I love the enthusiasm of people reading this and supporting it, but something we need to understand is the scale of carbon in the atmosphere. We've released more carbon into the air than contained in all the plants alive on earth today, and we're on the path emitting more carbon than contained in all living organisms on the planet. Our climate is on the path to Miocene where temperatures were 3-4C above today's levels.
I like to imagine CO2 in solid form (dry ice) to help visualize the scale of the problem.
1) Burning a gallon of gasoline releases almost 10 kgs of CO2 into the atmosphere. Let's say the average driving American consumes 1.5 gallons of gas a day. That's almost 15 kgs of matter to deal with every day. Imagine instead of it being released as gaseous CO2, it accumulated in your car's trunk as dry ice. After a few days, what would you do with it all? Maybe you'd throw it in your basement or your backyard. After a week or two, all free space in even a large home would be totally occupied with the waste. And this is only for personal travel done by individuals. All transportation (including the transportation of goods) is less than a 3rd of U.S. CO2 emissions. If dealing with the waste of driving on an individual level is so hard, how can we possibly hope to deal with all CO2 emissions?
2) You can also do the same thought experiment with total CO2 emissions per capita, which is currently about 15.25 metric tons per year per person in the U.S. That averages out to 41 kg of CO2 per day. How could you possibly find a way to deal with 41 kg of dry ice per day.
Right now, our solution is to happily dump it into the atmosphere, which conveniently carries the CO2 away from us without us needing to worry. There really isn't a solution to this problem. It's a tragedy of the commons.
I like the idea of stacking up a lot of 1 meter cubes of pure carbon (graphite, or diamond!) into nice shapes. Each cube is just over 2 metric tons (2266 kg) of carbon, or the equivalent of 8 metric tons of carbon dioxide. 20 cubic kilometers per year is enough to get us back to pre-industrial levels in no time, and build some interesting monuments while we're at it. A roughly 4-kilometer tall pyramid, anyone? Low low price of ~4 trillion dollars each.
Casually building pyramids out of the ~57 cubic kilometers of carbon blocks would be pretty neat. Three 4 kilometer tall square based pyramids would do it.
They would also be the largest structures ever built by humanity by an order of magnitude. If we did it in Australia, we could employ the entire country twice over, and they would be the 3 new tallest mountains in Down Under (by 1,772m).
Its a wonderful image, but how do you propose sequestering the carbon? Without a powerful source of truly carbon-neutral energy, the losses incurred would simply see more carbon released downstream as a result of whatever process you choose to create such artful carbon chunks.
I still really enjoy the mental image of a post-industrial society in a few thousand years sitting on a foundation of diamond bricks. :)
Well, that's kind of down stream of what I was talking about - I am assuming that we can get to $250 per ton of direct carbon capture and then use something like a solar CO2 reduction system with a metal catalyst to strip the O2 off. But it's "merely a matter of money" at that point.
There's almost certainly some coking issues to overcome, but hey, we're already hypothetically taking on the largest industrial project of all time, roughly equivalent to all the effort spent to extract fossil fuels ever.
One thing I find particularly concerning in these plans is how people want to use them. Lots of people inevitably suggest under these posts that we just use DAC as counterbalance instead of reducing emissions. This is very much impossible as optimistic reduction scenarios still need trillions annually from every country and a no-reduction scheme would lead to hundreds upon hundreds of trillions of global DAC funding, far more than the GDP of the Earth is right now. This is the scale of the megaproject we need to undertake.
The only way we can make these things viable is massive funding and incredible carbon emissions reduction. This is very literally the largest industrial project that ever has happened, a re-terraforming of our own planet. There is absolutely no way we are going to succeed without full effort from all countries.
Honestly I don't expect it to happen. It's depressing, but I just don't think humanity collectively can take action on a scale like this without direct personal incentives, and I don't think there are any. I think we're going to drown in our waste products like yeast in a fermentation tank due to the tragedy of the commons.
With a properly designed electricity grid with interconnects to other grids and using all those idle electric cars as batteries we surely can solve this problem. The wind is always blowing somewhere, the sun is always shining somewhere, and most electric vehicles are idle at night when the sun is not shining and they could be used to smooth out the peaks and troughs. Most private vehicles are idle for more than 90% of the time.
If those were all electric with, say 50 kWh batteries they would be able to deliver an instantaneous power of something like 58 TW if the connectors could take it. But even if we assume that they are connected to only 7 kW charging points they could deliver 2 TW instantaneously. They could keep this up for an hour at the cost of losing less than 20% of a full charge.
Average US electricity consumption is about 500 GW so vehicle to grid plus an upgraded and properly interconnected grid should be able to solve the problem of intermittent generation.
I hope I haven't made a mistake in the arithmetic!
Also, we have lots of energy storage options that produce minimal amounts of waste.
Flywheels, molten salt, iron air batteries, literally dozens of alternative systems exist that are all viable and variably scalable power grid stabilization systems that can work harmoniously with renewable generation to keep electricity available to the consumer at both the individual and commercial level.
It needs a lot of financial and engineering investment to make headway, and these decisions would have to come from government leadership as otherwise there are too many cats to corral to ever make is succeed.
Sure, but if you separate the carbon from the oxygen and return the oxygen to the atmosphere you reverse the process and you’re back to, simply, having to deal with roughly the same mass of fuel as you originally burned. Which is obviously a tractable problem since you burned it in the first place.
If we had a good way to make synthetic gasoline from energy + carbon, we could have a totally carbon neutral fuel cycle where we use nuclear power to extract carbon from the air and produce synthetic gasoline.
It's monstrously inefficient to use nuclear power to create hydrocarbon fuels, truck them to petrol stations, and then burn them.
