Folks not doing right even when incentivized to do right isn't the argument against "people are never going to actually going to do right so we need to engineer our way out of the problem" that you seem to think it is.
In todays more Positive Climate News: A Company Opens World's Largest Vacuum to Suck Carbon From Atmosphere. It has is now operational.
- Thread starter thanosotitan
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Off the top of my head, freight, both air and sea, probably could be reduced or made more expensive (using so called "bio jet fuel" and probably other technologies I don't know about) which assuredly has many trickle down effects and impacts across society.
Shifting away from meat production (good old cow farts/burps) and car use as well are fundamental life choices that most people will refuse to sacrifice. Countless things that are unsustainable now because we're over producing/consuming.
Preventing emissions is another consideration entirely, and that's not what this is attempting to do. Does it cause lower net emissions? If yes, which is the answer, then it's a good thing. Getting mad at any one endeavor because "the energy is better used to reduce emissions" is a fool's errand and is an infinitely scalable, impossible-to-meet demand. That's some effective altruism nonsense that imagines some pretend utopia use case and then gets made at practical reality for not fitting that exact deployment.
Because what happens, as you hem and haw and poo-poo imperfect-but-better-than-literally-nothing, what you will get instead is: literally nothing. You will get literally nothing else better than this in this instance. Which isn't the worse thing, because as much as this isn't that pretend utopia, it's still at least, as I've been saying, an unequivocal good. A very, very, very small good, tackling a very, very, very small part of the problem, but still good. Issues with this specific effort are 100% misplaced. Unless you have a plan how a small private entity can change laws for the entire planet.
In the meantime, how does it make VCs rich? Because I can tell you, this is making no investor rich. Like, genuinely. Climate investing isn't manifesting any actual returns for investors, and won't until it starts to actually bring about the changes people in this thread are asking for.
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All the people shouting that this is a waste of time and resources need to realize that even if we cut all CO2 emissions globally right now, we'd still sail at the very least past 1.5c, probably even higher. Even just 1.5c is devastating to the world, especially to the poorer regions.
We need to actively TAKE carbon out of the atmosphere, not just stop putting more into it.
We need to at least get ideas floated around and projects like this get people brainstorming.
We need to actively TAKE carbon out of the atmosphere, not just stop putting more into it.
We need to at least get ideas floated around and projects like this get people brainstorming.
Or,you know, use the geothermal energy on things that actually matter and spend it efficiently instead of wasting it?
"There are only so many things we can put the literal power of the Earth to use doing at once. This project is taking this clearly limited resource away from better projects such as <blank>"
It doesn't cause lower net emissions because, once again, all that energy from geothermal could have gone to actual efficient uses. Carbon capture is only ever going to make sense when the world's energy comes 100% from renewable sources.
im confused on how you are struggling to think of projects when the whole world needs energy every day. Literally any thing you can think of that requires power is a better use than this.
if that magical hypothetical scenario existed then yes, carbon capture would make sense. As it stands now though, it's a net negative that ends up with more carbon in the atmosphere in the end, not less.
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Oh, so because it's not absolutely ideal it's bad. Got it. Does this cause there to be more CO2 in the atmosphere, or less, or are you again referring to some pretend utopia scenario where things are only valid if they're absolutely 100% optimized to the greatest extent of humanity's capacity?
More, because, once again, you just wasted a gigantic amount of energy that would infinitely better used elsewhere, and that elsewhere os going to put more CO2 in the atmosphere.
"I don't know how you can't fill in the blanks for my non-specific hypothetical. If we ignore the limitations of physical distance and methods of transmission then anything is a better use. And also, as I said before, we obviously can't put the literal power of the planet upon which we live to more than one use at once."
Oh, so pretend utopia scenario where the only things that matter are things that solve everything all at once, got it.
No. Don't you understand? It just needs to be used elsewhere. Elsewhere is always better. Where elsewhere? What a silly question! Everyone knows a better elsewhere right off the top of their head. Which is why she hasn't given a single example.
