Our economic system has no affordances for making choices based on true costs – only sticker prices. When these are systematically distorted, it causes a huge collective problem.
If we’re going after all the fun stuff I don’t want the parents to get away scott free.
If we price in the emissions where they happen it will be priced in for all consumers of the products that cause them.
- all the meat and diary your child is going to consume in those 18 years
- all diapers that are going to be produced and disposed.
- all methane and CO2 you child produced on an a daily basis for those 18 years (exhaling, digesting/pooping/farting)
- concrete used for building this extra room for your child
...
just to name a few.
Shall I give you my Venmo?
I can explain my critiques in more detail if you clarify exactly what your argument is.
[1] https://manuelgarciajr.com/2020/08/09/the-improbability-of-c... [2] Comical, but fact-based take: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8
No one here is saying we should all be Amish, but if gasoline is $3 per gallon, but it costs $3 to remove the CO2 from the atmosphere (making both these numbers up, I don't own a car), then there's a good chance that the gas is effectively too cheap, and the rest of us are going to have to pay to clean it up later. If we taxed gas to be its true price (cost of extraction + refining + shipping + profit-margin + environmental cleanup), it would help incentivize cleaner fuels.
This sort of direct air capture will be absolutely necessary in the second half of this century for all of our current oaths to keep warming to 1.5C, according to the IPCC SR1.5 report. And though many parts of the supply chain of CO2 direct air capture might get cheaper with time, the actual sequestration part might get harder and more expensive with time.
Chevron had promised to capture only a small amount of CO2 as part of a LNG project in Australia, but is facing massive fines because they didn't understand the geology enough to actually sequester CO2.
So while I'm fairly confident that we could eventually get the tech for CO2 capture down to maybe $1/gallon of gas, the actual sequestration is only going to get more difficult with time.
Every gallon of gas burned today makes 20 pounds of CO2 that will need to be removed in the future we are burdening future generations with an incredibly difficult debt that we don't yet know how to pay down.
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2021/9/9/22663597/largest-direct-ai...
In essence, we're still burning lots and lots of carbon just to extract energy. Thermodynamics says to reverse the process and get carbon from CO2 we need to put all that energy back, with a hefty bonus due to inefficiencies.
So how can it be feasible to afford enough energy to "unburn" a century's worth of burnt carbon if we can't even get enough energy to avoid burning new carbon in the first place? Like, our energy generation might double in a few decades, but this "unburning" would require so much spare energy that it doesn't seem likely to achieve as soon as the second half of this century.
The key insight is that you don't need to turn carbon dioxide back into carbon. You just need to store those carbon atoms it in a stable form that keeps them out of the atmosphere. The most plausible way of doing that at large scale is to accelerate the reaction of naturally occurring silicates from rocks with atmospheric CO2.
"From a thermodynamic point of view, inorganic carbonates represent a lower energy state than CO2; hence the carbonation reaction is exothermic..."
That's from chapter 7 of the IPCC Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage, which I recommend reading for more details.
Chapter 7 PDF: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/srccs_chapte...
Page 321 has the executive summary with your quote.
Parent page for full book: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/carbon-dioxide-capture-and-storag...
The gist is that if you look at the exponential curves of growth of both wind and solar deployments, and assume that we don't back off from those, you get X amount of TWh/year in 2040. Combine that with conversion of heating and transport to electrification, which provides huge efficiency boosts and requires only 1/3 to 1/4 the energy (most fossil fuel energy is just wasted). Then add in all the parts of the developing world which will increase their energy use to EU/China standards, and we are just barely there.
However I think we are likely to see big gains in production capacity as the developing world ups their game. They will be consuming more electricity, but also be immensely more productive.
It isn't, and it won't be. Carbon capture is a pleasing myth we tell ourselves to avoid the massive and immediate actions that would be necessary to avert catastrophe.
We're addicted to fossil fuels, telling ourselves that when we eventually sober up we can undo the damage we've done to ourselves.
There are several startups trying to come up with ways of sequestering atmospheric carbon in ways that will last for thousands of years. We need something like that to work, and to come up with ways to fund massive deployment in the second half of this century.
IMHO when estimating future, starting with the desired outcome (or even considering it much) is harmful, as it causes you to accept unrealistic assumptions and estimates for the key items driving your predictions, just so the predictions will come out as "acceptable" to you. You need to consider the impact factors as they are, and have realistic expectations of the effect and likelihood of interventions (especially considering the specific motivation factors of the narrow groups who can make each of those interventions, how that aligns with their interests), and see to what prognosis they lead you.