"Modern gasoline engines have a maximum thermal efficiency of more than 50%,[1] but road legal cars are only about 20% to 35% when used to power a car. In other words, even when the engine is operating at its point of maximum thermal efficiency, of the total heat energy released by the gasoline consumed, about 65-80% of total power is emitted as heat without being turned into useful work, i.e. turning the crankshaft"
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_efficiency#Gasoline_(pe...
And the heat engine efficiency limits are only one part of the problem. Extracting the CO2 from the atmosphere also costs a lot of energy.
It is more efficient and simpler to just use the existing electricity grid to charge electric vehicles.
Charging the battery itself alone might be efficient. Take your 90% efficiency as true, and assume electric motor efficiency as 90% too, now the net efficiency drops to 81%. To reach your home, there most likely at least one step-up transformer and 2 or more step-down transformers. Assuming all those transformers are super efficient with a efficiency of 90% too, then the efficiency now becomes 65.61% for two transformers scenarios, 59.049% for 3 transforms scenarios. Considering the cost of manufacturing the battery, the huge weigh of the battery(85kWh now weighs around 540kg), the overhead of the power grid as a result of staggeringly over provisioning needed: assuming charging a 85kWh battery from 0% to 100% in 1 hour, using 220V AC power, nominal current required is 85 * 1000(kW) / 220(V) = 386.36A. Assuming power factor 80%, then the required currency is 386.36/0.8=482.95A, how much is going to cost for that capacity? 1 hour might be too aggressive, let take a concession to 8 hours, then the currency required is 60.37A. Just take look at your home's fuse, how much is that rating? Let's take another concession to require only 50% charge, then the required currency is ~30.19A, which is still around 10 times normal off-peak usage or ~3 times peak hour usage. Are you seriously considering to increase the capacity of the whole power grid by 3 to 10 times just for charging the car at home to 50% juice in 8 hours?
You're making some low assumptions for efficiency there - 90% is an absolute low end efficiency for transformers under full and non-linear load. Transmission losses for the UK grid average 8% total - regardless of how many transformers are involved.
You also forgot to take into account that most cars don't drive 300+ miles every day. The average car drives (depending on country) maybe 7000 - 10,000 miles a year. That means it will either be fully charged rarely, or topped up a little bit every night. We don't have to have a grid which can charge every car in the country from empty every night, we just need a grid which can charge a small fraction them.
In fact, in the UK where the average car drives about 7000 miles a year, the overall average power requirement is something like 200 W. That's well within the capacity of our grid.
We will have to take care to limit the surge effect of every car being plugged in at 6pm - but that just means delaying the nightly top up of most cars until the early hours (or whenever electricity is available).
While not familar with how things are in the UK, I understand DNO, which is the layer of the distribution network. Which means the part from power-plant->substation->high voltage line to at least one other substation near a city, or so. That does not include middle voltage into the city, or further downstepping until it is fit for your wall socket or similar.
If it claims to, it is a political fiction like so many other. In reality transmission losses from the one virtual plant powering the grid to your wall socket range from about
50% to 60% depending on the grid and many other factors.
Seems you have more detailed info. I just checked full-load efficiencies of transformers and it turned out to vary from 95% to 98.5% and the comprehensive efficiency can actually drop below 90%. If we factor in the loss on wires, I guess my estimate of loss per transformer layer 10% should be pretty close to actual. So I'm not surprised to see a transmission loss of 50% to 60%.
10% loss was just meant for quick calc, and I did not even factor in the loss in power generation etc.
And the assumption was only 50% of the capacity, so that would drop to ~150 miles. Again, it's claimed value, how much you can actually get out of it really varies.
If you just want to get 30 miles per day, then you will need ~ 6A, which is within household circuit rating but will still double the load of the ordinary family peak.
Please don't simply use Watts to calculate AC load, it will not give you the real current demand.
Using 10% for a quick calc is fine, if you only use it once. But you then multiplied that error by 3. The resulting assumption - that the transmission losses with 3 transformers would be ~73% (0.9^3) is completely wrong, given that we know total grid transmission losses are in the order of <10%
Well, look at your calc again. Transmission loss per my calc is actually 1 - 0.9^3 = 27.1%. At grid level, high efficient part(mainly stable industry loads) will cover up low efficiency of household loads.
Then don't. Use it for producing hydrogen. Compress, liquify it, slush it. Use the surplus electricity by nuclear, fantastic fusion, whatever, to suck the carbon out of the air, and make zeolites out of it to mix it into agriculturally used grounds, cat litter, whatever.
But the details may differ. If you can generate the synthetic fuel near the energy source, let's say a wind, farm you can shift the cost of transportation from one medium to another. That opens up possibilities to optimize on a network scale. In Germany, there is a pipeline network to transport and store natural gas to many many places. That transport is happening without trucks or ships driving around, I assume there are some pumps involved. But you don't have to move overhead mass.
Depending on your definition of "good" we already have ways to make liquid fuel from CO2+energy [1]. It just that you lose something like 90% of the energy from power plant to motion. Electric cars are much more efficient.
Nice graphic, but the ideal scenario would be to find a method that strips the carbon out of the CO2. We're putting about 50 Billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year.
However, the Atomic weight of carbon is 12 whereas the Atomic weight of Oxygen is 16, and there are 2 oxygen atoms in every CO2 molecule, so 1 ton of pure sequestered carbon is 12+16+16 = 44/12 = 3 & 2/3 tons of CO2 removed from the atmosphere.
2.27 tons of carbon compacted together makes an approximately 1 meter cube.
Of course, that would mean we would have to sequester ~6 billion cubic meters (13.6 billion tons or the equivalent of 4,079 hoover dams in size, probably enough to resurface every highway and road in America 2-3 inches deep) of pure carbon every year to reach carbon neutral, and then we would need to go beyond that to begin to reverse the effects.
