How much COF-999 would you need to reverse global warming?
November 26, 2024 11:26 PM Subscribe
This New, Yellow Powder Quickly Pulls Carbon Dioxide From the Air, and Researchers Say 'There's Nothing Like It' - "Scientists say just 200 grams of the material could capture 44 pounds of the greenhouse gas per year—the same as a large tree."
How much carbon dioxide would we have to remove from the air to counteract climate change? - "If we relied on carbon removal alone, we would need to sequester around 20 billion tons of CO2 a year to balance out our emissions—an incredibly tall order."
so, back of the envelope, around 200 million metric tonnes please?
also btw...
How much carbon dioxide would we have to remove from the air to counteract climate change? - "If we relied on carbon removal alone, we would need to sequester around 20 billion tons of CO2 a year to balance out our emissions—an incredibly tall order."
so, back of the envelope, around 200 million metric tonnes please?
also btw...
- Reality check on technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air - "Study finds many climate-stabilization plans are based on questionable assumptions about the future cost and deployment of 'direct air capture' and therefore may not bring about promised reductions."
- The World's Best Hope to Beat Climate Change Is Vanishing - "To have a chance against global warming, key economies and industries need to hit crucial emissions targets by 2030. They're far off track."
"...the material could capture 44 pounds of the greenhouse gas per year—the same as a large tree"
Cool cool but what if we just planted trees instead?
posted by zardoz at 12:40 AM on November 27 [19 favorites]
Cool cool but what if we just planted trees instead?
posted by zardoz at 12:40 AM on November 27 [19 favorites]
You don't plant large trees. You plant seeds or saplings, then you wait.
Getting trees takes some thought-- you need to choose trees and locations so the trees have a chance to thrive. Showing off about how many trees you can plant doesn't seem to work.
This doesn't mean trees are bad, but something faster sounds like a good idea.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:46 AM on November 27 [8 favorites]
Getting trees takes some thought-- you need to choose trees and locations so the trees have a chance to thrive. Showing off about how many trees you can plant doesn't seem to work.
This doesn't mean trees are bad, but something faster sounds like a good idea.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 12:46 AM on November 27 [8 favorites]
You don't plant large trees. You plant seeds or saplings, then you wait.
There are trees where I am that propagate by cutting, then grow 12 feet in a year, but, your point stands
Can we mineralize the CO2 captured into concrete?
posted by eustatic at 2:11 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
There are trees where I am that propagate by cutting, then grow 12 feet in a year, but, your point stands
Can we mineralize the CO2 captured into concrete?
posted by eustatic at 2:11 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
Yes, we can plant trees, for many good reasons.
But if we want to just plant trees to absorb our emissions... then we're going to need lots of trees on lots of land. About as much land as India. We don't have that much land suitable for growing trees that isn't being used already.
Yes, we can mineralise some CO2 into concrete... except that when concrete cures it absorbs carbon dioxide from the air. So if we cure that concrete with CO2 that we have captured, then it absorbs less CO2 from the air. So that's not any benefit.
(This is a gross over-simplification. Providing CO2 makes for faster curing and there's a bunch of non-cement materials we can add to concrete to increase sequestration and reduce emissions from cement manufacturing, but ... again, these are small and expensive improvements in comparison to the overall emissions from concrete.)
posted by happyinmotion at 2:34 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
But if we want to just plant trees to absorb our emissions... then we're going to need lots of trees on lots of land. About as much land as India. We don't have that much land suitable for growing trees that isn't being used already.
Yes, we can mineralise some CO2 into concrete... except that when concrete cures it absorbs carbon dioxide from the air. So if we cure that concrete with CO2 that we have captured, then it absorbs less CO2 from the air. So that's not any benefit.
(This is a gross over-simplification. Providing CO2 makes for faster curing and there's a bunch of non-cement materials we can add to concrete to increase sequestration and reduce emissions from cement manufacturing, but ... again, these are small and expensive improvements in comparison to the overall emissions from concrete.)
posted by happyinmotion at 2:34 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
"just 200 grams of the material could capture 44 pounds..."
W H Y
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 2:47 AM on November 27 [10 favorites]
W H Y
posted by polytope subirb enby-of-piano-dice at 2:47 AM on November 27 [10 favorites]
"just 200 grams of the material could capture 44 pounds..."
