Negative carbon, Do you mean removing co2 from the armosphere, including at high elevations, where the level is less than 0.25 grams/m³, compared to sea level 0.49 grams/m³. At the Altiplano the grain producing plants are suffering from co2 STARVATION ,and so are the people. Do you even know what you are doing? about a million people depend on a meager ration. So that is carbon justice! THINK ABOUT IT. Better, go, fly to La Paz and see for yourself. It is a bloddy good Idea, as you put it!
Before I offer my opinion on this, allow me to say that this is a great channel. Thanks for producing it. Now, my comments. A bunch of trees do not equal a healthy forrest. Forests are extremely complex, involving understory, canopy, mycelium complexes below ground, below ground and above ground microbe interactions (some of them taking hundreds of years to develop), and the interdependency of yet to be discovered systems that merely planting trees can never replace. Planted wooded areas, not being forests, usually result in less than optimal health for the trees, and can even lead to unforeseen consequences involving new ecosystem balances that might actually be harmful. Nature's interactions are complex beyond comprehension, but to comprehend we must at least try. Though we don't fully understand the process, we need to make an attempt to understand and replicate the actual forests that have been destroyed. But natural grasslands are equally important, and an entirely different subject. Trying to solve this problem with a capitalist system is questionable in my view. Out of control capitalism created this problem. Mechanically recapturing carbon in fancy new factories designed to operate at a profit is crazy. The best carbon recapture system ever devised is the process of natural photosynthesis on a massive scale. Our photosynthetic earth is crying out for help, that part of it that is still alive.
I guess that’s briefly touched on here, and I think we need to focus more on what you’ve said, and re-wilding, together with regenerative farming, combined with every process we can use that’s more natural and renewable energy with storage etc.
hows about the concept of totally boycotting corporate capitalism that we currently use to put that CO2 in our ceiling in the first place. Resolve to never buy an ICE car (internal combustion engine). That'll make them legacy cart makers react( fold, shabby,merky bents,rolvo..you guys). Resolve never to fly another jet plane anywhere ( ask Gretta). That'll get them oily unctious biggest business in the world guys on their toes, 2.5 billion dollars per day, it'll get them guys interested. Show we're serious, use an attitude adjuster on them, hit them with a big stick by boycotting them. Buy no more Christmas presents for anybody never again. Use lottsa double negatives, to show you're serious and scary. That'll slow down these consumptive corporate capitalists too., Kids will be fine with a good orange, like in the old days. Adults will cope. Quit your job, and live with a loved one. That usta work, still does. Cut your own hair. Love your kids a lot. This doesn't need to make any CO2. Cook your own food. The rich people absolutely cannot live without poor people to kiss their guilded asses. They will not even close their own umbrellas. Make peace and love.
xflyingtiger Ok, great. Should we not plant trees then? I'm all for healthy natural forests, but if we don't get the carbon out of the atmosphere soon, we might not have any forests at all.
Before throwing the "capitalist system" in the waste bin, go take a look at the company "Nori" (Nori.com) that Dave mentioned - and look at how consumers (individuals, families, companies) buy carbon offsets and how suppliers (i.e., entities that extract and store carbon like Harborview Farms [one of Nori's suppliers]. After you've explore the whole solution end-to-end, I think you'll see that it is a capitalist solution that does what capitalism can (but doesn't always) do: identify a problem worth solving (aka an opportunity), develop a solution that consumers will purchase, and make a market. Also, go look at a company called IndigoAg and their project "The Terraton Initiative," which is designed to make a market to pay farmers en masse to change agricultural practices to drawn down and sequester carbon in the soil. "Out of control capitalism," in most cases was responding to consumer demand for products and services. If we're looking for someone to blame, we should look in the mirror. When it's 95 degrees outside and 70%+ humidity, I want to run my air conditioner. When I want to watch UA-cam videos like this one about climate change and possible solutions, I power up my laptop and watch "Just Have A Think" - both those activities take electricity that someone has to generate. So, I'm part of the problem. Now - it's up to me, and millions of people like me, to demand a solution. Markets move at comparatively lightning speed when a legitimate opportunity (a problem to be solved, a need to be met) presents itself - governments, no so much. These days in the U.S., with Democrats and Republicans engaged in battle, even less is getting accomplished by government. Case in point - energy companies (like Dominion Energy in Virginia) are closing down coal-fired power plants much faster that the Federal Gov. would ever have tried because there's a cheaper way to generate electricity (thankfully that cheaper way is also cleaner than coal).
This has inspired me to finally do something: South of San Francisco, there is San Bruno mtn, like a rocky cork separating the City from the peninsula to the south. In the local fire station in Brisbane, CA, [the next town south of SF] there are several old 1880~90's photographs of loggers standing amongst the felled trees and stumps covering the mountain. Like most of the now grass covered hills around the Bay Area, all of these hills and mountains around the region were once covered with old growth redwood forests. It's time to replant them!!
We generally re-use as much of the carbon-based material we encounter on a daily basis as we can manage, with the goal of increasing the soil health of our nearby woods and our garden. It's small-scale, but it's pretty cool. I feed my coffee grounds to fungi, harvest the mushrooms from the surface as it matures, and then bury the digested coffee and fungi in the garden soil. We compost with worms in the kitchen, then reuse that soil. But so far as actually trapping carbon, we have even more fun; the sawdust from my projects, the stems and pits and other hard plant material "waste" we generate, all goes into making charcoal. Then bury that charcoal in the garden, or sprinkle it in the woods, and it holds nutrients in the soil while not degrading into gaseous carbon for a long, long time. It isn't long-term, large scale carbon capture, but it could be. Our lakes produce massive quantities of algae, and 500 pounds of the stuff is equal to 1 pound of phosphorus fertilizer. Filtering out the algae would restore the health of the lakes; compressing and drying the algae into biomass cakes and then heating to off-gas hydrogen for fuel, you end up with a phosphorus-rich biochar that could be sold to farmers as not only a fertilizer, but a soil-enrichment that would help phosphorus to cycle within the soil rather than requiring constant artificial application. People aren't paying attention to this local level, small scale stuff, because it doesn't generate profit. But is it worthwhile to examine it for scaling up, to consider it a profit-neutral process that saves us from the run-away climate change we're on track to experience?
Apple polisher. I've cut my wash back to twice a week & my semi-annual laundry, dishwash & vacuum to once per 3 years to save carbons even though it'd be fun to do daily. I also do pocket composting the same as David Suzuki.
holistic grazing management is one of the management "systems" that with the help of animals can do carbon sequestration and soil improvement. We started converting to it a year ago and the pasture has never been better. This year i encountered way more mushrooms and frogs all over our farm, wich are good indicators for increasing health. Also the hight of the grass and the density of plants as visibly increased. All from moving 130 chickens a cow calf pair and a horse around on pasture and monitoring the grass that it doesn´t get overgrazed. Another farm i worked at is starting to implement it this year as well with about 22 hectars of grazing land and about 80 cow/steers. And they already had more peace of mind being able to better manage the animals in a holistic way. It can also be scaled up to whole communities of more than 400 hectars with a lot of regeneration happening and increased profits and a better way of life. For more information check out the Savoury Institute or Holistic Management International.
Many people suggest that in order to feel optimistic one should start acting (fighting for a carbon neutral world - politically, with your daily choices etc.).
@@stauffap Politically is where we will have the most effect. What will really help my attitude is global legislation, or watching the amazing drop in renewable energy prices over the last 10 years. And even though the USA may be beyond saving when it comes to legislation, it is only responsible for 16% of emissions now, and market forces are going to take down even the most stubborn Joe Manchins in the world - although Manchin may be dead by then. Good riddance. Other things that give me hope are, for instance, that India is building the largest nuclear plant ever constructed right now and pouring research $$$ into thorium reactors. So it may not follow China's coal, coal, coal path to higher living standards.
@@squamish4244 Exactly. Heat pumps are as expensive as oil heaters, PV was called the cheapest electrcity in history by the IEA and a lot of EV's are already as expensive or even cheaper (costs per km) then ICE's...all of that gives me hope as well. And of course car companies are realising that they can't keep the carbon emissions from their car fleets low enough with hydrogen fueled cars, so a lot of them realise that they have to go full electric. Things are changing rapidly. I've seen more positive change in the last year then in the past 10 years. Things might finally be moving a bit faster.
As I was watching this ‘positive’ video, I was thinking, who could possibly be negative about ‘rewilding ’ (Alan Savory, and the Savory Institute for example), and marine permaculture..........and yes, planting trees. And I’m not against investment for financial profit, if it gets the job done. And we have to get the job done, let’s face it. I reckon, if you keep informing us of real world, productive solutions, you’ll be doing a hell of a lot of good.
@Donald McCarthy There you go, crass, self glorifying negativity. On the point of Alan Savory, yes, in his early days, he did come to that fateful conclusion, which he regrets to this day.....as you will know. He was also backed, unfortunately, by an overwhelming number of ‘experts’. But you carry on, trawling through the soup of judgement and despair. I hope you don’t have designs on ‘entertaining’ at the ‘hospice’.
I've build a true carbon negative biochar producing stove inside my house and have been using this concept for cooking and heating for a few years already. This Winter I've improved upon my design to the point that I'm very close to making plans available for purchase. Videos of the stove can be found on my channel.
Omitted in this video is another vital step we need to take urgently. Make it economically unfeasible to take part in any step of searching for, extracting, refining, selling, and using fossil fuels.
Caldermologist, what you wish for is to remove all of modern life. Without fossil fuels we will literally be back in the dark ages with a life span of forty years, if you are lucky. Fossil fuels provide so many of what we now look on as essentials, including medicines.
@Donald McCarthy Er . . . Didn't you watch the video? If you did and didn't understand the concept, I suggest watching it again, paying particular attention to the location of the floating kelp forest and the use of solar powered pumps to bring cold water up from the depths. hey, it's not perfect, but at least someone is trying.
13:50 I'm more more skeptical about corporations trying to cash in the environmental movement and commodify pollution. I suspect it'll only lead to imposing further financial stress on the lower classes instead of actually doing much of anything. After all, the members of their executive boards will continue to fly around the world, live lavish lifestyles and maintain their huge carbon footprints. I always raise my eyebrow when capitalists lecture the lower classes on carbon emissions when they themselves are responsible for the vast majority of them.
I assume, based on your comments, that you don't support a capitalist system. Does that mean that you don't use the internet (oops, I guess you do), you don't use a computer, you don't drive a car or ride on a bus or train, and you don't buy your food from grocery store or local markets, and you don't use commercially produce medications / over the counter drugs, nor go to doctors offices and hospitals where doctors and nurses use computers and instruments to diagnose your health problems and treat you. Governments didn't make any of those things, companies and people did - and they did so to earn a living (i.e., make money). If you go study emissions data, you'll find that carbon emissions from "the lower classes" are not insignificant - ergo, they're part of the problem. I'm willing to bet that my electric stove is responsible for less CO2 than a kerosene cookstove in Africa or India or Southeast Asia. I too always raise my eyebrows - when people want to pretend that capitalism is the root of all evil. Just ask the people of North Korea, or read the diaries of people in Russia in the 1930s - 1950s. BTW - I wonder how many people were shot trying to escape TO East Germany.
@@northavealum Gotta love it when people use a phrase like, out of control Capitalism. Not sure what that even means. Or when they make the claim of a Capitalist government. Hate it when people do nothing but regurgitate the stupidity of others, especially those that are political figures. The sad part is, most people don't realize that every countries economies are either completely Socialist/Communist, or they are a mix of Capitalism and Socialism. Sadly, here in America we have the mix yet our economy is far more Socialist than it is Capitalist. People also don't understand that the economic problems that America has ever had is due to the Socialists economic influences. It's truly sad how people are just blindly following authority, especially in this age of information.
@@northavealum 👍only one family was running away and escaped from West Germany to East Germany... Angela Merkel 's parents...😂 /true story/ "Scientific" Question: Why Al Gore and now recently Barack Obama bought a mansion on the beach...? What about the fear of melting glacier flood and the rising sea levels...? Oh..., I see they beach will be saved and not affected by that...🤔 “I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” ― Richard Feynman.
northavealum - now your just being ridiculous. No where near the comment that I agree with about capitalism creating a whole new series of industries to address a made up problem - capitalism is running out of easy way to make money - they seem to like running to governments for bailouts and subsidies only to close shop or move their factories to China India or Mexico with the money they sucked out of the feds. Some even took millions in bonuses and closed shop - capitalism is a great system ? Sure - trouble is we’ve gone beyond normal capitalism into corporate socialism while the real people have their benefits cut to the bone.
