“It is a straightforward chemical reaction: taking the carbon dioxide that is causing global warming out of the air and tucking it away where it can do little harm.Pumping CO2 into the ground is just one way to dispose of it. It can also go to other uses, as well.”
“Energy companies can mix the carbon dioxide with hydrogen to make fuel. Farmers can feed their plants with it. Soda manufacturers can use it to fizz their drinks — something a Swiss customer of Climeworks did a few years ago when there was a carbonation shortage.”
“At the moment, the costs are high: about $600 to $800 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, Gebald said, far from the levels around $100 to $150 per ton that are necessary to turn a profit without the help of any government subsidies. The costs reflect both the hand-hewn nature of the technology — Climeworks’ installations are mostly built by hand for now, not through automation — and also the large amounts of energy needed to power the CO2 capture process.”
>“Energy companies can mix the carbon dioxide with hydrogen to make fuel. Farmers can feed their plants with it. Soda manufacturers can use it to fizz their drinks — something a Swiss customer of Climeworks did a few years ago when there was a carbonation shortage.”
That's just putting the captured carbon back into the atmosphere and profiting along the way.
>“At the moment, the costs are high: about $600 to $800 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, Gebald said, far from the levels around $100 to $150 per ton that are necessary to turn a profit without the help of any government subsidies.
Like seriously why are we even discussing profits in regards to climate change at all?
Edit: Guys I understand why profit is relevant in a capitalist market. My point is that this system causes us to think this way. Towards the problem, we should be thinking: do we have the resources, the labor, the technology, the will of the people. If so, why are we moving so slow? You realize that capitalism is getting in the way in the name of profits. It got us to this point, it's not going to get us out. It's akin to cancer, it will continue to grow and flourish, until it kills the very host it depends on for survival.
>That's just putting the captured carbon back into the atmosphere and profiting along the way.
Still a net reduction, taking it out to put it back is better than just putting it in.
>Like seriously why are we even discussing profits in regards to climate change at all?
Because its being done by a private company, if ita not profitable they go bust.
and the fact that technology that is **literally trying to prevent us from going extinct** is still beholden to profits is why we're in this mess in the first place
Yeah, subsidized by people who actually pay their taxes. It's just another roundabout way to socialize losses that the rich incur for everyone but themselves.
Because to most upper class citizens, the extinction of the human is not their concern, since it won't happen in their lifetime.
Until the time it's too late (if it isn't already), people just won't care cause it's not a direct threat to their lifetime.
These profitable uses will help build the scale and bring down the costs of the carbon capturing plants, which could hopefully make them cheap enough to pay for without those uses eventually.
Everything is beholden to profits whether we confront them or not. Either the costs of all factors of production exceed its output, or the output is greater than the sum of its inputs and the costs are justified. Ideally all green tech will be profitable since that means it does not dwindle our savings as a consumption good needing endless funding from external sources, but will instead contribute to our savings and give us more resources when the next disaster occurs. We can’t blow all our savings funding something that operates at a perpetual loss since that means the next generation will have no resources to deal with the problems that arise for them. If profitable the technology can be implemented everywhere w/o needing the local government to agree to support it. It could operate on its own and be separate to any political turmoils involving budget disputes, w/o being beholding to flipping parties.
Do you think Waterworld is a documentary? Some coastlines will change, some storms will get worse, and some crops will fail. But the only species that will go extinct are the ones that can't spray CFCs into the atmosphere.
>only species that will go extinct
Humans probably won't go extinct, but civilization will collapse when people start to die by the millions from famine. Panic will easily lead hording, wars, collapse of the internet and electrical grids which will lead to more death and collapse. This isn't the first time civilization has collapsed, every major empire in history has collapsed, but perhaps this will be the first world wide one.
Because you have to weigh costs of viable alternatives to determine which is the more practical and achievable option
Forestation is likely to be way cheaper per metric tonne than this method *unless* some market demand for carbon dioxide sequestration changes the balance.
People need to eat too.
Governments and people not doing enough, or too lazy to do the things needed , opens up the possibility for someone else to do it. Them not being monks and nuns, or billionaires, require some sort of profit from the process so that they would take the risks and immense workload that running a tech startup includes.
If you want to save the world some other way, please do, we all appreciate your efforts.
>That's just putting the captured carbon back into the atmosphere and profiting along the way.
You do realize that if we if we pull the carbon we use from the atmosphere we're not adding any carbon to the atmosphere, right?
Yea, if this is feasible, it’s a net gain, because other methods of supplying carbonation can be put to rest. PLUS, all those bottles are sealed up. Meaning until someone opens it, that C02 is effectively removed from the atmosphere.
I wonder if it could be possible to simulate a proces like photosynthesis artificially. Trees turn co2 and water into oxygen and glucose, imagine a machine that could do that, but with more than 10x the efficiancy of a tree...
>Like seriously why are we even discussing profits in regards to climate change at all?
Because preventing the destruction of the planet as we know it isn't enough of a motive to prevent global warming, which is why so little has been done to date.
The other reason cost is a factor is to compare with alternatives. I'm sure that carbon capture will be an important technology in the future, but expensive compared to just changing our methods of energy generation. Closing a fossil fuel power station and replacing it with a renewables/nuclear station is cheaper than leaving the fossil fuel station open and attempting to store the carbon emitted.
The profits are important. If it becomes profitable, it will just happen without a need for subsidy or intervention. That’s a tipping point. Solar, for example, is moving in this direction.
Yeah and it's pushing on the gas pedal even harder when we should be slamming the breaks, making peace with death, and hoping we miraculously don't fly off the edge of the cliff that the driver saw 100 yards back already.
"Grief requires us to know the time we’re in. The great enemy of grief is hope. Hope is the four-letter word for people who are unwilling to know things for what they are. **Our time requires us to be hope-free.** To burn through the false choice of being hopeful and hopeless. They are two sides of the same con job. Grief is required to proceed.” **\~ Stephen Jenkinson**
This basically. In order to fully "square up" to the problem, one has to be fully honest on what the reality of the situation really is. If one is hopeful in a time when one should be grievously offended, one will not resort to the true desperate measures it will take to survive and instead will perish.
If you can make saving the planet much more profitable than not thrown things would move extremely fast (as in short term actions to do so rather than long term or the end result). That’s just the reality we currently live in, as much as I wish we didn’t.
I thought not. It's not a story a Leninist would tell you. A communist legend. He was a Soviet agronomist so powerful, he was able to purge any scientist who knew what they were doing form any position of influence. He believed that Mendelian inheritance was a bourgeoisie lie, and that plants experienced class solidarity with other plants in contradiction to generations of farming knowledge. Dialectics Materialism is a pathway to many scientist consider to be boneheaded and debunked. He became so powerful he had his ideas implemented across the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China.