W H Y
Yes, looks as if someone has done a quick conversion from 20 kilograms and left it there. How much more effective it would have been to say it can capture a hundred times its own mass in CO2...
posted by rory at 3:13 AM on November 27 [3 favorites]
W H Y
Yes, looks as if someone has done a quick conversion from 20 kilograms and left it there. How much more effective it would have been to say it can capture a hundred times its own mass in CO2...
posted by rory at 3:13 AM on November 27 [3 favorites]
Sigh. You can’t sink carbon with concrete. Because the first step in making concrete is roasting CO2 out of limestone to make the Portland cement in the first place. Every molecule of CO2 concrete absorbs is just replacing a molecule of CO2 you drove off into the air previously.
Oh, and the roasting process requires vast amounts of heat input, which is generated by, you guessed it, more CO2 being put into the air by burning fossil fuels. And it takes a lot of heat, very concentrated. I don’t think anybody’s ever demonstrated a practical way of generating sufficiently concentrated heat with anything but fossil fuels.
And even if you did generate the concrete magically with zero “extra” CO2; only the innate CO2 gen from the cement creation chemistry, it is still an emitter of CO2 in the short run because all the CO2 gets emitted right off during manufacture, but the absorption occurs slowly over decades.
Concrete is not a CO2 absorption solution and can never be. But it comes up every fucking time when the topic is raised. There’s some greenwashing expert group that has to be getting a big belly laugh every time this happens.
posted by notoriety public at 4:13 AM on November 27 [16 favorites]
Oh, and the roasting process requires vast amounts of heat input, which is generated by, you guessed it, more CO2 being put into the air by burning fossil fuels. And it takes a lot of heat, very concentrated. I don’t think anybody’s ever demonstrated a practical way of generating sufficiently concentrated heat with anything but fossil fuels.
And even if you did generate the concrete magically with zero “extra” CO2; only the innate CO2 gen from the cement creation chemistry, it is still an emitter of CO2 in the short run because all the CO2 gets emitted right off during manufacture, but the absorption occurs slowly over decades.
Concrete is not a CO2 absorption solution and can never be. But it comes up every fucking time when the topic is raised. There’s some greenwashing expert group that has to be getting a big belly laugh every time this happens.
posted by notoriety public at 4:13 AM on November 27 [16 favorites]
Are we just going to let it go unremarked that "Electroswing is the big buzz right now"?
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:38 AM on November 27 [8 favorites]
posted by rum-soaked space hobo at 4:38 AM on November 27 [8 favorites]
That sounds great; here’s a thought: To make it really effective, maybe we need to deposit it way up in the atmosphere. Just put tanks of it in commercial airliners and have them spray it out as they fly. I can’t see anyone having a problem with that, can any of you?
posted by TedW at 5:14 AM on November 27 [3 favorites]
posted by TedW at 5:14 AM on November 27 [3 favorites]
However there is some research on producing cement from old concrete, as a by-product from recycling steel (using electrically-powered arc furnaces):
The Cambridge Electric Cement process begins with concrete waste from demolition of old buildings. This is crushed, to separate the stones and sand that form concrete from the mixture of cement powder and water that bind them together. The old cement powder is then used instead of lime-flux in steel recycling. As the steel melts, the flux forms a slag that floats on the liquid steel, to protect it from oxygen in the air. After the recycled steel is tapped off, the liquid slag is cooled rapidly in air, and ground up into a powder which is virtually identical to the clinker which is the basis of new Portland cement. In pilot-scale trials of the new process, the Cambridge team have demonstrated this combined recycling process, and the results show that it has the chemical composition of a clinker made with today’s process.
posted by Kiwi at 5:26 AM on November 27 [5 favorites]
The Cambridge Electric Cement process begins with concrete waste from demolition of old buildings. This is crushed, to separate the stones and sand that form concrete from the mixture of cement powder and water that bind them together. The old cement powder is then used instead of lime-flux in steel recycling. As the steel melts, the flux forms a slag that floats on the liquid steel, to protect it from oxygen in the air. After the recycled steel is tapped off, the liquid slag is cooled rapidly in air, and ground up into a powder which is virtually identical to the clinker which is the basis of new Portland cement. In pilot-scale trials of the new process, the Cambridge team have demonstrated this combined recycling process, and the results show that it has the chemical composition of a clinker made with today’s process.
posted by Kiwi at 5:26 AM on November 27 [5 favorites]
Every news story about a technological solution for climate change has the same lifecycle: "Oh, hooray, we're saved! (click, scroll...scroll...) Aw, dang, we're still all gonna die."
