What it would take to suck more carbon dioxide out of the air than we put in

http://nautil.us/issue/78/atmospheres/is-net-zero-emissions-an-impossible-goal

by dnetesn • 7 years ago

78 96 7 years ago

lm28469• 7 years ago

If you have an open fire in your living room do you put it out or do you bring a machine to purify the air ?

That depends; am I a single brain with control over my actions as one conscious being and one single, holistic incentive? Or am I a Balkanised agglomeration of independent agents with incompatible short-term incentives?

The carbon problem is a social one, not a technical one. This analogy focusses on the wrong aspect.

jiofih3• 7 years ago

You dump the burnt remains at the bottom of the sea.

Jommi• 7 years ago

If you have had a noxious gas in your house for already quite a while, and it will soon kill you, do you reduce the toxicity of the air first, or try and figure out the source and stop it?

phtrivier• 7 years ago

What if the open fire is the main system of heating your house, that has (both by accident and a stream of unfortunate decisions) long ago been built in the middle of a perpetual blizzard ? (And where most of the occupants demand a 22°C room temperature ?)

(Feel free to suggest a humane way to deal with those occupants, if you're convinced that you're furry enough not to need the open fire.

On the other hand, we're having this discussion on computers connected to the Internet, which, for the sake of analogy, we might as well call "the barbecue on top of the open fire in the living room.")

ggm• 7 years ago

The first thing is not to give up hope. The forest planting may not abate enough to remediate but it's still worth doing for associated reasons like its effect in microclimate and wildlife.

Biochar may not help much either but is still net beneficial and pyrolysis is going to be one of the paths to the feedstock we need for chemicals I would think. The absorbing concrete can be priced right and carbon taxing would drive there.

Deep sea storage, olivine and other rock formation, all useful.

Mainly, it's not giving up hope. Because giving up would be way, way worse.

Sometimes reading these realism write-ups is not very hope inducing. Even stoics don't always give up hope.

There is no better world. We have to try and make the best of all possible worlds here.

perfunctory3• 7 years ago

The first thing is not to give up hope

On the other hand - "We Need Courage, Not Hope, to Face Climate Change" (https://onbeing.org/blog/kate-marvel-we-need-courage-not-hop...)

perfunctory3• 7 years ago

Also

"I am a pessimist by nature. Many people can only keep on fighting when they expect to win. I'm not like that, I always expect to lose. I fight anyway, and sometimes I win."

-- Richard Stallman

What I am trying to say is that even one lost all hope and thinks catastrophic climate change is already unstoppable and human civilization is going to collapse and the game is over, one can still fight. Because it's the right thing to do. Fuck hope.

adventured• 7 years ago

We have to try and make the best of all possible worlds here.

In this specific context, it's primarily the things outside of your control - far outside of your borders and political influence - that make that an impossible action for a given person.

China is currently adding nearly as much coal power output (+121 GW) as exist in the whole of the EU combined. [1][2] Their companies are working on adding even more output and plants than that around other parts of Asia. Domestically China is building more new coal plants than the rest of the world combined, in fact.

China has approximately 987 GW of coal power in operation, soon to be 1,100 GW. The EU has 149 GW. China passed the EU in coal plant GW output around the year 2000 at 200 GW, they passed the US in 2006 at around 340 GW, and are now closing in on 1,000 GW this year. Next year they will have 4x the coal plant GW output of the US.

The US has reduced its coal-based power output by ~80 GW (1/4 reduction) in about 12 years and continues to close coal plants. China has an additional 149 GW of coal power output under construction. China's actions trivially wipe out anything the rest of the world can do to counter it.

The article properly lists the US as a mega emissions culprit, along with China and India. Except the US isn't massively expanding its emissions, it's reducing. The US isn't opening new coal plants, it's rapidly closing them. The problem in the US is that it isn't moving fast enough.

How does a person from, say, Finland do anything about any of that to try to make this the best possible of worlds? China's actions alone will wipe out any chance of stopping (much less reversing) the accelerating climate damage. It guarantees there can be no positive outcome. How do you force China to stop building hundreds of new coal plants? You can't and they won't.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/c1feee40-0add-11ea-b2d6-9bf4d1957...