@@nomorewar4189 What your saying is government is the problem? I completely agree with that. What do you mean by normal Capitalism? So what if companies move to China, India, Mexico, or any other country? Yes, they move to save money. Not seeing a problem with that. In fact, it's a win for both the consumers and the producers. Workers have their benefits cut to the bone is somehow a problem? Do workers have a right to benefits? No, that is a luxury that the producers are giving their workers. Yet, since the government keeps writing and passing regulation after regulation, that puts a cost on the producer. Now, they can either raise their prices to keep those benefits, or they're going to have to cut benefits to keep products at a cost that the consumers are willing to pay for. Again, this all stems from government getting involved, not Capitalism.
The Oil Lobby could have made the change with little pain in 2010, they didn't and now are crying. But I'm not going to wipe away their tears since they have doubled investments in fossil fuels in only the last two years.
I think that their bet seems right - even if first world reduces its consumption, there would be plenty of demand inenthusiastically industrialising 3rd world.
Lawrence Taylor CO2 accounts for less than .5% of greenhouse gases - the human component of that number is 1/10th for those who like the fear mongering taxation laden Global Warming fearporn - they couldn’t even tell you what the #1 greenhouse gas is cause they’re to damn lazy to do their own research to find out the basic facts. Without CO2 in the atmosphere we would all be dead from lack of oxygen so this scientific consensus is full of holes. Anyone who has passed Science 101 could do a better job of explaining it than those charlatans.
Thank you for this roundup of capture schemes. That biomass burning system seems nuts on nearly every level. I really hope all the tree planting going on is with locally indigenous trees in each area, else a different type of ecological disaster will unfold. The marine system sounds very cool. One personal catch 22 my household just faced was we had to cut down about 2/3 of our c.25 year old trees around our house to prepare for covering our entire roof with solar panels.
Biomass is a reasonable backup fuel for wind and solar until there is enough oversupply and storage. We are just being to see serious rates of wind and solar installation now, storage will follow and oversupply is inevitable in a decade or two. Ecologically regenerative mixed agriculture and forestry can produce plenty of biomass for backup fuel, and timber and food at the same time. Land has just been used incredibly destructively and inefficiently during the fossil burning era.
You win some you lose some, don't sweat it. Plant a desert where the trees were because desert sand has high albedo. Sahara Desert exerts some cooling influence on Earth. New slogan: Help The Planet, Plant a Desert.
Nice work Dave! It’s truly amazing the how much we’re learning about the natural world - every day! Thank you for curating for us! The ecologists have seen this for decades and even Wall Street is waking up. Anyone paying any attention at all to the natural world, knows that big change is coming. For whatever reason those of us with strong attachments to our political identities will be the last to tip - and in my experience they are largely beyond persuasion by reason or even reality. Let them be, as at this point they really no longer matter. But there are those, confused by the noise - here there is life and a chance. I think you can speak to them - and many will hear. Thank you
I've invented this amazing solar powered machine that extracts CO2 from the atmosphere and converts it into a solid, easily transportable form in a miniscule footprint and zero waste products. Unfortunately, it is apparently impossible to patent a tree.
Only carbon negative if you lock up that carbon for a significant amount of time. In other words convert it to biochar. Which can be done in small domestic stoves that produce both heat for cooking and heating your house. I've been doing this for a few years already. Water heating or even electricity generation could be added to such systems as well.
@@CarbonConscious Well, what you do with the carbon afterwards is up to you. If you want to open up the valve to drain the tanks to make room for the next lot (or burn the wood) then you're back to square one. Burying it, biochar, building then burying all work just so long as they're taken out of the cycle. Personally, I love biochar and it's a good way of using a byproduct but we urgently need to get started on this.
@@immortalsofar5314 When building with wood you store the carbon for whatever the average lifespan of wood is in construction these days, I'm sure it's below 100 years. If you bury or allow the biomass to compost then at least 99% will find it's way back into the atmosphere within a decade or so so that's far from long term storage as well. Biochar on the other hand can last 1000+ years and some studies even claim a half-life of 7000 years. Now that is something that we can call long term storage. The nice thing about biochar production is that it still enables us to make use of about 50% of the energy. On top of that the biochar can reduce other GHG emissions when it's added to the bedding of livestock where it will bind a large part of the methane and nitrous oxide emissions which then become nutrients for the plants in the soil where the biochar is applied. Making even more growth possible and setting a positive feedback loop in motion. I totally agree that we need to get on this with urgency. That's why I'm mentioning here that I have developed a very simple stove that can be used for domestic heating and cooking. Personally I haven't used any gas for cooking or heating this whole year while my house has never been warmer than it has been this Winter, because of my stove.
You'll need a good corporate insurance because your damn product keeps falling over & blocking the road outside my house. We got 7 of your product in 2 km that are being held up off the road by Bell Canada's telephone cable at a jaunty angle the last 2+ years. It's very different here in God's Country. Apparently, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
This channel's category should be upgraded from People & Blogs to Education :) Nice spot on the insanity of making profits on the survival of our species. Keep up with your courage to make more of this kind of spot!
Thank you so much for all the work you put into these broadcasts. As a teacher of environmental issues, they are an invaluable source for me and my students, and the clarity and erudition that underlie them are a godsend. Thank you!
So you're teaching this man made climate change fraud, you should be ashamed of yourself and do some research, if that is you're capable and not brain dead.
Not only that, they use GWP100 on purpose which is biased against methane. GWP100 uses a 100 year timescale which makes no sense because we don't have that time.
I'd have a sliver of hope if governmets decided to act on 50% reductions within 10 years..instead they focus on net zero by 2050. That tells me the whole thing is make believe.
A 20% reduction in industrial activity would lead to a 1C increase in the global average temp in days to weeks. We can't just switch to renewables because of the aerosol masking effect. We need to stop animal agriculture and cool the planet with SRM such as floating mirror arrays.
Lots of positive stuff to inspire us, and thats exactly what is needed since the optimistic co-operation of Paris 2015 was followed all too soon by the science denying nationalism of Brexit, Trump and Bolsonaro.
One minute in: No, it does not mean decarbonising energy necessarily. We can sequester crystalline carbon (charcoal) into the ground as well to offset. Meanwhile we green the desert and improve our agricultural soil. This must be part of the solution!
In addition to getting off fossil fuels and planting trees, we can reverse the desertification of our grasslands using regenerative agriculture. See Charles Massey and Allan Savory.
When a tree grows, it absorbs the Carbon from the CO2 and releases the O2, right. However, when the tree dies it decomposes (rots) and the process puts back ALL of the CO2 back into our atmosphere. Planting a tree does NOTHING to mitigate CO2. Go see this UA-cam video "20 years too late": ua-cam.com/video/iCnTY9UPQQ4/v-deo.html
First off, I am a great supporter of your work and up until now I can't remember disagreeing on anything significant. However in this episode regarding offsetting I strongly disagree. The European Commission made a study in 2016 that found that 85% of claimed offsetting schemes didn't offset basically anything (Link at the bottom). Central points are lack of accountability and the question of additionality, last one meaning if the project of planting new trees is actually being done because of the offset-program or it would have been done anyways. Another problem being that the assumptions about a tree absorbing so and so much CO2 in a lifetime, more often than not being true, as 9/10 trees simply die young. The lack of accountability makes it a business ripe with fraud, or regions taking money to plant forests they would have planted for other reasons. A danish newspaper Politiken just revealed how this was the case with the vast majority of projects danish companies had been paying to reduce emissions in various regions of the world, one example being a chemical plant in Russia with high HFC emissions. They simply increased their HFC emissions and then reduced them again. In that vain I also find it questionably that you uncritically read the marketing material written on the offsetting companies websites, as there is now a lot of money to be made and if it sounds to good to be true, well then... However I would love if you did actually do a video with in-depth analysis of accountability and additionality. Where are all these trees which Ecosia and other companies planted? In the end I think the idea of paying off others to offset emissions is dubious at best, and catastrophic at worst as it will give a false sense of safety as we are not taking the necessary measures to curb emissions in our part of the world. Again, I really appreciate your work and I would love to hear your feedback. Cheers ec.europa.eu/clima/sites/clima/files/ets/docs/clean_dev_mechanism_en.pdf
Hi Kjartan. Thanks for your feedback. I agree with you about many carbon off set schemes (and indeed even country to country carbon emissions trading). Many of these have indeed been shown to be corrupt. It is worth keeping an open mind about the newer carbon negative schemes in my view. Only time will tell of course. All the best. Dave
@Just Have a Think Hi Dave, thank you so much for your reply. I absolutely agree that we should keep an open mind about new carbon negative schemes, if we are to win this battle we have to fight on many fronts, and lot's of innovation is needed. It's just after following the debate for twenty years I've seen so many solutions being presented as being the next big fix. There was the big hype around biofuel from algae, which didn't really result in much in the end. BECCS and carbon-capture in other forms have also been talked about fro decades now with only negligible realisation in the real world. Then there was the idea of adding seaweed to cows feed, so they emit less methane, which I have also heard about for at least ten years. And the list goes on and on. All the while global emissions keep increasing year after year, so that we today emit around +80%(!) more per yar than when the IPCC was founded in 1988. In the end it just feels like a distraction from making the substantial structural change that is needed. I know you are making videos on a wide range of topics around climate change and the fight against i, which I really appreciate, and this was just one aspect of it. Some kind of overall review would be very interesting. Where have we actually succeeded in decreasing emissions, where not, which innovations worked out and which didn't, and possibly why. And of course accountability and monitoring of these schemes would also be very interesting, in fact so interesting that I will go see if I can find something on it now. Best Regards, Kjartan.
Finally someone on UA-cam makes a video about carbon negativity. Considering we are about to literally end this world due to greenhouse gas emissions, carbon neutrality isn't good enough. Carbon negativity is imperative to our survival.
Where oh where did you poison your mind to the point you think CO2 matters and that it will end the world? Most of this planet's history has had CO2 at well over 1,000 ppm. Right now we are in a CO2 drought and need more. Not less.
@@CheapHomeTech Why don't you get a life? If you think this channel has it all wrong find something more constructive to do with your time than trolling. Go somewhere else.
Plant trees for plantation wood. Build the wood into engineered beams to build multi-story quality buildings (and houses). This sequesters carbon for a long time. Pyrolize all the waste wood from the forest and from milling and construction, producing LPG, gasoline, diesel and air craft fuel, reducing the amount we have to take from the ground. Incorporate the charcoal which is a by-product from wood pyrolysis into agricultural soils to their benefit and sequestering more carbon. And, by the way, building with engineered wood displaces a lot of cement - itself a large source of carbon pollution.
"Carbon Negative : Can we get there?" short answer: Pwahaha ... no. long answers: Yes, it could work. But it costs. And I would argue, that since our society is based on short term economic viability and not on long term ecological sustainability, this idea will never be implemented on a scale as we would need it.
That is true, but things change all the time. Working at the level of human greed as short term economic viability does, and generating these eco markets the vid refers to, (out of thin air as many markets are today) can ramp up carbon negative effects quickly driven by the very greed that digs the carbon out of the ground in the first place. However, real markets driven by wind, solar and the ocean need to keep pace, so the emphasis needs to be on both. The future is created by every little decision we individually make - if you choose to drink your last days at the pub, then you are contributing to our last day as a future, being greedy and buying into these make believe eco markets will help create a future that our kids and their kids can live.
@@jameslewis6998 People like you and Scribble Scrabble do more harm than good. If you don't have any useful ideas, then STFU and let people who do have ideas use this space. All you're doing is encouraging more people to give up.
IncognitoTorpedo The more people I can wake up to the CAGW scam the better off we’ll be in the long run. So no I have no interest in Shutting Up and leaving the place to you environmental Fascists.
@@Jibe111111111 "In ideal conditions its concentration would be 10 times what is it today" that would spell disaster for the human race, co2 is fundamemntal for life but too much would cause to much warming. 10x as much, ha! look up the permian exctinction and consider that the sun was weaker back then,.
polo99a9 - they’ll have to change the basis of the economy that relies on tourism - business trade - and global integration - countries will need to be self sufficient to cut out all the wasteful use of fuel to operate.
Consuming less is just part of the solution. We need to get to carbon neutral asap. Not taking flights for holidays is great, but you still need to warm your house and get food on your plate.