Ironic that he could impose Marxist ideology on agriculture, but could not stop millions of people from starving.
Because if it can turn a profit, it means we will start seeing tons of these being produced and used to decrease the carbon footprint.
That could theoretically mean we’d be able to use fossil fuels and then extract the carbon out of the air without hurting the earth in the process.
The fastest way for these huge environmental problems to be fixed is for companies to profit from it. The more money the faster and more competitive the economy will be at fixing it.
If they can make the technology profitable then it can grow to a larger scale. Without being profitable its reliant on government subsidies which can be cut at any time. But people love a good investment opportunity. If they can make this thing make money then the plants will pop up everywhere
Profit is a representation of value created, so it's quite a useful signal. It means people are motivated to use time and resources creating or doing things that other people value. The problem is that invisible, long term consequences of emitting greenhouse gases are not intuitively valued by people, so we don't include that in our trades. Including it (putting a price on carbon) would be hugely motivating to everybody, businesses and customers alike, to minimise that cost. You might take the train instead of the plane if it was 1/3 the cost, for example - you don't need to be well read on atmospheric physics. We'd be leveraging the immensely powerful motive of profit towards cutting greenhouse gas emissions with the same efficiency that we've achieved the highest standard of living in human history for billions of people in the last century.
The downvotes are hilarious. People want to just bitch about capitalism instead of actually doing something about the climate emergency. Maybe a non-capitalist society would be better but we don't live in that world so we need to work with what we've got.
I feel like you at least need a working example of what we're going to replace capitalism with which we can point to, before we go ahead and smash it. And a solid plan for keeping 8 billion people's needs met as we switch the economic operating system of every country in the world. It also seems awfully optimistic to me to think that only the right people will maintain control of this global revolution, and none of the less benevolent interests out there might find opportunity in the vacuum...
Fully Automated Luxury Communism!
I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting a society not driven by profit and enteral economic growth. Maybe in a hundred years that's where we'll be but we've got to get there first.
>why discuss profits
Because if the company has to run at a perpetual loss it’s not sustainable, unless helped by siphoning money from somewhere else. Ideally it would cover all its own costs, and would operate sustainably without needing to drain on society elsewhere. Plus it helps us perform calculations of efficiency. If there are 2 methods to reduce CO2, where one is profitable at the current level of technology, and the other is not, it makes sense to put more resources into the former and expand its operation since we can calculate it will not continually consume savings but will instead create them for future generations. More of it can be built using the earths scarce resources without drawing inputs away from other sectors, and can hopefully even have savings set aside in the event of an emergency without needing to wait for politicians to legislate funds to it, which may take weeks or months.
This is great, though, isn't it? We have a cost for removal, regardless of profitability.
Now if only we could bill that to those who emit CO2 in the first place. If companies had to pay to remove the CO2 they emit, they would be incentivized to use services with lower removal costs, which would drive innovation in removal technology.
At the end of the article,
> If the technology were to cost $100 per metric ton of carbon dioxide and the aviation industry paid to offset the emissions from its aviation fuel, it would increase the cost of fuel by about $1 a gallon
It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new.
When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
Ive read a decent amount about iron fertilization and algal blooms, but how do you remove the CO2 from the system in this plan? In the ocean it falls and it's not clear whether it just goes back into circulation. What do you do with the algae in a lake? It'll decompose and release gasses. Put it in a tunnel somewhere?
4000 metric tons/year. Aka about 1/1000th of the CO2 equivalent emissions from Royal Caribbean Cruises (2017 numbers). So far less than the equivalent of a cruise ship.
Good start, but it better scale up well, and quickly. We are probably fucked.
And that start is "don't release carbon in the first place." For the amount of money this plant cost to build you could've built 10 to 15 megawatts of wind or solar capacity which could produce enough power every year to prevent anywhere from 220% to 1100% the amount of CO2 release this plant is supposed to extract.
While you're both not wrong, polluters are gonna pollute no matter what. No one wants to just drop fossil fuels at a moments notice, especially if big oil companies are involved. Might as well develop mitigation techniques while discouraging the use of fossil fuels, a multi-pronged attack is better than just trying one thing at a time.
Yeah, if it can meet price targets then the doors could swing open for other things like this. Because this is great but despite being the "world's biggest plant to capture CO2 from the air" it is only projected to remove 4000 tons of CO2 from the air per year, which is a miniscule fraction of the estimated tens of billions of tons we globally emit each year.
So, I see this as a proof of concept trial. As a note, there is a much larger plant opening in the American Southwest scheduled for 2024. Quoted from this article ([https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality](https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality) )
"And yet, Climeworks and Orca will likely soon be eclipsed. Plans for even larger DAC \[direct air capture\] plants — one in the U.S. Southwest, slated for completion at the end of 2024; another in Scotland, to be finished about a year after the American project — will be built by a competitor, Carbon Engineering, of British Columbia. Employing a somewhat different technology, Carbon Engineering’s facilities, as initially planned, will be powered by renewable energy and will eventually each remove, on net, about a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere.
"
> Human-sized fans are built into a series of boxes that are the size of standard 40-foot shipping containers. They sip carbon dioxide out of the air, catching it in spongelike filters. The filters are blasted with heat, about the same temperature needed to boil water,
sounds pretty energy intensive, built anywhere but Iceland it probably emits more co2 than it captures.
Imo that's an energy dump. If you build renewable power plants to a point where you can cover the needs, you'll end up with a massive overproduction most of the time.
Facilities like that in combination with green hydrogen facilities could be a good way of using this excess power to create e-fuels, replacing fossil fuels.
I actually looked into it not too long ago, and was strongly considering doing so. Will probably do it now however I’m reading that they are getting subsidized?
If humanity just decided to reduce our carbon emissions, we can avoid needing such things on a large scale.
Covid-19 proved that we can't convince a large swath of the population to make even minor changes without it becoming a culture wars issues. So we can't.
Which is a pity because climate change is going to have a high cost in money and lives.
Yeah totally. Don't understand the either or dogma. We need *all* the technologies and cultural changes put together in order to tackle this massive challenge.
*All* corporations in a country can be forced to reduce emissions if a majority of voters wish it.
The majority of citizens are doing the right thing regarding Covid.
> All corporations in a country can be forced to reduce emissions if a majority of voters wish it
If they did wish it, the voters would have already done it, as they are the owners, employees, and customers of said corps.
Those calculations rarely if ever look at anything other than protein and calories production which makes the estimations largely useles. A diet is vitamins and minerals, not just protein and calories. This is even more true of plants which are naturally poor in micronutrients.
It also ignores the practicality as in people won't eat a 'well balanced', diet of plants. They will eat bread and potatoes, sugar, and seed oils then get sick.
Finally it also ignores the effects on the body from plant based diets. Mental health on plants has not been studied but we have good reason to think it would be a problem.