[1a] outline version of the FT article: https://outline.com/dbCT6e

[2] https://fortune.com/2019/11/20/china-coal-power-plants-pipel...

melling3• 7 years ago

The world generates 40% of its electricity from coal. It has been like this for decades. Seems like addressing this now instead of complicated solutions later would be a good idea.

Consumers globally can choose “Not coal”

https://h4labs.org/ive-got-another-stupid-idea-to-deal-with-...

pjc50• 7 years ago

Individual action is indeed of very limited effect. That's why we need political action. It's not just coal that matters, and not just in China; all the other fossil fuels, methane emissions, and deforestation matter as well. As do all the other countries.

YawningAngel• 7 years ago

The most plausible (and least palatable) path seems to be offering them trillions of dollars in subsidies for alternatives.

Andrew_nenakhov2• 7 years ago

When I faced a global warming threat playing Civ2 because my neighbours were not cleaning up pollution, I just bombed them into oblivion, then moved in my settlers and cleaned up the debris.

ClumsyPilot2• 7 years ago

You post suggest China doesnt care about climate change, and that's super misleading.

China is investing more in renewables than any other country [1], they have the most electric buses in the world [2], the largest high-speed rail network so you don't have to take a plane, the largest nuclear power build-out in the world and their emissions per capita are lower than US.

The younger and poorer countries actually take climate change more seriously than the West, we had 50 years to address the issue and did nothing about it. I would bet on China and India achieving 100% renewable energy before US does, despite them being poorer.

[1]https://www.statista.com/statistics/799098/global-clean-ener...

[2]https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/news/articles/2019-05-15/in-sh...

simonsarris• 7 years ago

The scope of China's coal is incredible. Truly Mordor-like on the Carbon Monoxide map. Every time there's a forest fire issue around climate change I go look at the map to remind myself. Examples I documented with screenshots:

Australian bush fires vs... China and India: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1197612762039554048

The October California forest fires vs a Normal Day In China: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1189229024951881728

I should have documented Brazil, too. Those fires cause serious pollution and carbon emissions, but they're peanuts compared to every single day in China.

cmcaine2• 7 years ago

This blame China narrative is pretty ridiculous.

China's per capita emissions are about half those of US or Canada (though still over the global average). That should help you understand how incredibly profligate North America is. China's growth in per-capita emissions also seems to be slowing while in the US, the per-capita emissions are basically static since 2012.

The USA is also the world leader in cumulative emissions (which is what really matters if you're trying to draw up a carbon budget or assign blame). While the biggest historical emitters continue to do so little it's no wonder that others don't take climate change as seriously as we might want.

Cumulative emissions sources and plots:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cumulative-co-emissions?t... https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/uploads/historic... https://wriorg.s3.amazonaws.com/s3fs-public/uploads/cumulati...

These emissions figures will be assigning the manufacturing emissions of exported goods to the country that exports them, not the one that imports them. This is one contributor to China's high emissions: manufacturing loads of stuff for the west. Those emissions should really be attributed to the purchaser.

Source for CO2 emissions over time:

Nice table: https://knoema.com/atlas/ranks/CO2-emissions-per-capita?base...

Source data for that table: https://edgar.jrc.ec.europa.eu/overview.php?v=booklet2019&ds...

hi5eyes• 7 years ago

stop the global economy stop emissions problem solved

jiofih3• 7 years ago

the time when a forest pulls down the most carbon is when it’s first growing

I believe this has been disproved long ago. Trees don’t ever stop growing, and it takes carbon to grow. Recent studies show that large old trees still capture a significant amount of co2 due to their massive surface area.

JDEW• 7 years ago

Citation needed.

Literally two lines later:

But decaying wood and organic material releases carbon back into the air. A climax forest is close to a steady state: The rate at which it removes carbon from the air is roughly equal to the rate at which it releases this carbon.

Trees keep on growing, yes, but it’s the old, decaying material that releases CO2 back in the air again, compensating tree growth.