@GWT123 that's fine, if climate deniers commit their offspring to moving to the areas that will be flooded or desertified by the end of the century. Deal?
Chers for the vid! I've been toying with the idea of starting a small business where I convert woody agricultural waste (prunings etc) into biochar. Hearing about those other initiatives that are already up and running is heartening.
The most immediate and most certain pathway to human carbon reduction and the most cost effective, (to those that live and die by this metric) is to produce less and consume less. Less air travel, less beef, pigs, chickens, less cars, less planned obsolescence, less production and destruction demanded by the frivolity of fashion and human vanity. Unlike speculative technological fixes, this process of carbon reduction has been rigorously tested in real world circumstances most recently in 2008 without requiring the consumption or destruction of any blindfolds, cigarettes, priests or brick walls. Additionally, this pathway to carbon reduction lacks the uncertainty and consequent potential misappropriation of scarce resources as well as the long lead times and additional carbon expenditures. However the prospect of less is most threatening to those at the extremes of the income distribution curve. The poor and the impoverished regions of the world know that less means less for them than for others and the rich at the other extreme realize that less means less opportunity for extraction, exploitation and consumption upon which all profit is derived. The poor as the saying goes suffer what they must, while the rich prefer the less certain but potentially more profitable path of growth and applied technology carefully vetted by Wall Street financiers. And who knows, they may be right....in a couple hundred years the evidence will be clear.
Yes. You've hit the nail on the nub of the head or whatever it's called. That's why it's pretty-near hopeless. Not to worry though, Life will go on. Mustn't grumble.
Tom Hall I agree with you Tom. The idea that we continue to increase our footprint on this planet on the simple reason that we must be better and better is troubling.
Tom Hall I can’t say I’m innocent by any means. It demands constant attention and of course ones ideals must be somewhat sacrificed. As a husband father I have to satisfy others. Hopefully my children lead lives with less impact. I’m very worried about the developing world being westernized and wanting all the meaningless crap we fill our lives with. Peace
@evolunter I fear the choice to consume less will be imposed from without as the fragile complexity of human civilisation breaks down. Our current pandemic illustrates both the hope and despair for our future. The monumental efforts world wide to create vaccines is juxtaposed against the powerful economic interests that would subordinate the preservation of human life to the continued acceleration of consumption. However our future unfolds, lower levels of consumption will be a unavoidable characteristic.
On Ecosia, when I did the math a few years ago (asking Ecosia for data) it didn't add up. Planting a tree can be easy, keeping it alive to absorb CO2 during the next 30 - 50 years (if we have that long) is not as simple, beside fires, bugs or just plain Climate Change.
10:40 carbon can be drawn back in and locked away in our soils - nope, a million year old forest does not "lock away" a million years of carbon capture by that forest. It's more to the tune of 200 years of forest growth is contained in the soil. It's a carbon cycle, not a carbon vault.
@@Alrukitaf - Good point even if it's totally off topic, a million year old forest soil is not coal. And for the "carbon negative" topic we aren't going to wait 300 million years.
Doug Mcdonell carbon “locked away” that is destined to stay there forever is a carbon vault. Unless we dig up in a few hundred million years and use the oil, coal or gas. It’s on point to your comment about forests not being carbon vaults.
C02 vertical farming is the best alternative to open land farming. I advocate for the integration of on-land aquaculture fish farming and combining the water systems to extract waste from the fish, and apply the waste as nutrient-enriched water for plants.
climate change deniers are a weird sort, being in denial can have ugly results. My mother would get like that when she farted, whereas if I'm laughing, I'm guilty even in an awkward lift situation. But some people get angry and will deny it hands down but people fart, its a simple fact of life that some people can't accept. Then you have strongly religious people that get angry over too many questions. Parents with naughty kids will see an angel who has every right to hit the other kids because all the other kids were being mean. I struggle to understand people like that, I struggle to understand anyone that chooses what to see or what to hear. If I'm ever proven wrong on something, I'm usually quite happy or impressed and attempt to correct my knowledge on the topic. But my husband will aggressively defend an opinion even if he has little knowledge of the topic, usually needs 20 mins and a kiss before being able to explain why hes wrong and then hes happy to reconsider and seek evidence on the topic together. What can the human race possibly do to improve the inherent lack of understanding and knowledge in the world because most people base their knowledge on personal belief these days, its crazy, a modern medieval mess where scientists and learned people are attacked while idiots decide whats true and whats not and quickly the truth becomes hate speech, extremism or terrorism even! The Australian government treated climate change protesters like terrorists because they were in the eyes of fascists, nothing more dangerous in a world of lies than the truth
"I struggle to understand people like that, I struggle to understand anyone that chooses what to see or what to hear." I think there are several effects playing together. Two might be _cognitive ease_ and _having special insight_ . The first one, in short, is the rewarding feeling when thoughts seemingly fit together, that happens usually when already held concepts are being reinforced, usually by repeatedly hearing the same thing over and over over long periods of time. Sadly, reading scientific publication, especially not of ones field of work, rarely does that. So climate science might not lend itself to cognitive ease for the majority of people. There is also a book named cognitive ease, I think it revolves around using this concept in marketing. With the second I mean the feeling of having special insight others do not seem to see or (are unable) to understand. It gives someone a boost in self worth and self confidence. Both good feelings. Easy topic for "special insight", conspiracies. There are certainly more factors, like the _illusion of control_ . But I am not anyone with further insight into someting like that.
Consider that our heliosphere is crossing the galactic ecliptic as you read this there by destabilizing the magnetosphere of the planets and sun in the solar system in turn this is destabilizing the plasmasphere which couples directly to the ionosphere which drives the destabilizing jet stream causing it to be wavy. This then leads to uncertain and unpredictable weather. We are also entering another grand solar minimum. This increases cloud nucleation which as of 2020 has been allowed to be part of the 2022 ipcc climate models. Look for that. In short we are on the cusp of not only falling into another 200-plus year solar minimum but a 80000 year glacial period.expect rapidly moving magnetic poles, destabilization of the jet stream initially, then increased volcanic and tectonic activity. if you really care about saving the planet and humanity try doing something about the 700+ nuclear facilities that will abruptly go offline during the next Carrington event. That would be 700 + fukushima's. and don't think that the jerks behind the curtain haven't been aware of this for decades. Have a nice day and do a little research 😁 most of this data was taken directly from NASA papers.
Mrs Flibble Ah yes but you might not be accounting for the fact that our heliosphere crossed the galactic ecliptic 497,326 seconds ago as analyzed by "Hahn Ilso" in your thread, and this causes Tribbles which CHANGES EVERYTHING. Personally speaking I think we're on the cusp.
Thorium-fuelled molten salt nuclear fission reactors can turn atmospheric CO2 and seawater into petrochemicals, plastics and fuels while also providing desalinated fresh water, and lithium for batteries. You said it. So there's no problem. . . .
Ecosystem will always pay the bill. To solve CO2 emissions you get in order from easiest to hardest : 1- Do nothing (mass extinction will continue and end). 2- Cut all forests and use them to put CO2 underground, plant and start over (selective mass extinction, only humans and cattle left). 3- Stop CO2 emissions, plan a century long strategy to capture carbon, while preserving natural ecosystems (close call last-minute safe, Life in the Solar System remain feasible). Conservation of energy law state that humans will stay at 1, or between 1&2 when sh*t hits the fan.
You are exactly correct: Planting a tree does nothing to mitigate CO2 in our atmosphere. When the tree eventually dies it decomposes (rots) and puts ALL of the CO2 back into the atmosphere. We need to cut down all the old mature trees, Carbonize them and bury thye carbon. We then plant new tree and recycle. I don't understand why people keep falling for the same old "Plant a tree and everything will be OK"...It wont, we are in serious trouble and all the energy companies knew what they were doing and they did it anyway See UA-cam video "20 years too late": ua-cam.com/video/iCnTY9UPQQ4/v-deo.html
@@DiscipleOfHeavyMeta1 It's ironical, but it's basically what we're doing : artificially selecting what's beneficial for us. Natural selection is just a way to say : what's can't survive in an environment will disappear from it. We're making gigantic farms, forests are exploited so not natural at all (just single tree specie to be cut at maturity), and our ways to hunt, fish, at an industrial scale is making conditions too hasch for wild life to thrive. At the end, there will only be cattle left, as the conditions are made ideals for it.
We have GAS ducted heating but last year we installed a solid fuel heater. We reduced our gas use by about 40% over the winter months but we ran out of fire wood at the end. We are now planting 40 Sugar Gum Eucalipts in our paddocks, this will use carbon to grow and will be the source of our fire wood in the coming years Full circle re-usable energy, we will only need about 25 trees but nothing wrong with some extra.
We do not have to set stupid unrealistic targets to reduce the temperature. Net Zero Carbon by 2050 is a ridiculous target. We have to focus on sensible solutions to pollution and remember CO2 is not a pollutant. We have an excess of CO2 beyond requirements which we should have more control over than we presently have. When you focus on clean air and water we will get better results. An initial focus should be on cleaner power plants this starts with Natural Gas and sequestering any CO2 and it includes nuclear power plants and hydro geothermal. Wind and Solar because they are dependent intermittent power systems they could be used possibly more effectively to generate hydrogen fuels. Once we have established a working reliable clean power grid we can then increase electrification for vehicles and reduce petrol/diesel vehicles. At the same time, we need to reduce waste in particular single-use plastic.
Any Destiny fans will very much notice the logo for Caíque Barcelos 😅 Rasputin is the answer to climate change... No but really, great video! Love Ecosia! Still a little hesitant about for forms of biomass and bioenergy used in this video though, given how algae seems to be the best alternative now. Some cities around the world like Chicago, IL stack functions by growing algae on top of waste water, purifying the water and cultivating algae that could be used as alternative fuels. Not very familiar with the carbon calculation on that one, but repurposing the Earth's surface area for multiple uses gives us a feasible chance at sequestering carbon. Lots of people still eat meat and dairy all over the world, products which agricultural lands are primarily used to create, and given that those habits likely won't change as fast as we want them to, the algae biomass method might be the better route. Cheers 🤙
Great video Dave. I had to pause the video to go check out Nori. A very interesting company. I drilled down to one certificate (Harborview Farms, which is about 90 minutes northwest of my home) to try to understand more about how the whole solution works. Pretty interesting. Nori, if totally legit and honest/transparent, is an example of capitalism at its best: see a problem (aka opportunity) and figure out how to solve and make money doing it. Nori's approach of connecting consumers (large companies, families, some individual wanting to fly to Europe, etc.) as customers wanting to buy carbon offsets to mitigate their carbon footprint - with Nori will connecting the consumer to sellers (like Harborview Farms w/ no-till farming, winter cover crops, etc.) to fulfill the offset. The kelp seaweed forests (part of Project Drawdown) was also very interesting. If you've not done it, you should check out the Terraton Initiative and the company IndigoAg - the CEO has appeared in several different UA-cams (including a Ted Talk) describing the Terraton Initiative.
Great video! One thing you didn't mention however was biochar, and Terra preta. And how you can actually create a carbon negative fuel through pyrolysis. You just recondense the combustible gases that the pyrolysis process emits.
Thats why i am supporting justdiggit.org , working with kenyan maasaii communities to revitalise their grounds from sand flats back to green area's for wildlife and their hurdes of animals.
Yes. I have been in contact with just diggit and I should have included them in the video. Major error on my part. We will get them in a video later this year.
I'm a bit confused here on a couple points. @2:50 it's stated negative carbon power stations will stop CO2 from entering the atmosphere and place the CO2 underground or in the oceans. But later in the video @14:40 it's stated that the oceans are dying because of all the CO2 it is absorbing from the atmosphere. So if I've got my head on straight, their plan is to add more CO2 to the oceans? And spend trillions of dollars to do it? Isn't that a little concerning? @7:25 it's stated we've lost 50% of our forests since humans have been around, and between 1990-2016 the world lost 502,000 square miles of forests. But conflicting evidence shows that while some forested areas have reduced in size, others have gained in size and the overall net effect has been a gain. This article from 2018 states the earth has gained 2.24 million square km (864,868 square miles) in the period between 1982 and 2016. psmag.com/environment/the-planet-now-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago
2:50 It depends if it is soluble/will be solved in water. 7:25 It depends on the baseline time frame youre comparing to. And by definitions of "more forests/more wood/more plants". For example if its planned reforestation, or more biomass as the result of higher CO2 concentrations, or natural reforestation due to less wood collected. Thats why numbers vary.