It would literally be the largest human undertaking in the history of the planet.
"Burning a gallon of gasoline releases almost 10 kgs of CO2 into the atmosphere"
I am not sure I understand the math here. 1 gallon of gasoline weights about 5kg, so how is that 10 kg of CO2 are released? Looks like mass will not be conserved in such a process. Am I missing something?
I haven't checked the math, but carbon from the fuel binds with oxygen from the air. CO2 consists of one carbon atom (12g/mol), two oxygen atoms (16g/mol). So, most of the weight comes from the oxygen from the air, rather than the fuel itself.
It's not a tragedy of the commons but a tragedy of markets. Markets cannot factor in these externalities. It's a known fault with market systems. And carbon taxes simply won't work for many reasons (hence why oil companies are pro carbon tax).
What we need is carbon rationing. Everyone gets X amount of carbon and prices of things are both in dollars and carbon rations. The rich, who use most of the carbon will have to buy from the poor who use very little. These rations will become more expensive over time until people don't get anymore. So they will only be able to buy things that are carbon neutral/carbon free.
Well, even without a spurce, they did give one very compelling piece of evidence: oil companies support this idea. Given everything we know about them, this is already strong evidence that it will be ineffective at curtailing the oil trade, which means it will be ineffective at affecting CO2.
A recent video leak shows an oil company lobbiest saying thay they publicly support a carbon tax, because they know it won't pass because they privately tell politicians to not pass it.
1. Oil companies support carbon taxes because they know they are politically dead in the water.
2. Yellow vest movement shows that if you punish the vast population for problems elite created, you will get mass protests.
3. The tax will be miss priced because it will be set by policy. Likely won't be high enough to stop global warming.
While a carbon ration doesn't have these problems since we know what the carbon budget is. Once it's spent it's spent and provides the right incentive. Instead of punishing regular people with a tax, it rewards people who use less carbon by giving them an asset. Since the vast majority of people use very little carbon if you divide up the the carbon budget evenly, you suddenly have a method to lower inequality and provide the right incentives for industry to move to a zero carbon world because when the rations are expired, they won't be able to have a business.
Carbon taxes simply have too many flaws and bad incentives and don't address the underlying problem, that we have a limited resource (carbon budget).
>What we need is carbon rationing. Everyone gets X amount of carbon and prices of things are both in dollars and carbon rations. The rich, who use most of the carbon will have to buy from the poor who use very little. These rations will become more expensive over time until people don't get anymore. So they will only be able to buy things that are carbon neutral/carbon free.
When you talk about "carbon rations," are you referring just to fossil fuels and petroleum-based products? Or are you referring to everything that contains carbon?
Given that life here is just brimming with carbon (we are, after all, carbon-based life), does that "carbon ration" include food? Pets? Yeast?
I'm not being snarky here, but it's not clear to me what exactly you mean. If you'd expand on that, it would be much appreciated.
Gawking at the enormity of the challenge and ultimately never doing anything isn't acceptable though.
I'm not saying that's all you're suggesting, and realism is certainly a requirement for working out what we actually need to achieve here, but this enthusiasm is essential. We need it to drive policy in the face of economic penalty and limiting nutritional choice. We need the enthusiasm if we want to be able to tell our kids (and theirs) that we actually tried.
It's a balance. "I love the enthusiasm but" might be accurate, but as-is, serves to smother that spark of hope that we need from everybody right now. Don't give up completely on our species.
Capturing CO₂ from typical atmosphere is a very difficult problem, and it's a big problem too. Talking about that distracts from a problem that's much smaller and more accessible, namely capturing CO₂ from the parts of the atmosphere where there's very much CO₂.
The photo shows a number of pipelines that guide CO₂ up and release it. Capturing it at the top of the photo, in the open air, is very much more difficult and expensive than capturing it near the middle, in those big vertical things.
If you start thinking about how to capture it in the middle of the photo, you very quickly also consider other ways of achieving the same goal at the same site. Capturing CO₂ is damned expensive compared to those other ways, and the discussion is a distraction.
IMO capturing old CO₂ is necessary (as the article says) but when discussed it's usually contrasted to current emissions rather than old emissions, and it's hopelessly inefficient compared to current emissions. We can't go back in time and avoid old emissions, so avoiding capture isn't IMO possible. For the time being it's irrelevant because there current level of emissions (the highest of all time) presents us with very much to do that's both simpler and cheaper.
FYI, there probably aren't coal stacks aren't visible in that photo. Or if they are they aren't obvious. What it is showcasing is the cooling towers (ie, water vapour). There is a reason that there is a large lake in the frame. It isn't decorative or accidental.
The coal stacks are likely to be much thinner and the gasses less visible.
Stop pumping C02 into the atmosphere and massive reforestation (not directly for binding C02 but to give moisture into the air which gives other plants a chance to grow for them self's and strengthen the ground)...in short, try to reinstate nature as it was, because we little humans cannot do what nature did for millions of years (washing and binding C02 out the atmosphere and into the ground).
The point is on "millions" of years. We really went too far and there is nothing we can do to "revers" it, for the first time in ~100 years humans will have to adapt to nature and not the other way around.
That part that is taking time to get out and have people understand is that we can't do a thing about it. Some of the proposals out there are flat-out crazy. The very article you posted has a line that is just plain insane: "This means that to avoid disaster, we must confront capitalism." Sorry, that's a complete joke.
Here's the plain and simple truth: If all of humanity left the planet next week, and we took all of our technology and capitalism with us. In other words, Captain Kirk beams all of us up into somewhere in space. Even if we did that, it would still take somewhere in the order of 50K to 100K years for a 100 ppm drop in atmospheric CO2.
