Not only will there be an increase in emissions while we work on this project, the project itself will generate tremendous emissions assuming it will use steel, concrete and plastic.
And your point is? No point in trying, we're just f*ked, right? But there is a point to be made WRT this, which has some validity. Setting up whatever is needed for CDR will itself create emissions. In principle, that is true, although the details can be debated. In my view, this is exactly why the emphasis MUST be on conversion to renewable energy first, before ramping up CDR. Then, when CDR goes through the middle of its S-curve (a trajectory I feel sure it will have), it will have a much smaller carbon footprint, as well as lower overall cost.
The problem is one of scale. Climate scientists agree that to retain our stable Holocene environment, CO2 concentration must not exceed 350 ppm. We are now at 420 ppm. The difference (70 ppm) represents 546B metric tons of CO2. Each year we are adding another 40B tons. If we were to stop all emissions immediately, we would have to remove 546B tons of CO2 to get back to 350 ppm. The world's largest carbon capture plant is Climeworks' Mammoth plant in Hellisheiði, Iceland which removes 36K tons of CO2 per year. It would take 100,000 of these plants 150 years to remove 546B tons of CO2. There is no way we can build this many plants, and we don't have 150 years to make it happen. And, of course, we aren't going to stop GHG emissions immediately, so the problem continues to grow. The problem of scale also applies to clean energy. Despite rapid expansion, wind and solar still only provide 13% of electrical energy and less than 3% of total energy. We would need tens of millions of solar farms and wind turbines to replace fossil fuels. Nuclear fission provides 4% of global energy. There are 440 nuclear reactors in the world. We would need more than 10,000 to replace fossil fuels. Again, it just isn't possible to build on this scale. And, as you and the original commenter observed, all this construction will produce even more emissions. Nuclear fusion remains only a dream. The largest fusion experiment in the world - ITER - just announced a ten-year delay in its planned 2025 operational date. Many other fusion experiments are happening so there might be a breakthrough, but it is only a hope. Of course, we could reduce our energy consumption, but with the world population still growing, and with governments and companies competing, that isn't likely. There have been 28 annual COP meetings to do this and nothing has been accomplished.
@@fr57ujf Well, I thought I had replied to this, but apparently other things got in the way. Sorry for the oversight and delay. Scale is not a prohibitive problem for any of the things you mentioned, and in all cases it's for fundamentally similar reasons. WRT the amount of CO2 to be removed: I'd have to recheck the amounts you gave, but they look like reasonable estimates, so let's go with them. It's actually quite simple to calculate the amount, but I'm not going to repeat it unless someone shows a sincere interest in the amount. BTW 546 represents a false precision for this situation. Not sure if you knew that. You might as well say 600. Actually, you leave out a potentially important component, because about half of cumulative emissions are dissolved in the Oceans, and as concentrations are reduced, they will start to come out of solution again. So in the long run, we may have to remove more than that 600 gigatonnes. OTOH the release will not be immediate, and if the time scale is quite long, we may not have reckon with it WRT near-term CO2 reduction. I admit I don't know how to determine the release rates. I'm not sure that would be very simple to calculate, even for a climate scientist. But it could be relevant. Possibly. For now, I'll approach the matter in a simpler way. You can take the excess CO2 now in the Atmosphere, compare it to current emissions, and what you will find is that the excess over the pre-industrial level is equivalent to somewhere around 40 to 45 years of current emissions. If I recall right, that's the excess over the pre-industrial 280 ppm. I think. Maybe it's 350 ppm, but I think it's for 280 ppm. So that's equivalent to about 40 to 50 years of our current emissions. What you seem to be claiming is that, globally, we have done the equivalent of that long a period of our current emissions, yet to remove a similar amount represents an insurmountable amount of material to be removed. You could run some numbers and try to make a case for that, but it's certainly not obvious ipso facto. We put it in, so it is not unreasonable to think we can remove it. I don't think what is currently being done in Iceland is any solid indication