@@hooplehead1019 Water soluble? But it's still there isn't it? Sitting dormant until something causes it to be released again? I mean you can trap it but you can't eliminate it or am I wrong? Atmospheric co2 went from 7000 ppm 550 million years ago (when life really began to grow at unprecedented rates on earth) fairly steadily down to a low of 180 ppm around the time human beings came to be, nearly eliminating all life on earth. budbromley.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/600-million-years.jpg Then it appears humans had an influence on bringing co2 levels up from 180 to what we see today, accelerating that increase in the last 70 years or so. Where did all that co2 go from hundreds of millions of years ago? From what I can tell it either got buried underground in what is now fossil fuels or dissolved in the ocean settling on the ocean floor. So if the ground and ocean absorbing co2 nearly destroyed life on earth why are we trying to push more co2 down there? How much co2 should we have in the atmosphere anyway? So we get condemned for cutting forests but no credit for planned reforestation? And what does it matter how the earth got greener? Fact is, it is greener. If human efforts result in a net zero effect on tree loss (replant the same amount that we cut down) then other factors have caused the overall increase in "greenery". Great! If we haven't been replanting as fast as we've been cutting down then those other factors played an even larger role in the increased "greenery". Great! I don't think anyone believes humans reforested 2.24 million km since 1982, but if we did then we're doing a really great job, so....yay us!
@@jasperthebeau6075 "Atmospheric co2 went from 7000 ppm 550 million years ago (when life really began to grow at unprecedented rates on earth)" Well duh of course life really began to grow because Earth was a ball of ice before that, hardly conducive to vast amounts of Life is a ball of ice. However, I am in total agreement with you that the present species mix of Life should be jettisoned in favour of the species mix of Life that pertained 550 million years ago, and I base that opinion on your comment, and I also base that opinion on your comment.
@@grindupBaker so are you saying co2 levels back then would be toxic to humans? Humans couldn't possibly have existed in an environment with such high co2 levels? You should tell all the astronauts that go to space and all the people in submarines! Human lives are at risk! The people in those shuttles, space stations and submarines are exposed to an average of around 3500-4000 ppm of co2 and they dont get concerned until it hits about 8000 ppm! Complications above this number include headaches, problems sleeping and reduced cognitive ability but this is a result of the combination of elevated co2 and being in an environment that causes increased cranial pressure and blood flow issues where blood does not drain well from the head, like space or deep underwater. Being in 1g on earth's surface would alleviate these symptoms at these levels and these symptoms would the return if exposed to even higher concentrations than that.
A significant factor in global warming is the area of roofing, where vegetation, which doesn’t trap heat, is replaced with tile or metal roof. We should be converting these to green roofs.
My question is about climate change and its possible connection to catastrophizing. The human impact on biodiversity is so profound that scientists say the Earth's sixth major extinction event (i.e., the Anthropocene epoch) is already underway. Add to that cognitive inertia which in clinical and neuroscientific literature is defined as humanities lack of motivation to generate distinct cognitive processes needed to attend to a problem or issue. Then. . . we have abrupt climate change (sudden, detectable and rapid warming within the span of a single human lifetime) problem to contend with. Tell me; knowing all of this how can we realistically have hope for our future and the future of our children?
Well, it has worked in the past - probably because "the system" is more diverse than we think: With the same "system" as today, weve had numerous environmental problems already until today. We all solved them by listening to the scientists (instead of today, in the internet age, behave like little children and deny by inventing conspiracy theories discrediting science). And acting on their suggestions. Governments put regulations on pollutants, the industry came up with technical solutions - and so today your children dont grow up with brain impairments due to leaded gas any more. The ozone layer is recovering - and asbestos doesnt cause lung cancer either any more. Because we substituted it with better materials. The difference of the problem now is in quantity: it is arguably the biggest challenge we have faced in the environmental field (Id say imminent WW3 was a bigger one politically) so far. With the most powerful players in the world for the last century to lose the most: Fossil fuel companies. Ofc they wont give up without a fight - we wouldnt in their shoes. The tobacco industry, orders of magnitude smaller, didnt. It took decades for politicians to act upon the science. And the science to be upheld against the same doubt and misinformation and fraud conspiracies, often instigated by Tobacco industry run marketing campaigns back then, by fossil fuel industries now.
@John Paterson It has to be done in a way so that entrepreneurs become vastly wealthy. Think Rex Tillerson who predicted this. It will be so so it will be fine.
It is so interesting, .. it is like floating towards a cliff in a canoe, ... there is nothing to do in the canoe except float towards the edge because WE are certainly not going to start paddaling backwards are we? WE can not really farm in the canoe, so maybe , ... while WE still have Cell Phone coverage we could call ahead and tell them to start farming at the destination . Perhaps Dr. Patrick Moore is right and Plant food will save us. I wish people understood that just planting trees does NOT make a forest so at best, ... it is a POSSIBLE short term gain. Who knew that the Ole Sargasso Sea, "The Ships Graveyard" would be a savior to us sailors, ... who knew that soda pop would be our landing pad at the bottom of the cliff. Who Bloody Knew???
"Plant Food", you mean the observed greening of some areas of earth, I guess, won't save us, because for the effect of CO2 fertilization to work, the level of CO2 obviously needs to be elevated. And since the mol fraction of CO2 is growing faster dispite the "greening of earth" I do not hink it is enough.
@@scribblescrabble3185 earth stopped greening 20 years, we have crossed that line www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-stopped-getting-greener-20-years-ago/
Use waste from crops to create biochar locking away carbon and improving soil. As part of the biochar process produce energy for grid use (waste heat for industrial process or district heating systems) and some gas can be diverted off to operate peaker plants for when alternative energy is low. Grow these crops using permaculture methods such as using nitrogen fixing plants etc. Reduce meat and dairy consumption freeing huge areas for these processes. Improve efficiencies of currently used systems. For instance gas that can be used for heating can produce electricity at the same time giving micro generator to the grid. The more heating needed the more electricity generated.
There's the idea of putting iron, powdered rust or something, to the oceans and maybe that would work, but unlike the C3 plant idea, which is self-growing, the iron would have to be made into suitable form and spread out over the ocean.
Great work! We do need to reverse our industrial carbon emissions ASAP. Any thoughts on building Giga-farms outside all our cities...they could grow food, bamboo for building materials and high speed, high carbon sequestering plants for biochar production and geological burial. We could rebuild our coal mines, oilfields and global soils with this biochar.
One silly question - why do we need to burn the biomass? If we grow wood and make furniture out of it, it’s locked away, (unless some $&@&$& comes along and burns it!)
Removing greenhouse gases other than CO2 might prove cheaper and easier. Methane , nitrous oxide and hydro flouro- carbons represent upwards of one third of the warming of the planet . There is a very nuanced article entitled “Removal of Non-CO2 greenhouse gases by large-scale by large-scale atmospheric solar Photocatalysis . Might save us, it’s at least worth a think.
i dont know why most focus on some future expensive technological solutions while we have plants and trees there are easier solutions like putting carbon in soil, no-till farming, biochar ...etc
That is, as matter of fact, the solution and almost certainly the only solution. All humans hold your breath for a couple of hours. 1 human is fine but DO NOT LEAVE A MATING PAIR.
Follow your thoughts through to the conclusion, Dave. None of these CDR pathways are viable. In 1920 people could have said we have a dozen different ways of flying to the moon. But the reality is they had no way of doing it at that time. All these CDR proposals will fail because of CCATS, (complete carbon accounting, timeframe & scale.) This is a race against a rapidly warming Arctic & jetstreams that are becoming less supportive to life on Earth. People need to be honest and say humanity will be destroyed if a breakthrough in CDR is not found and deployed soon.
We could do a great deal more to engineer our cities, infrastructure and other human built environments to be carbon sinks. Design the built environment to lock up carbon under or within the materials of new roads, highways, houses, skyscrapers, dams and any other construction projects. The making of cement is one of the single largest sources of CO2 emissions, maybe it's possible to design cement or other building materials that can sequester the same amount of carbon within the finished product generated in their production.
Great channel indeed! Comment about the 'air to fuels' process - combustion engines are not greatly efficient in turning converting energy from their fuels; at best these are 20% efficient meaning that 80% is lost through heat. So, why turn captured co2 into fuel again at all? It's a waste of energy in so many ways. This is also inherently true for many biofuels.
I wont say the vast majority - and I wont say "sacrifice" but investment - but other than that, youre certainly right. Thats why as with small children who also cant yet delay gratification en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_gratification , you have to convince, teach them it is necessary until they learn it. Thats exactly what this channel is doing.
it would be useless to rely on energy intensive Technology to solve this problem without a severe carbon tax to force extreme energy efficiency thruout our economy. vote for Bernie!
Thanks for that shout out! Love your channel, cheers!
Thanks for what you do Dave.
Give me an ulcer....
Negative carbon, Do you mean removing co2 from the armosphere, including at high elevations, where the level is less than 0.25 grams/m³, compared to sea level 0.49 grams/m³.
At the Altiplano the grain producing plants are suffering from co2 STARVATION ,and so are the people. Do you even know what you are doing?
about a million people depend on a meager ration. So that is carbon justice!
THINK ABOUT IT.
Better, go, fly to La Paz and see for yourself. It is a bloddy good Idea, as you put it!
Before I offer my opinion on this, allow me to say that this is a great channel. Thanks for producing it. Now, my comments. A bunch of trees do not equal a healthy forrest. Forests are extremely complex, involving understory, canopy, mycelium complexes below ground, below ground and above ground microbe interactions (some of them taking hundreds of years to develop), and the interdependency of yet to be discovered systems that merely planting trees can never replace. Planted wooded areas, not being forests, usually result in less than optimal health for the trees, and can even lead to unforeseen consequences involving new ecosystem balances that might actually be harmful. Nature's interactions are complex beyond comprehension, but to comprehend we must at least try. Though we don't fully understand the process, we need to make an attempt to understand and replicate the actual forests that have been destroyed. But natural grasslands are equally important, and an entirely different subject. Trying to solve this problem with a capitalist system is questionable in my view. Out of control capitalism created this problem. Mechanically recapturing carbon in fancy new factories designed to operate at a profit is crazy. The best carbon recapture system ever devised is the process of natural photosynthesis on a massive scale. Our photosynthetic earth is crying out for help, that part of it that is still alive.
best read, most sense I have seen in just about all comments on the subject. 100%
I guess that’s briefly touched on here, and I think we need to focus more on what you’ve said, and re-wilding, together with regenerative farming, combined with every process we can use that’s more natural and renewable energy with storage etc.
hows about the concept of totally boycotting corporate capitalism that we currently use to put that CO2 in our ceiling in the first place. Resolve to never buy an ICE car (internal combustion engine). That'll make them legacy cart makers react( fold, shabby,merky bents,rolvo..you guys). Resolve never to fly another jet plane anywhere ( ask Gretta). That'll get them oily unctious biggest business in the world guys on their toes, 2.5 billion dollars per day, it'll get them guys interested. Show we're serious, use an attitude adjuster on them, hit them with a big stick by boycotting them. Buy no more Christmas presents for anybody never again. Use lottsa double negatives, to show you're serious and scary. That'll slow down these consumptive corporate capitalists too., Kids will be fine with a good orange, like in the old days. Adults will cope. Quit your job, and live with a loved one. That usta work, still does. Cut your own hair. Love your kids a lot. This doesn't need to make any CO2. Cook your own food. The rich people absolutely cannot live without poor people to kiss their guilded asses. They will not even close their own umbrellas. Make peace and love.
xflyingtiger Ok, great. Should we not plant trees then? I'm all for healthy natural forests, but if we don't get the carbon out of the atmosphere soon, we might not have any forests at all.
Before throwing the "capitalist system" in the waste bin, go take a look at the company "Nori" (Nori.com) that Dave mentioned - and look at how consumers (individuals, families, companies) buy carbon offsets and how suppliers (i.e., entities that extract and store carbon like Harborview Farms [one of Nori's suppliers]. After you've explore the whole solution end-to-end, I think you'll see that it is a capitalist solution that does what capitalism can (but doesn't always) do: identify a problem worth solving (aka an opportunity), develop a solution that consumers will purchase, and make a market. Also, go look at a company called IndigoAg and their project "The Terraton Initiative," which is designed to make a market to pay farmers en masse to change agricultural practices to drawn down and sequester carbon in the soil.
