The problem is that, given we're failing the straightforward task of curtailment even now, what are the chances that we can successfully achieve curtailment and sequestering in the required time-frame?
Curtailment is a large task but we know what to do. Sequestering would also be a large task but what to do is uncertain. Curtailment so far has been a corrupt circus with "pledges" and other indirect inducements ("carbon credits") being most of what was done. These indirect inducements primarily served as speculative vehicles and advertising gloss.
And here, I just google'd up what you'd expect: A bitcoin-based platform for trading carbon credit. Now you can use the certainty of damaging the environment to make a promise to repair it.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/ibm-and-veridium-transf...
On the other hand, global fossil fuel use has not peaked yet. Global population has not peaked yet. Many countries have worse cost-and-schedule problems with attempted deployments of nuclear reactors than they did 40 years ago. We are barely reaching "maybe starting to flatten out emissions" -- actually trending down toward zero is just a mirage in the distance at present. The opportunity to stabilize the climate just by cutting emissions is now in the past.
I feel like humanity is moving toward making the changes it needs, and has a better toolset for those changes than before, but is changing much slower and later than it should have. We're out of completely safe options and have to try to navigate between various risky options. I can understand the perspective of people who feel like we're acting too late and there is no chance of industrial civilization surviving into the 22nd century, even though I don't share that perspective.
Indeed, but if solar power is now the preferred energy source, solar power could be being used for all new energy need as well as help us cut back on fossil fuel's original usage.
But it's not. That's a world-killing problem.
What we're out of is laize faire options. Neither sequestering nor dramatic winding down of fossil fuel consumption is going to happen without a world level authority dictating things. Sadly, that seems unlikely.
Although it seems unlikely today, a military coalition to enforce stricter emissions standards may be something that comes together in the future.
Unfortunately the only parties interested in winding down fossil fuel use are Europe and China. If Europe is further disrupted by the infusion of right-wing politics, that might leave China going it alone.
At some point this will tip from "wouldn't it be nice" to "this is a battle for survival". A tactical strike on coal plants or other sources of egregious carbon emission seems ridiculous today, but it might be no different than striking a nuclear weapons lab is, something that's got the potential to cause immense harm that needs to be eliminated.
That's not a bright future at all.
Another way to put this - we're not out of safe options if we're not doing the safe options. We may need to do risky options once we are fully engaged in doing the safe option but today, now, we have not yet acquired the ability to even do the safe options consistently.
Sure, maybe the risky options will be necessary but if efforts to do the safe get pissed away with corrupt deceptions, how are we expecting efforts to do the risky efforts won't suffer the safe fate?
That some amount of CO2 production is being reduced almost at random isn't much of an argument that human society has the ability to choose a path and follow it effectively. How many fake versions of sequestering do you think scammers will come up with if the money ever appears?
A regulatory body capable of doing CO2 reduction might have the competence to then regulate sequestering. Random activity by supposedly concerned citizens or something just invites abuse.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36812
Coal consumption in 2018 is on track for a 4% decline below 2017:
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php
That same short-term outlook predicts a further 5% drop in 2019 over 2018.
It is at least physically possible that the US could consume more coal in 2019 than in 2018, though only a sucker would take that bet. But it's not even in the realm of possibility for the US to consume an all-time-high amount of coal in 2019, greater than 2008. Too many coal plants have already been shut down and scrapped since 2008. It takes years to build a new plant. There would be years of advance warning if the US were going to reach a new peak of coal consumption, because there would have to be a large wave of new coal plant construction first.
And it’s not as if the world has been standing still over the last decades, huge progress has been made and many technologies are at the borderline of being economical or cheaper than the alternatives, and are continually falling in price. Once we push the boulder over the crest of the hill it will roll down unaided. The economy can change much quicker than we think.
I agree that many technologies for replacing fossil usage have now achieved or are close to economic superiority, and that change can come very rapidly with economic superiority. But I also think that reaching this point has taken too long and now we will need active measures as well as emissions cuts.
So, due to these different marginal costs, there's no way even completely practical, economical solar can stop fossil fuel usage quickly without active regulator intervention.
