The next quadrant chart of sexy vs practical is in place, carbon drawdown. It complements charts on electricity, and ground, marine and air transportation.
, per the Mauna Loa observatory. That’s up from the year before and the year before and the year before. That’s up from about 280 ppm in 1750, almost 50%. And that doesn’t capture high global warming potential atmospheric methane increases,when it started being measured. This article focuses on the overhyped and overly hoped for silver bullets vs. the realities of what will actually work to start reducing the CO2 and CO2e in the atmosphere.
There are less than 8 billion people on earth, or 0.8% of a trillion. About 700 million people live in extreme poverty, under $1.90 a day, and they are much more likely to eat any blossoms, fruit, nuts, leaves, and bark and burn the wood of any tree near them than plant new ones. We can safely say that the poorest 25% of people in the world have much bigger concerns than global warming, and so can be excluded from tree planting unless we pay them. Really, it’s more like 0.
Diagram of global excess CO2, annual additions and annual carbon use, by Michael Barnard, Chief Strategist, TFIE Strategy Inc The next thing that has a leg in the practical and sexy quadrant is flue carbon capture, grabbing CO2 as it exits smokestacks and cement kilns. We’ve been doing this for industrial CO2 feedstock purposes for over a century. The chemistry is well understood. We know exactly what we are doing, how much it costs, and the like. There’s zero mystery here.
And so, on to the overhyped and almost entirely useless quadrant. Pride of place goes to direct air capture. Imagine, if you will, 1.2 miles of fans 8 feet thick and 60 feet high, with liquid dripping through them running 24/7/365, in order to capture a million tons of CO2 from the air per year. Imagine the liquid being heated to 900° Celsius to crack the CO2 out of the carbonate suspension, allowing it to be collected in a second process.
Carbon Engineering is only the most egregious of this bad space. ClimeWorks is much more earnest but so vastly out of any perspective of scale that it’s a toothpick lost in a forest. It is gettingfor starting construction on a facility that will take 36,000 tons of CO2 out of the air every year. 36,000 tons sounds like a lot, but remember the context. That’s 0.036 million tons, when a million tons was already a rounding error on a gnat’s ass.
Climate scientists figured this out long before governmental policy makers, of course. Coal was bad, natural gas was good — it had ‘natural’ in its name, right!? — and so natural gas was the ‘bridge’ fuel. The STEM types in the fossil fuel industry knew better, but they didn’t consider it their job to point out the massive negative externalities associated with their profit margins, quite the opposite.
The proponents of olivine weathering propose that we mine gigatons of the silicate from the tectonic zones where it tends to be abundant, crush and process it sufficiently to have a reasonable percentage of the mineral, transport it for potentially thousands of kilometers and spread it on the ground. They seem oblivious to the energy and carbon implications of a mining and distribution exercise that would dwarf sand and limestone for the global concrete market in order to have a material impact.
Given that a rather absurd percentage of natural gas has been coming from the rogue state of Russia and its surroundings, and that US shale oil and fracking providers are among the worst in the world in terms of methane emissions, this is a deeply idealistic and utopian vision. Thealone should make it clear what a silly idea this is.
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