"Out of control capitalism," in most cases was responding to consumer demand for products and services. If we're looking for someone to blame, we should look in the mirror. When it's 95 degrees outside and 70%+ humidity, I want to run my air conditioner. When I want to watch UA-cam videos like this one about climate change and possible solutions, I power up my laptop and watch "Just Have A Think" - both those activities take electricity that someone has to generate. So, I'm part of the problem. Now - it's up to me, and millions of people like me, to demand a solution. Markets move at comparatively lightning speed when a legitimate opportunity (a problem to be solved, a need to be met) presents itself - governments, no so much. These days in the U.S., with Democrats and Republicans engaged in battle, even less is getting accomplished by government. Case in point - energy companies (like Dominion Energy in Virginia) are closing down coal-fired power plants much faster that the Federal Gov. would ever have tried because there's a cheaper way to generate electricity (thankfully that cheaper way is also cleaner than coal).
Awww yeah I'm glad you mentioned marine permaculture!
You should get von herzen on the show.
The Kelp plan sounds interesting.
This has inspired me to finally do something: South of San Francisco, there is San Bruno mtn, like a rocky cork separating the City from the peninsula to the south. In the local fire station in Brisbane, CA, [the next town south of SF] there are several old 1880~90's photographs of loggers standing amongst the felled trees and stumps covering the mountain. Like most of the now grass covered hills around the Bay Area, all of these hills and mountains around the region were once covered with old growth redwood forests.
It's time to replant them!!
Redwood is a cash crop.
Yeah, they take "only" a few hundred years to grow...
We generally re-use as much of the carbon-based material we encounter on a daily basis as we can manage, with the goal of increasing the soil health of our nearby woods and our garden. It's small-scale, but it's pretty cool. I feed my coffee grounds to fungi, harvest the mushrooms from the surface as it matures, and then bury the digested coffee and fungi in the garden soil. We compost with worms in the kitchen, then reuse that soil. But so far as actually trapping carbon, we have even more fun; the sawdust from my projects, the stems and pits and other hard plant material "waste" we generate, all goes into making charcoal. Then bury that charcoal in the garden, or sprinkle it in the woods, and it holds nutrients in the soil while not degrading into gaseous carbon for a long, long time.
It isn't long-term, large scale carbon capture, but it could be. Our lakes produce massive quantities of algae, and 500 pounds of the stuff is equal to 1 pound of phosphorus fertilizer. Filtering out the algae would restore the health of the lakes; compressing and drying the algae into biomass cakes and then heating to off-gas hydrogen for fuel, you end up with a phosphorus-rich biochar that could be sold to farmers as not only a fertilizer, but a soil-enrichment that would help phosphorus to cycle within the soil rather than requiring constant artificial application.
People aren't paying attention to this local level, small scale stuff, because it doesn't generate profit. But is it worthwhile to examine it for scaling up, to consider it a profit-neutral process that saves us from the run-away climate change we're on track to experience?
Yes,Nice to to read some positive methods discussed on line . Mulch everything deserts ,forests ,pasture.
Biochar is awesome
Apple polisher. I've cut my wash back to twice a week & my semi-annual laundry, dishwash & vacuum to once per 3 years to save carbons even though it'd be fun to do daily. I also do pocket composting the same as David Suzuki.
holistic grazing management is one of the management "systems" that with the help of animals can do carbon sequestration and soil improvement. We started converting to it a year ago and the pasture has never been better. This year i encountered way more mushrooms and frogs all over our farm, wich are good indicators for increasing health. Also the hight of the grass and the density of plants as visibly increased. All from moving 130 chickens a cow calf pair and a horse around on pasture and monitoring the grass that it doesn´t get overgrazed.
Another farm i worked at is starting to implement it this year as well with about 22 hectars of grazing land and about 80 cow/steers. And they already had more peace of mind being able to better manage the animals in a holistic way.
It can also be scaled up to whole communities of more than 400 hectars with a lot of regeneration happening and increased profits and a better way of life.
For more information check out the Savoury Institute or Holistic Management International.
@@TheNightwalker247 Neat stuff! Fungus and frogs as indicators, that's exactly right!
Fascinating! Almost makes me feel optimistic! Thank you very much - very informative.
Many people suggest that in order to feel optimistic one should start acting (fighting for a carbon neutral world - politically, with your daily choices etc.).
@@stauffap Politically is where we will have the most effect. What will really help my attitude is global legislation, or watching the amazing drop in renewable energy prices over the last 10 years. And even though the USA may be beyond saving when it comes to legislation, it is only responsible for 16% of emissions now, and market forces are going to take down even the most stubborn Joe Manchins in the world - although Manchin may be dead by then. Good riddance.
Other things that give me hope are, for instance, that India is building the largest nuclear plant ever constructed right now and pouring research $$$ into thorium reactors. So it may not follow China's coal, coal, coal path to higher living standards.
@@squamish4244
Exactly. Heat pumps are as expensive as oil heaters, PV was called the cheapest electrcity in history by the IEA and a lot of EV's are already as expensive or even cheaper (costs per km) then ICE's...all of that gives me hope as well.
And of course car companies are realising that they can't keep the carbon emissions from their car fleets low enough with hydrogen fueled cars, so a lot of them realise that they have to go full electric. Things are changing rapidly. I've seen more positive change in the last year then in the past 10 years. Things might finally be moving a bit faster.
Dear Dave, thanks for the info! I’ll dive deeper into Ecosia due to your suggestion. Keep up the good work!
As I was watching this ‘positive’ video, I was thinking, who could possibly be negative about ‘rewilding ’ (Alan Savory, and the Savory Institute for example), and marine permaculture..........and yes, planting trees. And I’m not against investment for financial profit, if it gets the job done. And we have to get the job done, let’s face it.
I reckon, if you keep informing us of real world, productive solutions, you’ll be doing a hell of a lot of good.
And the prophets of doom in the comments will continue to tear it all down. I wish they'd STFU.
Very well said.
@Donald McCarthy There you go, crass, self glorifying negativity.
On the point of Alan Savory, yes, in his early days, he did come to that fateful conclusion, which he regrets to this day.....as you will know. He was also backed, unfortunately, by an overwhelming number of ‘experts’.
But you carry on, trawling through the soup of judgement and despair. I hope you don’t have designs on ‘entertaining’ at the ‘hospice’.
@Donald McCarthy Yeah, it's killed me. ;)
I've build a true carbon negative biochar producing stove inside my house and have been using this concept for cooking and heating for a few years already. This Winter I've improved upon my design to the point that I'm very close to making plans available for purchase.
Videos of the stove can be found on my channel.
Omitted in this video is another vital step we need to take urgently. Make it economically unfeasible to take part in any step of searching for, extracting, refining, selling, and using fossil fuels.
That's really easy.
All you have to do is cut the subsidies to fossil fuels.
It has not been economical for decades.
@@jimmmaaay1 No details. That's a clue.
Caldermologist,
what you wish for is to remove all of modern life.
Without fossil fuels we will literally be back in the dark ages with a life span of forty years, if you are lucky.
Fossil fuels provide so many of what we now look on as essentials, including medicines.
Corporate greed is destroying the planet
That is very poorly thought out nonesence.
I love the idea of floating kelp forests. Ingenious.
@Donald McCarthy I also love innovative thinking, finding solutions to problems whether man made or natural. :)
@Donald McCarthy Er . . . Didn't you watch the video? If you did and didn't understand the concept, I suggest watching it again, paying particular attention to the location of the floating kelp forest and the use of solar powered pumps to bring cold water up from the depths. hey, it's not perfect, but at least someone is trying.
@Donald McCarthy Not to worry, next ice will take care of the problem.
These are so well written and produced. Fascinating information. Scary too!
13:50 I'm more more skeptical about corporations trying to cash in the environmental movement and commodify pollution. I suspect it'll only lead to imposing further financial stress on the lower classes instead of actually doing much of anything. After all, the members of their executive boards will continue to fly around the world, live lavish lifestyles and maintain their huge carbon footprints.
I always raise my eyebrow when capitalists lecture the lower classes on carbon emissions when they themselves are responsible for the vast majority of them.
I assume, based on your comments, that you don't support a capitalist system. Does that mean that you don't use the internet (oops, I guess you do), you don't use a computer, you don't drive a car or ride on a bus or train, and you don't buy your food from grocery store or local markets, and you don't use commercially produce medications / over the counter drugs, nor go to doctors offices and hospitals where doctors and nurses use computers and instruments to diagnose your health problems and treat you. Governments didn't make any of those things, companies and people did - and they did so to earn a living (i.e., make money). If you go study emissions data, you'll find that carbon emissions from "the lower classes" are not insignificant - ergo, they're part of the problem. I'm willing to bet that my electric stove is responsible for less CO2 than a kerosene cookstove in Africa or India or Southeast Asia.
I too always raise my eyebrows - when people want to pretend that capitalism is the root of all evil. Just ask the people of North Korea, or read the diaries of people in Russia in the 1930s - 1950s. BTW - I wonder how many people were shot trying to escape TO East Germany.
@@northavealum Gotta love it when people use a phrase like, out of control Capitalism. Not sure what that even means. Or when they make the claim of a Capitalist government. Hate it when people do nothing but regurgitate the stupidity of others, especially those that are political figures. The sad part is, most people don't realize that every countries economies are either completely Socialist/Communist, or they are a mix of Capitalism and Socialism. Sadly, here in America we have the mix yet our economy is far more Socialist than it is Capitalist. People also don't understand that the economic problems that America has ever had is due to the Socialists economic influences. It's truly sad how people are just blindly following authority, especially in this age of information.
@@northavealum 👍only one family was running away and escaped from West Germany to East Germany...
Angela Merkel 's parents...😂 /true story/
"Scientific" Question: Why Al Gore and now recently Barack Obama bought a mansion on the beach...? What about the fear of melting glacier flood and the rising sea levels...? Oh..., I see they beach will be saved and not affected by that...🤔
“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.” ― Richard Feynman.
northavealum - now your just being ridiculous. No where near the comment that I agree with about capitalism creating a whole new series of industries to address a made up problem - capitalism is running out of easy way to make money - they seem to like running to governments for bailouts and subsidies only to close shop or move their factories to China India or Mexico with the money they sucked out of the feds. Some even took millions in bonuses and closed shop - capitalism is a great system ? Sure - trouble is we’ve gone beyond normal capitalism into corporate socialism while the real people have their benefits cut to the bone.
@@nomorewar4189 What your saying is government is the problem? I completely agree with that. What do you mean by normal Capitalism? So what if companies move to China, India, Mexico, or any other country? Yes, they move to save money. Not seeing a problem with that. In fact, it's a win for both the consumers and the producers. Workers have their benefits cut to the bone is somehow a problem? Do workers have a right to benefits? No, that is a luxury that the producers are giving their workers. Yet, since the government keeps writing and passing regulation after regulation, that puts a cost on the producer. Now, they can either raise their prices to keep those benefits, or they're going to have to cut benefits to keep products at a cost that the consumers are willing to pay for. Again, this all stems from government getting involved, not Capitalism.
The Oil Lobby could have made the change with little pain in 2010, they didn't and now are crying. But I'm not going to wipe away their tears since they have doubled investments in fossil fuels in only the last two years.
I think that their bet seems right - even if first world reduces its consumption, there would be plenty of demand inenthusiastically industrialising 3rd world.
Lawrence Taylor CO2 accounts for less than .5% of greenhouse gases - the human component of that number is 1/10th for those who like the fear mongering taxation laden Global Warming fearporn - they couldn’t even tell you what the #1 greenhouse gas is cause they’re to damn lazy to do their own research to find out the basic facts. Without CO2 in the atmosphere we would all be dead from lack of oxygen so this scientific consensus is full of holes. Anyone who has passed Science 101 could do a better job of explaining it than those charlatans.
Thank you for this roundup of capture schemes. That biomass burning system seems nuts on nearly every level. I really hope all the tree planting going on is with locally indigenous trees in each area, else a different type of ecological disaster will unfold. The marine system sounds very cool. One personal catch 22 my household just faced was we had to cut down about 2/3 of our c.25 year old trees around our house to prepare for covering our entire roof with solar panels.
Biomass is a reasonable backup fuel for wind and solar until there is enough oversupply and storage. We are just being to see serious rates of wind and solar installation now, storage will follow and oversupply is inevitable in a decade or two. Ecologically regenerative mixed agriculture and forestry can produce plenty of biomass for backup fuel, and timber and food at the same time. Land has just been used incredibly destructively and inefficiently during the fossil burning era.