Note that there is also quite a bit of already-built fossil capacity that can be retired early by economic pressures. Not every big fossil project has operational costs as low as Saudi oil.
For example, the Navajo Generating Station is the largest American coal plant west of the Mississippi River. It was built in the 1970s. It has a stable, low cost for coal since it is supplied by the nearby dedicated Kayenta Mine. Just a few years ago it was planned to run until 2044. But the falling costs of gas and renewables have made it economically uncompetitive. It's now going to close at the end of 2019, 25 years early:
https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/energy/2017/0...
I agree on the broader point that fossil fuel emissions won't be curbed quickly without active regulator intervention. Since that intervention may arrive late-or-never in different nations, it's one of the reasons that I believe active carbon dioxide removal measures will be necessary in addition to emissions reduction efforts.
Both regulating carbon emissions and active carbon dioxide removal measures will, in the end, come down to some state or world body acting in a coordinated way to push money at this problem. It seems like people are imagining active removal would be easier in this fashion than basic regulation. Why?
The largest one build seems to be 10 GW between Xinjiang and Anhui. It's still quite a bit from the scale we'd need to wean of natural gas however.
Operators, by the way, love this concept. It means they can continue production basically forever, if they want. But there's a big economic disadvantage in being the first mover, which is why we need government regulations forcing it.
If you do something fairly extreme for curtailment, like a tax on fuel that motorists really notice, the other party will get voted in and they'll undo it. Now you've got kicked out of office, with no environmental benefit to show for it.
And if you go further with something like a ban on pet dogs or ban on meat-eating? Same thing but faster and with more certainty.
The world needs to declare a WAR ON CO2 and put it on a war-time footing. Further considerations of tinkering around with an environment we've already de-stabilized only shows we haven't learned our lesson. We don't know enough to know what's safe... except the way things were.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
Given more time I'm sure he would have come up with other world destroying chemicals.
We are though. Most people I talk to don't know that the US peaked CO2 emissions ten years ago and it's been falling every since - in per capita, per GDP, and absolute terms.
The problem is that the US can export it's carbon-intensive industries and even consume new carbon intensive entities produced by other countries. For example, US investors certainly consume a modest fraction of bitcoins mined in China and bitcoins wind-up consuming not just a lot of energy but also form a new source sort of carbon-intensive production.
Solar and wind power are becoming competitive with oil in general but this can never by itself halt hydrocarbon-energy production 'cause as it's relative price drops, there's always a practical use for hydrocarbon-energy close to the source, where pumping it out of the ground is nearly free.
The reason it was falling was because of strict emissions standards and a strong EPA, both of which are basically gone.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php
https://www.utilitydive.com/news/westmoreland-chapter-11-mar...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mission-coal-bankruptcy-marks-5...
Pro-coal government action in other countries has managed to delay and diminish coal retirements there, so I wouldn't consider it impossible that it could happen in the USA too. I'm grateful that the economics are so steeply tilted against coal in the USA and that few politicians appear to have the stomach for large direct subsidies to keep coal plants profitable here.
I'm not sure how long (absent intelligent policy) til we hit peak natural gas and the balance naturally shifts back towards dirty energy sources.
I.e. policy helps, but economics had as much to do with it
Coal CO2 emissions are almost double natgas' [1]. While it is true that natgas is mainly CH4, a highly potent GG, its atmospheric lifetime is about 8 yrs. Further, the only way the methane would be getting into the air is via leaks in upstream/midstream processes. Today, hardly any of this leaks (EPA estimates leak rate of 1.4%).
Now addressing fracking, the drilling and fracturing process are the cause of little to no environmental impact/damage. The culprit is wastewater injection. This is the unknown, and while the EPA found no evidence of widespread or systemic pollution of water resources due to the fracking process (which includes WWI before the well is capped), it did highlight the potential in several stages of production for contamination to occur.
Now that said, the damage natgas causes, from E&P (especially) to burn, pales in comparison to coal's at any stage.
I think it would be beneficial for HN users to spend some time in the energy industry before making baseless claims.
There's also a defence of the original study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-012-0401-0#...
And the reason it was falling is natural gas / hydraulic fracking, which emits far less carbon for the energy produced.
