No shit, carbon capture barely even exists
The only reason we’re even talking about it is because it would let us have it cake and eat it. It may even be possible some day, but it definitely isn’t the most efficient option
Carbon capture is a boondoggle, just like “the hydrogen economy”.
Hydrogen at least has it’s uses in stuff like planes.
- Adding trees help in local health and biodiversity
- Wood can replace concrete in building projects
https://www.dezeen.com/2019/03/19/mjostarne-worlds-tallest-timber-tower-voll-arkitekter-norway/
That is just not what the article means when it talks about carbon capture
- Does timber contain carbon? Yes
- Does concrete emit carbon? Yes
- Where did the carbon in the timber come from? 🪿🪿🪿
The article talks about how moving to renewables is better than staying with fossil, which is true. It is also true that we need fossil sources for things that don’t have an alternative (yet, like steel production) It is also true that to keep the price of more expensive cleaner option viable carbon credits help
Hint: photosynthesis
To be fair you can use the captured carbon for building or for carbon rivers so its not completely useless. Just way to expensive.
Problem the first: carbon capture is too expensive
Problem the second: when you do carbon capture you get CO2 gas
I’m starting to like the idea of growing forests, cutting down those forests, cooking the wood to
charcoalactivated carbon (in solar furnaces perhaps) and storing near pure solid carbon
Why does cost even mean anything when talking about keeping our planet livable?
Do both.
Because talking about carbon capture let’s emitting companies not do anything to reduce emissions and tell themselves and the public “ah, we’re just gonna do carbon capture in the future”. It’s the same with hydrogen btw., there won’t be enough of it for our current use of fossils, we know it, but we still tell ourselves “ah, we’ll just switch to green H2 as soon as it’s available” instead of working to reduce emissions and implement new processes.
Renewable energy being the cheapest energy really, really helps
Carbon capture being expensive is unfortunate. It would be nice if we could cheaply use fossil fuels and keep the carbon out of the biosphere, but we can’t, so we should just use renewable energy, and big countries can also use nuclear until we run out of fissile material
use fossil fuels and keep the carbon out of the biosphere
Put big balloons on the exhausts.
use nuclear
Yeah nuclear would be really great too for the time being.
The Waterschap may decide to lower the water level. When that happens, the wooden poles are exposed to air. When wood comes in contact with oxygen, it will start to rot. The decay of the wooden foundation is why houses in Amsterdam built on wooden piles can lean to one side.
https://whatsupwithamsterdam.com/amsterdam-houses-crooked/
Wood rot only occurs if the water level is too low. Some of these poles have lasted 500 years.
Governments should enforcement carbon credits for polluters, then we can see it as a carbon tax instead of a greenwashing advertisement, but until then:
Go to your local representative and ask what they are doing to offset emissions of road upkeep, busses & overall infrastructural fossil dependency!
Our previous progressive government lost its next election over a price on carbon
It’s too easy for right wing politics to cast it as “your electricity prices will go up; fuel will get more expensive; you won’t be able to afford to use your gas heater in winter”
It’s a difficult policy to get, you need a party brave enough to implement it in their first weeks in power so people see it doesn’t hurt by the next election
There’s a really easy solution to this problem: Evenly redistribute the carbon tax income to all citizens. That way, prices might increase, but it you manage to have a low carbon footprint, you will end up net positive.
Although it’s virtually impossible to track on a personal level, so making people actually notice that net gain might prove difficult.
This is theoretically what we do in Germany, but the government kind of forgot about the paying out part.
This didn’t work in Canada. That is the carbon pricing system we have and still the opposing party has made it so unpopular every party has said they will remove the system in the next election.
Despite lots of evidence that the carbon pricing system we have was a net positive for most Canadians, people still are convinced it’s the cause of inflation.
It would be too good to be true. Because there is too much Carbon in the air and it would be good if we actually could somehow get it out of the air again. But maybe that is 2120s technology. It would be amazing if the human species were be able to create the problem, realize the problem, counteract to the problem and solve the problem all in one century. But it will take several centuries of uncontrolled climate change before humans will be able to control it in any significant way - if it is not already to late.
Wait until you look up the discovery and destruction of the natural salt cycle of the world.
if only we had an abundance big tall leafy structures that have naturally evolved to capture carbon.
So even that is a misnomer tree only capture it temporarily when they die and rot or worse catch fire they release it again. You would have to grow the tree real big then chop it down then bury it really deep to get that carbon out of the cycle.
Luckily new ones grow as old ones die, to keep the balance.
Not only that but plants also improve (feed) the amount of life in the ground (remember life = carbon)
It is not a balance but a net gain in carbon sequestered.
Yeah but it does nothing to help off set what we humans have done that’s why it’s a temporary sink. People say oil is dinosaurs that is also is incorrect its plants frome billions of years ago that has been compressed but not changed like ice at the bottoms of glaciers.
This takes millions of years for this kind of long term sync to take hold. So once the genie is out. You can’t put it back in the bottle. That’s why carbon capture is snake oil and any real technology we find is basically magic to do it at scale. It would be easier to send it in to space with spaces elevators that’s the level of tech gap we would need to cross for carbon capture to work.
The only chance we had was stop putting a single gram more of carbon into the environment and have humanity adapt to the new normal. But also that ship sailed about 20 years ago. Now we are on start of the cascade that will super heat the earth. That will take 100’s of millions of years to fix.
Even if we stopped all man made CO2 tomorrow the ice caps will melt releasing methane into the atmosphere this will then keep warming the planet releasing more glacial ice and more methane and so on and so on. This will also create more acid rain. Oh and did I mention the gulf stream is changing right now and will even halt at some point causing even more polar water to heat up and melt. It’s a fly wheel that keeps spinning even when you don’t give it more power.