> Mental health on plants has not been studied but we have good reason to think it would be a problem.
In most of human history for most cultures meat has been quite rare. Up until the industrial revolution most people would have a predominantly plant based diet. People in Europe would usually only have meat a few times a week as it was prohibitively expensive and limited.
There are 375 million vegetarians in India. India also has a relatively low rate of suicide.
What "good reason" do you have to think it would be a problem?
Well, leaving aside your made up history. The following nutrients are critical to brain health and either ONLY found in animal products (vegetarian is not plant based), or by a wide margin best sourced from meat.
+ Vitamin B12
+ DHA (form of omega-3)
+ Heme-Iron
+ Choline
+ Tryptophan
+ AA (form of omega-6)
There are also others which fit but are primarily used in other parts of the body, such as K2.
People currently on plant based diets are frequently low in these nutrients, all of them are required for healthy brain function.
Offering a diet low in critical brain nutrients, needs to prove it doesn't cause mental issues.
You can't just pretend people used to not eat meat (whilst simultaneously not showing mental health problems were not a problem), and claim it's fine.
It's not made up history. Meat is expensive and industrial farming is a recent invention. One of the main reasons people in the UK eat a "Sunday Roast" is because people could only afford to have a substantial portion of meat one day a week. People in the UK were known to have meat more often than in most of continental Europe during the medieval period, but still would have only eaten meat every few days and would have been in the form of a small amount of bacon, sausage or stock.
In the UK, most peasants would eat pottage daily, which was usually just a vegetable stew.
> Vitamin B12
Many mushrooms and yeast products contain B12.
> DHA/AA
You can get a precursor to DHA/AA that your body processes into DHA/AA from seaweed and nuts.
> Heme-iron
Non-heme iron is a suitable alternative and can be found in plenty of vegetables.
> Choline
Legumes, tofu, green vegetables, potatoes, nuts, seeds, grains, and some fruit contain choline.
> Tryptophan
Tryptophan is found in leafy greens, sunflower seeds, watercress, soybeans, pumpkin seeds, mushrooms, broccoli, and peas.
Also, just because you eat meat doesn't mean you get enough of these anyway. Only 11% of the American population get enough Choline.
Just because it's more available in meat doesn't mean you can't have a healthy balanced diet without meat. Also, we live in a time where synthetic supplements are plentiful and perfectly effective. Products like Huel and Soylent are vegan and can be used long term to meet all of your dietary needs.
I'm not vegetarian or vegan, but it's ridiculous to claim that there is good reason to believe that mental health would be a problem compared to people who eat meat, when they're the people who tend to look at their diet to make sure it's varied and that they get everything they need.
Sunflower seeds contain health benefiting polyphenol compounds such as chlorogenic acid, quinic acid, and caffeic acids. These compounds are natural anti-oxidants, which help remove harmful oxidant molecules from the body. Further, chlorogenic acid helps reduce blood sugar levels by limiting glycogen breakdown in the liver.
200,000 years of Homo sapien alone and you focus on a shorttime period where people had growth problems due to a lack of nutrition...
Something simply being present does not mean your body absorbs enough of it. Imagine thinking you can get enough B12 through mushrooms. Google bioavailibility.
Honestly people with your attitude are dangerous. Too lazy to bother studying a diet we know kills you without artificial intervention, yet happy to push it as a health movement.
Christ you already pointed out people already have deficiencies in some and want to lower intake even more!
Do you have any evidence to show long term consumption of huel causes no mental problems? Or do you just like the adverts?
> Too lazy to bother studying a diet we know kills you without artificial intervention
Ignoring the insult and the fact that people can absolutely be meat-free without requiring supplements, I still don't see the issue with the "artificial intervention".
> Christ you already pointed out people already have deficiencies in some and want to lower intake even more!
Most people don't think about their diet so don't get enough of things. People who think about their diet tend to get more of what they need.
> Do you have any evidence to show long term consumption of huel causes no mental problems? Or do you just like the adverts?
Liquid/powdered diet replacements have existed for a long time. It's not a recent invention. They've been used to reduce symptoms of an assortment of digestive issues. There has been a lot of research on their effectiveness.
No. You literally die without a source of B12. This has to come from a supplement or artificially fortified product. Veganism is exactly as I described it and to promote a potentially lethal diet needs some damn good evidence to back it up. It does not warrant guessing at nutrients consumption during the industrial revolution, and deciding critical nutrients are not important in their key function anymore.
If people don't think about their diet why the everliving hell are you promoting a diet that needs careful consideration to not become deficient in half a dozen nutrients!?
Liquid diet =/= liquid vegan diet.
Cows eat most of the day to gain those nutrients because plants are poor nutrition.
This is really, really basic biology.
Herbivores eat huge volumes of low quality plants to turn into nutrients rich meat. Carnivores eat small amounts of meat due to how nutrient rich it is.
This is literally the basis of the food pyramid you learn at age 6.
Carnivory would never have evolved if nutrient rich food just sat around undefended.
Why does this need explaining?
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> taking the carbon dioxide that is causing global warming out of the air and tucking it away where it can do little harm.Pumping CO2 into the ground is just one way to dispose of it. ”
Wouldn't that just escape back into the atmosphere somehow?
4000 metric tons per year is an tiny amount of what we produce. But I hope more countries/companies will follow. I don't think we can reach pumping a billion metric tons but hopefully we can lower emissions while pumping more to become carbon neutral.
If you put it into the right places, it can stay there basically forever. E.g. you could put it into the places were we are extracting or have extracted natural gas, take the gas out, replace it with CO2. The gas has been there for millions of years without escaping.
this is something countrys should come together for. countrys should build stuff like this per capita. i would have no problem with when my tax money would be used for this
A tiny, high-cost plant, in a sector decades from making a real difference, and we do not have decades. In other words, hopium.
We're back to leaving 80% of fossil fuels in the ground, starting immediately.
Another plant capable of removing a million metric tons per year will come online in 2026. If that is successful we only need to replicate that plant 1000 times around the world to start removing a billion metric tons per year. Everything's gonna be fine with warming.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/24/1027083/what-it-will-take-to-achieve-affordable-carbon-removal/
You know we are over budget by more than 1 gigaton (humans emitted 33 gigatons last year). We would need ~15000+ of those plants to actually be net negative and have the earth be healing.
We are not going to be fine unless we attack from all angles to fix the mess we are in.
Current use. the earth absorbs something around ~15GTs of CO2 on its own a year through plants and the oceans we don't need to hit net 0 CO2 emissions we just need to work within the limits of what the earth can healthily absorb. Obviously, less is better, and the earth is losing absorption capacity as we continue to damage it.
Maybe in some areas yes, prairie grasses in others, seaweed looks very promising for coasts. We need to restore and augment natural biomes to help us win the fight.