The EPA can lay claim to many environmental successes, but this isn't one of them.
Things don't just work out, they get worked out. Telling people to stop worrying, relax and become lazy and complacent is extremely counterproductive.
Yes, the EPA is taking a beating. But within my lifetime, the EPA didn't even exist. We did something about it. The EPA can and will be rebuilt. The benefits of solar/wind power are real market benefits, and will triumph, despite the desperate resistance of the coal industry. Etc.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/un-says-climate-genoc...
https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
So we have to start with an assumption that emission cuts of the required scale are not going to happen (or, at least, are not going to happen soon enough), and look for more realistic alternatives than convincing 7 billion people to voluntarily downshift their lifestyle by 2050. Large scale carbon sequestration is one such alternative option.
Basically every organization that has looked at the issue and built a serious model has reached the same conclusion. From early studies done by engineers at oil and gas companies, to research undertaken by skeptics, the message is the same: we're not in Kansas anymore, and we're running out of time to turn around.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of...
All of the models you mention use the completely incorrect math for feedbacks that will worsen warming caused by CO2. They literally all use the 3K per doubling figure. Despite it being proven wrong mathematically, and proven wrong historically as these models have all been wrong for the last 20 years of observed data.
As soon as you get him to address the error, let me know.
>I'm sure you're aware that Monckton has no formal mathematical training
Good thing it has been confirmed by mathematicians like I pointed out then huh?
>that his complaints against terrestrial climate models include the "fact" that they didn't predict warming on Pluto.
I am not interested in strawmen, I am interested in the simple, verifiable, objective claim being made. Every single climate model used to promote climate change hysteria uses the same feedback equation. They all make the same error, using the temperature difference rather than the temperature as they should. Using the correct data to calculate the feedback, those climate models produce only 2 degrees warming by 1200ppm CO2 rather than the 6 the IPCC is promoting. And they match with the last 20 years of data, while using the wrong figures as the IPCC promoted predictions do gave us hugely overestimated warming for the past 20 years. No amount of "I don't like things I pretend that guy said before" changes this. Math does not care about what anyone says or how anyone feels. The entire warming hysteria relies on the feedbacks, the IPCC and CIMP both agree that direct warming is only 1k, and claim feedbacks make it 3k. Without the incorrectly calculated feedback, there's simply no justifying the hysteria.
I've yet to see a plan for a transition to a carbon-neutral economy, even on a 30-year timeline.
I’ve roughly gauged most of our species moves on climate accurately so far.
I bet that We are going to go full bore on geo engineering. It’s the perfect eco-poli-socio fix, and is a perfect storm to fill a lot of our mental blind spots.
Geo engineering is jobs, and economic spending. It’s great PR, and it’s a BIG moonshot style project, so the optics are stupendous. Which politician wouldn’t like to say “we secured billions in funding for jobs protecting our environment, by creating factories that absorb carbon from the air”
It doesn’t even have to work, for people to sell it.
Create a military industrial complex style system with geo engineering at its root, and soon humanity will be performing biospheric surgery.
There’s a specific vein of cynical realism, that acknowledges both humanities ingenuity and it’s emtrapment to its darker natures.
We will stick to a carbon positive economy, because no one can turn around and tell the world “its over, the good days are gone, and now when we price environmental costs to everything, the markets will tank.”
Too many goods are cheap because externalities aren’t priced in. A price rise in plastic costs will end product lines and packaging.
This will push people to alternatives which are worse (paper takes more water than plastic, and decays causing eventual spoilage and replacement.)
The iron particles aren't going to breed and make more iron particles.
> let's just curtail CO2 emissions
So we shouldn't aim for zero (or even less)? Because 'curtail' will never reach zero.
Iron particles won't replicate, but the chemistry of the ocean could change dramatically. We don't know what happens at scale, and we probably don't want to find out.
Find another solution.
We are at the point of choosing between what disasters we will suffer, rather than figuring out how to not have a disaster.