Edit: clarity.

dr_dshiv4• 7 years ago

Old trees tend to grow faster and consume more carbon per unit of time.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/how-old-trees-help-climate-1....

brohoolio• 7 years ago

I keep thinking that carbon in the air is the just the largest game of prisoners dilemma where we likely all lose.

perfunctory3• 7 years ago

In prisoners dilemma each prisoner is in solitary confinement with no means of communicating with the other. This is not the world we are in.

_fizz_buzz_• 7 years ago

Not a game theory expert, but maybe it would be more correct to say that we are stuck in a Nash equilibrium (no player can benefit by changing strategies while the other players keep theirs unchanged).

scotty79• 7 years ago

It's not so much that prisoners can't talk. They just can't influence eachothers decisions which kinda reminds current setup of sovereign nation states.

yreg• 7 years ago

Not in "the" prisoner dilemma, but there are versions with communication/iteration, which are just as worthwhile exploring as the original one.

seventytwo• 7 years ago

Tragedy of the commons

Mirioron• 7 years ago

I don't see what there is to figure out about what we should do with the carbon we sequester from the atmosphere. It seems to me that the only thing we can do is dump it into the ground (maybe as plastic?). That's where the carbon we've put into the atmosphere came from, and that is exactly where we should put it back. Planting forests, using it as fuel, using it for plastic goods, putting it into the oceans are all temporary measures. The carbon from that will enter the cycle again rather quickly.

Of course this will be energy intensive. We essentially need to put the energy back into carbon that we got from burning those carbon fuels over the last two centuries. That is obviously a tremendous amount of energy. There probably is no way around this.

we will probably need to be removing about 10 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the air each year by 2050, and double that by 2100.
They’re hoping to use these gadgets to make carbonated water for soft drinks—or create greenhouses that have lots of carbon dioxide in the air, for tastier vegetables. This sounds very exciting … until you learn that currently their method of getting carbon dioxide costs about $500 per ton.

The numbers don't even look as bad as I thought they would. They at least seem achievable if we really wanted it. $500 per ton for 10 billion tons comes out at $5 trillion. The world's GDP is around $80 trillion. From a numbers perspective it seems like this is at least possible. Whether this solution will work politically is another matter though. My own suspicion is that politicking and corruption will make this a much more difficult and expensive process than it should be.

This article makes the future look less bleak to me than what I hear on the news.

galangalalgol3• 7 years ago

Or we could spend $1B seeding the ocean with iron sulphate to create algal blooms that reflect sunlight well. Harvest the excess salmon to balance the ecosystem, and repeat whenever we need to dump some heat. As the co2 continues to climb buffer the oceans with a cheap base to counter acidification. Which will sequester that carbon as a salt.

sveme• 7 years ago

Oh, how I love these handwaving arguments. You don't think that a huge algal bloom in our oceans, a prime protein source for billions of people, will not have an effect on the life in the ocean? Just one of a plethora of inadvertent effects that would need to be thoroughly studied...

herogreen2• 7 years ago

This seems impossible to undo, so extremely risky.

gumby• 7 years ago

Back in the 1990s Jeff Shrager (then at the Carnegie institute at Stanford) built a library of algae strains that thrived at different concentrations of O2 and CO2 as a last ditch hedge against climate change. Then he lost funding and the library was discarded.

kragen3• 7 years ago

Some forms of sequestered carbon, like compressed CO2 injected back into salt domes and magnesite, are much lower energy than the hydrocarbons and coal the humans burned. So it isn't necessary to put the energy back, necessarily. Just the carbon.

Even if it is, though, the Earth receives about 1000 years of world marketed energy consumption in the form of sunlight every year. So even energy-intensive carbon sequestration approaches like algal photosynthesis (promoted with iron sulfate, say) may be feasible.

ryanmercer4• 7 years ago

So even energy-intensive carbon sequestration approaches like algal photosynthesis (promoted with iron sulfate, say) may be feasible.

They aren't though, algae is more than carbon and pure water. They still need various minerals which you have to input into the system somehow. To do this at any scale it means mining massive amounts and feeding the system, that's just one of the reasons why YC's own idea to turn to Sahara into a bunch of shallow algae pools [1] is absurd.

[1] http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/

Buttons8402• 7 years ago

The carbon cycle you mention was an important realization to me, one I learned rather late compared to many I think.