If we "need to come up with ways" then it means that it's plausible that we won't, and we (in this case, not we-as-the-world but we-as-individuals and we-as-smaller-communities) also need to plan on how to protect our interests in that (quite likely) scenario. An aching desire for something to work does not imply that it's possible in the required timeframe. Especially because there's no single "we"; those that need a solution to climate change and those that could fund it are largely separate groups; you can't look at it as a primarily technical problem when the largest impact factors are political.
Perhaps you can avoid "unburning" it by some other chemical process (which is why I was asking this) but simply pumping the CO2 somewhere does not seem a reasonable option, the only place on Earth that can easily hold that much of CO2 gas is the general atmosphere where it already resides.
Climeworks' proposal to pump it into basalt caverns, where it chemically reacts and becomes solid, is one way around that.
Carbon Engineering is doing gas to liquids, and claims that they need ~2.25 kWh of electricity to convert atmospheric CO2 to 1 kWh worth of liquid hydrocarbons. We will see.
We will need gigatons/year of sequestration in 2050. It's going to require a ton of innovation to get there.
We'd need to pay back all that energy, but in the coming decades we can't even afford the energy cost of the relatively much simpler solution of "simply" not burning bulk carbon for heat.
Re gas heating, I sure could've used some just this past winter during the Texas snowpocalypse. My apartment uses electric power for heating/cooking, so electricity was a single point of failure. Resiliency through diversity is a point I missed above.
I do not fear being downvotes at all on this topic. If I'm not getting downvoted by the few persistent anti-climate-change voters here, then IMHO I am not pushing forward the truth enough! People, even here, have a lot more to realize about the technological, economic, and political implications of the transition that we must go through in the coming decades.
> 100 gallons of gas convert to a ton of CO2
https://climatekids.nasa.gov/review/carbon/gasoline.html
Using imperial units is always unfortunate, but when dealing with the typical unit of gasoline in the US, it's inevitable.
Not sure where you are getting your numbers, perhaps you're using a UK gallon or something?
Well, no, when dealing with the typical unit of gasoline in the US, Imperial units are irrelevant, and US Customary units are inevitable.
https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...
Your error appears to be using a single significant figure for the density of gasoline, at 700. Other sources place it from 711 to 749 kg/m3.
Hopefully you will reconsider my comment being "not nice," since you started with one sig fig and ended with four, and then did not consider the two different meanings of ton. And on top of this all, this ignores all the upstream emissions to generate the gasoline, which is greater than the 15% which you said was "not nice."
still well short of a ton
However, I already told you that I was using a US ton, 2000 pounds, 907kg:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=1+ton+in+kg
Additionally, you are not including the 3-6 pounds per gallon in upstream emissions for gasoline.
Let's recall that this all started from the phrase "about 100 gallons of gas convert to a ton of CO2" and that when you quotes, you omitted the "about" so that you could try to make your incorrect quibble relevant. So at this point I would like to call this a very "not nice scientifically" departure from anything relevant, but I'm all ears if you were going somewhere interesting with this.
That density seems to be on the low end; different formulations have different densities, and the sources I’ve found give somewhat different ranges, but the ranges given typically seems to be about 750±35 kg/m³.
19.64 - http://www.patagoniaalliance.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/...
20 - https://climatekids.nasa.gov/review/carbon/gasoline.html
20 - https://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/contentincludes/co2_inc.htm
19.6 (converted from grams) - https://www.epa.gov/energy/greenhouse-gases-equivalencies-ca...
“Just over 19” - https://epicenergyblog.com/2013/05/24/how-many-pounds-of-car...
The next hit isn’t about CO2 from burning Gas, but about the upstream emissions that go into producing gasoline, which it pegs at 3.3 to 6.7 per gallon - https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/ask-mr-green/hey-mr-green-...
What sort of estimates are you getting?
Yes, “gasoline” is a family of related fuels of different densities and compositions, and it will also vary based on assumptions about how it is burned. Incomplete combustion will result in more “dirty” pollution and less CO2.
IIRC 1 ppm of CO2 is ~1 gigaton of carbon. Roughly the weight of Mt Everest. We're adding ~26 Everests annually.
Thanks.