of anything. Mass-producing anything leads to lower costs. And that is the strength of all the most important solutions being proposed for all the big energy and carbon problems. Whether it's DAC, solar PV, electric cars, batteries for mobile or stationary use, or anything such as that, costs decline radically as scale increases. (It has a popular name: Wright's Law.) I don't recall being the one to say that all the construction required will produce more emissions. That's true in principle, but again, as mass production matures, the resources required, per unit of function, decline inexorably. I just with I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone like you raise these objections, that the scale is just too large. I certainly can remember when solar PV was too small to make any difference. That is, until it wasn't. And so it is with all of these things. You're not telling me any new objections. I have heard it ALL before. BTW I can tell you the carbon footprint for manufacturing and deploying energy-related hardware devices when energy is all from renewables. It's ZERO. So that objection is only a temporary one. As for fusion, I don't recall even mentioning it, so I don't know why you're even bringing that up. FWIW I don't have a solid opinion about fusion, beyond just saying that it needs to be shown to work in some limited way first, and that hasn't happened yet. Its proponents seem to all think that once that happens, it can ramp up rapidly from there. Given the right conditions, that might be possible. But for now, in addressing the current global energy picture, we really don't have anything to go on when it comes to fusion. As for the rate of energy consumption, you don't really say anything quantitative, but you seem to imply that there is some kind of runaway exponential growth. Actually, population growth is slowing, and is negative in some places, and energy use keeps gradually getting more efficient. If you were to say that population is now increasing about 1% per year, energy intensity per unit of GDP is improving at about 1% per year, and economic growth is about 3% per year, and if you look at it for some decades, like maybe 20 years or 50 years, you would probably be about right, to a first approximation in expecting energy use to rise about 2% per year, later slowing to perhaps 1% a year. But obviously, there are various things that could alter that in the long run. I guess we're all supposed to be hyperventilating about this, but I need more to go on before anything like that is possible for me.
Absorption of CO2 by the ocean is irrelevant when calculating only atmospheric loading. It isn't as easy to get CO2 out of the atmosphere as it is to put it in. Savings from mass production do not scale linearly.
10 billion tons of carbon is the equivalent of 22 billion tons of air dry wood which would cover NYC to a depth of 65 feet or weigh the same as 440 great walls of China. It is also equivalent to 40 billion tons of CO2 which is what we're dumping into the atmosphere per year. Carbon removal is an integral part of the IPCC projections which limit warming to below 2°C. It is already used as a justification to extend the target date of "net zero" to beyond 2060.
Discussions like this need much more attention to audio levels. This is hard to hear, and attempts to compensate can lead to other problems. For example, irritated neighbors.
For each method of CCS, how much energy would be required to construct, implement, and operate the systems being proposed... what is the EROEI? How great is the atmospheric CO2 investment to get even a break even CO2 removal benefit?
@@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885 What do you do with the algae? If it goes wild, you end up deoxygenating the water. If you harvest it, then you have to keep the harvested carbon sequestered. Use it for something. Or bury it deep in the ground. Fill up old mines? Pump it into wells with frack waste water?
@@kimweaver1252 Professor William Calvin. Sir David King. Double Ph.D. in marine biology Raffael Jovine. I have a paper on algae - starting with a quote from Monteray Bay Institute lead scientist stating ONLY algae can save Earth when the climate is out of control. just search algae environmental coffeehouse for my algae talk. thanks
~49:00 I have to challenge some of these comments, too. It's just not true that nothing was being done several decades ago. What's being pushed now, in regard to efficiency and renewables, was a subject of much interest in the Seventies, in particular, when oil prices spiked, but really these are trends that have been going on since before any of us were around. The difference now is that some of them are reaching proportions where they cannot be ignored.
