Also once companies are paying for these costs there will be lots of money to go around, suddenly the R&D budgets will be huge, which is a great thing.
--
To illustrate -- if you drive 15k miles per year the cost of "recapture" for your carbon on driving is $3,600 (@25mpg). How many more people would drive Tesla if the alternative was to pay $9 per gallon of gasoline? How many more people would buy hybrids?
[Please double-check my math]
gallon of gas has 19.60 lb co2 / gallon [1] = 11,760 pounds of co2 (600 * 19.6) = 5.88 tons (19.6 * 600 / 2000)
cost for clime works to sequester co2 is $600 [2] so total cost to sequester for the 15k is $3,528 (5.88 * 600)
cost to sequester per gallon is $5.88 per gallon ($3,528 / 600 gallons)
price of gas in NYC is $3.11 per gallon so new cost per gallon factoring in the current high cost of carbon capture is $3.11 base price + $5.88 to sequester = $8.99 per gallon
yeah your math seems great lol
assuming cost to sequester goes down to $100 per ton, the cost for 15k of driving at 25mpg would be $588 (5.88 * $100), cost to sequester per gallon would be $0.98 so the new price of gas in NYC would be $4.09 (3.11 + .98), actually not absurd given recent trends and probably not high enough to discourage people from driving
sources:
[1] https://www.eia.gov/environment/emissions/co2_vol_mass.php
[2] https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-...
[3] https://www.nyserda.ny.gov/researchers-and-policymakers/ener...
Oh, that’s only net zero. In this fantasy we should also charge fossil fuel industries for past infractions too - maybe they need to pay an extra 20% for extra dac capacity.
Global warming is only a subset of environmental damage.
There's all kinds of other damage in the wake of over-consumption.
When you kill more trees than you grow back, the devastation comes much quicker than waiting for the whole world to get hotter.
Carbon can be looked at as only one material and IF it can be been made neutral in the face of rising or even curtailed consumption, that seems to be the pricing that can be correctly assessed to compensate.
To raise the ante and try to price in many other forms of environmental damage too, you're going to need a bigger bank.
Plus just to earn all that money to allow all that consumption leaves an additional trail of damage behind, with a departing path of financial acumulation leading off in the opposite direction.
And as we know, different currencies have different toxic footprints themselves, and that was before bitcoin which has gotten into a category of its own.
Gemstones and rare elements too, some are bloodier than others. Deaths here can occur faster and sooner than forests are dying.
To me this tends to indicate that reducing consumption will always be green.
carbon engineering's carbon capture technology is projected to be significantly less than $600 tonne, they say the plant they are building for occidental petroleum in texas will be profitable from 1) cost of avoided CO2 purchases (CO2 is used to pump oil out of the ground) and 2) california CO2 credits for "low carbon oil" which is between $175 and $200 USD/tonne [0].
so if carbon ends up at $200 per tonne instead of $100, cost per gallon would be $3.11 + $1.96 = $5.07. If you drive a lot probably enough to nudge you towards an EV!
[0] https://www.neste.com/investors/market-data/lcfs-credit-pric...
However, and I expect this to be the case in most European high-taxed countries, the taxes are just fed in to the general tax revenue of the government. Not ear marked for e.g capture programs.
These taxes do of course fund some inovation projects etc, but I think it would be a hard sell politically even here to direct all carbon-related taxes directly into buying Co2 capture.
For example, as renewables have grown larger in Sweden, the government has started taxing the production of solar power on larger installations (≈ roof of a warehouse), even if the energy is never sold/transmitted to the grid.
But cars are different. For many people, driving is not essential. It should be a luxury to drive a huge hunk of metal around a smooth road. By right that shouldn't be affordable, given the current situation. We just got used to cheap cars and cheap fuel, and built our culture and our cities and our lives around that. (Yeah, I know, people who live in the country are married to their cars). If your country really pushes EV charge points and implements tax incentives on EV vehicles, then you are providing people with a way out of high carbon tax. And you need your PR campaign to be clear that people are getting a choice: high price fossil fuel or cheap EV. Because the chicken/egg here is that you won't get a government that'll make those changes until your convince people to vote for it. And people won't vote for poverty, but they will vote for options.
Currently most incentives for buying electric cars benefit the wealthy. For example in the UK, I can get 45% of my tax back through salary sacrifice on an electric car, whereas a person on basic rate only gets 20%. It should arguably be the other way around i.e. a "super deduction" for the poor, capped at basic rate relief for the rich.