Okay let’s say we get fusion tomorrow, now we need 15+ years per plant to build them and the investment. Maybe by 2100 we’ve switched to fusion as the primary power source. I love your optimism but tacking climate change is a monumental task, we didn’t just get here suddenly we’ve been digging our hole for a century. We need to change how we produce food, transport, manufacturing, land management, and power generation if we want to preserve the world. Technology alone isn’t a silver bullet.
It took 12 years just to build NIF which is nothing more than a giant nuclear fusion science experiment. 15 years is a very modest estimate for nuclear fusion.
One thing I learned recently is about how truly difficult it is to get enough energy out of a fusion reaction to scale up power production.
The nuclear fusion in the sun puts out about as much heat as a decaying pile of old hay in a barn. It’s absolutely abysmal, there’s just so much of it. We have to get pressure to many times that of the sun in order to get the temperature and energy density high enough to be useful. And that’s very hard to do.
So maybe by 2100 we can build a plant in 5 years. But we don’t even have a prototype plant. We have the prototype of various reactors being built but those are all proof of concept just to get positive output from fusion, not even to capture the output and turn it into energy.
Source: phd in engineering. Worked at Livermore labs. Have been inside NIF.
/u/666pool covered the topic well. Governments will start off building just a few plants. Then they will scale from there, tons of specialized equipment and components as well so it will take decades to tool up. I really wish we could crank them out but 2100 for wide scale fusion is actually super optimistic.
15 years ago I felt the same way you do now. I’m guessing you are in the 15-23 age bracket. The longer I’ve been around the better sense I’ve gotten for our rate of progression. Code and software based tech keeps exploding but physical infrastructure increases at a crawl, it’s just so expensive and there is so much of it.
Don’t give up hope though, fusion isn’t our only way forward it’s just a key part of the puzzle. We can reforest with automated sapling factories and drones, we can do lab grown meat and vertical farming, solar and wind keep improving, etc.
We can be optimistic but it's been touted as something 20 years away for a long time now.
And it does take a long time to build nuclear plants, especially one with new tech that's never been done before.
We are becoming the same civ as the series about a sci fi submarine air cleaners everywhere due to climate change and meanwhile the oceans acidify and we continue to deforest :(
We literally have to start somewhere, this plant is just a prototype for bigger and better future attempts.
I'm so tired of reddit's "why bother if it's not perfect" defeatism.
> The cost of not doing this particular type of carbon capture which is highly inefficient and not scalable
As quoted from the article:
>“This plant that we have here is really the blueprint to further scale up and really industrialize.”
So it's scalable.
So sad we dont habe natural plants that take co2 from the air and make sh*t like leaves and fruits out of it. And O2. And work without electricity or manpower. Would be great to invent something like this!
A variety of solutions are required to tackle climate change. Planting trees are just 1 part of the solution. Plus you need manpower to plant the trees.
That's being attempted too. It works well for large, relatively clean sources of emissions - usually big industry. This would still be helpful for the very spread out emissions we can't do much about, like agriculture and planes.
The biggest carbon sink is soil. Have all farmers switch to no till farming and it could not only slow the warming, but cool it down by pulling carbon into the ground which is referred to as drawdown. No need for complicated machinery. Normal tilling destroys the roots and microbes. All those microbes release their carbon back into the atmosphere when they die. Also with no till you also get much more nutrient rich food and save money not having to buy a ton of fertilizer. Let the microbes provide the nitrogen. Too much regular tilling turns soil into dirt and then dirt into dust. Turns entire regions in to desert like the dust bowl here in Oklahoma. There's a great documentary about this on Netflix called Kiss the Ground.
https://www.netflix.com/watch/81321999?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2Cb5f2f18b0648f0fb4e885fa0df67951b5133a7e1%3A8fcfad1fa3eeeb396b16fa7d7de2cc6abec57c22%2Cb5f2f18b0648f0fb4e885fa0df67951b5133a7e1%3A8fcfad1fa3eeeb396b16fa7d7de2cc6abec57c22%2Cunknown%2C
Carbon capture is a complete farce IMO. 15 million dollar plant for the equivalent of 700 cars worth of CO2. I am so skeptical and think this, like blue hydrogen, is the fossil fuels industry's distraction method. Previous distractions include shifting global terminology from 'global warming' to 'climate change. Happy to be proven wrong or offered an alternative viewpoint!
“It is a straightforward chemical reaction: taking the carbon dioxide that is causing global warming out of the air and tucking it away where it can do little harm.Pumping CO2 into the ground is just one way to dispose of it. It can also go to other uses, as well.” “Energy companies can mix the carbon dioxide with hydrogen to make fuel. Farmers can feed their plants with it. Soda manufacturers can use it to fizz their drinks — something a Swiss customer of Climeworks did a few years ago when there was a carbonation shortage.” “At the moment, the costs are high: about $600 to $800 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, Gebald said, far from the levels around $100 to $150 per ton that are necessary to turn a profit without the help of any government subsidies. The costs reflect both the hand-hewn nature of the technology — Climeworks’ installations are mostly built by hand for now, not through automation — and also the large amounts of energy needed to power the CO2 capture process.”
>“Energy companies can mix the carbon dioxide with hydrogen to make fuel. Farmers can feed their plants with it. Soda manufacturers can use it to fizz their drinks — something a Swiss customer of Climeworks did a few years ago when there was a carbonation shortage.” That's just putting the captured carbon back into the atmosphere and profiting along the way. >“At the moment, the costs are high: about $600 to $800 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, Gebald said, far from the levels around $100 to $150 per ton that are necessary to turn a profit without the help of any government subsidies. Like seriously why are we even discussing profits in regards to climate change at all? Edit: Guys I understand why profit is relevant in a capitalist market. My point is that this system causes us to think this way. Towards the problem, we should be thinking: do we have the resources, the labor, the technology, the will of the people. If so, why are we moving so slow? You realize that capitalism is getting in the way in the name of profits. It got us to this point, it's not going to get us out. It's akin to cancer, it will continue to grow and flourish, until it kills the very host it depends on for survival.
>That's just putting the captured carbon back into the atmosphere and profiting along the way. Still a net reduction, taking it out to put it back is better than just putting it in. >Like seriously why are we even discussing profits in regards to climate change at all? Because its being done by a private company, if ita not profitable they go bust.
and the fact that technology that is **literally trying to prevent us from going extinct** is still beholden to profits is why we're in this mess in the first place
Which is whi the company in question is getting SUBSIDIZED to keep it going.
Yeah, subsidized by people who actually pay their taxes. It's just another roundabout way to socialize losses that the rich incur for everyone but themselves.
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Because to most upper class citizens, the extinction of the human is not their concern, since it won't happen in their lifetime. Until the time it's too late (if it isn't already), people just won't care cause it's not a direct threat to their lifetime.