So-called "greenhouse effect" physics: It happens in Earth's troposphere. The H2O gas & CO2 in Earth's atmosphere manufacture ~1,500 times as much radiation as the Sun's radiation that Earth absorbs (or something of that scale, hundreds of times as much). Taking 1 Unit as the Sun's radiation that Earth absorbs (which is 99.93% of all energy going into the ecosphere, geothermal and all the human nuclear fission and fossil carbon burning are 0.035% each) and the 1,500 times as a workable example (not accurate) to describe the physics concept: Units 1 Solar SWR that Earth absorbs (1/3rd in the air, 2/3rds in the surface) 1,500 LWR manufactured by H2O gas & CO2 molecules in Earth's atmosphere 1,497.64 LWR absorbed by H2O gas & CO2 molecules in Earth's atmosphere 0.92 Leaks out the top of Earth's atmosphere and goes to space 1.44 Leaks out the bottom of Earth's atmosphere and goes into the surface (Note: There's 0.08 LWR straight from the surface to space because H2O gas, CO2, CH4, O3, NOx, CFCs don't absorb those wavelengths) So there's the balance with 1 Solar SWR Unit being absorbed and 0.92+0.08=1 LWR Unit being sent to space. The "greenhouse effect" is the fact that only 0.92 leaks out the top of Earth's atmosphere but a larger 1.44 leaks out the bottom of Earth's atmosphere into the surface, because only the leakage to space gets rid of the constant stream of solar SWR energy, not the leakage into the surface. If they were both the same, both 1.18, then there'd still be 2.36 leaking out of Earth's atmosphere but there'd be no "greenhouse effect" (as you see, out of the top of Earth's atmosphere to space has gone up from 0.92 to 1.18 so there's obviously much more cooling). The reason why they are unbalanced with more leaking out the bottom than out the top is simply because Earth's troposphere is usually by far (much) colder at the top than at the bottom and colder gases make less radiation than warmer gases because they collide less frequently and with less force (that's what "colder" means, it's just molecules bashing other molecules less frequently and with less force). ------ If more H2O gas & CO2 molecules are added into Earth's troposphere then the 0.92 that leaks out the top of Earth's atmosphere is reduced and the 1.44 that leaks out the bottom of Earth's atmosphere is correspondingly increased. For example, add some ghg molecules for a 0.01 Unit effect and the 0.92:1.44 leakage changes to 0.91:1.45 leakage, so there's more "greenhouse effect". That 0.01 Unit example is a "forcing" of 2.4 w/m**2 which is 60 years of the current ghgs increase and is expected would warm by ~2.4 degrees with the feedbacks.
To point out earth uses the AirSeaInterface to exchange gases at_scale vs on land/lg.islands one must remove it from the greenhouse layer not below it the constraint. Fwiw
~29:00 So there might be some tradeoffs, and we shouldn't focus exclusively on CO2? Well, OK, out with it. What ARE the tradeoffs? I don't want to hear just about how there MIGHT be some tradeoff. Show some real information.
~42:00 This is not as complicated as it's being made to sound here. If you, as a consumer, benefited from use of cheap fossil fuels, and disposal in the Atmosphere, the producer's cost savings got passed on to you in lower prices. LIkewise, if producers are required to pay for their cumulative emissions, they will pass on those extra costs in higher prices. It works in both directions. As for morality of past actions, many things in life fall into a category you could call "it's not your fault, but it is your problem."" No need to put anyone on trial for criminal offenses (unless there is willful criminality, of course), it's just part of the cost of doing business.
That depends on whether you think hiding research of their own scientists and spending millions on a deliberate misinformation campaign is/were criminal.
@@stephanmarcus448 Of course there was criminality. My point is basically that we're all complicit in it. I like to think I'm much less complicit than most (as to why, specifics on request). But we all influence this stuff in countless ways, whether we think about it or not. Consumer choice matters. Political action matters. Actions of business decision-makers matter. There are multiple points at which to apply pressure.
oil and coal are from algae and to algae they will return. algae can sequester 100 gigatons of co2 per year. We can embrace the algae or the algae will embrace us. Algae is 4.6 billion years old. Algae will survive. We won't.
Not only will there be an increase in emissions while we work on this project, the project itself will generate tremendous emissions assuming it will use steel, concrete and plastic.
And your point is? No point in trying, we're just f*ked, right?
But there is a point to be made WRT this, which has some validity. Setting up whatever is needed for CDR will itself create emissions. In principle, that is true, although the details can be debated. In my view, this is exactly why the emphasis MUST be on conversion to renewable energy first, before ramping up CDR. Then, when CDR goes through the middle of its S-curve (a trajectory I feel sure it will have), it will have a much smaller carbon footprint, as well as lower overall cost.