We pull carbon out of the ground with no way to ever (relative to human life spans) put it back, and it doesn't just "dissolve into nothing" like so much of what we do seems too, it stays in various forms on the surface "forever". We also pull so much oil from the ground that running out world wide is a concern we give some thought too. It's going to have an effect.

If I seem stuck on first base, it's because I regularly deal with people who don't believe in climate change.

dr_dshiv4• 7 years ago

If we could replace concrete and steel for pressed/processed wood in most construction, that works out well for removing sources of carbon and incentivizing sequestration.

hsnewman2• 7 years ago

I have been talking about this with my wife, how many trees would I have to plant to alleviate the amount of carbon I put into the atmosphere up to now. Since I'm retiring soon, I hope to have a hobby that will be productive.

gameswithgo• 7 years ago

trees are only a buffer, they buy some time but don’t solve the problem

arvesv• 7 years ago

If we cut the trees and ship them somewhere they will not decay(south pole?). And then grow new trees and do the same thing again. That should remove carbon from the carbon cycle. Is this doable and sensible?

SmellyGeekBoy• 7 years ago

What are you saying? Don't bother?

hsnewman2• 7 years ago

So the trees that grew in the Jurassic age, which were covered with soil and over millennium became coal and oil, did not sequester carbon? Using the above logic, no, because we, in the millions of years since burned it and now it's in the air? Trees may mostly buffer carbon, but they have the potential to buffer it for a really really long time.

mac01021• 7 years ago

Why? An acre of land converted _permanently_ from field/desert/parking lot to forest translates to X tons of carbon permanently removed from the atmosphere.

mixedmath2• 7 years ago

I've also thought about that! And I seem to recall being surprised by the answer --- something like 2 trees per year per person roughly balances out on average (assuming the trees are healthy, never die, and grow forever).

As a citation, I give a tongue-in-cheek blog post from some years ago [1].

[1] https://davidlowryduda.com/how-fat-would-we-have-to-get-to-b...

herogreen2• 7 years ago

I am surprised they consider putting agricultural "waste" outside the loop as a way to store CO2, because we (will) probably need it as fertilizer.

mnw21cam2• 7 years ago

The main problem I have with some of the carbon sequestering methods like dumping waste biomass at the bottom of the sea is that that biomass is a mixture of carbon we want to sequester, and nutrients that we really want to put back into the land. Constantly removing biomass from a land area is a really effective method of turning that land into a totally useless area that doesn't grow anything any more.

mixedmath2• 7 years ago

I was recently thinking about this. Farming is essentially constant repeated removal of extreme amounts of biomass from a land area. We rely heavily on fertilizers for industrial farming.

What is the ultimate source of most of the nutrients that are used to produce the fertilizers? There are massive amounts of carbon, phosphorous, nitrogen, and potassium required.

mnw21cam2• 7 years ago

Farming has been described as mining soil for a good reason.

Some of those nutrients, particularly phosphorus, are in short supply, until they hit a high enough price to start extracting them from seawater.

spodek• 7 years ago

Any business person should see the most important action immediately. If you want to make a company profitable, lowering costs is almost always essential and more effective than raising revenues. Do both, of course, but keep costs down.

If you want to lower greenhouse gas concentrations, do everything, but lowering emissions is essential. The article barely mentioned it, but the most effective emissions reductions limit concentrations more than all capturing technologies combined.

The number one technologies to combat environmental problems such as climate change (but also all others -- extinctions, resource depletion, plastic, mercury, etc) are the pill, IUDs, vasectomies, condoms, and the like, combined with educating everyone on family planning. People knee-jerk respond with concerns about China's policy or eugenics, but many nations have reduced birth rates non-coercively, increasing prosperity -- Thailand, Costa Rica, Iran, and more.

A few generations of a global 1.5 children per woman average brings human population to sustainable levels with a reasonable level of material abundance, around 2 billion people -- for reference, the population before the Haber-Bosch process allowed us to turn oil into food. Any population more than sustainable only forestalls collapse. I'd like to say otherwise, and achieving on a global scale what a few nations did on a national scale is hard, but nature doesn't make allowances for something being hard. And we've known this for generations.