posted by mittens at 5:35 AM on November 27 [4 favorites]
posted by mittens at 5:35 AM on November 27 [4 favorites]
At this point, I just assume we are likely to get the worst case scenario or something close to it, are living in the last good time, and may as well try to scrape some enjoyment out of it. We are not going to engineer our way out of a problem that we’re collectively too stupid and venal to face honestly.
posted by ryanshepard at 5:35 AM on November 27 [5 favorites]
posted by ryanshepard at 5:35 AM on November 27 [5 favorites]
Cool cool but what if we just planted trees instead?
When the #teamtrees fundraiser (Wikipedia) was going I did a bit of research and calculation and worked out that planting 20 million trees would sequester a grand total of about 8 hours worth of global emissions (at 2018 rates), and take 20 years to do it. At the time I could only find one source for how much carbon a tree can sequester, and the numbers I've seen since (including that wikipedia page) say that trees sequester only a fraction of what I had thought.
If that's depressing enough, you might want to skip the rest of this comment...
It's important to understand the scale of things, and the economics that drive that scale. When talking about how much it costs to sequester carbon, we are talking about a cost. On the other side of the issue, there is desequestering of carbon that has been naturally sequestered for millions of years (coal, oil, gas). The cost there is net negative: it's profitable. Because of that profitability, desequestering carbon has become several of the largest industries in existence. Because of the cost, there is no incentive for sequestration to ever come anywhere near that scale.
posted by swr at 5:42 AM on November 27 [10 favorites]
When the #teamtrees fundraiser (Wikipedia) was going I did a bit of research and calculation and worked out that planting 20 million trees would sequester a grand total of about 8 hours worth of global emissions (at 2018 rates), and take 20 years to do it. At the time I could only find one source for how much carbon a tree can sequester, and the numbers I've seen since (including that wikipedia page) say that trees sequester only a fraction of what I had thought.
If that's depressing enough, you might want to skip the rest of this comment...
It's important to understand the scale of things, and the economics that drive that scale. When talking about how much it costs to sequester carbon, we are talking about a cost. On the other side of the issue, there is desequestering of carbon that has been naturally sequestered for millions of years (coal, oil, gas). The cost there is net negative: it's profitable. Because of that profitability, desequestering carbon has become several of the largest industries in existence. Because of the cost, there is no incentive for sequestration to ever come anywhere near that scale.
posted by swr at 5:42 AM on November 27 [10 favorites]
Every news story about a technological miracle solution for climate change has the same lifecycle: "Oh, hooray, we're saved! (click, scroll...scroll...) Aw, dang, we're still all gonna die."
There may well be real solutions, technological and otherwise, but due to their impacts on our global corporate economy, they are not even put up for consideration. So, yes we are indeed stuck with these miracle product infomercial-style news stories/cycles.
posted by fairmettle at 6:02 AM on November 27 [4 favorites]
There may well be real solutions, technological and otherwise, but due to their impacts on our global corporate economy, they are not even put up for consideration. So, yes we are indeed stuck with these miracle product infomercial-style news stories/cycles.
posted by fairmettle at 6:02 AM on November 27 [4 favorites]
Unless I missed it, I noticed that the article doesn't mention how much carbon dioxide it takes to make this new miracle substance. How much does it take to manufacture it, how much does it take to source the raw materials?
posted by LSK at 6:25 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
posted by LSK at 6:25 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
Behaviour change, wealth redistribution, and wealth reduction. But those are politically unachievable right now.
Quoted for truth. I've worked a bit in biogeochem/climate change research. And it's depressing really, knowing that we have several proven practical and simple mitigation techniques that are casually dismissed because they don't immediately serve the capital interest. And people think it's not worth taking the first steps, seemingly only because they are not also the last. Somehow that's never an issue when it's a cool new electronic gizmo being developed, but it flies when it's about the survival of our society. And maybe our society shouldn't survive. Certainly it can't survive without significant change.
People mistake what serves capital interest with what is possible, but those are actually different things. This quote from U.K. Le Guin comes to mind: We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:25 AM on November 27 [8 favorites]
Quoted for truth. I've worked a bit in biogeochem/climate change research. And it's depressing really, knowing that we have several proven practical and simple mitigation techniques that are casually dismissed because they don't immediately serve the capital interest. And people think it's not worth taking the first steps, seemingly only because they are not also the last. Somehow that's never an issue when it's a cool new electronic gizmo being developed, but it flies when it's about the survival of our society. And maybe our society shouldn't survive. Certainly it can't survive without significant change.
