Its Not that hard to understand. Since the industrial revolution we’ve taken energy out of a system that, as a pollutant, generated CO2.
If you want to remove the excess CO2 we generated we’ll have to put back at least the same amount of energy to reverse that process. Adding in typical losses like heat, you can triple or quadruple that.
So let’s say we need four time the energy that humanity had generated since the industrial revolution to get co2 back to pre industrial levels. Great. ALL this energy must come from non CO2 sources like solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, because of not you’re just spending 100 units of CO2 to capture 30…
This already means that currently, carbon capture is a bad idea. Any energy spent on that is energy that generated more CO2 than it will capture and even if it is renewable, or nuclear, it would be better spent on something else and that something else would still spend 100 units CO2 for the 30 you capture.
So this means that step one, before really starting to capture CO2, is getting ALL of your energy generation where possible (airplanes, for example, cannot go electrical). We’re not even at step 0.1, honestly.
We need to get rid of all fossil fuel cars, trucks and power plants before we can even start thinking about fixing this and we’re literally a sliver in that direction, currently.
So can we please PLEASE start with this damn conversion already?
There actually is a much easier way with enhanced weathering. Igneous rocks naturally carbonate as they weather, and pull CO2 out of the atmosphere to make carbonates. This is why when you have a mountain building event it causes global cooling. So what you need to do is expose more igneous rock surface area to the atmosphere by grinding it up and spreading it out. This also costs energy but not nearly as much as carbon capture, and it’s also slower. But we know it works, and there are several pilot studies trying it.
The problem is capitalism. There’s no room for a zero-profit process in the economic system that everyone accepts as necessary. It has to somehow enrich the investor class.
Its Not that hard to understand. Since the industrial revolution we’ve taken energy out of a system that, as a pollutant, generated CO2.
If you want to remove the excess CO2 we generated we’ll have to put back at least the same amount of energy to reverse that process. Adding in typical losses like heat, you can triple or quadruple that.
So let’s say we need four time the energy that humanity had generated since the industrial revolution to get co2 back to pre industrial levels. Great. ALL this energy must come from non CO2 sources like solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, because of not you’re just spending 100 units of CO2 to capture 30…
This already means that currently, carbon capture is a bad idea. Any energy spent on that is energy that generated more CO2 than it will capture and even if it is renewable, or nuclear, it would be better spent on something else and that something else would still spend 100 units CO2 for the 30 you capture.
So this means that step one, before really starting to capture CO2, is getting ALL of your energy generation where possible (airplanes, for example, cannot go electrical). We’re not even at step 0.1, honestly.
We need to get rid of all fossil fuel cars, trucks and power plants before we can even start thinking about fixing this and we’re literally a sliver in that direction, currently.
So can we please PLEASE start with this damn conversion already?
There actually is a much easier way with enhanced weathering. Igneous rocks naturally carbonate as they weather, and pull CO2 out of the atmosphere to make carbonates. This is why when you have a mountain building event it causes global cooling. So what you need to do is expose more igneous rock surface area to the atmosphere by grinding it up and spreading it out. This also costs energy but not nearly as much as carbon capture, and it’s also slower. But we know it works, and there are several pilot studies trying it.
The problem is capitalism. There’s no room for a zero-profit process in the economic system that everyone accepts as necessary. It has to somehow enrich the investor class.