energy policy? Building nuclear power? Coordinating national energy infrastructure? Maybe hardening our energy systems against
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First: how are we doing on big projects in the US, lately?
Pretty good, one administration got vaccine development down to 9 months from 5 years.
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Vaccine development is not the same scale or type of work as a real infrastructure (i.e., building something).
Actually there are quite similar bottlenecks, often regulator and legal, financial risks as well.
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The first vaccine to be developed for use in the US was first because it declined to do the paperwork required to get the government money. So I don't think you can credit the government with that response.
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The first vaccine to be developed for use in the US was first because it declined to do the paperwork required to get the government money. So I don't think you can credit the government with that response.
Its primarily first because the regulatory path had been expedited. Regardless of who funded the research, the regulator path remained a huge barrier.
And money absolutely factored in given that there were guaranteed orders prior to approval. That removed a manufacturing barrier.
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Second: what - precisely - has the Dept of Energy done for the last 44 years?
Do I really need to tel you or is this a Joke :) Dept of Energy is the office that implements all the Ideas the lobbyist bribe^H^H^H^H^H suggest to Congress
But that's not really the point (Score:2)
I guarantee you that nobody pushing a climate change agenda is going to care about this because fixing it isn't their goal. When third-world countries tell the US that it is to blame and not only that the US go into hock to deal with it locally but also demand a crapton of (taxpayer) money be given to them to help combat it in their country, I call B.S.
Let me guess. (Score:2)
Rednecks will roll their coal [wikipedia.org] in reverse? :-)
It will happen only if it's profitable (Score:2)
A scheme to capture carbon dioxide and sequester it underground will only work if the government pays for it, and government is not good at long-term large-scale projects.
If someone can pull carbon dioxide out of the air and use solar power to turn it into jet fuel, and the jet fuel can then be sold at a profit... that would happen for sure. Doubly so if government adds tax rules that promote the renewable fuel by penalizing fuel made by extracting additional petroleum from the ground.
Honest Government Ad (Score:5, Funny)
Carbon Capture & Storage. [youtube.com]
Very educational.
Re: Honest Government Ad (Score:2)
This is just bad economics (Score:3)
OK, so let's say they magically get it to $100/ton of CO2 removal, and the removed CO2 actually stays in the ground and doesn't gradually leak out. Let's say it works perfectly.
That's still a shitty price in most instances. For instance, an ICE automobile used by the typical American releases 4.6 tons of CO2 per year. The average American car lasts for 8 years (I find this surprisingly short but that's what Consumer Reports says). This means that 4.6 * 8 == 36.8 $3680 is the cost differential just based on purchase price alone.
But electric cars are also cheaper to run and maintain. Maintenance is hard to quantify, but let's just go by fuel. The US average for miles per $100 of gas is 950. A typical electric vehicle will get you an average of 4500 miles on $100 of electricity. Consumer reports the typical car in America drives 150,000 miles in its lifetime. Meaning $15789 in lifetime fuel cost for ICE, vs $3260 for an electric car, meaning $12529 in lifetime fuel savings. Add $3680 and you get $16209.
So, assuming the electric car is running on 100% renewable energy, as long as the price premium of going electric is less than $16209 per car, it's cheaper to just go all-electric, instead of having ICE cars pump out CO2 and paying to scrub the CO2 back out of the atmosphere. Given that the price differential is already less than $12529, over the lifetime of the car, going electric is ALREADY cheaper than ICE without worrying about the fate of the CO2.
This is a more difficult proposition for other applications, but the main point is that extracting CO2 and putting it back in the ground is almost always more expensive than just finding other ways to get our energy and not digging it up and burning it in the first place.
Yes we do need to do CO2 sequestration someday, but for the time being our money is far better spent on not releasing CO2 in the first place. It's simply better economics. The only reason companies are pushing hard on sequestration is they think they will get a license to continue to pollute while not having to pay for their pollution. They expect taxpayers to pay for the sequestration. If you went and told everyone they had to pay $100 per ton of CO2 they release in order to put it back in the ground, they'd VERY quickly find ways to reduce their emissions.
And really, the $100/ton figure is pretty much a pipe dream I suspect.
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Saw any electric airplanes lately? Battery energy density is tiny compared to fossil fuels, not suitable for many applications. On the other hand, carbon capture can be located anywhere on the planet and take advantage of excess wind/solar energy when there is not enough demand for other uses. Or in the case of algae bloom sequestration, use natural elements and provide food and net carbon neutral fuel.
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Saw any electric airplanes lately? Battery energy density is tiny compared to fossil fuels, not suitable for many applications.
Sure, but in those cases generating fuel from renewable resources is also likely to be cheaper than burning fossil fuels then trying to recapture and sequester the CO2. Or maybe even burn fossil fuel in something like a fuel cell that is designed to capture the CO2 immediately. The added weight and complexity of such a system would be larger than a burn-and-release system, but less than a battery electric system. Since it does look like battery-electric airplanes may make sense for short commuter flights,
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A lot of people don't realize this, but we need to actively remove a lot of CO2 from the atmosphere to reach 1.5C.