People mistake what serves capital interest with what is possible, but those are actually different things. This quote from U.K. Le Guin comes to mind: We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.
posted by SaltySalticid at 7:25 AM on November 27 [8 favorites]
These carbon capture press releases are an offensive distraction. "You have to take CO2 from the air—there’s no way around it" No, there are many ways around it, ways that are actually working. Talk to me when your exotic substance can be manufactured at prices similar to other CO2 abatement systems.
Stopping global warming is going to require a bunch of different strategies, I'm all for scientists doing experiments on things like direct carbon capture. But these breathless headlines and mediocre science writing are harmful propaganda. This stuff doesn't even remove CO2, it just captures it temporarily to be moved and "used in industrial applications or sequestered in geologic reservoirs deep in bedrock". Neither sink for CO2 is practical at the scale we need.
posted by Nelson at 7:48 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
Stopping global warming is going to require a bunch of different strategies, I'm all for scientists doing experiments on things like direct carbon capture. But these breathless headlines and mediocre science writing are harmful propaganda. This stuff doesn't even remove CO2, it just captures it temporarily to be moved and "used in industrial applications or sequestered in geologic reservoirs deep in bedrock". Neither sink for CO2 is practical at the scale we need.
posted by Nelson at 7:48 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
This stuff in TFA is something to capture CO2 from the air so that it can be heated and re-released into... some kind of currently-not-imagined technology for actually sequestering the carbon.
I am not at all excited. Well, the old organic chemistry enthusiast thinks that these C-N COF macromolecules sound pretty cool, as exercises in controlled stereochemisty. But I am not hyped that this really does anything about the climate situation.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:13 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
I am not at all excited. Well, the old organic chemistry enthusiast thinks that these C-N COF macromolecules sound pretty cool, as exercises in controlled stereochemisty. But I am not hyped that this really does anything about the climate situation.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:13 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
Behaviour change, wealth redistribution, and wealth reduction. But those are politically unachievable right now.
Politically unachievable ever. When your policy solution requires the complete reshaping of global human society, it's going to fail.
posted by Galvanic at 8:52 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
Politically unachievable ever. When your policy solution requires the complete reshaping of global human society, it's going to fail.
posted by Galvanic at 8:52 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
Tell that to the King of France I guess?
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:11 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
posted by SaltySalticid at 9:11 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
Cool cool but what if we just planted trees instead?
Climate change is killing forests. In the Pacific Northwest we have what's called "fire season" every year now (August), where vast amounts of carbon previously stored in trees gets released into the atmosphere.
Then what we do with the gigatonnes of CO2 that we're apparently going to capture is the other half of the problem
I attempted the math. 36.5B tons of CO2 last year, diamond has a density of 3.5 grams/cm³, so what we do is manufacture a cube of solid diamond 215m on each side, a diamond with a surface footprint larger than four football fields. Every year.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 9:49 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
Climate change is killing forests. In the Pacific Northwest we have what's called "fire season" every year now (August), where vast amounts of carbon previously stored in trees gets released into the atmosphere.
Then what we do with the gigatonnes of CO2 that we're apparently going to capture is the other half of the problem
I attempted the math. 36.5B tons of CO2 last year, diamond has a density of 3.5 grams/cm³, so what we do is manufacture a cube of solid diamond 215m on each side, a diamond with a surface footprint larger than four football fields. Every year.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 9:49 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
Instead of using this stuff to remove the carbon that’s already in the air, could we use it to prevent new emissions? Something like a tailpipe or smokestack filter, perhaps?
posted by disentir at 10:01 AM on November 27
posted by disentir at 10:01 AM on November 27
MetaFilter: I Am Not At All Excited
posted by MrBadExample at 10:26 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
posted by MrBadExample at 10:26 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
Cool cool but what if we just planted trees instead?
Apart from the fact that you'll never be able to get rid of it if you do, big bamboo comes to mind.
posted by y2karl at 10:37 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
Apart from the fact that you'll never be able to get rid of it if you do, big bamboo comes to mind.
posted by y2karl at 10:37 AM on November 27 [2 favorites]
Just put tanks of it in commercial airliners and have them spray it out as they fly. I can’t see anyone having a problem with that, can any of you?
