We do. But it's so much easier to not pump carbon up, than to use tons of energy to put carbon back in the ground. Even if you'd use carbon free energy, for a long time coming that energy can offset existing fossil energy...
It's not about what's easier, and it's not an either/or proposal. Atmospheric CO2 is currently around 419ppm. Even if we cut our CO2 emissions to zero tomorrow, we still have 419ppm. The temperature might stop going up, but it's not going to go back down unless we get greenhouse gasses out of the atmosphere.
Most importantly, it's not certain that runaway warming can't happen even at our current temperature. Methane is being released from permafrost at our current levels of warming and is 20x as potent a greenhouse gas as CO2. Also, our natural carbon sinks (the ocean, macroalgae, forests, soil) are in decline whether or not we stop emitting CO2 - so CO2 may keep going up anyway as we lose biomass.
And let's be honest with ourselves here, we're not cutting emissions to 0 tomorrow. Or next year. Or by 2030. Or by 2050 most likely.
We have to reduce emissions, at a level that seems inconceivable. We ALSO have to pull CO2 back out, again, at a level that seems inconceivable. The ability to scale up CO2 removal to a planetary scale requires that we accelerate development right now.
I wonder if atmospheric CO2 increase is correlated with the massive reduction in insect biomass we've seen. If so, would it be possible for us to reverse if we decrease insecticides and allow insect population regrowth.
> I wonder if atmospheric CO2 increase is correlated with the massive reduction in insect biomass we've seen.
A byproduct of increased atmospheric CO2 levels is an increase in vegetative growth. My naive assumption is that more plant mass means more food and habitat for insects.
This is not true and is based on the naive assumption that more CO2 means more food for plants. Far more important for plants and biomes in general is the climate. Plants might have more CO2 making it more available for sugar production, but this leads to plants creating more sugars but less nutrient rich. Getting back to the climate, plants can only grow if their climates are hospitable to them, but look at the wildfires in California and the Taiga. Trees can't grow there like they used to because the climate has shifted rapidly and are no longer the right conditions, they're too dry and turning into grasslands and deserts.
We've created a world that is vastly different in climate than what came before. This is the problem with the climate crisis in general, all our ecosystems are in the wrong places
look at the wildfires in California and the Taiga. Trees can't grow there like they used to because the climate has shifted rapidly and are no longer the right conditions
Can't speak to Taiga, but trees are growing just fine in California. Overgrowth of trees creating fuel for fires is as much a problem as anything.
We’re going to need as much carbon neutral energy as possible no matter what. (If only we had somehow invented an extremely plentiful, carbon-neutral energy source in the 1940’s, we might not be in this mess right now….)
Once you get to the hardest marginal cases, I’m not actually sure what the most efficient way of offsetting the carbon emissions of airplanes is. It might actually be more efficient to just capture and sequester enough CO2 to offset the emissions of jet engines than to find a new energy source that works on airplanes.
Planes can run off of biodiesel made from oil extracted from algae or waste vegetable oil. The remaining carbohydrates in the algae can be turned into ethyl alcohol by yeast, or Acetone/Butanol/Ethanol by the ABE fermentation cycle and the protein can be used for animal consumption, or anaerobic respiration into methane. All of these are suitable fuel sources.
I agree with this to some extent, but at the same time it seems like so long as there exists carbon in the volatile format of fossil fuels, someone or something will eventually find it expedient to burn it.
Hell, it's not beyond the realm of possibility that certain superpowers (namely Russia) decide that climate change is actually in their long term interest, as it devastates regions near the equator and opens up currently difficult to tap resources in their own.
Slowing down carbon emission is definitely worth pursuing as much as possible, if for no other reason than it buys us time to solve the problem. But I doubt we'll ever get to a safe steady state until all the fossil fuel has been converted into a format that can't be burned.
> I agree with this to some extent, but at the same time it seems like so long as there exists carbon in the volatile format of fossil fuels, someone or something will eventually find it expedient to burn it.
wouldn't it be cheaper to buy fossil fuels on the open market, somehow convert it to a non-harmful form (eg. pure carbon) and then dump it in the ocean?
IDK. Maybe someone more in tune with the physics and chemistry can chime in, but I'd imagine you have to release the energy stored in the chemical bonds in some way before you can convert the carbon to a more stable form.
The simple answer might be that you'd still have to burn it, but immediately convert the exhaust to a stable solid. I'm unaware if this conversion can be done with less energy than can be extracted from burning it.
Yeah, carbon capture can be done with less energy, see BECCS for an example (where people grow trees/grasses to capture carbon from the air, then burn it for energy, and capture the CO2 for immediate sequestration).
If there's still demand then the market will spur more development and exploration. It turns there's a lot of oil in the world, the fracking revolution in the US proved that. It would take $Ts to make a dent. And it wouldn't even work, as most oil reserves are held by national governments, who would thank you for raising the price of oil.
But let's suppose you did spend $Ts to shut in specific wells. You've spend all that money and gotten no economic benefit, except for other fossil fuel producers. If you had instead spent those $Ts on encouraging the deployment of fossil fuel free transportation and industrial processes you would destroy demand for that oil and (hopefully) leave it in the ground because its not economic to take it out.
Yeah, makes sense. In fact I don't care much if oil is taken out or not.
I just came up with a funny scheme. Each person submits a bid saying "I'd like to receive X dollars per 1MT increase in net daily emissions, and I'm willing to pay the same sum per 1MT decrease". The tricky part is paying for second derivative: not CO2 concentration, not emissions, but change in emissions. Then as the emissions actually happen, they get tallied up by the government, an average "price per 1MT increase" gets determined, and emitters are forced to pay that price, so everyone gets paid (or pays) exactly as they asked. If carbon capture also happens, then carbon capture companies also get paid, either by emitters if there's a net increase, or from people's stated bids if there's a net decrease.
This seems weird at first, what if everyone submits million-dollar bids? Well, then emitters reduce emissions for a short time and take everyone's money. On the other hand, what if everyone submits zero? Then emitters keep increasing emissions, and everyone misses out on being paid. So there's some optimal bid in between. Anyone who wants emissions to go down just submits a larger bid.
For now, it's true that we should focus on low hanging fruits like energy production and transportation. For them, we know what to do and some of them already have viable technologies. Perhaps we can achieve 80~90% of the goal by focusing on carbon reduction specifically optimized for those industries.
But what do we do next when we're running out of these low hanging goals? It's more of death by a thousand cuts spanning across every industries you can ever imagine. And we've had a long, hard time to make politics work even on a very few number of those obvious low hanging fruits and it's still dysfunctional... Political will is a limited resource and we cannot really waste them on efforts with negligible impacts.
This is why we need to prepare more general and economically scalable solutions that directly deal with carbon emission itself. Keep in mind that we're not trying to handle all of carbon emission problems with carbon capture. It's more of an auxiliary one on top of highly optimized carbon reduction solutions.
> But what do we do next when we're running out of these low hanging goals?
Housing insulation retrofits next, and then metro-area roading and zoning reform to heavily encourage walking, with neighborhood shops, cafes, and communal spaces every few streets, and public transport to get between neighborhoods.
The first hangs lower than restructuring built-up areas, true. The second has great public health benefits though.
But I agree about political will. The political way to deal with climate change is not in policy documents, it's to produce policy documents.