You win some you lose some, don't sweat it. Plant a desert where the trees were because desert sand has high albedo. Sahara Desert exerts some cooling influence on Earth. New slogan: Help The Planet, Plant a Desert.
Tony Lovell's "Soil carbon" and Hemp which absorbs 1.5x it's own mass as it grows, plus all the benefits of hemp based material
Ecosia all the way!
Nice work Dave!
It’s truly amazing the how much we’re learning about the natural world - every day! Thank you for curating for us!
The ecologists have seen this for decades and even Wall Street is waking up. Anyone paying any attention at all to the natural world, knows that big change is coming.
For whatever reason those of us with strong attachments to our political identities will be the last to tip - and in my experience they are largely beyond persuasion by reason or even reality. Let them be, as at this point they really no longer matter.
But there are those, confused by the noise - here there is life and a chance. I think you can speak to them - and many will hear.
Thank you
I've invented this amazing solar powered machine that extracts CO2 from the atmosphere and converts it into a solid, easily transportable form in a miniscule footprint and zero waste products. Unfortunately, it is apparently impossible to patent a tree.
Only carbon negative if you lock up that carbon for a significant amount of time. In other words convert it to biochar.
Which can be done in small domestic stoves that produce both heat for cooking and heating your house. I've been doing this for a few years already.
Water heating or even electricity generation could be added to such systems as well.
@@CarbonConscious Well, what you do with the carbon afterwards is up to you. If you want to open up the valve to drain the tanks to make room for the next lot (or burn the wood) then you're back to square one. Burying it, biochar, building then burying all work just so long as they're taken out of the cycle.
Personally, I love biochar and it's a good way of using a byproduct but we urgently need to get started on this.
@@immortalsofar5314 When building with wood you store the carbon for whatever the average lifespan of wood is in construction these days, I'm sure it's below 100 years. If you bury or allow the biomass to compost then at least 99% will find it's way back into the atmosphere within a decade or so so that's far from long term storage as well.
Biochar on the other hand can last 1000+ years and some studies even claim a half-life of 7000 years. Now that is something that we can call long term storage.
The nice thing about biochar production is that it still enables us to make use of about 50% of the energy.
On top of that the biochar can reduce other GHG emissions when it's added to the bedding of livestock where it will bind a large part of the methane and nitrous oxide emissions which then become nutrients for the plants in the soil where the biochar is applied. Making even more growth possible and setting a positive feedback loop in motion.
I totally agree that we need to get on this with urgency. That's why I'm mentioning here that I have developed a very simple stove that can be used for domestic heating and cooking.
Personally I haven't used any gas for cooking or heating this whole year while my house has never been warmer than it has been this Winter, because of my stove.
@@CarbonConscious Doesn't that process release the carbon?
You'll need a good corporate insurance because your damn product keeps falling over & blocking the road outside my house. We got 7 of your product in 2 km that are being held up off the road by Bell Canada's telephone cable at a jaunty angle the last 2+ years. It's very different here in God's Country. Apparently, if it ain't broke don't fix it.
YES YES YES!!!! THANK YOU! We desperately need more positive news and actionable steps. Great work Sir.
Yes but we also need more hairy humans. There's a dearth.
This channel's category should be upgraded from People & Blogs to Education :) Nice spot on the insanity of making profits on the survival of our species. Keep up with your courage to make more of this kind of spot!
Thank you so much for all the work you put into these broadcasts. As a teacher of environmental issues, they are an invaluable source for me and my students, and the clarity and erudition that underlie them are a godsend. Thank you!
So you're teaching this man made climate change fraud, you should be ashamed of yourself and do some research, if that is you're capable and not brain dead.
Thanks Tim. I'm delighted to hear they're useful 😊
Forget 2c we be lucky to keep it under 4c the IPCC are far to Conservative.😉
Not only that, they use GWP100 on purpose which is biased against methane. GWP100 uses a 100 year timescale which makes no sense because we don't have that time.
I'd have a sliver of hope if governmets decided to act on 50% reductions within 10 years..instead they focus on net zero by 2050. That tells me the whole thing is make believe.
A 20% reduction in industrial activity would lead to a 1C increase in the global average temp in days to weeks. We can't just switch to renewables because of the aerosol masking effect. We need to stop animal agriculture and cool the planet with SRM such as floating mirror arrays.
@Trigger Troll You got the troll part right. I smell oil and gas money.
too*
Loved that point at 6 minutes Dave, and you kept a straight face.
Lots of positive stuff to inspire us, and thats exactly what is needed since the optimistic co-operation of Paris 2015 was followed all too soon by the science denying nationalism of Brexit, Trump and Bolsonaro.
WTF has Brexit got to do with science ?
One minute in: No, it does not mean decarbonising energy necessarily. We can sequester crystalline carbon (charcoal) into the ground as well to offset. Meanwhile we green the desert and improve our agricultural soil. This must be part of the solution!
In addition to getting off fossil fuels and planting trees, we can reverse the desertification of our grasslands using regenerative agriculture. See Charles Massey and Allan Savory.
Agreed. This step is definitely part of the picture.
When a tree grows, it absorbs the Carbon from the CO2 and releases the O2, right. However, when the tree dies it decomposes (rots) and the process puts back ALL of the CO2 back into our atmosphere. Planting a tree does NOTHING to mitigate CO2. Go see this UA-cam video "20 years too late": ua-cam.com/video/iCnTY9UPQQ4/v-deo.html
This is a great channel, really enjoy the presentations. Thanks.
First off, I am a great supporter of your work and up until now I can't remember disagreeing on anything significant. However in this episode regarding offsetting I strongly disagree. The European Commission made a study in 2016 that found that 85% of claimed offsetting schemes didn't offset basically anything (Link at the bottom). Central points are lack of accountability and the question of additionality, last one meaning if the project of planting new trees is actually being done because of the offset-program or it would have been done anyways. Another problem being that the assumptions about a tree absorbing so and so much CO2 in a lifetime, more often than not being true, as 9/10 trees simply die young.
The lack of accountability makes it a business ripe with fraud, or regions taking money to plant forests they would have planted for other reasons. A danish newspaper Politiken just revealed how this was the case with the vast majority of projects danish companies had been paying to reduce emissions in various regions of the world, one example being a chemical plant in Russia with high HFC emissions. They simply increased their HFC emissions and then reduced them again. In that vain I also find it questionably that you uncritically read the marketing material written on the offsetting companies websites, as there is now a lot of money to be made and if it sounds to good to be true, well then...
However I would love if you did actually do a video with in-depth analysis of accountability and additionality. Where are all these trees which Ecosia and other companies planted?
In the end I think the idea of paying off others to offset emissions is dubious at best, and catastrophic at worst as it will give a false sense of safety as we are not taking the necessary measures to curb emissions in our part of the world.
Again, I really appreciate your work and I would love to hear your feedback.
Cheers
ec.europa.eu/clima/sites/clima/files/ets/docs/clean_dev_mechanism_en.pdf
Hi Kjartan. Thanks for your feedback. I agree with you about many carbon off set schemes (and indeed even country to country carbon emissions trading). Many of these have indeed been shown to be corrupt. It is worth keeping an open mind about the newer carbon negative schemes in my view. Only time will tell of course. All the best. Dave
@Just Have a Think Hi Dave, thank you so much for your reply. I absolutely agree that we should keep an open mind about new carbon negative schemes, if we are to win this battle we have to fight on many fronts, and lot's of innovation is needed. It's just after following the debate for twenty years I've seen so many solutions being presented as being the next big fix. There was the big hype around biofuel from algae, which didn't really result in much in the end. BECCS and carbon-capture in other forms have also been talked about fro decades now with only negligible realisation in the real world. Then there was the idea of adding seaweed to cows feed, so they emit less methane, which I have also heard about for at least ten years. And the list goes on and on. All the while global emissions keep increasing year after year, so that we today emit around +80%(!) more per yar than when the IPCC was founded in 1988. In the end it just feels like a distraction from making the substantial structural change that is needed. I know you are making videos on a wide range of topics around climate change and the fight against i, which I really appreciate, and this was just one aspect of it. Some kind of overall review would be very interesting. Where have we actually succeeded in decreasing emissions, where not, which innovations worked out and which didn't, and possibly why. And of course accountability and monitoring of these schemes would also be very interesting, in fact so interesting that I will go see if I can find something on it now. Best Regards, Kjartan.
And you heat your house in the winter and air condition it in the summer.
I'm a vegan, crypto hodlr with a small farm. This video had everything that I'm interested in. Great Job! I'd definitely like to learn more about Nori
Thanks 😊 I'm a carnivore only, you're helping me keep by keeping beef cheap
Finally someone on UA-cam makes a video about carbon negativity. Considering we are about to literally end this world due to greenhouse gas emissions, carbon neutrality isn't good enough. Carbon negativity is imperative to our survival.
Where oh where did you poison your mind to the point you think CO2 matters and that it will end the world? Most of this planet's history has had CO2 at well over 1,000 ppm. Right now we are in a CO2 drought and need more. Not less.
@@CheapHomeTech Why don't you get a life? If you think this channel has it all wrong find something more constructive to do with your time than trolling. Go somewhere else.
@@everythingmatters6308 one does not let evil grow in the dark. You get things like climate change activists if you don't disinfect with light.
@@CheapHomeTech You are warped and twisted if you think taking care of the planet God gave us is evil.
@@everythingmatters6308 or you are if you think you are helping the planet by lowering co2.
Plant trees for plantation wood. Build the wood into engineered beams to build multi-story quality buildings (and houses). This sequesters carbon for a long time. Pyrolize all the waste wood from the forest and from milling and construction, producing LPG, gasoline, diesel and air craft fuel, reducing the amount we have to take from the ground. Incorporate the charcoal which is a by-product from wood pyrolysis into agricultural soils to their benefit and sequestering more carbon. And, by the way, building with engineered wood displaces a lot of cement - itself a large source of carbon pollution.
"Carbon Negative : Can we get there?"
short answer: Pwahaha ... no.
long answers: Yes, it could work. But it costs. And I would argue, that since our society is based on short term economic viability and not on long term ecological sustainability, this idea will never be implemented on a scale as we would need it.
So we're doomed and we might as well just spend the rest of our lives getting drunk at the bar.
Question is: “should we be even trying” Short answer: No
That is true, but things change all the time. Working at the level of human greed as short term economic viability does, and generating these eco markets the vid refers to, (out of thin air as many markets are today) can ramp up carbon negative effects quickly driven by the very greed that digs the carbon out of the ground in the first place. However, real markets driven by wind, solar and the ocean need to keep pace, so the emphasis needs to be on both.
The future is created by every little decision we individually make - if you choose to drink your last days at the pub, then you are contributing to our last day as a future, being greedy and buying into these make believe eco markets will help create a future that our kids and their kids can live.
@@jameslewis6998 People like you and Scribble Scrabble do more harm than good. If you don't have any useful ideas, then STFU and let people who do have ideas use this space. All you're doing is encouraging more people to give up.
IncognitoTorpedo The more people I can wake up to the CAGW scam the better off we’ll be in the long run. So no I have no interest in Shutting Up and leaving the place to you environmental Fascists.
More of this please sir.
This video is preciously important to understand how vital it is to remove co2 from the atmosphere.
Thank you !
Do you not realize after all your time on earth, the environment cannot survive without it, there would be no plant life. get a grip
Co2 is life giving. In ideal conditions, its concentration would be 10 times what is it today. Deal with it, sheepole.
@@Jibe111111111
"In ideal conditions its concentration would be 10 times what is it today"
that would spell disaster for the human race, co2 is fundamemntal for life but too much would cause to much warming. 10x as much, ha! look up the permian exctinction and consider that the sun was weaker back then,.
@@deathgatedeathstar9259 the greenhouse effect of co2 is saturated wether you like it or not. Stop listening to globalist propaganda.
@@Jibe111111111
globalist = NASA
yea right
stop being a twat
Thanks Dave! Amazing work! Have a great week! :)
Thanks Kenneth. You too.
How about we consume less. Fewer car rides, less travel, less food waste, etc.? Always looking for solutions to keep our high consumption up.
polo99a9 - they’ll have to change the basis of the economy that relies on tourism - business trade - and global integration - countries will need to be self sufficient to cut out all the wasteful use of fuel to operate.
Consuming less is just part of the solution. We need to get to carbon neutral asap. Not taking flights for holidays is great, but you still need to warm your house and get food on your plate.