If every country stuck to every promise made so far on net zero and emissions reductions, we would get to 1.9C.
So 1.5C is dependent on us removing large volumes of CO2. Trees and re-wilding will be part of that, but we are going to need machines to do it on a massive scale.
Whatever the cost is, it will be less than the cost of dealing with 1.9C.
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Yes, we will need to do sequestration in the future, and we should continue R&D to improve it, but right now we can get more bang for our buck by eliminating as much CO2 emissions as possible. Once the low-hanging fruit is gone and sequestration becomes cheaper than curtailing emissions, THEN we begin mass rollout.
Let's say we can afford $1 trillion to decarbonize.over the next 5 years. If we spend it on reducing emissions, there will be a lot less carbon in the atmosphere in 5 years than if we spent it
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$1tn isn't enough.
Throw it out of the atmosphere? (Score:2)
Iceland is already doing this (Score:2)
OK, Iceland has the advantage of very green energy but it is already taking CO2 and binding it into underground granite. I think the actual company is Swiss or something and this will just be a small scale test but that could be the first country to go carbon negative!
AKA (Score:2)
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How much has Egypt emitted since 5,000 BC?
Re: As they should. (Score:3)
Much less.
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Here is news for you: You live on the same planet as China and you _will_ get fucked by climate change. Still think that claiming it is somebody else's problem is a good idea in any way?
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Just like we say at my work, "you fuck it - you fix it".
You're quite right -- the USA should be responsible for removing the amount of carbon that the USA has emitted, and China should be responsible for removing the amount of Carbon that China has emitted, and so on. That's only fair.
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Has been considered, does not pan out. The numbers are wayyy too bad.
Seriously, do you think the people looking for solutions are all completely stupid? They are not.
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Even a 1% solution helps. Besides, I like trees.
Re: If only there was another way... (Score:2)
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If only arable land and water resources weren't limited. If only plants didn't mingle the carbon with other nutrients you don't want to remove from the environment.
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What could possibly go wrong?
Yeah, what scientific research is saying long term storage of carbon underground is safe. ;-)
Re: What? (Score:2)
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That would work...now figure the energy expenditure required. (Maybe nanotubes could be worth the effort. Perhaps. They are less exothernic. Diamond is unstable at standard temperature and pressure, and it's costly to make. (OK, it's not very unstable. It still wants to turn into graphite. Producing graphite is a cheaper and better answer unless you plan on selling it.)
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That would work...now figure the energy expenditure required.
I know you followed this up with some good feedback, but I think we should really stop starting conversations around CO2 mitigation, with concerns around cost, complexity and especially profit, because the alternative here is somewhere between impossible and certain death.
No matter what Greed says, this isn't a matter of capitalistic profit. We humans either fix the CO2 problem, or we perish. Plain and simple. We're not leaving this dying rock, anytime soon.
Re: What? (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you know what you get without capitalism? A poor and inefficient solution that grabs the lowest fruit and throws effort at it because there is no reason to do anything beyond that. It won't scale because it wasn't required to be a sustainable effort in the first place. Capitalism works so well and is so powerful it enabled mankind to reshape the climate of the entire fucking planet and if you think we've come up with another tool that has the potential to change it back you are deluded.
Yeah, we need to fix the problem or we perish but capitalism tells us HOW to do it in a way that keeps the greedy little monkey's which are the human race following through. Do you know what those non-capitalists come up with? Plugging up the places the oil came from and then estimate we don't have enough room so we should give up. The capitalists on the other hand are thinking of hundreds of ways to turn that carbon into building materials, into nonreactive substances that don't break down easily and level lawns with it, and otherwise get the masses to spread it around the Earth for them and pay them for the privilege rather than the other way around.
Sit down junior. There are still millions of people walking around who've already seen your dumb new ideas tried when they were dumb new ideas before and then recognized the dozens of times those dumb new ideas were tried before with the same results. Like you said, we actually need to solve this problem.
Re: What? (Score:4, Interesting)
In a competitive environment profits decrease in opposition to the capitalists desire to increase profits. So the capitalist has a choice: decrease production cost more or increase production, so that he can sell more. If he could have decreased the cost of production he would have already. So he produces more, he and every other capitalist producing fungible goods, and in doing so they drive the profits down again. This cycle continues until production is maximized and profits are minimized, at which point you enter the later stages of market development where it becomes totally unprofitable for new competitors to enter the market and older competitors die off. Thus ultimately leading to oligopoly and monopoly within that market segment.
Ultimately, monopolies unable to grow profits will seek out public funds, becoming wards of the state for private profits. This is why you see ever major tech corporation taking on military contracts or other government contracts. That's why big oil is subsidized to the tune of $4 trillion every 10 years.
The capitalism you described is the lego, Econ 101, capitalist propaganda version. It starts at t=0 and ends at t+1. But it doesn't consider where things are going or how the capitalist got their money to begin with.