It is sad to see just how political climate change has become. The data is out there. The studies are out there. The understanding is out there. We need to stop talking about magically capturing CO2 out of the atmosphere and start talking about adaptation. That is the only thing we can do.
Switch our entire economy to renewable energy?
No. That won't fix it. It won't even slow it down.
Switch the entire world economy to the most optimal --yet to be invented-- forms of renewables?
Nope. That won't fix it.
In fact, we already know that, even if we were able to do it, not only would atmospheric CO2 concentration not drop, it would continue to rise.
We need to start having conversations about the truth, not the fantasy du jour, which is the endless loop we seem to be locked into. I get why, it has political value. The ignorant masses are driven into a self-righteous state where support for fantasy merchants actually feels like they are "saving the planet". The entire thing is a silly fantasy. Sorry.
I have written about this on HN before, complete with sources and data. If interested you can find my comments on multiple threads.
As you say, most fail to recognize the scale of the problem. It's a planetary scale issue. Fixing it would require more energy and resources than we could possibly imagine --we might not even have enough on the planet. Even worse, deploying such "solutions" at the scale (energy, materials, etc.) necessary to affect change on a human timeline (decades rather than tens of thousands of years) is far more likely to kill everything on earth than to save the planet. We really, truly, need to stop with this fantasy and come back to a manageable reality. Urgently. This is getting silly.
Basic concept:
In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it.
Basic physics. From that principle there's only one possibly conclusion when it comes to climate change: We can't do a damn thing about it.
I firmly agree that we've crossed several tipping points and that adaptation is a large and necessary part of our response. You seem to ignore that there are degrees of badness here, though!
Limiting warming to 2 or 3 degrees C is going to result in a situation that's a heck of a lot better than what 6 or 7 degrees C looks like. When asked if we should adapt or spend money on renewables/carbon capture/etc, the answer should be "Yes". We should be doing all of these things.
> You seem to ignore that there are degrees of badness here, though!
No, I am not doing that. I devoted a little over a year to taking a deep dive into this subject. I really wanted to understand. This was a few years ago, when I started to get this feeling that climate change was becoming a religion. It quickly became obvious that both non-believers and zealots are nothing less than delusional. Nobody devotes one iota of work and effort towards understanding the subject and everyone jumps on their respective bandwagon.
If you study that data --very reliable data going back 800,000 years--, do a little analysis, and read just a few documents, it becomes very obvious that we can't stop it and we sure as heck can't slow it down.
That DOES NOT mean it will not regulate. The planet is far more powerful than we could ever hope to be. The way our planet regulates CO2 is through weather events. That's the first reality we need to understand and accept. We are going to have lots more hurricanes, rains, cyclones, etc.
Every time I post about this people respond with negative comments and not one person bothers to look at the data and documents. I have had this conversation with people with advanced degrees in science over the last several years. Not one person has come back with a scientifically sound dismissal of my hypothesis. It goes as follows:
We know, from ice core atmospheric sample data going back 800K years, without a shadow of a doubt, how the planet behaves without humanity around.
The rate of change of atmospheric CO2 without humanity around (or when we were a rounding error in the planetary context) is about 100 ppm in 50K to 100K years. For easy numbers, let's call it 1,000 years/1 ppm.
It's a simple matter to fit lines to the up and down slopes and get a rough measurement of what I call the natural rate of change. That is, the rate of change with humanity being insignificant.
That rate of change is the baseline from which anything else has to be measured. Examples:
"Let's shut down the entire United States and move to Mars"
Nope, won't work. That is not better than if humanity left the entire planet, which would give us 1 ppm every thousand years.
"Let's cover the entire ecuatorial band with solar panels and have wind turbines everywhere we can put them"
No, again, how is that better than all of humanity leaving the planet?
"Let's build huge filters and suck the CO2 out of the atmosphere in every city"
Nope. First of all, building something like that at a scale sufficiently large to actually make any kind of an impact on a shortened time scale (50 to 100 years) would require resources to build, operate and maintain the systems of an unimaginable scale. Just the processing and transportation of the construction materials to build the thing on every major city on this planet would likely emit more CO2 than the system could ever consume. And then you have to power it. No, solar won't do it.
And then, on top of that, all seven-going-on-eight billion of us are still on the planet, which means that we can't do better than the baseline 1K years for 1 ppm reduction.
"Let's use magic dust to seed the ocean and capture CO2"
I don't even want to imagine the disaster and CO2 contribution just mining, transporting and deploying this stuff would entail. We are far more likely to kill everything in the ocean than to fix a darn thing with the atmosphere.
And, once more, billions of us would still be here, which means we can't do any better than the baseline.
Here's the easiest-to-read paper I found on this. In fact, back in 2014-ish, when I read it, this is the document that launched me into a year-long deep dive into this subject. I always give credit to the authors. They were full-on believers on saving the planet with renewables and set out to, once and for all, prove it. They say so in the paper. What they discovered was precisely the opposite, and, as good scientists do, accepted the failure of their hypothesis and published the result. In this charged political environment this took huge balls.
To paraphrase: Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of renewables, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2, it will continue to rise exponentially.
This paper stopped at that conclusion (because it was the answer to the hypothesis they were trying to prove). I wish they had continued or done another paper evaluating the reality of controlling CO2 through any other means. The conclusion would have been the same.
Thankfully a group out of Germany asked that question and published results about a year later (2015):
"Scientists from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany say that if we were to remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate of 2.5 times that of the current annual emissions, oceans would not recover to a low-emission state by 2700."