At the same time, probably everyone reading these words emits beyond the IPCC recommendations per person. Combining personal action by those willing to lead and set examples with education and legislation can reduce emissions per person. As ineffective as personal action is alone, it is a necessary first step to create role models and show that living sustainably is joyful and creates community and connection, not the burden and sacrifice people erroneously fear when they think of flying less or eating less meat. On the contrary, stewardship and taking responsibility for how our behavior affects others, especially those helpless to defend themselves, such as those breathing our jet fuel exhaust, creates some of the most joy, meaning, value, and purpose, as any parent will tell you.

We'll have to change our values to a steady-state economy based on increasing gross happiness and community from a growth economy based on increasing GDP. There are many examples of steady-state economies working for longer than our growth economy producing prosperous, stable communities, and one huge example of a growth economy wrecking the entire planet's biosphere, making it clear to all except economists that we have to stop growth or nature will do it for us.

Bottom line: 1) Reducing emissions is by far the most effective means to avert the worst disasters, even if some are inevitable. We can do a lot more and once we start we'll love it. 2) Personal action is not enough, but it's a necessary first step. It's also called leadership. Most don't want to lead, but those willing to will be the Mandelas, MLK's, Rosa Parks, etc of the environment.

Grue3• 7 years ago

1. Generate large amounts of carbon-free energy

2. Use the excess energy to sequester CO2 out of the air.

Now if only there was a proven technology to consistently generate lots of energy that is clean, safe and has plenty of readily available fuel...

Accujack• 7 years ago

I noticed this too.

In addition to planting forests that we then harvest and convert to biochar at peak rather than letting them decay and release carbon back to the cycle, we need to use energy intensive means to capture carbon.

I have seen one proposal linked on HN that suggested direct use of a nuclear reactor's energy to do it... something like that would have the necessary power (pardon the expression) to make a dent in atmospheric CO2.

Essentially, we need to build machines like the ones on LV427 in the movie "Aliens"...large structures that are essentially nuclear reactors with some extra equipment to use all their energy to terraform.... Terra.

aazaa2• 7 years ago

I find it disturbing how popular science articles on climate change seem to find it unimportant to convince the reader that human CO2 emissions are causing most of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in recent years.

Here's a challenge to illustrate my point. Where can I find the best popular science treatment of the specific question:

How do we know with certainty that human-produced CO2 is responsible for most (or all) of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in the last 100 years?

I have looked for such a treatment and found... nothing compelling. This is especially worrisome given that nebulous ideas of what caused previous ice ages and numerous interglacial periods within them.

If the source of previous events that grew an ice sheet 1 mile thick over New York and then melted it completely 12,000 years ago isn't understood, then how can anyone expect smart non-experts to jump onboard the notion that we know what's causing warming in the last 100 years?

This question relates directly to the article in the sense that we as a species are very good at causing unintended consequences. Sulfa and penicillin were seen as wonder drugs and started to be used everywhere prophylactically and misused. We now face the specter of planet-wide extinction events based on antibiotic resistance.

Pulling vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere could lead to unintended consequences on an even larger scale without a solid understanding of the system we're dealing with.

cmutel• 7 years ago

This is a reasonable place to start reading, they provide both summaries and detailed explanations of the science: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/syr/

Someone12342• 7 years ago

How do we know with certainty that human-produced CO2 is responsible for most (or all) of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in the last 100 years?

Measurements. See:

https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/...

https://climate.nasa.gov/causes/

If you want to know facts, the science (inc. raw data) is out there in open access journals. If you don't want to believe the science ("nothing compelling"), then nothing I can link will change your mind.

lazyjones3• 7 years ago

Measurements. See: https://www.climate.gov/news-features/understanding-climate/....

This just documents increase in atmospheric CO2 since 1970 and theories about what effects it might have. It completely leaves out the temperature changes in the 20th century and how there were warming and cooling periods despite steady increase in CO2, which quite obviously means there are stronger mechanisms involved (if there was cooling despite CO2 increase in the 60s/70s).

aazaa2• 7 years ago

There are many subtleties in those discussion that never get mentioned.