Yet somehow "this giant plant has now done what putting approximately 100 buses on the road around the world would have done" is an achievement great enough to defend using the worst strawmen ever because now it might decrease the net emissions in like 0.01% when it reaches full capacity in 2050?
Well I should know better than to expect better
Does building this plant prevent anyone from putting 100 buses on the road?
Nope.
Those 100 more buses aren't on the road because no one wants to put them there.
Your options aren't "plant or more busses." It's "plant or continue to do nothing at all."
I hate people who whine about "better" when all they do is complain anytime something better isn't better enough.
It's a shame there's nothing we can do about it but cheer for a company doing something that might save a plot of land in Antarctica for a billionaire to lease for us to plant soybeans :/ even though they're willing to build that, and there's no shortage of energy on Earth but there somehow is a shortage of political action to be done :/
The Adder: "This is actually really cool 😎 now I'll paraphrase something no one said 😎"
Iceland has far more geothermal energy than they have use for, and it's not an appreciably finite resource on a human timescale. Iceland already gets 100% of its grid energy from renewables, including about 2/3rds from geothermal. It's not like they can export it elsewhere. So what should this Icelandic geothermal energy be spent on?
Gah! I forgot about elsewhere; boy is my face red. Personally, I don't know why any company spends any effort at all on "not perfect from the start". All this time and money where we knowwww that it's just so simple to solve. They forgot to hit the "perfect" button! Stupid engineers. Honestly, what really gets me annoyed is how this company also insisted all other climate efforts should completely stop and also that oil companies should drill more. I guess their global powers of persuasion work in the negative sense - they must be in cahoots with those dastardly Investors!
Bitching about something making a measurable, yet insufficient difference is certainly a much better tact and far more likely to get us those buses.
Palas: "I'm only happy when we're doing nothing and whining about nothing being done. Now let me poorly emulate The Adder's format because it clearly does its job of getting under the skin."
I mean speak for yourself? If you can't be politically involved in your city's development plan or can't be arsed to organize in your local community for one single bus line to be implemented then I can't relate. Then the best thing you'll be able to do is nothing/shilling, yeah
It's not a magical scenario. It's mandatory if we want to avoid complete civilizational collapse.
My city has a robust (for America) hybrid public transport system, thank you very much. Waiting for a bus as we speak. Furthermore, "this thing that does good thing is bad actually" isn't a normal position to hold. It is peak cyniscism for the sake of internet cool points. When you run out of actual reason, just call the other person a shill.
Internet cool points? With who? Some guys obsessed with billionaires and their endeavors? Look, Climeworks funds itself partly by selling carbon credits. This will be the primary DAC funding strategy going into the future. If you're struggling to think how this is bad because Liberal Words Said It's Good, I'll be so kind as to spell it out for you.
- If you're selling carbon credits, you're just a tax on carbon emissions. Worse: a tax that exists on a market. This means your efforts are actually actively used by corporations around the world trying to save face. It's not a hypothetical. It's a way for Microsoft, one of their biggest business partners if their site is any indication, to keep pumping just as much carbon as they do today. Which is not even neutral for two reasons:
- Carbon isn't even stored equally in the atmosphere anyway. The carbon released above a coal plant in the US will just kind of stay there for a while, more concentrated, and won't be absorbed by Mammoth;
- Global warming isn't just "more carbon = more warming". By allowing actors to chop down trees, kill phytoplankton, erode soil, promote desertification and turn cities into furnaces, you're helping them get a pass because they got closer to "zero net emissions" while climate change still gets worse. Like someone said, you need the right kind of tree for each place, but trees are inherently better because they help in many fronts. And yes, by making it just a number game you're helping corporations fuck up the environment in these less numerical ways;
- The reason why it's "plant or nothing" is because, among other things, enough attention and press is given to something capturing the equivalent of 1.5 mil trees over a year and not enough to the fact that we lose 1.5 mil trees every day just in the Amazon. It's like you're trying to say I should be happy and thankful because Israel spared a baby in Gaza that one time.