And that is a best case scenario. In reality, anyone who has ever done real work of any kind in the real world knows that these estimates are, at best, optimistic and in most cases a complete fantasy. It is useful to have a number of some kind just to get a sense of proportion. The 700 year estimate means "not measured in a scale corresponding to a human lifetime". Generations. And, if we go back to the baseline I introduced, the real number, with all of humanity still around and growing, the real number is in the high tens of thousands of years.
I know I am going to get pounded on any time I post this. The vast majority of people who believe or do not believe have done near zero work to actually understand the subject, they take the conclusions from whatever side of the argument they like and go with it. That's OK. I am one who decided to stop regurgitating what I was being told and actually go out and try to confirm it first. If I just make a few people take that scientifically necessary path of skepticism and do the work, mission accomplished.
Yes, we have to clean-up our act. No, we are not going to save the planet. There are plenty of reasons for which we should clean-up our act. And, yes, climate change is real. And, yes, of course, we made a significant contribution to the problem. We just need to stop pushing fantasies and address reality.
What do you think about off-planet solutions (like space mirrors, etc)? Dealing with temperature regulation would mitigate a lot of negative effects of hight CO2.
No opinion at this point other than a sense that, if we did the math, we might very well discover that we would burn so much fuel and produce so much CO2 in manufacturing and transporting everything we might need (and then launch it) that it could be a complete non-starter.
What really worries me about some of these ideas is that they could go horribly wrong. We are talking about changing the fundamental energy equation for an entire planet. We can't even control the ecological effects of our technology at the local level and we are actually convincing ourselves we can hit the mark with a planetary scale process? This is scary.
So...having actually worked for companies in aerospace making rockets that leave the planet...
The cost per kilogram to orbit today is likely around $2000. That same kilogram landing on the moon (I also worked on a device that will get to the moon's surface in a future Artemis mission and dealt with all the lander companies) is somewhere in the two million USD range.
And asteroid? And mining equipment? Well, it will be a lot more than that. 10x? 100x? No clue.
Let's assume the cost is the same. Lets' further assume we need, say, 50,000 kg in equipment, supplies and fuel/energy to get there, mine and bring it back.
At $2MM per kg this would mean a one-way trip cost of $100 billion dollars. Round trip? Let's call it $200 billion. My guess is that might bring back somewhere between 500 and 1,000 kg of whatever was mined.
This is all hypothetical, of course. Just having fun.
Let's say we mine gold. Current value per kg is about $60K. So, a thousand kilograms of gold brought back from an asteroid would yield $60 million dollars. That would represent a loss of $199,940,000,000 dollars.
Diamonds? They are worth about 1,000x more than gold per weight. That still represents a loss of $140 billion.
The same is the story with fabrication in space. Getting tools, equipment, energy production means and raw materials there and back cost tons of cash (literally). If it can be done in low orbit it's much more manageable, still tons of cash though. Try to move farther away from earth and costs go exponential very quickly.
Asteroid mining is one of those neat concepts that people keep talking about over the years. Fun and interesting, of course. I just don't see it ever making financial sense.
Minion on mars to build stuff on mars is a different matter. Well, it will still cost tons of cash to get everything there, but at least you don't have to bring it back!
That would be (if at all) for the first mission only. The 'bootstrap'. And in-situ utilizing the shit out of anything available to build as much as possible of the equipment up there. And why would I care about the money? That's just a few wars, peanuts so to speak. By stopping that shit alone you'd burn way less carbon! See? Wheee!
Anyways, read the book I suggested and see if it changes your assumptions, or not.
edit: Btw. nobody needs gold from space. Maybe infrastructure needs gold in space. Be it for reflectors, wires, chips... don't know. Don't care about your experience either, because that tends to lead to institutional blindness and inability to think 'out of the box'.
> Don't care about your experience either, because that tends to lead to institutional blindness and inability to think 'out of the box'
Very funny.
Hey, if you ever need surgery, repeat the above to your experienced surgeon and ask that they bring over some dumb-shit with a two year old degree who can thing out of the box. Sit back. Relax. Enjoy.
Not really, not when you consider the entire process.
Also, I did not say "turn CO2 back into hydrocarbons", that would be preposterous. No, it would take an unimaginable amount of energy to go out and take it out of the atmosphere and turn it into anything of any form.
The super simplistic example I use is: Take a bag of flour and let your building air conditioning system spread the dust all over the building. Now go pick up every single particle you released. And no, you can't open the windows and let outside wind clear out most of it. It's a closed building.
This is not a perfect analog, it is just an illustration of how it is very easy to create a mess and many, many times harder to clean it up.
>> In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it.
>> Basic physics. From that principle there's only one possibly conclusion when it comes to climate change: We can't do a damn thing about it.
I agree that the climate crisis is grim and that geoengineering is not a cure all. I do not think your reasoning makes much sense. Say it takes 100x as much energy to capture C02 as to create it. If the energy it takes does not warm the atmosphere it is not a problem. For example, if solar energy was removed to C02 it would not contribute to the warming of the planet either by directly releasing heat or a greenhouse gas.
That's a perfectly good "had wavy" argument. However, once you start attaching numbers to such a thing you will quickly discover reality is not as nice and clean as writing two lines of text.
There's nothing grim about climate change reality. We just have to accept it, clean up our act to the extent possible and adapt. The planet has survived billions of years. We are insignificant. We either pretend we can fix it (which is a mistake) or understand that the planet can make us disappear in an instant.
I mean, look at this pandemic. Had we not developed vaccines so quickly it would have been perfectly plausible for half the population of this plante to perish. Thinking we can control things at a planetary scale is pure ignorant hubris. We cannot. And we stand a far greater chance of killing everything on earth than to save the planet. The planet does not need saving.
