If only there were a Kingdom whom we could engage, one that naturally and enthusiastically removes carbon dioxide from the air. There must be an answer, maybe if we plant a seed, metaphorically speaking, a long standing solution will grow to fruition.
That sounds like a lot of work though
That’s the nifty part, members of the Plant Kingdom do all the heavy lifting on this. We just need to assist a bit.
that’s the neat part, we don’t even need to assist just get out of the way. and that’s going to happen sooner than later.
Oh! I know how to do that!
*dies*
They’re now using these with drones instead of cargo jets. The drones can plant 100k trees a day!
The tricky part is keeping the carbon in the plants. My grass clippings will decompose back into CO2 if you just dump it in a pile. A better option would be to dehydrate the clippings and bury it in a cave or something.
I also understand that there would be better plants than grass as well.
Shit, (literally) we can get members of the animal kingdom to do most of the medium lifting too.
Sounds like a great idea. Good thing there’s no money in “harvesting” said hypotheticals.
Expensive is the wrong word here, most of these calculations are not about money, but energy, they are about doing stupid things like using power from burning coal to collect CO2 emitted from it…at a net waste of energy. It literally emits more CO2 than doing nothing (unless all your energy and factories producing solar panels and wind turbines and cars and infrastructure already run on green energy). It is only good for greenwashing in the near to medium future.
It also doesn’t work.
Trees do it.
Plant more trees.
I’m all for more trees but they eventually decompose and release their captured CO2. Combine it with BECCS and it could actually net in reduced CO2 over the course of centuries. We’ll need a myriad of solutions, unfortunately a lot of capture methods are greenwashing bs.
Yeh, but then the Oligarchy can get the public off it’s back, regardless of the effectiveness. I am sure in a few years when things keep getting worse, they will come up with another “solution” which does not address the root cause.
So how do we fight climate change?
Not that I can really do anything, I’m just curious on how exactly we should do after killing all the rich people and using their wealth
In the US? The IRA is a very good model. Hard to overstate what a good piece of legislation it is. Doesn’t go far enough, but it makes some serious strides.
Promote electrification. Renewable energy generation is already cheaper than fossil fuel, so with minimal additional incentives the market is going to wipe out grid fossil energy production over time. Calibrate your incentives and penalties to make it happen as fast as possible – we aren’t there yet, but we’ve taken major strides.
You’ll need to do a LOT of grid enhancement in the process. As more electrification occurs, you’ll need better transmission of that electricity. A lot of the utilities have vastly miscalibrated incentive structures right now, which favor building major capital projects over doing repair and maintenance. Better regulation can fix this, though some of them are so incompetent and corrupt that they long-term probably just need to be nationalized (looking at you Central Maine Power/Versant). Re-conductoring is a good place to start for this because it’s cheap and can increase current grid capacity by something like 2-3x. Large grids with a good mix of wind/solar and dynamic pricing should be largely resistant to any intermittency issues of renewables, by some energy storage sugar on top will take care of that.
Side note: the main thing pumping the breaks on more renewable energy generation facilities is not actually a lack of demand, it’s interconnection queues.
Another prong is urbanization. You massively reduce emissions by reducing vehicle miles traveled (VMT). Good urbanism reduces VMT, creates more financially sustainable towns, and also more pleasant, safe, and healthy environments for the average person to live in. Strong Towns has a lot to say about how you can start pushing for better urbanism right now. There’s little more you can do for total emissions as an individual than helping your city avoid expensive and dehumanizing sprawl; show up to your MPC/city council meetings and advocate for good urban policy.
We can further cut back on emissions by reducing the reliance on interstate trucking for freight. Trains can (and should) be electrically-powered and are FAR cheaper for a society. Delivery “last miles” can be done by various EVs pretty easily. For the US, this pretty much requires nationalization of the right of way/track (and then, ideally, deregulation of the freight operators). That is, make the train network function a lot more like the current highway network. Bonus points: ~80% of microplastics in our water are just tire dust. Let’s do less of that.
Industrial heat is another major pillar. Places like steel and concrete plants need to switch to heat batteries powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels. This tech is ancient and reliable, but still not at scale, but at least some promising pilots are already happening. And the minute any of them work at all, they’ll take over fast. Because renewables + heat batteries ought to be a lot cheaper and more reliable than furnaces + fossil fuels once operating at scale. And the facilities will also be able to make use of aforementioned renewable intermittency to save even more money (e.g., charging their heat battles at nadir hours where energy prices go to near 0 or even negative).
We’ll also need to do some stuff that is politically sketchier. Reducing certain kinds of consumption (industrial beef, fast fashion, tariff-loophole import goods, etc). But those are higher-hanging fruit and it’s ok to procrastinate on them a bit if they’re too politically difficult right now.
Well the first step is to reduce or at least drastically eliminate the amount of CO2 that is being released in the first place. Removal of carbon from the air is necessarily going to have to be a down the road plan. It literally cannot happen to any scale if we are still relying on fossil fuels in the first place.
I’ve always thought it’d be useful to pursue just as a backstop: you set a carbon tax to whatever the cost of sucking the co2 back out is, and then you have net zero.
I guess it’d have to be introduced slowly to 1. Give them time to develop lower costs before bankrupting literally everyone and 2. Reduce the shock of painfully high carbon tax, and give everyone time to jump for cheaper alternatives. But it feels like the closest to a proper solution that I can imagine.
hey, kill the planet more because it’s too expensive not too. Sound logic…
It’s not just expensive, it also doesnt work unlesss almost all energy used world wide is carbon neutral. This is because carbon removal is the reverse of a reaction used to gain energy, so it needs higher input energy than was gained by the power plant.
It would be really great if we had fusion.
But for now, excess solar energy is interesting to dump into carbon capture, since we currently have no way to store it.
Yeah but venture capitalists can’t make money off of it if they don’t! Think of the share holders!
the problem isn’t that it’s expensive it’s that it requires us to deal with more volume than every other industry combined through history to even start to think about making a difference.
and you’ll notice it talks about the US hitting it’s climate goals … rich nations will need to do a lot of heavy lifting for the rest of the world for it to be worthwhile not just hit their own targets then say “Well, Somalia isn’t pulling it’s weight so we’re all just going to die I guess but at least we did our small part”
This is also related to the ultimate bullshit about any kind of carbon credits.
The only way it makes sense to sell a carbon credit, at least in a world paradigm (such as it is under Paris) where all nations need to get to zero, is to price those credits backwards from the last ton of CO2 you are going to remove. Because all the tons need to be removed. In the most honest, true, legitimate scenario, selling a credit is taking a loan out against yourself which will HAVE to be paid back eventually.
So the cost of a carbon credit, assuming it actually represents the thing it claims to represent (hint: they don’t), should be as expensive as it is per ton of DAC, since DAC is certainly the most expensive way to mitigate emissions.
That means they should be going at something like $500/ton or more in developed nations. Plus the interest on the loan.
In poorer nations, it’s possible that those last tons will be cheaper to remove by nature of their lower costs. Maybe that DAC facility built in Indonesia will have lower operational costs than the one you build in Norway. But in that case, selling the credits from Indonesia to Norway makes even LESS sense because now Indonesia is effectively going to have to pay for that last ton to be removed from Norway… where it’s WAY more expensive.
If we are to actually believe that carbon credits are what they purport to be, they are usury. They are colonialism. I guess we should be glad they’re just regular scams and not that, eh?