I was thinking about things like prescription contact lenses. Or items made with memory foam such as memory foam pillows, mattresses, earplugs, or shoe inserts. Are there mass-produced items made with materials such as plastics and foams that we'd be seeing less of or have less access to over time as part of trying to move away from overproduction of goods and a shrinking of the global supply chain?
I'm trying to get a grasp of like… what is a middle-class American's day going to look like, from morning routine to work to evening-time recreation in an economy and society that's become geared toward mitigating climate change and hyperconsumption?
The thing is I'm in the camp that banning single use plastics is also stupid if we're fine letting everyone single person in the world own their own car. At that point we might as well just give up if we're not going to address that issue. And switching to EVs isn't the answer if you believe that using human slavery to mine Cobalt is wrong. (If you don't, then I suppose EVs are a solution).
Similarly ordering garbage from Wish or Temu is wasteful, but probably more for the actual shipping from across the world rather than for the products themselves.
But I don't even know if reduction is possible though outside of societal collapse because the incentive structures are for infinite growth. It's why oil companies are heavily invested in carbon capture, because it allows them to continue their growth under the idea of these technologies mitigating any impacts of their continued oil production.
The problem with EVs is that individually owned passenger cars are terribly inefficient in terms of the resources needed to transport people. Ride-hailing passenger cars are somewhat more efficient. But both are much worse than public transportation of pretty much any form.
The cobalt problem (for EVs) is solving itself. Roughly 1/3 of EVs sold today are cobalt-free, because lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries are cheaper to make than cobalt-containing batteries. Sodium batteries will further reduce the use of cobalt. Cobalt is still being mined, but electronics is the bigger problem.
Electronics is such a complicated mess that I just assume we're not really going to change. Even if you fix the materials sourcing, there's still the manufacturing and recycling ends to deal with.
It's funny, in Canada the government is forcing its employees to go back to the office and people are pointing out that for a government that's fighting climate change, forcing people to drive to work in order to sit in zoom meetings is basically against what Trudeau is promising. But that's the reality of our world. No one is actually serious about tackling climate change because there are other more 'important' issues to solve, like stimulating local economies or executives who think working from home destroys productivity.
Iceland's energy *ALREADY* comes from >99% renewable resources. It's one of the reasons it's a great place for these kinds of technologies to develop as they have easy access to geothermal energy that can't easily be moved elsewhere.
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You're advocating fighting entrophy in place of doing literally anything else. That's a battle that can't be won.
The resource and energy cost over the lifetime of that plant could have put 500-1000 buses on the road keeping 25000-50000 cars off the road, almost an order of magnitude greater than their hypothetical peak capacity. That's the public transport capacity of a medium sized city. How about focusing limited resources on effective and efficient wins, like capitalist dogma says it by design does and not waste what capacity we have have on attempting to bend the second law of thermodymaics to our will.
Every dollar and joule of power wasted on this diverts action away from projects that can have far faster and higher returns in reducing co2 emissions. You have to accept that we are locked in to 2.5c by now, it's enevitable. We need to focus on halting current emissions so we dont blow past the point where large swathes of the world become virtually unihabitable because consequences of that means there wont be a future where we will have the chance to clean up this mess.
Y'all have a serious reading comprehension problem. I'm advocating doing something in lieu of continuing to do nothing.
No, it couldn't. Because the geothermal energy cannot be used for transportation because it does not transport. The things that it can be used for? Iceland is already using it for that.
You people live in a magical fairytale land where somehow, if we just stopped doing anything at all that isn't your pet project people will suddenly come around to finally doing what they're supposed to do.
I guess the moment they decided to pursue this avenue was the moment that everyone in urban centers in dire need of public transportation all agreed they would suddenly start doing that, if only Iceland hadn't built this planet. The last forty years of doing jack and shit were just a fluke.
Certainly the post of a reasonable person with something worthwhile to say and not a grown ass child trying to win an internet argument.But if you just want to feel good about yourself and believe you're the Reasonable one, go ahead.