> We really, truly, need to stop with this fantasy and come back to a manageable reality. Urgently. This is getting silly.
You're truly living in a fantasy world if you imagine it's possible to keep the current rate of CO2 production and just adapt to the effects in the long term.
We first need to transition the economy to renewables, drastically reduce production and consumption of many goods, get rid of the incentive structures that have kept things in this state. We could then hope to reach 0 emissions, which would mean maybe 2-4 degrees of warming. Catastrophic, but not world ending. To live in this world, we will indeed have to start looking at adaptation.
If we do it your way, with no reduction in emissions, bit focusing on adaptation, we'll be looking at 6-10 degrees of warming, which there would definitely be no adapting around.
Back in 2014-ish, when I read it, this is the document that launched me into a year-long deep dive into this subject. I always give credit to the authors. They were full-on believers on saving the planet with renewables and set out to, once and for all, prove it. They say so in the paper. What they discovered was precisely the opposite, and, as good scientists do, accepted the failure of their hypothesis and published the result. In this charged political environment this took huge balls.
The conclusion, paraphrasing:
Even if we deploy the most optimal forms of renewables, not only will we not stop atmospheric CO2, it will continue to rise exponentially.
> We could then hope to reach 0 emissions
No, we cannot. That is a fantasy.
For starters, we consume about 35 billion barrels of oil per year, nearly 100 million per day. Our very lives are so dependent on this stuff that we are not going to dent this level of consumption. Even if we cut it in half, this will not slow down atmospheric CO2 contributions enough.
And, not, a conversion to electric transportation will not make this happen. There are 1.5 billion vehicles in the world. Replacing that entire fleet with electric powered vehicles will likely take somewhere in the order of 50 years, if even possible. We also have to manufacture 1.5 new electric vehicles to replace them, which means producing massive amounts of CO2 and consuming equally massive amounts of resources.
And then we have to CHARGE 1.5 billion vehicles per day, every day, all around the world. The global power generation system cannot handle this. In the US alone we would need somewhere in the order of one hundred giga-watt class nuclear power plants just to be able to deliver the kind of power (not energy, power is the problem) we would need to handle our entire fleet going electric. Even if I am off by 75%, we need 25 new nuclear power plants, along with changes to our power distribution infrastructure to be able to handle it all. We did not build an infrastructure that has a 100% excess generation and transportation capacity. Most power plants operate very close to full capacity.
And then there's the reality of what would happen if we reached 0 emissions (again, impossible, we have forest fires that release more CO2 in a few weeks than the entire fleet of automobiles in the US).
Let's say for a moment that we could actually reach zero emissions world wide. You do understand that if it is only the US or the US and Europe it is pointless, right? You do understand that seven billion people cooking food every day by burning something will produce a massive amount of CO2, right? Analyze any process, making clothes, preparing food, transporting and processing our excrement in towns and cities, you will quickly discover zero emissions is an absolute fantasy.
Let's ignore all of that reality and actually believe we can get to zero emission world wide. The entirety of humanity, zero emissions. Like we do not exist.
Do we actually know what will happen if we could achieve this fantasy?
These are atmospheric composition records extracted from ice core samples going back 800K years. In other words, we have good reliable and accurate data of a scenario, hundreds of thousands of years in duration, when humanity was "zero emissions" due to either being insignificant or not actually existing as we do today (7 billion people and our toys).
What does this data say?
It says that, if we did achieve zero emissions it would take about 100,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction in atmospheric CO2 concentration.
That is the baseline. Zero emissions == 1,000 years for a 1 ppm drop.
Now, go back and evaluate any proposed solution from this baseline.
"Cover the entire equatorial band with solar panels?"
Nope. This would violate the zero emissions scenario, therefore creating a situation where we would not be able to achieve a 1 ppm drop in a thousand years.
"Convert the entire transportation fleet to electricity?"
Nope. We would contribute even more CO2 and it would take somewhere in the order of 50 years. We would need to build thousands of new power generation plants. And, of course, there is no way to predict what the population of our planet would be, we are at seven billion today. Eight billion? Nine? Ten? More cooking. More clothing. More housing. More food. More everything. More CO2.
It does not take an advanced degree in math and physics to look at this and quickly understand the entire thing is a huge fantasy. This does not mean climate change is not real. It is very real. And this does not mean we should clean-up our act. We should. Yet not for some religious blind belief that we are going to save the planet. We cannot. And, if we act on some of the nonsense being pushed around we are bound to do more harm than good. Climate change has become a horrifically powerful political tool because both believers and zealots are following their "leader" blindly off the cliff. There's delusion on both ends of the scale. Some of us are in the middle saying "No! Stop! This is crazy!". Our voices, for the most part, are being drowned out by the delusion. I can only hope someone listens.
As other already pointed out, Earth isn't a closed system! That fundamental misunderstanding of you invalidates your whole reasoning.
About 173,000 TW of energy strikes earth continuously. We have all the technology and we have all the resources we need to rapidly limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels and to start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
The only thing that is lacking is political will. This is our great tragedy.
> About 173,000 TW of energy strikes earth continuously. We have all the technology and we have all the resources we need to rapidly limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels and to start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.
No, we don't. Great sounding assertion, no analysis whatsoever.
And then do this math. Let's use your number, "173,000 TW of energy" coming into our blue marble in space.
BTW, the Watt is a unit of POWER, not energy. Ignoring that minor detail for a second...
How is petroleum made?
Dead plants + dead animals + dead insects + possibly other stuff + lots of solar energy + millions of years
How much energy goes into creating one gallon of oil?
n<followed by an unimaginably large number of zeros>
How was it possible for humanity to affect such a dramatic change in atmospheric CO2 concentration?
Well, we burned oil.