George Noory, Whitley Streiber, the bulk of the Coast ro Coast AM audience and RFKrayKray Jr come to mind.
posted by y2karl at 10:42 AM on November 27
George Noory, Whitley Streiber, the bulk of the Coast ro Coast AM audience and RFKrayKray Jr come to mind.
posted by y2karl at 10:42 AM on November 27
could we use it to prevent new emissions? Something like a tailpipe or smokestack filter, perhaps?
This is called point source carbon capture and is the most successful form of carbon capture. Part of what makes it so hard is CO2 is a rare molecule: 420 parts per million, or 0.04%. It's much easier if you're capturing CO2 from a carbon-heavy emissions stream like a burning coal plant. It's done regularly and this new material might help with it.
There's a debate how meaningful point source carbon capture is. Power plants use it as a political cover. (So called "clean coal"). Also you still have to store the CO2 somewhere which is not easy, although in the small volumes a power plant produces it's feasible.
posted by Nelson at 11:05 AM on November 27 [4 favorites]
This is called point source carbon capture and is the most successful form of carbon capture. Part of what makes it so hard is CO2 is a rare molecule: 420 parts per million, or 0.04%. It's much easier if you're capturing CO2 from a carbon-heavy emissions stream like a burning coal plant. It's done regularly and this new material might help with it.
There's a debate how meaningful point source carbon capture is. Power plants use it as a political cover. (So called "clean coal"). Also you still have to store the CO2 somewhere which is not easy, although in the small volumes a power plant produces it's feasible.
posted by Nelson at 11:05 AM on November 27 [4 favorites]
That sounds great; here’s a thought: To make it really effective, maybe we need to deposit it way up in the atmosphere. Just put tanks of it in commercial airliners and have them spray it out as they fly. I can’t see anyone having a problem with that, can any of you?
Trails of chemicals in the air? I'm in!
posted by JohnFromGR at 11:30 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
Trails of chemicals in the air? I'm in!
posted by JohnFromGR at 11:30 AM on November 27 [1 favorite]
Behaviour change .... But those are politically unachievable right now.
Back at the start of the 21st century there was peak oil forums and peak oil podcasters.
One of those early podcasters who still has non-paywalled moments had on a guest who speaks to teens about Carbon reduction/green energy.
He asks one simple question - are you using a clothes drying line?
What he's noticed is the Carbon concerned teens as a whole do not help with line drying laundry or use lines to dry laundry.
A simple task that increases clothes lifetimes, uses less energy but needs more time from humans to hang the wet fabric and take down the dry fabric and these Carbon angsty teens can't be bothered.
posted by rough ashlar at 1:18 PM on November 27 [2 favorites]
Back at the start of the 21st century there was peak oil forums and peak oil podcasters.
One of those early podcasters who still has non-paywalled moments had on a guest who speaks to teens about Carbon reduction/green energy.
He asks one simple question - are you using a clothes drying line?
What he's noticed is the Carbon concerned teens as a whole do not help with line drying laundry or use lines to dry laundry.
A simple task that increases clothes lifetimes, uses less energy but needs more time from humans to hang the wet fabric and take down the dry fabric and these Carbon angsty teens can't be bothered.
posted by rough ashlar at 1:18 PM on November 27 [2 favorites]
Instead of using this stuff to remove the carbon that’s already in the air, could we use it to prevent new emissions? Something like a tailpipe or smokestack filter, perhaps?
posted by disentir at 10:01 AM on
That's what is proposed.
Currently, there are about 100 new petrochemical plants in Texas and Louisiana funded under the inflation reduction act, largely LNG and Ammonia plants, but also some "plastic to CCS "
Most are brand new CO2 emissions, which include an "acid gas reduction" unit, which produces CO2 plus impurities. I imagine that these facilities don t need this absorbent in the OP, since AGRUs are already in use
The goal is to inject the CO2 from the AGRUs under the ocean, although this has never had success before, the US Treasury will be funding it using direct payments to Exxon, unser a section called "45q*. Thanks, Joe Manchin. This is clean coal on steroids.
None of this will work for the climate, but it will stall, for a long time, on the financial implications of the oilindustries' "stranded assets" problem.