The big problem with this, in the UK at least, is that the trains are already full even though they are much more expensive than this. We really need more capacity but the hugely corrupt debacle that is High speed 2 is going to turn people against building better public transport.
So you'll pay to bulldoze people homes and build massively dense downtown housing that offers a better quality of life than the suburbs?
However the implementation of such a tax, although conceptually simple, is practically very complicated.
>Directly fucks over the working class
From my experience of the U.S - number 2 is seldom the cause of number 1.
on edit: formatting
But, in USA, it would surely go to military.
Not doing that is like comparing emissions to electric vehicles whilst assuming a carbon cost of 0 for the electricity.
It's easy to forget how incredibly cheap gasoline still is in the US.
In Europe you expect to pay somewhere between $6 (Baltics) to $8 (Nordics).
Given the enormous budgetary excesses of the covid situation, one would only expect these prices to rise even further. Gasoline consumption is something a society generally want to discourage given the externalities involved.
But it's a very small step from here to an effective climate stategy that also inventivizes emission reductions everywhere else.
We should have a large-scale R&D program going to sequester CO2 for geological timescales, and pay for it using the existing gasoline taxes as well as an additional and gradually-increasing CO2 emission fee.
But instead this tax money goes towards increasing the number of people working in the public sector. You'd think this was a big talking point for the Greens, but those folks don't understand economics and focus all their efforts on trying to decommission the oil sector. I don't get it!
Is there a reason the cost per tonne is so far off? Is terrapass just BS?
They say I think $5 per 1,000 pounds co2
https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped
By this I mean they typically purchase and resell carbon credits generated by theoretically reducing emissions somewhere else - a common example to this is supplying more efficient fuel stoves to African communities. A credit is generated as theoretically there are less emissions now going into the atmosphere. This however does nothing to tackle the emissions from your car which remain in the atmosphere.
Carbon removal generally refers to these new technologies that actively capture and sequester CO2. These are currently immature and expensive but the result is "net-zero", if your car emits a ton, you remove a ton.
Some links for you:
Bloomberg dug a little into the forestation based carbon offsets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20xMbGkEIQI
[Disclaimer: I co-founded this] an alternative which aims to support a portfolio of carbon removals: https://carbonremoved.com
That huge removal cost just shows how underpriced oil is given the externalities.
I hope we are successful in some of the ongoing litigation like cigarette companies.
Specifically for energy corporations I am fine with complete Gov. sanctions/high regulation. Similar to electric companies but strip all shareholder profit until it's all spent cleaning up the mess. Not sorry to be the AOC socialist left on this one lol.
The facility in this article claims it will be able to pull 4000 metric tons of CO2 from the air each year.
Per the EPA, the average US driver produces 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Let's call it 4 for ease of calculation. That's 1000 cars negated.
How much does this facility cost to operate and what is the cost of depreciation each year? $3.6M sounds impossibly low.
[0] https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...
At current prices it's already economically viable to get a Tesla in many places.
I imagine the added-cost gets passed on to the consumer.
This doesn't need to be charity either; the maintenance cost of renewables can be much lower than the cost of fossil fuels, so they can end up cheaper over the long-term (obviously dependent on the situation). Hence it can be a straighforward loan/investment to set up this renewable tech. When talking about national policy, there are also factors like reducing dependence on oil imports, which can make renewables even more attractive.
We are not getting of fossil fuels anytime soon.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil?fbc...
You're just describing a feedback cycle: the more we transition to renewables, the less fossil fuels will go into wind turbines and solar cells.
From your link:
> Large trucks bring steel and other raw materials to the site, earth-moving equipment beats a path to otherwise inaccessible high ground, large cranes erect the structures, and all these machines burn diesel fuel. So do the freight trains and cargo ships that convey the materials needed for the production of cement, steel, and plastics.
In other words, we should transition our vehicles to renewable power. Electric motors are already preferable when it comes to heavy machinery (bucket-wheel excavators and conveyor bridges, the largest machines ever made, being the most extreme examples). Wind/solar farms generate electricity, so they can start charging batteries or electrolysing water to hydrogen as soon as the first turbines/panels are installed; they'll eventually need hefty grid connections, so installing those early-on can also power the construction.
Managing an electric/hydrogen construction site is mostly logistics rather than engineering: we don't need new battery tech or fuel cell membranes when vehicles are operating on a single site, centrally coordinated, centrally owned/rented, etc. Battery swaps make more sense when a single entity controls all the batteries (no fear of losing a good battery for a worn-out dud). Even if you want to be incredibly pessimistic about battery/hydrogen usage: with a bit more coordination and training, construction vehicles could just be wired!