Why was that so effective?
Because burning one gallon of oil, to put it in simple terms, is like burning an entire chunk of a forest...and we can burn a gallon of oil much faster than the equivalent forest area would burn. In other words, we can burn the result of a massive amount of raw matter, combined with a massive amount of solar energy and millions of years to produce it, in mere seconds.
In fact, one estimate says that one gallon of gasoline (not oil, that's worse) required some 98 tons of plants to produce:
""Can you imagine loading 40 acres worth of wheat – stalks, roots and all – into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles?" asks ecologist Jeff Dukes, whose study will be published in the November issue of the journal Climatic Change.""
So, by burning one gallon of gasoline, we are burning the equivalent of some 40 acres of plant matter in roughly 20 minutes on every vehicle on earth (seat of the pants average, it's likely worse than that).
Wow! OK, how many gallons of oil do we burn per year?
Barrels. We burn about 35 BILLION barrels per year:
Going back to my "it's a closed system" observation. All we have is some amount of energy coming in and some being lost to space. No magical vacuum cleaner to help us fix anything. And we have resources, minerals, etc. under and above ground. That's it.
What you have to balance in an equation when evaluating a proposed solution is the amount of energy it took to create the materials we used to be able to release so much CO2 into the atmosphere. It will not take less energy to claw it back, in any form. It will take more. Even if we found parity and it took the same amount of energy, it would be an impossibly large number. Even if we found a magical juju bean that could do it for 1/10 the the energy, it would still be an unimaginably large number, not to mention what it would take to go mine, process, transport, deploy and clean-up the magical juju beans.
Just a little bit of thought and high school math quickly reveals we are being sold fantasy after fantasy. We can't fix this. We need to start talking about adapting. There is no Superman.
About your first link from 2014: renewable energy is already cheaper.
About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible.
Apparently I have to teach you that power is energy per unit of time, that is we have 173,000 TJ/s. And then we can do some simple calculation from energy equivalence of 35 billion barrels of oil (213,000,000 TJ) and find that corresponds to about 20 minutes of sunlight hitting Earth. Or calculating from power instead, we burn 6.75 GW of oil, or about 3e-11 of the incoming sun power. There's plenty of energy available, and nowadays sun energy is cheaper than coal. You don't even need high school math for this.
So, as you see, the "not closed system", is kind of relevant. What is irrelevant is how much plant matter that is required to produce said oil. No one, absolutely no one, has suggested that we should make new oil by burying plant matter for a long time.
Nice bit of high school math after a google search. Good job. Pointless though.
You are pointing at solar energy coming into the planet as if it were some magical juju bean that can solve all of our problems. Well, it isn't. Had you actually read the report from which you got some of this information you would know just how wrong you are in trying to reduce the entirety of reality into a single variable: Solar energy. The whole idea is preposterous.
In your attempt to look smart and convert power to energy using a google search you fail to understand the key difference between power and energy in real life.
Using a simple example: The solar array I built in the back of my house can produce a theoretical maximum of 14,000 W any given instant (power). Assuming that is true (not even close), this means I could collect a theoretical 104 kW hours of energy over eight hours (also not true). Talking about energy is pointless because we do not use energy, we use power, we use the instantaneous version of, in this case, using electrons to do some work.
If you add-up the energy production capacity of all the power plants in the US (multiply their power output by 24 hours and add them all up) you can easily believe we have enough to charge 300 million electric cars. And that would be wrong. We do not have enough POWER generating capacity to support such a fleet. The energy calculation isn't correct because you can't use it to deliver power beyond the instantaneous power delivery capacity we have. The only way this would be true is if our future electric cars sat there for 24 hours to charge.
And then there's the reality that converting solar energy to anything useful is a horribly inefficient process. My 13 kW array covers about 80 square meters. That is a theoretical 80 kW (round numbers) of solar energy. At best, with all conditions being perfect, I have generated 11 kW. My average peak over several years in operation is about 8 kW. So 10% of the energy that hits it, at the PEAK moment in the day, much worse on either side of that curve. Counting energy, when what you need is power is a fantasy.
Oher solar energy conversion processes are even worse, as an example, geothermal is about 2% efficient, at best.
Do not reduce reality to a single variable. It isn't. It is a complex multivariate problem.
> About your first link from 2014: renewable energy is already cheaper.
You probably didn't even read it. Did you? The paper has NOTHING to do with cost. It has everything to do with "can we achieve zero emissions with renewables". And that means all renewables, not just solar. The answer is a solid "no".
> About your second link: no one has claimed that we all damage already done is reversible.
No idea what you are saying. You probably didn't read that either.
No, I don’t read the old, long papers after a short glance seeing that their initial assumptions are wrong or the subject doesn’t seem to relevant. If you have a point to make, make it. Then you can cite papers if say your numbers need some backing by actual research.
I really get the feeling that you don’t understand how power relates to energy. What are you trying to say about peak power capacity and charging of cars? You do know that not all cars are driven at exactly the same time or are charged at exactly the same time?
Also, of course we need to increase our electricity production if more things, like cars, are going to be run on electricity.
The efficiency of solar panels doesn’t matter much. You remember that ratio between incoming energy and energy usage? We have a lot of zeros to take from. It doesn’t matter that the average solar panel only converts about a fifth of incoming energy, because the incoming energy is abundant and completely free. The same argument can be made about geothermal. And the same argument can be made about storing energy as hydrogen. Yes, the conversation will be inefficient, but that doesn’t matter because you do it sunny, windy days, electricity will be more or less free.
Finally, I’m sorry you think my argument is too simple. But calling it magical juju doesn’t refute it. The amount of solar radiation hitting earth is a very well established, and easy to understand, scientific fact. And if you remember, that fact was used to refute your statement that earth should be seen as a closed system. You didn’t even try to defend that statement, so I hope you never try to use it again without embarrassment.