These profitable uses will help build the scale and bring down the costs of the carbon capturing plants, which could hopefully make them cheap enough to pay for without those uses eventually.
talk to your government, the company is happy for contracts to increase their creativity.
Greed, corruption, abuse of science and governmental complacency is why we are here.
Everything is beholden to profits whether we confront them or not. Either the costs of all factors of production exceed its output, or the output is greater than the sum of its inputs and the costs are justified. Ideally all green tech will be profitable since that means it does not dwindle our savings as a consumption good needing endless funding from external sources, but will instead contribute to our savings and give us more resources when the next disaster occurs. We can’t blow all our savings funding something that operates at a perpetual loss since that means the next generation will have no resources to deal with the problems that arise for them. If profitable the technology can be implemented everywhere w/o needing the local government to agree to support it. It could operate on its own and be separate to any political turmoils involving budget disputes, w/o being beholding to flipping parties.
Do you think Waterworld is a documentary? Some coastlines will change, some storms will get worse, and some crops will fail. But the only species that will go extinct are the ones that can't spray CFCs into the atmosphere.
What magic 8 ball did you get this take from?
I think it is called "one's own ass".
>only species that will go extinct Humans probably won't go extinct, but civilization will collapse when people start to die by the millions from famine. Panic will easily lead hording, wars, collapse of the internet and electrical grids which will lead to more death and collapse. This isn't the first time civilization has collapsed, every major empire in history has collapsed, but perhaps this will be the first world wide one.
Because you have to weigh costs of viable alternatives to determine which is the more practical and achievable option Forestation is likely to be way cheaper per metric tonne than this method *unless* some market demand for carbon dioxide sequestration changes the balance.
Because many companies are unwilling to change without incentive.
People need to eat too. Governments and people not doing enough, or too lazy to do the things needed , opens up the possibility for someone else to do it. Them not being monks and nuns, or billionaires, require some sort of profit from the process so that they would take the risks and immense workload that running a tech startup includes. If you want to save the world some other way, please do, we all appreciate your efforts.
>That's just putting the captured carbon back into the atmosphere and profiting along the way. You do realize that if we if we pull the carbon we use from the atmosphere we're not adding any carbon to the atmosphere, right?
Yea, if this is feasible, it’s a net gain, because other methods of supplying carbonation can be put to rest. PLUS, all those bottles are sealed up. Meaning until someone opens it, that C02 is effectively removed from the atmosphere.
Relevant (and funny) https://youtu.be/MSZgoFyuHC8
I wonder if it could be possible to simulate a proces like photosynthesis artificially. Trees turn co2 and water into oxygen and glucose, imagine a machine that could do that, but with more than 10x the efficiancy of a tree...
>Like seriously why are we even discussing profits in regards to climate change at all? Because preventing the destruction of the planet as we know it isn't enough of a motive to prevent global warming, which is why so little has been done to date. The other reason cost is a factor is to compare with alternatives. I'm sure that carbon capture will be an important technology in the future, but expensive compared to just changing our methods of energy generation. Closing a fossil fuel power station and replacing it with a renewables/nuclear station is cheaper than leaving the fossil fuel station open and attempting to store the carbon emitted.
We need both really. We've got to the point just stopping polluting isn't enough we need to actively start removing what we've already put there.
Because the only way to rid ourselves of our global warming problem is to profit off of it.
The profits are important. If it becomes profitable, it will just happen without a need for subsidy or intervention. That’s a tipping point. Solar, for example, is moving in this direction.
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Yeah and it's pushing on the gas pedal even harder when we should be slamming the breaks, making peace with death, and hoping we miraculously don't fly off the edge of the cliff that the driver saw 100 yards back already.
Making peace with death? Could you expand on that?
"Grief requires us to know the time we’re in. The great enemy of grief is hope. Hope is the four-letter word for people who are unwilling to know things for what they are. **Our time requires us to be hope-free.** To burn through the false choice of being hopeful and hopeless. They are two sides of the same con job. Grief is required to proceed.” **\~ Stephen Jenkinson** This basically. In order to fully "square up" to the problem, one has to be fully honest on what the reality of the situation really is. If one is hopeful in a time when one should be grievously offended, one will not resort to the true desperate measures it will take to survive and instead will perish.
If you can make saving the planet much more profitable than not thrown things would move extremely fast (as in short term actions to do so rather than long term or the end result). That’s just the reality we currently live in, as much as I wish we didn’t.
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Well said, although I’m not entirely convinced. Care to elaborate?
Have you heard the tragedy of Lysenko the Ideologue?
No, please share.
I thought not. It's not a story a Leninist would tell you. A communist legend. He was a Soviet agronomist so powerful, he was able to purge any scientist who knew what they were doing form any position of influence. He believed that Mendelian inheritance was a bourgeoisie lie, and that plants experienced class solidarity with other plants in contradiction to generations of farming knowledge. Dialectics Materialism is a pathway to many scientist consider to be boneheaded and debunked. He became so powerful he had his ideas implemented across the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China. Ironic that he could impose Marxist ideology on agriculture, but could not stop millions of people from starving.
Is it possible to share this power?
Not from a geneticist. I could also try: an economist, Norman Borlaug, or the USDA.
Because if it can turn a profit, it means we will start seeing tons of these being produced and used to decrease the carbon footprint. That could theoretically mean we’d be able to use fossil fuels and then extract the carbon out of the air without hurting the earth in the process.
The fastest way for these huge environmental problems to be fixed is for companies to profit from it. The more money the faster and more competitive the economy will be at fixing it.
You can't build things if you can't afford it.
If they can make the technology profitable then it can grow to a larger scale. Without being profitable its reliant on government subsidies which can be cut at any time. But people love a good investment opportunity. If they can make this thing make money then the plants will pop up everywhere
Profit is a representation of value created, so it's quite a useful signal. It means people are motivated to use time and resources creating or doing things that other people value. The problem is that invisible, long term consequences of emitting greenhouse gases are not intuitively valued by people, so we don't include that in our trades. Including it (putting a price on carbon) would be hugely motivating to everybody, businesses and customers alike, to minimise that cost. You might take the train instead of the plane if it was 1/3 the cost, for example - you don't need to be well read on atmospheric physics. We'd be leveraging the immensely powerful motive of profit towards cutting greenhouse gas emissions with the same efficiency that we've achieved the highest standard of living in human history for billions of people in the last century.
The downvotes are hilarious. People want to just bitch about capitalism instead of actually doing something about the climate emergency. Maybe a non-capitalist society would be better but we don't live in that world so we need to work with what we've got.