For example, the graph of CO2 concentration takes center stage. Fine, have a look at the caption:

Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations in parts per million (ppm) for the past 800,000 years, based on EPICA (ice core) data. The peaks and valleys in carbon dioxide levels track the coming and going of ice ages (low carbon dioxide) and warmer interglacials (higher levels). Throughout these cycles, atmospheric carbon dioxide was never higher than 300 ppm; in 2018, it reached 407.4 ppm (black dot). NOAA Climate.gov, based on EPICA Dome C data (Lüthi, D., et al., 2008) provided by NOAA NCEI Paleoclimatology Program.

So this is all ice core data, apparently. Except that the study was done in 2008. Yet there's a point clearly marked 2018 average in bold. Where did it come from?

I could assume that it came from atmospheric monitoring, but that's not what the site says.

Not good. Probably not ethical. When data from different sources are mixed together, but not identified clearly as having different sources, that's dishonest at best. And I see it all the time in the public presentation of this research.

Let's set aside the issue of whether anthropogenic climate change is real or not. I'm talking about presenting data to try to convince a general audience that something is true.

What I've seen so far is lacking.

cf141q5325• 7 years ago

The mind numbing thing to me is you wouldnt even have to believe in climate change to understand how incredibly screwed we are. We are already done for without multiple degrees of temperature increase. Climate change is just the last nail in the coffin. We are wasting non-replaceable resources at an unfathomable rate to sustain growth for growth sake. A lot of people still dont seem to understand what "finite" means. One day stuff is out. And that day is coming closer. And instead of prolonging the time we have left to search for solutions, we waste the remaining resources for growth as if there is no tomorrow. Which to be fair, there wont.

All of our progress since the industrial revolution was made possible by cheap/free energy. Once we run out of everything from energy to fertilizer to metals to sand to our ecosystem and its biodiversity, there will be no slowing down, there will be collapse. Without fossil fuel based fertilizers we can say goodbye to the idea of food safety. Especially since modern fertilizers are the only thing that allows the dirt we use instead of actual soil to grow anything. And despite that we are still burning this stuff for personal transportation and having ingenious ideas like growing biofuel, of course also unsustainable in overexploitation. Because fuck yeah! Better yet, we are actually trying to replace oil in the transport and energy sectors with natural gas. The natural gas we need to not be faced with an incredible productivity decrease in food production. Its like people are straight up mad, we are talking about electric cars replacing fossil fuel to keep our transportation network running, and of course the freedom of getting to drive around in your own car. Completely ignoring how many batteries we could actually build before we run out of lithium without an real option for recycling. We were all born right in time to witness the waste of the last few hopes we have for decelerating and long term survival of human civilization on a few more years of unsustainable growth. And the best part, none of this was inevitable. And none of it is a surprise.

OrangeMango2• 7 years ago

I find it disturbing how popular science articles on climate change seem to find it unimportant to convince the reader that human CO2 emissions are causing most of the temperature increases the earth has experienced in recent years.

I understand. You don't want to be convinced. Fair enough. Why not talk about the economic aspect instead? When you pay $3.00 for a gallon of gasoline, the best case scenario is that one third of that gallon is used to propel your car while the remaining two thirds ends up in the atmosphere in the form of wasted heat and emissions.

Have you considered the possibility that oil companies are engaged in a disinformation campaign because they don't want people to stop paying $3.00 for $1.00 worth of movement?

farss• 7 years ago

My understanding is that one of the main hurdles is the physical limits of actually catching the carbon to sequester it. Even though it is historically high, it is still relatively dispersed (a few hundred parts per million). Plants are extremely efficient at utilizing carbon, but their main limitation to growth is catching enough of it from the atmosphere.

avmich• 7 years ago

Here is technology which, I think, is less known than it should - https://sesinnovation.com/technology/carbon_capture/ .

And yet I think freezing out CO2 out of air can be used even wider - re-processing air from atmosphere, instead of going only after exhausts.

ecoled_ame• 7 years ago

Make less of the carbon producers (humans). You don't have to reproduce to be happy.

What it would take to suck more carbon dioxide out of the air than we put in

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