You don't get acidification as long as CO2 levels change slowly enough that it mixes down to the bottom of the ocean and then gets buffered by calcium bicarbonate being dissolved there and mixing back to the top. But this mixing takes place on the scale of a thousand years. This is no big deal for CO2 level changes taking place over geological time. But it doesn't help shellfish with sudden increases of CO2 taking place on a scale of decades or centuries.
Start raising a tax on CO2 emissions and at the same time start paying people to put it in the ground. Raise the price on both each year and you could reach equilibrium pretty fast. Should have started 20 years ago, but now is better than never. Maybe start at increasing it at $10 dollars a ton/year. $10/ton is about $4 per barrel of oil. If people saw that sequestering CO2 would pay $100 a ton in a decade the research and excitement around the ideas would be huge and likely encourage many breakthroughs. Isolated solar and wind farms extracting CO2 from the air and pumping it underground could be a huge business.
Edit: $10/ton CO2 is more like $4 a barrel than the $2 I originally wrote. Source: https://pyrolysium.org/how-much-co2-produced-by-burning-one-...
says:
> Bivalves grown under near preindustrial CO2 levels displayed thicker, more robust shells than individuals grown at present CO2 concentrations, whereas bivalves exposed to CO2 levels expected later this century had shells that were malformed and eroded. These results suggest that the ocean acidification that has occurred during the past two centuries may be inhibiting the development and survival of larval shellfish and contributing to global declines of some bivalve populations.
i'm not sure where the claim "all of the shellfish species that currently exist lived back then too" is coming from, although it is correct that CO2 was higher in the past (https://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm)
Also, we're talking about coral bleaching and it being blamed on CO2 despite absolutely no evidence, and despite the fact that some coral reefs are seeing normal growth, while others which are in major pollution streams from Asian rivers are seeing bleaching events. But it has to be CO2 because Al Gore says so! Ignore the billions of tons of toxic waste being pumped into the Ocean by China and India and Africa! Europeans and North Americans are the problem with their evil CO2! They need to become poor like everyone else to save the planet!
Technically, seeding the ocean with iron particles is a suspension, not a solution. Luckily, the common technique is to use Iron(II) sulfate, which mixed with water does create a solution!
If the government had any backbone at all they'd rally people around the idea of committing to it and getting it done. In World War II people lowered their "quality of life" to support the cause. It can be done.
Incentives are another way. I still think a global carbon tax agreement would be a good idea: companies work together to implement carbon taxes and cut income taxes or a local equivalent. That helps eliminat the problem of production offshoring to cheaper carbon areas, and gived incentives to alternatives.
Actually making carbon economically unviable with our psychology works, obviously. I really, really hope we can figure out something else cheaper.
Finally, if we had a carbon sequestering method with no major side effects and clear costs, it would be psychologically easier to charge fossil burning industries and activities the cost of the CO2 emitted. Eg a fee of $30 per ton if that's the cost of sequestering. Of course, you'd need a way to measure the carbon impact of the sequestering, to make sure that process wasn't indirectly emitting carbon.
Reducing would also be highly useful, and I hope we will, but enpirically we don't seem to be built for it without some mechanism like what I described above. It's terrifying and dispiriting and I hope we figure out a way to work around our broken mass psychology.
Good luck.
In the meantime I sure would like to try some mitigation techniques.
We get what we vote for, for need to vote for backbones.
In other words, the SUV or sports car apparently has more to do with making people happy by making them look to be of higher social status than the actual utility of those goods.
This is also demonstrated in the South Park episode Smug, which criticizes hybrids. From a public policy perspective, the greatest reduction in CO2 comes from getting people into economical cars (like a 42+mpg --or higher in EU models--Civic) rather than in necessarily Hybrids or electrics which not everyone can afford. The greatest co2/$ reduced is actually going from average to a civic-like car.
Perhaps cultural changes away from materialism, as well as effective public policy may be important in reducing global warming.
But what we get is more "War on Poverty" style bureaucracies and activism which has become a self-perpetuating and wasteful industry of its own.
> In other words, the SUV or sports car apparently has more to do with making people happy by making them look to be of higher social status than the actual utility of those goods.
The first statement doesn't imply the second. Low social status can make someone unhappy, but that doesn't imply that consuming more doesn't make them happy.