@GWT123 that's fine, if climate deniers commit their offspring to moving to the areas that will be flooded or desertified by the end of the century. Deal?
Chers for the vid!
I've been toying with the idea of starting a small business where I convert woody agricultural waste (prunings etc) into biochar. Hearing about those other initiatives that are already up and running is heartening.
I saw a talk at Stanford where some guys in the valley were doing this as a business
The most immediate and most certain pathway to human carbon reduction and the most cost effective, (to those that live and die by this metric) is to produce less and consume less. Less air travel, less beef, pigs, chickens, less cars, less planned obsolescence, less production and destruction demanded by the frivolity of fashion and human vanity. Unlike speculative technological fixes, this process of carbon reduction has been rigorously tested in real world circumstances most recently in 2008 without requiring the consumption or destruction of any blindfolds, cigarettes, priests or brick walls. Additionally, this pathway to carbon reduction lacks the uncertainty and consequent potential misappropriation of scarce resources as well as the long lead times and additional carbon expenditures. However the prospect of less is most threatening to those at the extremes of the income distribution curve.
The poor and the impoverished regions of the world know that less means less for them than for others and the rich at the other extreme realize that less means less opportunity for extraction, exploitation and consumption upon which all profit is derived.
The poor as the saying goes suffer what they must, while the rich prefer the less certain but potentially more profitable path of growth and applied technology carefully vetted by Wall Street financiers. And who knows, they may be right....in a couple hundred years the evidence will be clear.
Yes. You've hit the nail on the nub of the head or whatever it's called. That's why it's pretty-near hopeless. Not to worry though, Life will go on. Mustn't grumble.
Tom Hall I agree with you Tom. The idea that we continue to increase our footprint on this planet on the simple reason that we must be better and better is troubling.
@@optimisticfuture6808 perhaps fatally troubling Eric
Tom Hall I can’t say I’m innocent by any means. It demands constant attention and of course ones ideals must be somewhat sacrificed. As a husband father I have to satisfy others. Hopefully my children lead lives with less impact. I’m very worried about the developing world being westernized and wanting all the meaningless crap we fill our lives with. Peace
@evolunter I fear the choice to consume less will be imposed from without as the fragile complexity of human civilisation breaks down. Our current pandemic illustrates both the hope and despair for our future. The monumental efforts world wide to create vaccines is juxtaposed against the powerful economic interests that would subordinate the preservation of human life to the continued acceleration of consumption. However our future unfolds, lower levels of consumption will be a unavoidable characteristic.
Superb research & presentation. Thank you very for your work.
On Ecosia, when I did the math a few years ago (asking Ecosia for data) it didn't add up. Planting a tree can be easy, keeping it alive to absorb CO2 during the next 30 - 50 years (if we have that long) is not as simple, beside fires, bugs or just plain Climate Change.
Excellent point. Keep a tree healthy over it's lifespan is lot more difficult.
great video, thanks for your awesome work!
10:40 carbon can be drawn back in and locked away in our soils - nope, a million year old forest does not "lock away" a million years of carbon capture by that forest. It's more to the tune of 200 years of forest growth is contained in the soil. It's a carbon cycle, not a carbon vault.
Er.. actually there’s a part of the cycle that takes millions of years - remember Coal, oil and gas?
@@Alrukitaf - Good point even if it's totally off topic, a million year old forest soil is not coal. And for the "carbon negative" topic we aren't going to wait 300 million years.
Doug Mcdonell carbon “locked away” that is destined to stay there forever is a carbon vault. Unless we dig up in a few hundred million years and use the oil, coal or gas. It’s on point to your comment about forests not being carbon vaults.
Did u go 2 school?
@@derekthomson4871 - No I leaned to read and write by watching TV
C02 vertical farming is the best alternative to open land farming. I advocate for the integration of on-land aquaculture fish farming and combining the water systems to extract waste from the fish, and apply the waste as nutrient-enriched water for plants.
climate change deniers are a weird sort, being in denial can have ugly results. My mother would get like that when she farted, whereas if I'm laughing, I'm guilty even in an awkward lift situation. But some people get angry and will deny it hands down but people fart, its a simple fact of life that some people can't accept. Then you have strongly religious people that get angry over too many questions. Parents with naughty kids will see an angel who has every right to hit the other kids because all the other kids were being mean. I struggle to understand people like that, I struggle to understand anyone that chooses what to see or what to hear. If I'm ever proven wrong on something, I'm usually quite happy or impressed and attempt to correct my knowledge on the topic. But my husband will aggressively defend an opinion even if he has little knowledge of the topic, usually needs 20 mins and a kiss before being able to explain why hes wrong and then hes happy to reconsider and seek evidence on the topic together. What can the human race possibly do to improve the inherent lack of understanding and knowledge in the world because most people base their knowledge on personal belief these days, its crazy, a modern medieval mess where scientists and learned people are attacked while idiots decide whats true and whats not and quickly the truth becomes hate speech, extremism or terrorism even! The Australian government treated climate change protesters like terrorists because they were in the eyes of fascists, nothing more dangerous in a world of lies than the truth
"I struggle to understand people like that, I struggle to understand anyone that chooses what to see or what to hear."
I think there are several effects playing together. Two might be _cognitive ease_ and _having special insight_ . The first one, in short, is the rewarding feeling when thoughts seemingly fit together, that happens usually when already held concepts are being reinforced, usually by repeatedly hearing the same thing over and over over long periods of time. Sadly, reading scientific publication, especially not of ones field of work, rarely does that. So climate science might not lend itself to cognitive ease for the majority of people. There is also a book named cognitive ease, I think it revolves around using this concept in marketing.
With the second I mean the feeling of having special insight others do not seem to see or (are unable) to understand. It gives someone a boost in self worth and self confidence. Both good feelings. Easy topic for "special insight", conspiracies.
There are certainly more factors, like the _illusion of control_ . But I am not anyone with further insight into someting like that.
Consider that our heliosphere is crossing the galactic ecliptic as you read this there by destabilizing the magnetosphere of the planets and sun in the solar system in turn this is destabilizing the plasmasphere which couples directly to the ionosphere which drives the destabilizing jet stream causing it to be wavy. This then leads to uncertain and unpredictable weather. We are also entering another grand solar minimum. This increases cloud nucleation which as of 2020 has been allowed to be part of the 2022 ipcc climate models. Look for that. In short we are on the cusp of not only falling into another 200-plus year solar minimum but a 80000 year glacial period.expect rapidly moving magnetic poles, destabilization of the jet stream initially, then increased volcanic and tectonic activity. if you really care about saving the planet and humanity try doing something about the 700+ nuclear facilities that will abruptly go offline during the next Carrington event. That would be 700 + fukushima's. and don't think that the jerks behind the curtain haven't been aware of this for decades. Have a nice day and do a little research 😁 most of this data was taken directly from NASA papers.
Mrs Flibble Ah yes but you might not be accounting for the fact that our heliosphere crossed the galactic ecliptic 497,326 seconds ago as analyzed by "Hahn Ilso" in your thread, and this causes Tribbles which CHANGES EVERYTHING. Personally speaking I think we're on the cusp.
@@grindupBaker that's the trouble with tribbles :)
Thorium-fuelled molten salt nuclear fission reactors can turn atmospheric CO2 and seawater into petrochemicals, plastics and fuels while also providing desalinated fresh water, and lithium for batteries. You said it. So there's no problem. . . .
Ecosystem will always pay the bill. To solve CO2 emissions you get in order from easiest to hardest :
1- Do nothing (mass extinction will continue and end).
2- Cut all forests and use them to put CO2 underground, plant and start over (selective mass extinction, only humans and cattle left).
3- Stop CO2 emissions, plan a century long strategy to capture carbon, while preserving natural ecosystems (close call last-minute safe, Life in the Solar System remain feasible).
Conservation of energy law state that humans will stay at 1, or between 1&2 when sh*t hits the fan.
You are exactly correct: Planting a tree does nothing to mitigate CO2 in our atmosphere. When the tree eventually dies it decomposes (rots) and puts ALL of the CO2 back into the atmosphere. We need to cut down all the old mature trees, Carbonize them and bury thye carbon. We then plant new tree and recycle. I don't understand why people keep falling for the same old "Plant a tree and everything will be OK"...It wont, we are in serious trouble and all the energy companies knew what they were doing and they did it anyway
See UA-cam video "20 years too late": ua-cam.com/video/iCnTY9UPQQ4/v-deo.html
Genociding all species save for humans and cattle? Are you fucking insane?
Number 1 😂
That's not what the law of conservation of energy says. It has nothing to do with human behavior.
@@DiscipleOfHeavyMeta1 It's ironical, but it's basically what we're doing : artificially selecting what's beneficial for us. Natural selection is just a way to say : what's can't survive in an environment will disappear from it. We're making gigantic farms, forests are exploited so not natural at all (just single tree specie to be cut at maturity), and our ways to hunt, fish, at an industrial scale is making conditions too hasch for wild life to thrive. At the end, there will only be cattle left, as the conditions are made ideals for it.
We have GAS ducted heating but last year we installed a solid fuel heater.
We reduced our gas use by about 40% over the winter months but we ran out of fire wood at the end.
We are now planting 40 Sugar Gum Eucalipts in our paddocks, this will use carbon to grow and will be the source of our fire wood in the coming years
Full circle re-usable energy, we will only need about 25 trees but nothing wrong with some extra.
Superb work Dave.
This is certainly the best place to listen to common sense. Great stuff.
Bwahahaha
We do not have to set stupid unrealistic targets to reduce the temperature. Net Zero Carbon by 2050 is a ridiculous target. We have to focus on sensible solutions to pollution and remember CO2 is not a pollutant. We have an excess of CO2 beyond requirements which we should have more control over than we presently have. When you focus on clean air and water we will get better results. An initial focus should be on cleaner power plants this starts with Natural Gas and sequestering any CO2 and it includes nuclear power plants and hydro geothermal. Wind and Solar because they are dependent intermittent power systems they could be used possibly more effectively to generate hydrogen fuels. Once we have established a working reliable clean power grid we can then increase electrification for vehicles and reduce petrol/diesel vehicles.
At the same time, we need to reduce waste in particular single-use plastic.
Any Destiny fans will very much notice the logo for Caíque Barcelos 😅 Rasputin is the answer to climate change...
No but really, great video! Love Ecosia! Still a little hesitant about for forms of biomass and bioenergy used in this video though, given how algae seems to be the best alternative now. Some cities around the world like Chicago, IL stack functions by growing algae on top of waste water, purifying the water and cultivating algae that could be used as alternative fuels. Not very familiar with the carbon calculation on that one, but repurposing the Earth's surface area for multiple uses gives us a feasible chance at sequestering carbon. Lots of people still eat meat and dairy all over the world, products which agricultural lands are primarily used to create, and given that those habits likely won't change as fast as we want them to, the algae biomass method might be the better route.
Cheers 🤙
Great video Dave. I had to pause the video to go check out Nori. A very interesting company. I drilled down to one certificate (Harborview Farms, which is about 90 minutes northwest of my home) to try to understand more about how the whole solution works. Pretty interesting.
Nori, if totally legit and honest/transparent, is an example of capitalism at its best: see a problem (aka opportunity) and figure out how to solve and make money doing it. Nori's approach of connecting consumers (large companies, families, some individual wanting to fly to Europe, etc.) as customers wanting to buy carbon offsets to mitigate their carbon footprint - with Nori will connecting the consumer to sellers (like Harborview Farms w/ no-till farming, winter cover crops, etc.) to fulfill the offset.
The kelp seaweed forests (part of Project Drawdown) was also very interesting.
If you've not done it, you should check out the Terraton Initiative and the company IndigoAg - the CEO has appeared in several different UA-cams (including a Ted Talk) describing the Terraton Initiative.
Thanks for your feedback and suggestion. I will out Terraton
Terraton looks very interesting - terraton.indigoag.com
Dave.. OMTEC powers those technologies... Many of which could be on site... Great video again..
Thanks Patrick. Yes OMTEC would fit well in the mix.
Just Have a Think video on OMTEC - ua-cam.com/video/y2JO6cZT0mQ/v-deo.html
Reducing unintended pregnancies in rich nations will help give us more time. Currently 40% unintended pregnancy rate in USA.
Thanks for your work. Could you do an update on this subject.?..thank you.
Very nice video.
What do you think about biochar?
How could that be a way to capture carbon?
Hi there. Yes I think Biochar can play a role. We've looked at very briefly in the past but I may well do another video on it later in the year.