The problem is one of scale. Climate scientists agree that to retain our stable Holocene environment, CO2 concentration must not exceed 350 ppm. We are now at 420 ppm. The difference (70 ppm) represents 546B metric tons of CO2. Each year we are adding another 40B tons.
If we were to stop all emissions immediately, we would have to remove 546B tons of CO2 to get back to 350 ppm. The world's largest carbon capture plant is Climeworks' Mammoth plant in Hellisheiði, Iceland which removes 36K tons of CO2 per year. It would take 100,000 of these plants 150 years to remove 546B tons of CO2. There is no way we can build this many plants, and we don't have 150 years to make it happen. And, of course, we aren't going to stop GHG emissions immediately, so the problem continues to grow.
The problem of scale also applies to clean energy. Despite rapid expansion, wind and solar still only provide 13% of electrical energy and less than 3% of total energy. We would need tens of millions of solar farms and wind turbines to replace fossil fuels. Nuclear fission provides 4% of global energy. There are 440 nuclear reactors in the world. We would need more than 10,000 to replace fossil fuels. Again, it just isn't possible to build on this scale. And, as you and the original commenter observed, all this construction will produce even more emissions.
Nuclear fusion remains only a dream. The largest fusion experiment in the world - ITER - just announced a ten-year delay in its planned 2025 operational date. Many other fusion experiments are happening so there might be a breakthrough, but it is only a hope.
Of course, we could reduce our energy consumption, but with the world population still growing, and with governments and companies competing, that isn't likely. There have been 28 annual COP meetings to do this and nothing has been accomplished.
@@fr57ujf Well, I thought I had replied to this, but apparently other things got in the way. Sorry for the oversight and delay.
Scale is not a prohibitive problem for any of the things you mentioned, and in all cases it's for fundamentally similar reasons.
WRT the amount of CO2 to be removed: I'd have to recheck the amounts you gave, but they look like reasonable estimates, so let's go with them. It's actually quite simple to calculate the amount, but I'm not going to repeat it unless someone shows a sincere interest in the amount. BTW 546 represents a false precision for this situation. Not sure if you knew that. You might as well say 600. Actually, you leave out a potentially important component, because about half of cumulative emissions are dissolved in the Oceans, and as concentrations are reduced, they will start to come out of solution again. So in the long run, we may have to remove more than that 600 gigatonnes. OTOH the release will not be immediate, and if the time scale is quite long, we may not have reckon with it WRT near-term CO2 reduction. I admit I don't know how to determine the release rates. I'm not sure that would be very simple to calculate, even for a climate scientist. But it could be relevant. Possibly.
For now, I'll approach the matter in a simpler way. You can take the excess CO2 now in the Atmosphere, compare it to current emissions, and what you will find is that the excess over the pre-industrial level is equivalent to somewhere around 40 to 45 years of current emissions. If I recall right, that's the excess over the pre-industrial 280 ppm. I think. Maybe it's 350 ppm, but I think it's for 280 ppm.
So that's equivalent to about 40 to 50 years of our current emissions. What you seem to be claiming is that, globally, we have done the equivalent of that long a period of our current emissions, yet to remove a similar amount represents an insurmountable amount of material to be removed. You could run some numbers and try to make a case for that, but it's certainly not obvious ipso facto. We put it in, so it is not unreasonable to think we can remove it.
I don't think what is currently being done in Iceland is any solid indication of anything. Mass-producing anything leads to lower costs. And that is the strength of all the most important solutions being proposed for all the big energy and carbon problems. Whether it's DAC, solar PV, electric cars, batteries for mobile or stationary use, or anything such as that, costs decline radically as scale increases. (It has a popular name: Wright's Law.)
I don't recall being the one to say that all the construction required will produce more emissions. That's true in principle, but again, as mass production matures, the resources required, per unit of function, decline inexorably. I just with I had a dollar for every time I've seen someone like you raise these objections, that the scale is just too large. I certainly can remember when solar PV was too small to make any difference. That is, until it wasn't. And so it is with all of these things. You're not telling me any new objections. I have heard it ALL before.
BTW I can tell you the carbon footprint for manufacturing and deploying energy-related hardware devices when energy is all from renewables. It's ZERO. So that objection is only a temporary one.