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Shell’s ‘Milestone’ CCS Plant Emits More Carbon Than It Captures, Independent Analysis Finds
The federal government is looking into independent analysis claiming that carbon capture at a highly-touted Shell Canada demonstration project in Alberta is producing more greenhouse gas emissions than it prevents, The Energy Mix has learned.
www.theenergymix.com
this is from 2022 one, im curious tbh what make this one better than that one?
And we're trying to point out, that something is worse than literally nothing, which jungius has helpfully shown.
I think it's fair to be sceptical because up until now carbon capture and storage has been little more than a hope and a dream that has failed to deliver and often ends up being worse than doing nothing at all. It also is used by companies and governments to make it seem like they're doing something about climate change when even if this works it's a drop in the ocean.
I don't want to just add to the negativity but it's easy to see where it comes from.
I don't want to just add to the negativity but it's easy to see where it comes from.
So you read neither the article in the OP nor the article jungius posted. Just felt like shooting off at the mouth. Check.
The Quest Carbon Capture is attached to an Upgrader facility and touted as mitigating the output of that particular facility. It doesn't. It captures a bunch of carbon from that facility (which is why its numbers are so high compared to the modest numbers of the plant in the OP), but raw numbers don't tell the story when you look at how much more carbon that place had been putting out since the unit was built.Shell’s ‘Milestone’ CCS Plant Emits More Carbon Than It Captures, Independent Analysis Finds
The federal government is looking into independent analysis claiming that carbon capture at a highly-touted Shell Canada demonstration project in Alberta is producing more greenhouse gas emissions than it prevents, The Energy Mix has learned.www.theenergymix.com
this is from 2022 one, im curious tbh what make this one better than that one?
The one in the OP is a standalone facility powered by Iceland's abundant geothermo energy. It's using an effectively boundless resource that cannot be relocated far from where it originates in a country that already runs on near 100% renewable energy and has no use for the excess energy (that wouldn't require transporting it, which can't be done).
That's really not the best way of looking at this.
You see this sort of logic all the time when it comes to R&D, you could easily spin the Apollo missions as a huge waste of money on a vanity project and make very eye opening claims about how many starving people you could have fed with that money, and we would never have seen all the incredible spin off technologies that came from space exploration (including solar panels that you're arguing for).
Carbon capture is worth investing some amount of money in, it's mere existence doesn't prevent renewables from being deployed, the people working on this aren't the same exact people working on renewables, the people installing this aren't the same people that mine rare earth metals for panels or installing them on rooftops.
It's ok to have more than one solution to a problem.
So you come in this thread parroting what you think people are saying for maybe three posts straight, adding nothing worthwhile to the discussion and literally just to aggravate people, say that people who have lost reason will call others shill and now that you've been presented with honest arguments that would require research on your part to even talk about and have nothing else to say you'll say it's me who is a grown ass child?
Just go make a thread about Batman or something since all you're out to do here is trolling.
If there's nothing else Iceland could be doing with energy because it's a) small b) has plenty of renewable energy to spare I suppose it's a better endeavor than most. But if the selling point is that it's supposed to be scalable and it's very clearly something only worth pursuing for a country if you're already past this point, how many countries can realistically pursue it in the next 100 years instead of changing to a clean energy matrix? Again I don't think achieving per-country zero emissions until everyone does is that helpful a metric, but since that's the world we love in, what really is the hope of the tech politically scaling to make a dent? Efficiency can be improved despite all else, but is there any indication this isn't, at a macro level, Iceland "specializing" as a country in fighting climate change? Because if it IS, we have a massive problem.
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It is hard to fathom how much money a billion dollars truly is. It's a ridiculous number.
A 'good billionaire' doesn't exist because a good person would never end up becoming a billionaire in the first place. They would realize FAR sooner that they already have more than enough money to never want for anything in their lifetime (or their children's lifetimes), and would instead direct their wealth elsewhere for the good of others.