It would be more effective to take the 45Q monies that US Treasury willgive to Exxon, and use it to pay exxo to buy out the stranded assests, buy exxon 's debt
posted by eustatic at 1:34 PM on November 27
posted by disentir at 10:01 AM on
That's what is proposed.
Currently, there are about 100 new petrochemical plants in Texas and Louisiana funded under the inflation reduction act, largely LNG and Ammonia plants, but also some "plastic to CCS "
Most are brand new CO2 emissions, which include an "acid gas reduction" unit, which produces CO2 plus impurities. I imagine that these facilities don t need this absorbent in the OP, since AGRUs are already in use
The goal is to inject the CO2 from the AGRUs under the ocean, although this has never had success before, the US Treasury will be funding it using direct payments to Exxon, unser a section called "45q*. Thanks, Joe Manchin. This is clean coal on steroids.
None of this will work for the climate, but it will stall, for a long time, on the financial implications of the oilindustries' "stranded assets" problem.
It would be more effective to take the 45Q monies that US Treasury willgive to Exxon, and use it to pay exxo to buy out the stranded assests, buy exxon 's debt
posted by eustatic at 1:34 PM on November 27
This would nationalize ExxonMobil, effectively, to shut them down. What is happening instead is that Exxon has privatized the US Treasury through 45Q.
Big Oil: better nationalize them before they nationalize you
posted by eustatic at 1:42 PM on November 27 [3 favorites]
Big Oil: better nationalize them before they nationalize you
posted by eustatic at 1:42 PM on November 27 [3 favorites]
Apart from the fact that you'll never be able to get rid of it if you do, big bamboo comes to mind.
Which opens up compelling possibilities for big panda.
posted by rory at 2:02 PM on November 27 [3 favorites]
Which opens up compelling possibilities for big panda.
posted by rory at 2:02 PM on November 27 [3 favorites]
Tell that to the King of France I guess?
And how long before another King/Emperor took over? Yes, my point exactly.
People like their air conditioning and that means giant amounts of energy supply (aka nuclear) and climate engineering. I’d say good luck with your “hey, let’s all diet and exercise and that'll solve obesity” approach but oops there goes the planet.
posted by Galvanic at 2:40 PM on November 27
And how long before another King/Emperor took over? Yes, my point exactly.
People like their air conditioning and that means giant amounts of energy supply (aka nuclear) and climate engineering. I’d say good luck with your “hey, let’s all diet and exercise and that'll solve obesity” approach but oops there goes the planet.
posted by Galvanic at 2:40 PM on November 27
1) If someone told you they made a big breakthrough with infertility and handed you a new an improved pen, because you know, there's always paperwork invovled with infertility, and this will help with that, you would not think this worthy of a press release, let alone hope. The act of filtering the atmosphere and sequestering the GHGs has two enormously energy costly steps because of thermodynamics, and then a trivial step that already is solved (reversible CO2 binding, like with metal oxides or amines). They are improving the easy step and pretending this helps with the hard steps.
2) There is a bait and switch on how much we'd need to use (if we solved the atmosphere filter and carbon sequestration problems), because zeroing out current human emissions does not stop the climate crisis.
First, the planets warming hasn't caught up to GHG in the atmosphere, you have 2-3 decades of warming before current GHG levels are fully felt.
A) we have triggered excess natural emissions from tropical wetlands, warming temperate soils, thawing permafrost, methane release from shallow clathrates, wildfires, degassing from warming surface waters. So even zero-ing human emissions is only part of the way.
B) we also have altered earths albedo (reflectivity) by melting a bunch of ice and reducing seasonal snow cover
C) Many of our carbon sinks will attempt to re-equilibrate to lower GHG by releasing CO2 back, they helped mop up increases (about half our emissions) and that effect reverses or at least saturates for some of them.
D) There is already a tremdous amount of excess heat in the earth system, in the oceans, that will continue to impact the planet even after you have gotten back to atmospheroc equilibrium
so
E) you have to have GHG stop rising, fall and go lower than before to bleed off the excess heat, rebuild the lost ice, and compensate for we have a pipeline of heating coming because of the past 30 years of emissions and the other GHG gases and the natural emissions we have triggered from methane to co2 to albedo loss and there are several processes that are near or perhaps past running without our ability to reverse (greenland and west anartic, amoc, brazil savanah, permafrost, shallow clathrates).
I mean, this isnt a car that you can steer. We derained a train on a bridge and we are debating whether its to expensive to take our foot ever so slightly off the accerlator.