As for fusion, I don't recall even mentioning it, so I don't know why you're even bringing that up. FWIW I don't have a solid opinion about fusion, beyond just saying that it needs to be shown to work in some limited way first, and that hasn't happened yet. Its proponents seem to all think that once that happens, it can ramp up rapidly from there. Given the right conditions, that might be possible. But for now, in addressing the current global energy picture, we really don't have anything to go on when it comes to fusion.
As for the rate of energy consumption, you don't really say anything quantitative, but you seem to imply that there is some kind of runaway exponential growth. Actually, population growth is slowing, and is negative in some places, and energy use keeps gradually getting more efficient. If you were to say that population is now increasing about 1% per year, energy intensity per unit of GDP is improving at about 1% per year, and economic growth is about 3% per year, and if you look at it for some decades, like maybe 20 years or 50 years, you would probably be about right, to a first approximation in expecting energy use to rise about 2% per year, later slowing to perhaps 1% a year. But obviously, there are various things that could alter that in the long run. I guess we're all supposed to be hyperventilating about this, but I need more to go on before anything like that is possible for me.
Absorption of CO2 by the ocean is irrelevant when calculating only atmospheric loading. It isn't as easy to get CO2 out of the atmosphere as it is to put it in. Savings from mass production do not scale linearly.
@@fr57ujf PMFJI but both of you are making a series of assertions without evidence, and in some cases with unclear intent.
10 billion tons of carbon is the equivalent of 22 billion tons of air dry wood which would cover NYC to a depth of 65 feet or weigh the same as 440 great walls of China.
It is also equivalent to 40 billion tons of CO2 which is what we're dumping into the atmosphere per year.
Carbon removal is an integral part of the IPCC projections which limit warming to below 2°C. It is already used as a justification to extend the target date of "net zero" to beyond 2060.
And the technology is BS IMHO, meant to assist the fossil fuel industry. No way could we scale it up to current needs. So don't look up.
it's about photosynthesis. Algae can sequester 100 gigatons of co2 per year.
Discussions like this need much more attention to audio levels. This is hard to hear, and attempts to compensate can lead to other problems. For example, irritated neighbors.
For each method of CCS, how much energy would be required to construct, implement, and operate the systems being proposed... what is the EROEI? How great is the atmospheric CO2 investment to get even a break even CO2 removal benefit?
algae
@@voidisyinyangvoidisyinyang885 What do you do with the algae? If it goes wild, you end up deoxygenating the water. If you harvest it, then you have to keep the harvested carbon sequestered. Use it for something. Or bury it deep in the ground. Fill up old mines? Pump it into wells with frack waste water?
@@kimweaver1252 Professor William Calvin. Sir David King. Double Ph.D. in marine biology Raffael Jovine. I have a paper on algae - starting with a quote from Monteray Bay Institute lead scientist stating ONLY algae can save Earth when the climate is out of control. just search algae environmental coffeehouse for my algae talk. thanks
Highlight: 13:39: Overview of carbon removal pathways, and attributes framing (conventional/novel. Readiness, potential, timescale.)
~49:00 I have to challenge some of these comments, too. It's just not true that nothing was being done several decades ago. What's being pushed now, in regard to efficiency and renewables, was a subject of much interest in the Seventies, in particular, when oil prices spiked, but really these are trends that have been going on since before any of us were around. The difference now is that some of them are reaching proportions where they cannot be ignored.
Suggest you watch "Who Killed the Electric Car", a PBS documentary from early 2000. Its disgusting what our 'leaders' have done.