Similarly, electric trains are a thing; electric and hydrogen trucks are already available and getting better; we can sail cargo ships, for a price (time + money).
The only place which seems to require new science and engineering in all this is steel and concrete production, but (a) there are a bunch of companies bringing improvements to market already, and (b) that's no reason to avoid all the other improvements. Again, worst-case pessimism: we might need to plug excess renewables into some vastly-inefficient air capture system to offset jet aircraft, rockets (except hydrogen burners), concrete and steel; that's still easier than trying to offset all those things plus electricity and land transport and shipping and construction etc.
The only direct barriers are economic; and those are indirectly political.
That takes time. Meanwhile coal plants and concrete manufacture will continue as the developing countries grow. Even China has to operate a lot of coal plants to meet its current energy needs. Global C02 emissions likely won't peak for several years, before starting to decline.
Maybe the more developed countries should build or invest in power plants from renewable sources, or maybe nuclear, in less developed countries.
Ever seen what goes into building a windmill?
https://spectrum.ieee.org/to-get-wind-power-you-need-oil?fbc...
We are not even theoretically close to getting off oil, gas or coal.
So you need to address currently polluting countries as well, because they are very much an important part of the problem. This set partly overlaps with the set of developed countries, partly not.
It's only a real concern if you are very insistant about calling China and India "developing" countries.
I'm guessing this would require a change at the WTO level however, making it relatively unlikely.
OTOH renewable energy sources are getting economically competitive so development doesn't have to mean more carbon. For instance, wind power already accounts for 20% of Brazil's energy generation (and most of it was built recently with private capital, as the government has been broke for a few decades already).
If businesses in developed countries had to simply pay the cost of cleanup when importing from countries without their own laws in place, it would still be a massive improvement.
Carbon credits will be enforced with coercion, just as the petrodollar has been. At the end of the day they are both schemes where technocrats print permission slips to consume energy.
Putting aside the fear mongering rationalizations for both schemes, I hope posters here can appreciate the inherent moral hazards.
Does the government then get to set the winners and losers across broad swaths of industry?
Yes, we have endemic regulatory capture. Yes, we have shitty voting systems that severely restrict the electoral options and, worse, the Overton window.
But also, study the WW2 build-up. This was heavy state managed and did a fantastic job, and certainly our voting system were no better then.
I also hope a combination of UBI and Carbon taxes can work — so the relative prices of things change but the overall cost of living doesn't go up.
But a very easy to understand example of where that is insufficient is that it will be much more efficient to build out public transit than try to make electric cars for everyone cheap.
The history of state management is rife with adverse unintended consequences due to rampant short-sighted application of state power.
As with most things in economics, "demand comes first", so the big importers need to lead the way.
Way, way more than than mere gigatons. FTA: "Last year, about 31 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide were released into the atmosphere." That's tens of gigatons in one year.
Sorry, that's just impossible in anything even remotely approximating a human time scale. None of these purported solutions pass even the most basic of physics and economics tests. Not sure why people never ask the right questions.
Someone else pointed out that we would have to build some 30,000 of these facilities just to be able to keep up with current CO2 contributions.
Ignoring for a moment the utter fantasy that such a proposal would represent, just one look at what is happening this very moment with the forest fires in California should make everyone who thinks we can control atmospheric CL2 at a planetary scale take pause. These forests are burning at a rate of tens of thousands of acres and we can't control them. Last I heard the fires (there's more than one) were somewhere between 11% and 30% contained. It is likely that, in a single week, these fires emit more CO2 than then entire US ground transport fleet emits in a year.
We do not have planetary-scale control of these matters. We can't fix this. That's the simple reality of the matter.
We have known this for quite some time (that we can't "save the planet"). A recent thread on HN explored yet another aspect of the issue:
Regulation and necessity to survive will funnel more money and effort into this area.
Regarding the viability of solutions I don't think there will be a one-size-fits-all approach and it will actually take many removal methods combined to make a dent.
Does the necessity to survive even exists at civilization scale ?
Because climate change will probably not put a clear end to humanity as a specie. And, sure, I’m optimistic : we’ll get through this like we happened to survive, world wars, pandemics and a load of other global catastrophic events.
But what will be the cost in human lives ? If, say, 20% of the planet remains inhabitable by the time we succeed to stop climate change, is that an optimistic take ?