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Overproduction of... sequestering carbon. That is your counterclaim... repeating what I said but in words slanted with negative bias.
"Scaling up to maximize profit increases the amount of production and output. How much? By the profit, which then lets you expand efforts... in a cycle that doesn't end until you hit the actual limits."
As for the rest of your rant about not liking capitalism due to blaming it for outcomes which are the result of regulation not the cause of it not onl
Re: What? (Score:2)
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It is literally the last sentence of the first line of your comment.
"Similar to how your interpretation doesn't relate to my response and your conclusions lack any empirical basis."
You stated capitalism led to overproduction. There were no specific claims in your response to refute with empirical data. It was simply a rant about what you perceive to be flaws in capitalism. Flaws which wouldn't be relevant even if true because y
Re: What? (Score:2)
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You are the ignorant one. Capitalism is a system of, wait for it, CAPITAL ACCUMULATION.
Not OP, but Capitalism is an economic system as OP described. What you are describing:
Ultimately, monopolies unable to grow profits will seek out public funds, becoming wards of the state for private profits.
is a Social system corrupted by Capitalism.
The solution is NOT to throw away the Capitalism but rather to implement a system that cleans the accumulation of corruption. Throwing away Capitalism is just stupid. There is no more efficient way discovered yet that can allocate resources as effectively with respect to Reality.
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OK junior. Time for you to wake up and stop assuming so hard.
My statement, wasn't directed at capitalism, but more towards taking the ever-ignorant profitable approach towards this problem so we can continue to live on this planet.
Capitalistic Greed created this ENTIRE problem. Not sure why you Capitalist addicts are convinced that Capitalistic Greed is also the answer. That's like trying to cure alcoholism, with more alcohol. Stupid, ignorant, and quite obviously the textbook definition of insanity.
It'
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Nice trope but do you actually have a reasoned and logical refutation to anything I said?
"It's going to take a new approach"
Great. So what is this magical new approach that isn't a fresh coat of paint on something that has been tried be
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You know what works even better than keeping costs down? Making other people pay your costs for you!
Just dump all that waste CO2 into the atmosphere, all that worthless sludge into the nearest river. Then it's somebody else's problem and you get to make even more profit!
Capitalism doesn't solve that, it incentivises it. It's cheaper to just buy a politician or two than to clean up your mess. Nobody can sue you because it's impossible to link specific events to your emissions, or better still they are far aw
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I agree. That's why I said it.
"The capitalists on the other hand are thinking of hundreds of ways to turn that carbon into building materials, into nonreactive substances that don't break down easily and level lawns with it, and otherwise get the masses to spread it around the Earth for them and pay them for the privilege rather than the other way around."
There is nothing in the rest of your comment that lo
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Cost is always significant when choosing between actions. This is true even if your life depends on a correct choice, because there can be more than one correct choice.
But in this particular case cost dominates because all things that are done have "side effects", and in the case one of the side effects is excess expenditure of energy. The less energy you expend for a given amount of desired change, the more desired change you can afford. If a desired change is, e.g., closing coal burning processes, then
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Gigatons of gaseous CO2 with a premade weakness in the pressure vessel could go pretty wrong, can't ignite the blowout either.
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CO2 injected into the ground at the pressures used for fracking will form a supercritical fluid. It does not remain a gas.
CO2 is more geologically stable than methane. Shale formations that held methane for millions of years can hold CO2 at least as long.
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Survivor bias and shale rock wasn't fracked to shit with a nice borehole to the surface. If it initially comes out as a fountain instead of directly as gas it will still be a huge problem.
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After you've already fracked them...
There are plenty of depleted shale gas fields. They are the perfect place to sequester CO2. Not only does the CO2 stay in place, but it displaces the remaining gas upward and enables some of it to be recovered. The gas produced can help pay for the sequestering.
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The question is why aren't we using the carbon for productive things?
- Graphene concrete
- Synthetic Diamonds
And there is still energy requirements to do this. Sequestering underground works in the same way that burying nuclear waste works. It's cheap, but it doesn't tell future generations not to disturb it.
Like if I had the foresight of 1000 years, I would actually find a way to just store carbon and other airborne pollution as 10cm x 10cm x 10cm bricks, and just glue them together rather than storing it a
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The question is why aren't we using the carbon for productive things?
What makes you think we aren't? We can and do use carbon dioxide for lots of things, and we can use 'reclaimed CO2' for any or all of those things as well.
we could be making extremely cheap-durable concrete with it
indeed! [plant.ca]
Un Oeuf is Un Oeuf (Score:2)
Re: Plant Lives Matter (Score:2)
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Good point! We'll be sure to turn the machines off once CO2 levels are back down to an appropriate level.
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Yes, but how will they know which CO2 is the bad pollutant type and which is natural in order to remove the pollution?
Very funny but I suspect that there really are some people stupid enough to believe that is a real question...