So-called "greenhouse effect" physics: It happens in Earth's troposphere. The H2O gas & CO2 in Earth's atmosphere manufacture ~1,500 times as much radiation as the Sun's radiation that Earth absorbs (or something of that scale, hundreds of times as much). Taking 1 Unit as the Sun's radiation that Earth absorbs (which is 99.93% of all energy going into the ecosphere, geothermal and all the human nuclear fission and fossil carbon burning are 0.035% each) and the 1,500 times as a workable example (not accurate) to describe the physics concept:
Units
1 Solar SWR that Earth absorbs (1/3rd in the air, 2/3rds in the surface)
1,500 LWR manufactured by H2O gas & CO2 molecules in Earth's atmosphere
1,497.64 LWR absorbed by H2O gas & CO2 molecules in Earth's atmosphere
0.92 Leaks out the top of Earth's atmosphere and goes to space
1.44 Leaks out the bottom of Earth's atmosphere and goes into the surface
(Note: There's 0.08 LWR straight from the surface to space because H2O gas, CO2, CH4, O3, NOx, CFCs don't absorb those wavelengths)
So there's the balance with 1 Solar SWR Unit being absorbed and 0.92+0.08=1 LWR Unit being sent to space. The "greenhouse effect" is the fact that only 0.92 leaks out the top of Earth's atmosphere but a larger 1.44 leaks out the bottom of Earth's atmosphere into the surface, because only the leakage to space gets rid of the constant stream of solar SWR energy, not the leakage into the surface. If they were both the same, both 1.18, then there'd still be 2.36 leaking out of Earth's atmosphere but there'd be no "greenhouse effect" (as you see, out of the top of Earth's atmosphere to space has gone up from 0.92 to 1.18 so there's obviously much more cooling). The reason why they are unbalanced with more leaking out the bottom than out the top is simply because Earth's troposphere is usually by far (much) colder at the top than at the bottom and colder gases make less radiation than warmer gases because they collide less frequently and with less force (that's what "colder" means, it's just molecules bashing other molecules less frequently and with less force).
------
If more H2O gas & CO2 molecules are added into Earth's troposphere then the 0.92 that leaks out the top of Earth's atmosphere is reduced and the 1.44 that leaks out the bottom of Earth's atmosphere is correspondingly increased. For example, add some ghg molecules for a 0.01 Unit effect and the 0.92:1.44 leakage changes to 0.91:1.45 leakage, so there's more "greenhouse effect". That 0.01 Unit example is a "forcing" of 2.4 w/m**2 which is 60 years of the current ghgs increase and is expected would warm by ~2.4 degrees with the feedbacks.
@@grindupBaker Nope
A.I. is getting dumber by the day.
To point out earth uses the AirSeaInterface to exchange gases at_scale vs on land/lg.islands one must remove it from the greenhouse layer not below it the constraint.
Fwiw
~29:00 So there might be some tradeoffs, and we shouldn't focus exclusively on CO2? Well, OK, out with it. What ARE the tradeoffs? I don't want to hear just about how there MIGHT be some tradeoff. Show some real information.
look up algae that can sequester 100 gigatons of co2 per year. I did an algae talk on "environmental coffeehouse." thanks
~42:00 This is not as complicated as it's being made to sound here. If you, as a consumer, benefited from use of cheap fossil fuels, and disposal in the Atmosphere, the producer's cost savings got passed on to you in lower prices. LIkewise, if producers are required to pay for their cumulative emissions, they will pass on those extra costs in higher prices. It works in both directions. As for morality of past actions, many things in life fall into a category you could call "it's not your fault, but it is your problem."" No need to put anyone on trial for criminal offenses (unless there is willful criminality, of course), it's just part of the cost of doing business.
That depends on whether you think hiding research of their own scientists and spending millions on a deliberate misinformation campaign is/were criminal.
@@stephanmarcus448 Of course there was criminality. My point is basically that we're all complicit in it. I like to think I'm much less complicit than most (as to why, specifics on request). But we all influence this stuff in countless ways, whether we think about it or not. Consumer choice matters. Political action matters. Actions of business decision-makers matter. There are multiple points at which to apply pressure.
oil and coal are from algae and to algae they will return. algae can sequester 100 gigatons of co2 per year. We can embrace the algae or the algae will embrace us. Algae is 4.6 billion years old. Algae will survive. We won't.
SCientist "believe" "consensus"??? we are fucck!
Truth it’s so fucking hot here in Tennessee, I can’t imagine what it’s going to be like come July and August
@@Muddslinger0415 no where near as hot as July 1937!
I don't suppose anything happened environmentally since 1937. Could you fill in the gap?@terenceiutzi4003
@@UnknownPascal-sc2nk the climate drastically cooled
@@terenceiutzi4003 In lower 48 states, sure. But the PLANET is hotter now that in the '30s.