Nothing wrong with this. The issue is that, unfortunately, physics cares not one bit about optimism, aspirations or what we might wish for. It just doesn't care.
I have not seen a single purported solution to date that passes the physics test. Not one. Most don't even pass the economics test.
I'll give you a simple example without numbers. One proposal is to seed the oceans with iron powder. Let's ignore the mechanism for now, it's irrelevant.
Anyone who knows anything about manufacturing will immediately zero-in on the hard and cold reality that producing such a material is an incredibly dirty and energy-hungry process. Producing it at a rate of billions, tens of billions or hundreds of billions of tons per year would likely require more energy than most nations can spare.
This would mean that hundreds to thousands of new power plants would have to be built. If they are not nuclear, then they burn something. Wind and solar? They are not clean at scale, but sure. No matter what you do, you will be producing CO2 (and other substances) at an alarming rate just to produce the material. I don't even want to think about the waste product.
Of course, we also have to ask what we would do to the planet in terms of the incremental mining necessary to obtain all of the raw material this would necessitate.
So, after all of that, you now have what you are after, and then you have to transport and deliver it. Transporting billions of tons of iron dust at a planetary scale would engage millions of ground, air and sea vehicles, all burning oil derivatives at a, well, planetary scale rate. Millions to billions of trips would have to be made to "paint the oceans" with this stuff. We might not have enough vehicles to do this, which means we'll have to manufacture them, which comes with environmental consequences.
The CO2 and pollution (because none of these processes are clean) this would produce is far more likely to make matters worse than to actually solve any problem.
And then you have the reality that a planetary-scale problem isn't going to be affected in seven days. Which means that the above-noted hypothetical might require ten, twenty, fifty or a hundred years of constant effort before anything even registers.
We are far more likely to kill all life on earth than to fix the planet.
None of the purported solutions I have ever seen engage in any realistic full-process analysis, not even at a superficial level. If you fire-up Excel and throw some numbers at these things it quickly becomes very obvious that they all exist within a range that lies between nonsense and hubris. What's brilliant is that they are all taking advantage of nice grants and research money, which, from one perspective, makes it genius. I can think of a few other imaginary things on this planet that make tons of money, one of them has a whole city built around it!
Believe it or not, my view isn't pessimistic at all. I am simply trying to make people think and understand that we are being sold a fantasy. Once that is well understood we need to focus on the reality of the matter. Which means we need to develop technology and programs aimed at living with this reality rather than living under the delusion that we can change a planetary scale problem.
I also urge anyone who cares to understand the truth to go out and buy a CO2 meter to then explore their environment. If you do that, what you will discover is that we actually live in an environment ranging between about 650 and 1100 ppm. And this has likely been the case for centuries. The most immediate observation being that humanity has obviously not turned into shapeless blobs of gelatin. In other words, someone needs to explain the "sky is falling" theory given the realities of what we actually experience in our homes, apartments, offices and cars every day of our lives.
My optimism is based on the idea that we will eventually understand we are being lied to due to both political and financial interests. At some point the "emperor has no clothes" scenario has to play out. And, when that happens, we will change our focus to more productive pursuits having to do with making life better while letting the planet do what it has to in order to manage the ecosystem --as it has for billions of years.
We can live with this at the micro level (because, at a planetary scale we are insignificant) while letting the macro level function as it does.
One thing is certain: None of us are going to see any change of note. Changes at a planetary scale are measured in tens of thousands of years, not decades.
Evolution has a maximum speed. A too fast changing environment means the death of most life. Even science have a maximum speed, adapting crops to the new climate may be not fast enought and cause massive famine. To slow down the change is needed to avoid extremely situations.
I firmly believe this is a necessary future of the reality we are facing. I believe this to such an extent that we have been developing various technologies for CEA over the last couple of years, some of which will allow us to grow the same or better crops using 1/3 to 1/2 less energy (and heat) than best-in-class solutions in the market today.
I think this is an important element of humanity adapting to the changes ahead. It does not solve all problems. It solves one.
From the IPCC:
> All analysed pathways limiting warming to 1.5°C with no or limited overshoot use CDR to some extent to neutralize emissions from sources for which no mitigation measures have been identified
(Note: CDR Carbon Dioxide Removal)
On the CO2 budget calculated for 1.5°C:
> budgets applicable to 2100 would be approximately 100 GtCO2 lower than <calculated> to account for permafrost thawing and potential methane release from wetlands in the future, and more thereafter.