Great video! One thing you didn't mention however was biochar, and Terra preta. And how you can actually create a carbon negative fuel through pyrolysis. You just recondense the combustible gases that the pyrolysis process emits.
Where's the BioChar!? PyCCS is acknowledged by IPCC Special report SR 15 as an effective Carbon Capture & Storage technology.
Hi there. Fair challenge. We will be looking at Biochar as a separate video.
Thats why i am supporting justdiggit.org , working with kenyan maasaii communities to revitalise their grounds from sand flats back to green area's for wildlife and their hurdes of animals.
Yes. I have been in contact with just diggit and I should have included them in the video. Major error on my part. We will get them in a video later this year.
Brilliant Content. Thank you
Awesome video!
Shameless apple polisher. I gave you a thumbuppy anyway because I'm a bit of a jump on the band wagoner.
This channel should be titled "Just Have a Prayer".
excellent, informative video!
I'm a bit confused here on a couple points.
@2:50 it's stated negative carbon power stations will stop CO2 from entering the atmosphere and place the CO2 underground or in the oceans. But later in the video @14:40 it's stated that the oceans are dying because of all the CO2 it is absorbing from the atmosphere. So if I've got my head on straight, their plan is to add more CO2 to the oceans? And spend trillions of dollars to do it? Isn't that a little concerning?
@7:25 it's stated we've lost 50% of our forests since humans have been around, and between 1990-2016 the world lost 502,000 square miles of forests. But conflicting evidence shows that while some forested areas have reduced in size, others have gained in size and the overall net effect has been a gain. This article from 2018 states the earth has gained 2.24 million square km (864,868 square miles) in the period between 1982 and 2016. psmag.com/environment/the-planet-now-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago
2:50 It depends if it is soluble/will be solved in water.
7:25 It depends on the baseline time frame youre comparing to. And by definitions of "more forests/more wood/more plants". For example if its planned reforestation, or more biomass as the result of higher CO2 concentrations, or natural reforestation due to less wood collected. Thats why numbers vary.
@@hooplehead1019 Water soluble? But it's still there isn't it? Sitting dormant until something causes it to be released again? I mean you can trap it but you can't eliminate it or am I wrong? Atmospheric co2 went from 7000 ppm 550 million years ago (when life really began to grow at unprecedented rates on earth) fairly steadily down to a low of 180 ppm around the time human beings came to be, nearly eliminating all life on earth. budbromley.files.wordpress.com/2019/01/600-million-years.jpg Then it appears humans had an influence on bringing co2 levels up from 180 to what we see today, accelerating that increase in the last 70 years or so. Where did all that co2 go from hundreds of millions of years ago? From what I can tell it either got buried underground in what is now fossil fuels or dissolved in the ocean settling on the ocean floor. So if the ground and ocean absorbing co2 nearly destroyed life on earth why are we trying to push more co2 down there? How much co2 should we have in the atmosphere anyway?
So we get condemned for cutting forests but no credit for planned reforestation? And what does it matter how the earth got greener? Fact is, it is greener. If human efforts result in a net zero effect on tree loss (replant the same amount that we cut down) then other factors have caused the overall increase in "greenery". Great! If we haven't been replanting as fast as we've been cutting down then those other factors played an even larger role in the increased "greenery". Great! I don't think anyone believes humans reforested 2.24 million km since 1982, but if we did then we're doing a really great job, so....yay us!
@@jasperthebeau6075 "Atmospheric co2 went from 7000 ppm 550 million years ago (when life really began to grow at unprecedented rates on earth)" Well duh of course life really began to grow because Earth was a ball of ice before that, hardly conducive to vast amounts of Life is a ball of ice. However, I am in total agreement with you that the present species mix of Life should be jettisoned in favour of the species mix of Life that pertained 550 million years ago, and I base that opinion on your comment, and I also base that opinion on your comment.
@@grindupBaker so are you saying co2 levels back then would be toxic to humans? Humans couldn't possibly have existed in an environment with such high co2 levels? You should tell all the astronauts that go to space and all the people in submarines! Human lives are at risk! The people in those shuttles, space stations and submarines are exposed to an average of around 3500-4000 ppm of co2 and they dont get concerned until it hits about 8000 ppm! Complications above this number include headaches, problems sleeping and reduced cognitive ability but this is a result of the combination of elevated co2 and being in an environment that causes increased cranial pressure and blood flow issues where blood does not drain well from the head, like space or deep underwater. Being in 1g on earth's surface would alleviate these symptoms at these levels and these symptoms would the return if exposed to even higher concentrations than that.
Absolutely brilliant thank you
A significant factor in global warming is the area of roofing, where vegetation, which doesn’t trap heat, is replaced with tile or metal roof. We should be converting these to green roofs.
My question is about climate change and its possible connection to catastrophizing.
The human impact on biodiversity is so profound that scientists say the Earth's sixth major extinction event (i.e., the Anthropocene epoch) is already underway.
Add to that cognitive inertia which in clinical and neuroscientific literature is defined as humanities lack of motivation to generate distinct cognitive processes needed to attend to a problem or issue.
Then. . . we have abrupt climate change (sudden, detectable and rapid warming within the span of a single human lifetime) problem to contend with.
Tell me; knowing all of this how can we realistically have hope for our future and the future of our children?
Road surfaces as well as roofs, trap heat. We should cover as much road surface as possible with overhead solar panels.
Excellent! There’s always a Catch-22, isn’t there?
Great video thanks!
13.50 to expect the solution to be provided by the system that created and refused to acknowledge the problem is rather optimistic.
Well, it has worked in the past - probably because "the system" is more diverse than we think: With the same "system" as today, weve had numerous environmental problems already until today. We all solved them by listening to the scientists (instead of today, in the internet age, behave like little children and deny by inventing conspiracy theories discrediting science). And acting on their suggestions. Governments put regulations on pollutants, the industry came up with technical solutions - and so today your children dont grow up with brain impairments due to leaded gas any more. The ozone layer is recovering - and asbestos doesnt cause lung cancer either any more. Because we substituted it with better materials.
The difference of the problem now is in quantity: it is arguably the biggest challenge we have faced in the environmental field (Id say imminent WW3 was a bigger one politically) so far. With the most powerful players in the world for the last century to lose the most: Fossil fuel companies. Ofc they wont give up without a fight - we wouldnt in their shoes. The tobacco industry, orders of magnitude smaller, didnt. It took decades for politicians to act upon the science. And the science to be upheld against the same doubt and misinformation and fraud conspiracies, often instigated by Tobacco industry run marketing campaigns back then, by fossil fuel industries now.
@John Paterson
It has to be done in a way so that entrepreneurs become vastly wealthy. Think Rex Tillerson who predicted this. It will be so so it will be fine.
White Oak Pastures produces delicious beef which is carbon negative, according to a nearby university's study. Plant-based shplant-based.
Amazing channel this!
It is so interesting, .. it is like floating towards a cliff in a canoe, ... there is nothing to do in the canoe except float towards the edge because WE are certainly not going to start paddaling backwards are we?
WE can not really farm in the canoe, so maybe , ... while WE still have Cell Phone coverage we could call ahead and tell them to start farming at the destination .
Perhaps Dr. Patrick Moore is right and Plant food will save us. I wish people understood that just planting trees does NOT make a forest so at best, ... it is a POSSIBLE short term gain. Who knew that the Ole Sargasso Sea, "The Ships Graveyard" would be a savior to us sailors, ... who knew that soda pop would be our landing pad at the bottom of the cliff.
Who Bloody Knew???
I would love to see the animated version of this metaphor. Poetically put.
"Plant Food", you mean the observed greening of some areas of earth, I guess, won't save us, because for the effect of CO2 fertilization to work, the level of CO2 obviously needs to be elevated. And since the mol fraction of CO2 is growing faster dispite the "greening of earth" I do not hink it is enough.
@@scribblescrabble3185
earth stopped greening 20 years, we have crossed that line
www.scientificamerican.com/article/earth-stopped-getting-greener-20-years-ago/
It's like a football match where we've got to score 10 goals in 7.5 minutes to take it to extra time.
Use waste from crops to create biochar locking away carbon and improving soil. As part of the biochar process produce energy for grid use (waste heat for industrial process or district heating systems) and some gas can be diverted off to operate peaker plants for when alternative energy is low. Grow these crops using permaculture methods such as using nitrogen fixing plants etc. Reduce meat and dairy consumption freeing huge areas for these processes. Improve efficiencies of currently used systems. For instance gas that can be used for heating can produce electricity at the same time giving micro generator to the grid. The more heating needed the more electricity generated.
There's the idea of putting iron, powdered rust or something, to the oceans and maybe that would work, but unlike the C3 plant idea, which is self-growing, the iron would have to be made into suitable form and spread out over the ocean.
Well, ocean permaculture is definitely a new concept. I didn't see that one coming.
The fact is that we are spoiled and hypocritic . We aren't nearly to what should be done to stop catastrophy.
Have you ever looked into the creation and use of biochar as a way of putting carbon back into the soil and improving the soil health?
Dont do some of it, do all of it
I don't know the numbers regarding the artificial kelp farms but I love the idea of it!
Why not just capture carbon from biomass through charcoal rather than co2? Biomass energy through pyrolysis. Then return the charcoal to the farmland.
I search for work and it is great to see more ethical opportunities.
Great work! We do need to reverse our industrial carbon emissions ASAP. Any thoughts on building Giga-farms outside all our cities...they could grow food, bamboo for building materials and high speed, high carbon sequestering plants for biochar production and geological burial. We could rebuild our coal mines, oilfields and global soils with this biochar.
Nuclear powered DAC. nuff said.
One silly question - why do we need to burn the biomass? If we grow wood and make furniture out of it, it’s locked away, (unless some $&@&$& comes along and burns it!)
Removing greenhouse gases other than CO2 might prove cheaper and easier. Methane , nitrous oxide and hydro flouro- carbons represent upwards of one third of the warming of the planet . There is a very nuanced article entitled “Removal of Non-CO2 greenhouse gases by large-scale by large-scale atmospheric solar Photocatalysis . Might save us, it’s at least worth a think.
Crops growing better with solar panels above.
i dont know why most focus on some future expensive technological solutions
while we have plants and trees
there are easier solutions like putting carbon in soil, no-till farming, biochar ...etc
Eazey just everybody hold your breath for a very long time!
That is, as matter of fact, the solution and almost certainly the only solution. All humans hold your breath for a couple of hours. 1 human is fine but DO NOT LEAVE A MATING PAIR.
Follow your thoughts through to the conclusion, Dave. None of these CDR pathways are viable. In 1920 people could have said we have a dozen different ways of flying to the moon. But the reality is they had no way of doing it at that time. All these CDR proposals will fail because of CCATS, (complete carbon accounting, timeframe & scale.) This is a race against a rapidly warming Arctic & jetstreams that are becoming less supportive to life on Earth. People need to be honest and say humanity will be destroyed if a breakthrough in CDR is not found and deployed soon.
We could do a great deal more to engineer our cities, infrastructure and other human built environments to be carbon sinks. Design the built environment to lock up carbon under or within the materials of new roads, highways, houses, skyscrapers, dams and any other construction projects. The making of cement is one of the single largest sources of CO2 emissions, maybe it's possible to design cement or other building materials that can sequester the same amount of carbon within the finished product generated in their production.
Great channel indeed!
Comment about the 'air to fuels' process - combustion engines are not greatly efficient in turning converting energy from their fuels; at best these are 20% efficient meaning that 80% is lost through heat. So, why turn captured co2 into fuel again at all? It's a waste of energy in so many ways. This is also inherently true for many biofuels.
"to burn biomass instead of coal" so ground up trees instead of coal and you say that like its a good thing
The truth is the vast majority
Of people are not willing to make
The sacrifice which we are told
Is necessary...not by a long shot.
I wont say the vast majority - and I wont say "sacrifice" but investment - but other than that, youre certainly right. Thats why as with small children who also cant yet delay gratification en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_gratification , you have to convince, teach them it is necessary until they learn it. Thats exactly what this channel is doing.
@@hooplehead1019 People don't change.
@@grindupBaker They do only if presented with a shocking event, such as the effect on isolationists by Japan and Germany declaring war against the US.
it would be useless to rely on energy intensive Technology to solve this problem without a severe carbon tax to force extreme energy efficiency thruout our economy. vote for Bernie!
Bernie flippety floppetied on crime and was soft and released twice convicted murderer Sideshow Bob. Vote for Sideshow Bob for President !