It is a closed system. Energy in -> Energy out. No magic.
What this means is that we don't get to claim "and then a miracle occurs" when proposing a solutions. This is exactly what all so-called solutions boil down to. Including what you are talking about.
You are citing the total energy landing on a hemisphere and completely ignoring that we can't harvest even a small fraction of that. Solar energy is very, very far from free. I built a 13 kW array on my property, I can assure you it was not free. I can also assure likely produced far more CO2 than it will ever save us. This is where you need to understand manufacturing and construction. I won't even go into the shit I had to go through with the County of Los Angeles. I have 64,000 POUNDS of concrete anchoring this array to the ground --which LA County forced upon me. How much CO2 do you think it cost to produce, transport and install that? How about the non-trivial structure it is mounted on? I could go on.
This idea that solar energy is free is just plain silly.
You are refusing to read one of the most scientifically honest papers ever done on the question of whether or not solar energy (actually, all renewables combined) can stop atmospheric CO2 build-up and reverse it and you actually want to school me on having a valid argument.
And, speaking of energy vs. power. Lots of sunlight falls above and below latitudes where converting it into other usable forms of energy is just pointless. If you want to be honest about solar energy, well, you have to do the math. It isn't what you think it is. Do you even have solar?
Here's the output of my 13 kW array on an average day:
Do you see what happens? No, it isn't magical juju beans. You can't quote some theoretical number and actually believe this stuff is usable.
Besides, you could convert the entire planet to the most optimal forms of solar and wind power and you would still do nothing to stop atmospheric CO2 accumulation. Not sure why you are even arguing about solar. It's pointless.
> I really get the feeling that you don’t understand how power relates to energy. What are you trying to say about peak power capacity and charging of cars? You do know that not all cars are driven at exactly the same time or are charged at exactly the same time?
That's very funny. I have a nasty habit. I do not open my mouth unless I know what I am talking about. Which means I go way --ridiculously so-- out of my way to research things as far as necessary in order to understand and verify my claims. In the case of cars charging in the US, I actually developed a mathematical model that included behavioral elements and charging cars across our various time zones.
This, for example, is one of the outputs of the analysis:
This includes considering such things as a portion of the fleet fast-charging while others slow charge. I considers the effect of people going to work and coming home at different times across our six time zones, etc. I am not typing stuff I pull out of my ass my friend. You can either make the effort to understand and attempt to do your own math or just ignore it and believe whatever you might wish.
The only thing that would be better than this model would be to write more complex behavioral simulation code and take into account far more variables than I did. I'll do that one day when I have the time. I don't think the end-result will be radically different from the simpler model.
Like I said, unlike most people, I go very far towards actually understanding things before I open my mouth.
Back to my nasty habit. I said I do not open my mouth unless I know what I am talking about and I do enough research to confirm it. This also means I am constantly checking my assumptions.
Back to energy and electric vehicles. I told you that my models predicted a requirement for a massive increase in energy generation capacity to be able to go to full electric vehicles. I then shared an image from one of my simulation model run calculations. This one:
It shows a "new energy" need in the range of roughly 900 to 1,400 GW. Unimaginable. Right? That's over a thousand 1 GW class nuclear power plants.
I am delusional. Right?
Well, I decided to, once again, check my assumptions and math. They make sense to me. And then, looking around some more, I came across this from earlier this year:
Here you have Elon Musk saying (paraphrasing) "If we convert all of our transportation to electric, electricity demand more than doubles". He goes on to explain that it isn't just about generation, it is, as I said, about transportation as well (which really means it is about POWER, not energy).
So, what does "more than doubles" mean?
Well, let's start with what our current energy generation capacity is in the US:
Elon's "more than doubles" means we need more than 1,200 GW in new energy generation capacity. Interestingly enough, my model gave a range of between 900 GW and 1,400 GW. I created these models about five years ago.
We don't get to use all the solar energy landing on the planet. Not even close.
Why?
Because, if you did, you would kill every single forest and all of agriculture. You would kill every single animal. You would likely kill the oceans. You might kill bacteria, insects and seriously disrupt weather. I can't even think about all the variables that would be deeply disturbed if humanity decided we are going to attempt to use a big chunk of what solar energy lands on the planet.
And blocking it from space? Seriously? Again, refer to the prior paragraph, let's go ahead and kill everything on earth.
These ideas might sound good after a beer or two but are nothing less than laughable once someone sits down and really puts pen to paper.
We are proposing to mess with forces we can't possibly understand. I have said this many times, we can't even take care of small-scale ecosystems and we are actually lending credence to nut-cases suggesting such things as deploying devices in space to block the sun. Wonderful.
"In a closed system, you can't reverse something by using less energy than that which went into creating it."
You can do it elsewhere, though. And by different means.
Sahara is really big, really empty and has a lot of sunlight. If we had some at least semiefficient method of dumping carbon from the air back to solid form using electricity, the whole mankind could pay Niger or Chad or Libya or Algeria to rent 100 000 sqkm of dry desert, build a huge solar power station there and bury the resulting carbon mass in large, kilometer-deep trenches covered by stone and sand.
This further proves my point. People never bother to even attempt to do the math. People "know" the truth and "believe" in climate change and "solutions", yet nobody seems to have any interest in actually confirming what they are being told.
It's as bad as anti-vaxxers believing the government is installing tiny remote control radios in vaccines to control our minds. It really is that crazy, if not more.
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sources: https://mobile.twitter.com/RARohde/status/144389061943324672... https://medium.com/climate-conscious/cogs-in-the-climate-mac...