Maybe some deep deep water fish have a chance to survive but any land mamals not a chance in the long run. Bacteria maybe at the surface they may give life another chance to try again in our solar system.
Oh and for the billionaires thinking they will just ride this out for a little while in their bunkers. while the poors die. No mater how much money you throw at the problem you can’t dig a hole deep enough store enough food and water long enough to ride this out. You will die in a hole ether shot by your security staff or poisoned on your own water supply. Remember that whole ground watter becoming acidic.
Also the pressure of all that atmosphere going on outside. Humans can only live for any length of time in about max 4 times normal pressure and that requires they breath helium to offset the nitrogen poisoning and we have tech ways of making high pressure in a lower pressure environment but not low pressure in a high one. Boil a soda can on your stove and out it in cold water to see what happens. So all that silo, paradise is just fantasy frames to tell a good story and have no basis in reality.
And remember this is if we start tomorrow and snap our fingers all carbon production stops but we are not doing that we are now accelerating and can’t do anything about it till the fascist are gone.
Note with all that said I want to be the first person to be proven wrong. I will be so happy if we can makes it out of this and all the research is wrong.
Note some of the research was but in the wrong way it’s showing it’s accelerating faster than they thought like how we already hit 1.5C that was not ment to happen till 2030.
I don’t want to be a doomer I love humanity for all the good things it can be. But I can see the evidence and I want humanity to know what it’s in for so they can charish the time it has left.
I still thinking we should stop destroying rain forests and start restoring them.
Edit: but I’m aware that won’t be enough to save us.
Oh 100% we should do everything we can. It won’t save us but it will make it slightly better as we make the fall and save 1000s years of recovery for the planet. For every gram of carbon we stop from being released it’s a slightly cooler day. It may be the difference between 48C and 47C but people living 48C temps will welcome any relief they can get.
Hell even if those trees are temporary that temporary could buy us a year or two between different stages of collapse. A year or two with food production collapse but still breathable air will be charished.
All I’m saying is two things. Do your best to make things better in any way you can and be kind. When the collapse gets worse. Your family is your life blood and your neighbors become family.
Create community networks use your time helping that community in any way you can be it local food growth or storage like canning etc.
I just want people to come to terms with the diagnosis. Stop thinking some guy is going to create this magic machine to fix the problem or that the governments of the world are going to fix it they are not.
Create a Bucket List try to do some of those things while you can. Make it a priority not in the next 5 years more like this or next year. Hug your love ones extra long and take a moment to remember how it feels when you hug them.
What would you do if a doctor told you that you have 5 years to live? Whatever that is do it. Sooner rather than later while you still have a chance. If I’m wrong worse is you lived life to the fullest and enjoyed your family and did some good. If I’m right you will charish those memories while you endure a lot of suffering.
Efficient and cheap carbon capture already exists – it’s called trees
But you need to cut those trees down and place them somewhere they won’t rot
Sink them to the bottom of the deep ocean, but trees famously float
Leave them in deserts where the dryness will suppress rot, but damage the desert habitat
Dump them in peat bogs, but there aren’t enough
Perhaps it would be best to cook them to charcoal, it releases some carbon into the atmosphere, but it would leave some solid, inedible to anything carbon that can be dumped in any old mine, but that’s expensive
Also if you dump the whole trees in whatever way, you also dump whatever nutrients are in it
Yeah, just get a good ecosystem going and every now and then, collect extra decaying matter and dump it in deep landfills to further reduce carbon escape. Hopefully the pit will be deep enough to stop the decay and prevent instant (in geological terms) biogas formation.
Ok, I guess that is not very viable. Just go with normal forests then. But that won’t match the predicted numbers because predictions didn’t consider reduction of net Carbon -ive of the forests as they came closer to equilibrium.
We need way more trees than we previously thought, way sooner than we previously thought. Now, even more since the average temps have already increased, further changing the forest efficiency.
Yes… but that doesn’t make the oil billionaires more billions
Expensive or not, we’re well past the point where it’s optional. Even if 100% of new carbon emissions stopped today, let alone by 2050, we’d need to continue developing carbon capture technologies to take out what we’ve already put in the atmosphere. Not every part of the fixing process needs to be profitable.
Expensive or not, the cheapest option is renewables. Coal plants in Australia have closed down, unable to compete with solar and wind. We now export our coal to China
I agree with what you’re saying, but developing the technology right now is quite counterproductive. The stopping of carbon emissions needs to happen first, and it needs to happen quickly. Every bit of energy spent on carbon capture projects would be better spent implementing renewable processes.
Furthermore, the technology currently functions as an accountability sink for heavy polluters. It allows them to hand-waive away the entire problem of emissions since there is this “panacea” just around the corner, thus slowing down actual meaningful climate action.
Carbon capture needs to be discredited as a solution until its purpose stops being the continuation of the status quo.
I’m confused about this idea that cdr isn’t possible today.
Always has been and always will be, due to a little thing called entropy.
And it just doesn’t fucking work.
Please tell me how plants aren’t carbon sinks
They grow, build themselves out of carbon from the air. Live for a while (300 years for my local trees). Die, rot, release the carbon into the air; or they burn and release the carbon into the air
At best you replace forests we have destroyed and pull the same amount of CO2 out of the air as destroying those forests put in a hundred or more years ago. The main cause of carbon in the air is burning fossil fuels, so it won’t help much.
If you’re growing trees somewhere they could grow without special help (extra water, fertilizer) you’re definitely growing trees humans removed in the past
You can do it by cutting down the forests you’ve grown, and regrow them over and over again and storing or processing the wood so it never rots