The problem with a lot of these things is that everyone forms an opinion without investing any time reading the material (like the agreement) and doing even the most basic math to verify claims. And yet everyone knows we can "save the planet", it would be funny if it weren't so serious.
Must be a miscalculation here, the articles cites 4k tons scrubbed per year for this facility, and 31bn tons emited per year (to which you would have to add 5-6bn for land use change). So that's about 10 millions such facilities we need, only for co2.
I have yet to find a single purported solution that passes what I call the "Excel Test". In other words, running something slightly above a superficial mathematical model of the solution that includes some physics and economics. In my experience the model doesn't have to be deep and complex to quickly reach the conclusion that the so-called solution isn't, in fact, a solution. The problem is that almost nobody does this. Nobody seems to care to take these delusion merchants to task and ask the hard questions. And so we keep talking about a fantasy rather than the hard and cold reality of the matter. We cannot fix a planetary scale problem. We simply can't. We need to focus on living with it.
For starters, we don't build power plants to provide two or three times the power we need. Most power plants run at somewhere around 80% utilization with a margin for peak periods.
In addition to this, if we are serious about a transition to an electric transportation infrastructure by means of electric cars, trucks, boats and planes, well, there is no way the current installed base of power plants can handle this.
Again, easy math. For example, the US has somewhere around 300 million cars and trucks. The power (not energy, power is very important) an electrified version of this fleet would require far outstrips what we have available today.
Aside from this, you have to look at the historical timeline. 62K power plants were not built in 10 years. If we are optimistic and assume a 50 year timeline, well, quite a few of the people reading this will not be alive by the time 30,000 non-trivial anything is built. And the impact from these 30,000 whatever-they-are will not be seen for a long time, more than likely thousands of years. That's on the very benign assumption that they actually do something. The more likely scenario is that they do nothing or make matters worse.
Everyone was convinced that renewable energy was the answer...until someone actually bothered to do the math and physics work to try to understand. And the conclusion? Paraphrasing:
Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of solar and wind energy (forms so efficient they are yet to be invented) at a global scale, not only will this not stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation, it will continue to rise exponentially.
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
Physics can be a real heartless monster.
Finding the energy for 30k plants that are 250* more productive than this one (which, the article says, is the most efficient to date) is still kind of a problem.
This can be achieved with a carbon tax. Or even higher gasoline taxes in places like the US where gas is underpriced.
But people do not want this. It is politically infeasible. The current middle class rather preserves their current lifestyle for next 30-40 years they have left before the end of the old age rather than leaving a better planet for their children.
Then there's the issue that most carbon tax proposals try to invest the money in green energy R&D or electric vehicle subsidies.
Making gas 2x as expensive and Teslas 20% cheaper doesn't help these people at all - they simply can't afford a brand new car to begin with.
Unless 100% of carbon taxes are given back directly to the citizens in the form of cash, it will always be perceived as grabbing money from poor rural people to subsidize the fancy lifestyles of "coastal elites" who want to drive shiny new luxury electric SUVs.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2021/04/30/992545255/do-carbon-offsets-a...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/05/07/994774148/emission-impossible
I think buying credits from GoldStandard [1] is a safer bet. While I'm sure there's some of the same shadiness occasionally, I think that a lot more work goes into vetting projects. The majority of the projects I fund are small solar, wind or hydro plants. While many of these plants might get built anyway, I think the funding from GoldStandard may make the difference for lots of these small projects.
So that system can work, but don't give out the emission rights for free, have the companies buy them and invest the money earned in removing emissions from the air again.
There must be some sort of optimal strategy in there somewhere, that maximizes the economic incentive to reduce one's emissions.
According to the Economist's summary of the recent IPCC report, the current forcing effect of methane around 30% of that of CO2.
I hope I'm wrong, but I just absolutely cannot imagine that ever happening.
Is there a high resolution CO2 ppm map? Or does it not work like that, in terms of physical visibility?
Perhaps a big red blob marked “Coca Cola” or “Pitsburg” might kick things a bit more into action?
> As crucial as it may be to improve the technology, it will be equally important to compel industries and governments “to treat CO2 as a waste product,” he says, and therefore pay to clean it up.
This is really the key. Once this is implemented, loads of effort/money/research will flow into this field.
It already has a politically popular slogan, "polluter pays".
But in any case, it seems obvious that DAC is required to avoid bad outcomes. We've already pumped gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. We could just leave it there and deal with the problems, but it seems far better to actively remove it and get our atmospheric ppm down to what we saw ~150 years ago.