We can't even discuss what scale incrementals would be needed to lessen this disaster.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 5:34 PM on November 27 [3 favorites]
2) There is a bait and switch on how much we'd need to use (if we solved the atmosphere filter and carbon sequestration problems), because zeroing out current human emissions does not stop the climate crisis.
First, the planets warming hasn't caught up to GHG in the atmosphere, you have 2-3 decades of warming before current GHG levels are fully felt.
A) we have triggered excess natural emissions from tropical wetlands, warming temperate soils, thawing permafrost, methane release from shallow clathrates, wildfires, degassing from warming surface waters. So even zero-ing human emissions is only part of the way.
B) we also have altered earths albedo (reflectivity) by melting a bunch of ice and reducing seasonal snow cover
C) Many of our carbon sinks will attempt to re-equilibrate to lower GHG by releasing CO2 back, they helped mop up increases (about half our emissions) and that effect reverses or at least saturates for some of them.
D) There is already a tremdous amount of excess heat in the earth system, in the oceans, that will continue to impact the planet even after you have gotten back to atmospheroc equilibrium
so
E) you have to have GHG stop rising, fall and go lower than before to bleed off the excess heat, rebuild the lost ice, and compensate for we have a pipeline of heating coming because of the past 30 years of emissions and the other GHG gases and the natural emissions we have triggered from methane to co2 to albedo loss and there are several processes that are near or perhaps past running without our ability to reverse (greenland and west anartic, amoc, brazil savanah, permafrost, shallow clathrates).
I mean, this isnt a car that you can steer. We derained a train on a bridge and we are debating whether its to expensive to take our foot ever so slightly off the accerlator.
We can't even discuss what scale incrementals would be needed to lessen this disaster.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 5:34 PM on November 27 [3 favorites]
This powder doesn't capture 100x weight in CO2, just like I don't climb stairs to the moon each year. It captures almost nothing and passes that on to some as of yet uninvented process. The fact that it grabs and hands off CO2 easily is nice, but if there is nothing to hand off to, it accomplishes nothing. A tree on the otherhand does more than just grow by 44lbs dry mass per year, it lives and helps others live, builds soil and other useful and unknown things. But we are too busy cutting those trees down before they burn to notice.
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 5:43 PM on November 27 [2 favorites]
posted by No Climate - No Food, No Food - No Future. at 5:43 PM on November 27 [2 favorites]
It's pretty disturbing to me how often tree planting gets promoted as a solution without even a mention of how to avoid the difficulty and emissions of truly removing those trees from the carbon cycle. I have yet to see a convincing proposal that make it out to be the panacea people think it is, let alone even tractable on a net emission basis. Yet all throughout this thread people seem to think there's an easy solution we aren't doing for some reason.
posted by ilikemefi at 2:52 PM on November 28 [1 favorite]
posted by ilikemefi at 2:52 PM on November 28 [1 favorite]
Electroswing is the big buzz right now ?
We need Jungle I’m afraid
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:55 PM on November 28 [3 favorites]
We need Jungle I’m afraid
posted by Jon Mitchell at 10:55 PM on November 28 [3 favorites]
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What matters is the cost per tonne CO2 captured. This advance, and others coming out of many labs across the world, could bring that cost down, from "fucking hell how much?" to slightly less but still entirely unrealistically high if we try to do more than trivial amounts of capture. We're talking tens of trillions of dollars.
(Then what we do with the gigatonnes of CO2 that we're apparently going to capture is the other half of the problem.)
Look, if we were willing to pay actual money to capture emissions then we'd have been willing to pay actual money to reduce emissions at the source. And we aren't. We haven't been for decades and that's not changing rapidly enough, if at all.
What we're seeing is some technological change in the sectors where it's affordable. That's basically solar, wind, and electric vehicles. Great. That's reducing emissions for those sectors. But that's delivering about a quarter of the emissions cuts that we need. Maybe faster tech innovation will make more tech affordable, and tech can then deliver a third of the emissions cuts we need, instead of a quarter.
Where does the other two thirds come from? Behaviour change, wealth redistribution, and wealth reduction. But those are politically unachievable right now.
This kind of unaffordable technological solution is on the table because some people see "unaffordable" as easier to resolve than "unachievable". Good luck to them, but we need progress on making possible both what's unaffordable and what's unachievable.
posted by happyinmotion at 12:10 AM on November 27 [53 favorites]