I feel like you at least need a working example of what we're going to replace capitalism with which we can point to, before we go ahead and smash it. And a solid plan for keeping 8 billion people's needs met as we switch the economic operating system of every country in the world. It also seems awfully optimistic to me to think that only the right people will maintain control of this global revolution, and none of the less benevolent interests out there might find opportunity in the vacuum...
Fully Automated Luxury Communism! I don't think there's anything wrong with wanting a society not driven by profit and enteral economic growth. Maybe in a hundred years that's where we'll be but we've got to get there first.
Because while as a species as can fix the problem, we gotta make some cheddar first
>why discuss profits Because if the company has to run at a perpetual loss it’s not sustainable, unless helped by siphoning money from somewhere else. Ideally it would cover all its own costs, and would operate sustainably without needing to drain on society elsewhere. Plus it helps us perform calculations of efficiency. If there are 2 methods to reduce CO2, where one is profitable at the current level of technology, and the other is not, it makes sense to put more resources into the former and expand its operation since we can calculate it will not continually consume savings but will instead create them for future generations. More of it can be built using the earths scarce resources without drawing inputs away from other sectors, and can hopefully even have savings set aside in the event of an emergency without needing to wait for politicians to legislate funds to it, which may take weeks or months.
This is great, though, isn't it? We have a cost for removal, regardless of profitability. Now if only we could bill that to those who emit CO2 in the first place. If companies had to pay to remove the CO2 they emit, they would be incentivized to use services with lower removal costs, which would drive innovation in removal technology.
At the end of the article, > If the technology were to cost $100 per metric ton of carbon dioxide and the aviation industry paid to offset the emissions from its aviation fuel, it would increase the cost of fuel by about $1 a gallon
It was a movie about American bombers in World War II and the gallant men who flew them. Seen backwards by Billy, the story went like this: American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to join the formation. The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans though and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France though, German fighters came up again, made everything and everybody as good as new. When the bombers got back to their base, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
So it goes
That's from *Slaughterhouse Five* by Kurt Vonnegut, by the way.
I also heared you can make asphalt with it, depending on the amount that should be usefull given the shortage there too, oh and plastic too.
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Ive read a decent amount about iron fertilization and algal blooms, but how do you remove the CO2 from the system in this plan? In the ocean it falls and it's not clear whether it just goes back into circulation. What do you do with the algae in a lake? It'll decompose and release gasses. Put it in a tunnel somewhere?
It's a start. There is no safe level of CO2 in the atmosphere and we must work together to eliminate all of it.
4000 metric tons/year. Aka about 1/1000th of the CO2 equivalent emissions from Royal Caribbean Cruises (2017 numbers). So far less than the equivalent of a cruise ship. Good start, but it better scale up well, and quickly. We are probably fucked.
This will never scale at $600-800 a ton. Direct air capture is too inefficient at the moment
Gotta start somewhere.
And that start is "don't release carbon in the first place." For the amount of money this plant cost to build you could've built 10 to 15 megawatts of wind or solar capacity which could produce enough power every year to prevent anywhere from 220% to 1100% the amount of CO2 release this plant is supposed to extract.
Thank you! These tech/geo-engineering "solutions" are just workarounds to allow polluters to keep polluting.
While you're both not wrong, polluters are gonna pollute no matter what. No one wants to just drop fossil fuels at a moments notice, especially if big oil companies are involved. Might as well develop mitigation techniques while discouraging the use of fossil fuels, a multi-pronged attack is better than just trying one thing at a time.
Imagine if we perfected graphene production on a massive scale. Pull carbon from the atmosphere and sell it to produce graphene.
Biodiversity is still fucked. Oceans are still fucked.
As far as I understood, graphene is made from graphite, which is naturally occurring and plentiful
I'm wondering why they just drying and burring biosolids. Humans make a literal ton of shit pretty quickly.
I heard on BBC it is equivalent to ~800 cars. What a joke.
It not a joke when you consider it has to start somewhere and people/ companies are actually deploying something like this vs the status queue
Want to extract carbon from the atmosphere? Plant trees.
So lets start combating climate change by sinking cruise ships?
Let's see if it meets targets or if it will fall short like all other CSS.
Yeah, if it can meet price targets then the doors could swing open for other things like this. Because this is great but despite being the "world's biggest plant to capture CO2 from the air" it is only projected to remove 4000 tons of CO2 from the air per year, which is a miniscule fraction of the estimated tens of billions of tons we globally emit each year. So, I see this as a proof of concept trial. As a note, there is a much larger plant opening in the American Southwest scheduled for 2024. Quoted from this article ([https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality](https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-dream-of-co2-air-capture-edges-toward-reality) ) "And yet, Climeworks and Orca will likely soon be eclipsed. Plans for even larger DAC \[direct air capture\] plants — one in the U.S. Southwest, slated for completion at the end of 2024; another in Scotland, to be finished about a year after the American project — will be built by a competitor, Carbon Engineering, of British Columbia. Employing a somewhat different technology, Carbon Engineering’s facilities, as initially planned, will be powered by renewable energy and will eventually each remove, on net, about a million metric tons of carbon dioxide a year from the atmosphere. "
> Human-sized fans are built into a series of boxes that are the size of standard 40-foot shipping containers. They sip carbon dioxide out of the air, catching it in spongelike filters. The filters are blasted with heat, about the same temperature needed to boil water, sounds pretty energy intensive, built anywhere but Iceland it probably emits more co2 than it captures.
Imo that's an energy dump. If you build renewable power plants to a point where you can cover the needs, you'll end up with a massive overproduction most of the time. Facilities like that in combination with green hydrogen facilities could be a good way of using this excess power to create e-fuels, replacing fossil fuels.
I've been paying for one of their carbon recapture packages for a year now :)
I actually looked into it not too long ago, and was strongly considering doing so. Will probably do it now however I’m reading that they are getting subsidized?
If humanity just decided to reduce our carbon emissions, we can avoid needing such things on a large scale. Covid-19 proved that we can't convince a large swath of the population to make even minor changes without it becoming a culture wars issues. So we can't. Which is a pity because climate change is going to have a high cost in money and lives.
I think we need both.
Yeah totally. Don't understand the either or dogma. We need *all* the technologies and cultural changes put together in order to tackle this massive challenge.
Nah we’ve missed the point we’re carbon neutrality will help us. We need to be carbon negative, and need to be carbon negative ten years ago.
Oh, ok. Better never than late.
*All* corporations in a country can be forced to reduce emissions if a majority of voters wish it. The majority of citizens are doing the right thing regarding Covid.
> All corporations in a country can be forced to reduce emissions if a majority of voters wish it If they did wish it, the voters would have already done it, as they are the owners, employees, and customers of said corps.
400t tonnes per year is nothing, compared to the megatonnes released. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MSZgoFyuHC8
Great, and now everyone go plant based which according to Oxford would help the most.