In fact, I'm not even sure how much "materialism" is to blame for global warming. I know plenty of people who care more about "experiences" than "material goods" -- and in turn massively contribute to global warming by flying a lot. Equally, I don't view someone as wanting to live in a reasonably sized home in suburbia as necessarily materialistic, even though living there can introduce huge CO2 emissions from driving a lot.
This may seem contradictory makes sense if you think of it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you are at the base level of meeting your physiological needs for food and shelter, wealth directly helps you meet those needs and makes them happier. If you can take care of that, the law and order that brings you safety is again correlated with being in a wealthier society. But beyond that, the correlation vanishes because wealth doesn't give you love, esteem or self-actualization.
I’ve spent way to much time as lay man trying to penetrate Econ speak to get the issue, but the crux seems to be this:
Currently markets and goods don’t price the cost of economic damage into products.
So plastics are cheap as hell because they don’t reflect clean up costs.
This means we have plastic straws which are so cheap on a per unit basis, that you can sell 100s in a single bundle.
Saran Wrap, packaging plastic, tooth brushes, phones, pens, toothpicks, mugs, wires, buttons, and billions of other items are extremely cheap.
Now imagine if ALL of them went up by a small amount.
Then recall, that for the developing world the difference between a 0.01 cent plastic cost and 0.05, is an increase in packaging cost for cheap goods like single use detergent sachets, or single use shampoo packets.
Of course, this will directly reduce usage of those goods, which is the intended purpose, but the fact is that those goods being cheap means people can grow faster without worrying about the issues which arise.
Carbon curtailment is fundamentally energy consumptive. We will spend more energy to capture carbon. We would have to create a system which is carbon negative in itself (after power and maintenance costs are calculated), and then pay for the whole thing,
Taxing goods to price externalities is probably the most efficient way to achieve it.
If I buy a product that has less packaging, so there's less waste, my quality of life is lowered?
If I take up bicycling, and as a result drive less, is my quality of life lowered?
If the hotel I stay at starts using containers of soap instead of single-use packets, is my quality of life lowered?
In each case, those are choices made out of ZERO economic pressure. You can do that TODAY, without the need of us discussing carbon capture costs.
However, most people DOMT exercise that choice, either through necessity or preference.
For all of those people, an increase in oil prices mean that they have to choose between working and living in an affordable place. It means more Money out of the monthly budget which is not available for other things.
This is economically defined as a reduction in their quality of life.
Do consider that, For most of humanity, food, water, medicine, clothes are decisions separated by razor sharp margins. Owning a car is a distant dream.
Simply - If the cost of everything went up, and you thus has less disposable income to use, then your quality of life by definition has dropped.
2) If the packaging results in greater spoilage, reduces stimulated demand, or is more expensive to produce than cheap plastic
3) more time to do things, less ability to transport equipment and goods
4) you're being moronic at this point
I guess that could be considered "lowering people's quality of life" though.
A classic example of economic growth innovation in price sensitive India is the single use detergent sachet- each of those represents an improvement in cleanliness and hygiene for people who couldn’t afford it before.
Now increase the cost of plastic, even marginally and that change reverberates down the product chain.
Everything from medicine packaging, to Saran Wrap to those single use sachets change in price.
However, the correct point is that if we don’t do anything, what will happen to that number? Is it truly conceivable that climate change will not send more people into poverty eventually?
It's access to some rudimentary health care. It's maybe a bicycle for transportation. It's a gas stove so you no longer have to use firewood to cook (speaking of deforestation...). It's maybe getting a cash-paying job so you can quadruple your income again.
Maybe I'm not western enough, but I can't understand that thing. How is a single-use detergent sachet an improvement over good ol' powder? Do you have any articles discussing it?
It's not only that, but I think it's a major factor. I'm only extremely slow internet so I can't look up the table, but I think our annual rate of emissions are 30-50% higher than in 1998. Could be wrong there though.
Already jellyfish are taking over. We're killing off so many life forms we're essentially going back in time to the precambrian era.
Instead of looking for "quick fixes" like iron seeding, which has just as much a chance of going awry as Australia importing cane toads to deal with their crop insects, let's just curtail CO2 emissions.