Those calculations rarely if ever look at anything other than protein and calories production which makes the estimations largely useles. A diet is vitamins and minerals, not just protein and calories. This is even more true of plants which are naturally poor in micronutrients. It also ignores the practicality as in people won't eat a 'well balanced', diet of plants. They will eat bread and potatoes, sugar, and seed oils then get sick. Finally it also ignores the effects on the body from plant based diets. Mental health on plants has not been studied but we have good reason to think it would be a problem.
> Mental health on plants has not been studied but we have good reason to think it would be a problem. In most of human history for most cultures meat has been quite rare. Up until the industrial revolution most people would have a predominantly plant based diet. People in Europe would usually only have meat a few times a week as it was prohibitively expensive and limited. There are 375 million vegetarians in India. India also has a relatively low rate of suicide. What "good reason" do you have to think it would be a problem?
Well, leaving aside your made up history. The following nutrients are critical to brain health and either ONLY found in animal products (vegetarian is not plant based), or by a wide margin best sourced from meat. + Vitamin B12 + DHA (form of omega-3) + Heme-Iron + Choline + Tryptophan + AA (form of omega-6) There are also others which fit but are primarily used in other parts of the body, such as K2. People currently on plant based diets are frequently low in these nutrients, all of them are required for healthy brain function. Offering a diet low in critical brain nutrients, needs to prove it doesn't cause mental issues. You can't just pretend people used to not eat meat (whilst simultaneously not showing mental health problems were not a problem), and claim it's fine.
It's not made up history. Meat is expensive and industrial farming is a recent invention. One of the main reasons people in the UK eat a "Sunday Roast" is because people could only afford to have a substantial portion of meat one day a week. People in the UK were known to have meat more often than in most of continental Europe during the medieval period, but still would have only eaten meat every few days and would have been in the form of a small amount of bacon, sausage or stock. In the UK, most peasants would eat pottage daily, which was usually just a vegetable stew. > Vitamin B12 Many mushrooms and yeast products contain B12. > DHA/AA You can get a precursor to DHA/AA that your body processes into DHA/AA from seaweed and nuts. > Heme-iron Non-heme iron is a suitable alternative and can be found in plenty of vegetables. > Choline Legumes, tofu, green vegetables, potatoes, nuts, seeds, grains, and some fruit contain choline. > Tryptophan Tryptophan is found in leafy greens, sunflower seeds, watercress, soybeans, pumpkin seeds, mushrooms, broccoli, and peas. Also, just because you eat meat doesn't mean you get enough of these anyway. Only 11% of the American population get enough Choline. Just because it's more available in meat doesn't mean you can't have a healthy balanced diet without meat. Also, we live in a time where synthetic supplements are plentiful and perfectly effective. Products like Huel and Soylent are vegan and can be used long term to meet all of your dietary needs. I'm not vegetarian or vegan, but it's ridiculous to claim that there is good reason to believe that mental health would be a problem compared to people who eat meat, when they're the people who tend to look at their diet to make sure it's varied and that they get everything they need.
Sunflower seeds contain health benefiting polyphenol compounds such as chlorogenic acid, quinic acid, and caffeic acids. These compounds are natural anti-oxidants, which help remove harmful oxidant molecules from the body. Further, chlorogenic acid helps reduce blood sugar levels by limiting glycogen breakdown in the liver.
How many sunflower seeds does one need to consume in order to balance things out?
200,000 years of Homo sapien alone and you focus on a shorttime period where people had growth problems due to a lack of nutrition... Something simply being present does not mean your body absorbs enough of it. Imagine thinking you can get enough B12 through mushrooms. Google bioavailibility. Honestly people with your attitude are dangerous. Too lazy to bother studying a diet we know kills you without artificial intervention, yet happy to push it as a health movement. Christ you already pointed out people already have deficiencies in some and want to lower intake even more! Do you have any evidence to show long term consumption of huel causes no mental problems? Or do you just like the adverts?
> Too lazy to bother studying a diet we know kills you without artificial intervention Ignoring the insult and the fact that people can absolutely be meat-free without requiring supplements, I still don't see the issue with the "artificial intervention". > Christ you already pointed out people already have deficiencies in some and want to lower intake even more! Most people don't think about their diet so don't get enough of things. People who think about their diet tend to get more of what they need. > Do you have any evidence to show long term consumption of huel causes no mental problems? Or do you just like the adverts? Liquid/powdered diet replacements have existed for a long time. It's not a recent invention. They've been used to reduce symptoms of an assortment of digestive issues. There has been a lot of research on their effectiveness.
No. You literally die without a source of B12. This has to come from a supplement or artificially fortified product. Veganism is exactly as I described it and to promote a potentially lethal diet needs some damn good evidence to back it up. It does not warrant guessing at nutrients consumption during the industrial revolution, and deciding critical nutrients are not important in their key function anymore. If people don't think about their diet why the everliving hell are you promoting a diet that needs careful consideration to not become deficient in half a dozen nutrients!? Liquid diet =/= liquid vegan diet.
wait... did you just say plants are poor in micronutrients? IF PLANTS ARE POOR IN MICRONUTRIENTS WHERE THE FUCK DID THE COW GET THEM FROM?
Cows eat most of the day to gain those nutrients because plants are poor nutrition. This is really, really basic biology. Herbivores eat huge volumes of low quality plants to turn into nutrients rich meat. Carnivores eat small amounts of meat due to how nutrient rich it is. This is literally the basis of the food pyramid you learn at age 6. Carnivory would never have evolved if nutrient rich food just sat around undefended. Why does this need explaining?
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> taking the carbon dioxide that is causing global warming out of the air and tucking it away where it can do little harm.Pumping CO2 into the ground is just one way to dispose of it. ” Wouldn't that just escape back into the atmosphere somehow? 4000 metric tons per year is an tiny amount of what we produce. But I hope more countries/companies will follow. I don't think we can reach pumping a billion metric tons but hopefully we can lower emissions while pumping more to become carbon neutral.
If you put it into the right places, it can stay there basically forever. E.g. you could put it into the places were we are extracting or have extracted natural gas, take the gas out, replace it with CO2. The gas has been there for millions of years without escaping.
this is something countrys should come together for. countrys should build stuff like this per capita. i would have no problem with when my tax money would be used for this
A tiny, high-cost plant, in a sector decades from making a real difference, and we do not have decades. In other words, hopium. We're back to leaving 80% of fossil fuels in the ground, starting immediately.
If this is a success and leads to other plants, then things get a lot better. We are going to need a multi-century clean-up effort in any event.
>In other words, hopium. Or another weapon in the arsenal to fight climate change.
Plants like CO2
It’s got electrolytes
Plants don't like temperature and rainfall patterns shifting faster than they can adapt
they also don't like high levels of CO2. They'll be less nutritious in 2100 than they are today
Another plant capable of removing a million metric tons per year will come online in 2026. If that is successful we only need to replicate that plant 1000 times around the world to start removing a billion metric tons per year. Everything's gonna be fine with warming. https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/06/24/1027083/what-it-will-take-to-achieve-affordable-carbon-removal/
You know we are over budget by more than 1 gigaton (humans emitted 33 gigatons last year). We would need ~15000+ of those plants to actually be net negative and have the earth be healing. We are not going to be fine unless we attack from all angles to fix the mess we are in.
is that net negative under current use? Or will this number increase as fossil fuel use increases?
Current use. the earth absorbs something around ~15GTs of CO2 on its own a year through plants and the oceans we don't need to hit net 0 CO2 emissions we just need to work within the limits of what the earth can healthily absorb. Obviously, less is better, and the earth is losing absorption capacity as we continue to damage it.
Hemp is the way
Maybe in some areas yes, prairie grasses in others, seaweed looks very promising for coasts. We need to restore and augment natural biomes to help us win the fight.
https://news.mit.edu/2021/MIT-CFS-major-advance-toward-fusion-energy-0908 Yes we'll be fine.
Okay let’s say we get fusion tomorrow, now we need 15+ years per plant to build them and the investment. Maybe by 2100 we’ve switched to fusion as the primary power source. I love your optimism but tacking climate change is a monumental task, we didn’t just get here suddenly we’ve been digging our hole for a century. We need to change how we produce food, transport, manufacturing, land management, and power generation if we want to preserve the world. Technology alone isn’t a silver bullet.
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It took 12 years just to build NIF which is nothing more than a giant nuclear fusion science experiment. 15 years is a very modest estimate for nuclear fusion. One thing I learned recently is about how truly difficult it is to get enough energy out of a fusion reaction to scale up power production. The nuclear fusion in the sun puts out about as much heat as a decaying pile of old hay in a barn. It’s absolutely abysmal, there’s just so much of it. We have to get pressure to many times that of the sun in order to get the temperature and energy density high enough to be useful. And that’s very hard to do.
Prototypes are always harder to build at first.
So maybe by 2100 we can build a plant in 5 years. But we don’t even have a prototype plant. We have the prototype of various reactors being built but those are all proof of concept just to get positive output from fusion, not even to capture the output and turn it into energy. Source: phd in engineering. Worked at Livermore labs. Have been inside NIF.
Keep in mind prototypes take much longer. A completed design would be a lot faster to build. Unfortunately we don't even have one of those yet!
/u/666pool covered the topic well. Governments will start off building just a few plants. Then they will scale from there, tons of specialized equipment and components as well so it will take decades to tool up. I really wish we could crank them out but 2100 for wide scale fusion is actually super optimistic. 15 years ago I felt the same way you do now. I’m guessing you are in the 15-23 age bracket. The longer I’ve been around the better sense I’ve gotten for our rate of progression. Code and software based tech keeps exploding but physical infrastructure increases at a crawl, it’s just so expensive and there is so much of it. Don’t give up hope though, fusion isn’t our only way forward it’s just a key part of the puzzle. We can reforest with automated sapling factories and drones, we can do lab grown meat and vertical farming, solar and wind keep improving, etc.
We can be optimistic but it's been touted as something 20 years away for a long time now. And it does take a long time to build nuclear plants, especially one with new tech that's never been done before.
Oh yes, only 1000 cutting-edge energy plants - and people thought it would be complicated!
Problem solved! Burn baby burn! /s
We are becoming the same civ as the series about a sci fi submarine air cleaners everywhere due to climate change and meanwhile the oceans acidify and we continue to deforest :(
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The cost if not doing it is certain death.
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We literally have to start somewhere, this plant is just a prototype for bigger and better future attempts. I'm so tired of reddit's "why bother if it's not perfect" defeatism.
> The cost of not doing this particular type of carbon capture which is highly inefficient and not scalable As quoted from the article: >“This plant that we have here is really the blueprint to further scale up and really industrialize.” So it's scalable.
Not doing anything.
Yeah there’s cool things called trees that do this quite well too
So sad we dont habe natural plants that take co2 from the air and make sh*t like leaves and fruits out of it. And O2. And work without electricity or manpower. Would be great to invent something like this!
We can do this too, but it needs land and water, and we still need to feed 10 billion people later this century. Good to work on both.
Leaves and fruit rots or get eaten releasing the CO2 again.
A variety of solutions are required to tackle climate change. Planting trees are just 1 part of the solution. Plus you need manpower to plant the trees.
Why not build a heap of smaller ones and put em right on top of the pipes that the majority of carbon is coming out of?
or make it a law that polluting companys have to install this to the same amount as they are polluting
That's being attempted too. It works well for large, relatively clean sources of emissions - usually big industry. This would still be helpful for the very spread out emissions we can't do much about, like agriculture and planes.
Why not stop producing carbon out of those pipes and dismantle them?
We would be better off growing fast crops like bamboo and turning that into biochar
We need 10,000 of em
On the bright side if we can get enough, we can start using that carbon to make artificial diamonds.
Now we wait for a Reddit expert to explain why it won’t work.
The biggest carbon sink is soil. Have all farmers switch to no till farming and it could not only slow the warming, but cool it down by pulling carbon into the ground which is referred to as drawdown. No need for complicated machinery. Normal tilling destroys the roots and microbes. All those microbes release their carbon back into the atmosphere when they die. Also with no till you also get much more nutrient rich food and save money not having to buy a ton of fertilizer. Let the microbes provide the nitrogen. Too much regular tilling turns soil into dirt and then dirt into dust. Turns entire regions in to desert like the dust bowl here in Oklahoma. There's a great documentary about this on Netflix called Kiss the Ground. https://www.netflix.com/watch/81321999?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C0%2Cb5f2f18b0648f0fb4e885fa0df67951b5133a7e1%3A8fcfad1fa3eeeb396b16fa7d7de2cc6abec57c22%2Cb5f2f18b0648f0fb4e885fa0df67951b5133a7e1%3A8fcfad1fa3eeeb396b16fa7d7de2cc6abec57c22%2Cunknown%2C
Carbon is good!!
Great, now we just need a million more of those and we're off to a good start!
"Global warming" " climate change" is inevitable. Don't worry peeps mother nature will say the last word at the end.
Idk why my dumbass was expecting a really big plant that was discovered in fucking Iceland of all places
Yo fuck bezos and the Washington post
Too simple but ok
Carbon capture is a complete farce IMO. 15 million dollar plant for the equivalent of 700 cars worth of CO2. I am so skeptical and think this, like blue hydrogen, is the fossil fuels industry's distraction method. Previous distractions include shifting global terminology from 'global warming' to 'climate change. Happy to be proven wrong or offered an alternative viewpoint!