Renewable Revolution

Agelbert NOTE: The following article involves scientifically optimistic speculation. That means that they are hopeful, BUT THE TECHNOLOGY THEY ARE COUNTING ON IS NOT THERE YET.

I post it because I respect Elizabeth Kolbert's work. Nevertheless, I am extremely skeptical of this CO₂ technofix (see my kitty graphic). It just reads too much like HOPIUM to me. The CONSPICUOUS LACK of fingering ( see" "root cause" NOT defined as as burning hydrocrabons  - "root cause" is defined here as "CO₂ concentration", which is ACTUALLY a RESULT OF THE ROOT CAUSE, AS WELL AS A SYMPTOM OF THE EXTENT OF DAMAGE BEING INFLICTED BY THE ROOT CAUSE! ) the Hydrocarbon Hellspawn BASTARDS (i.e. the Fossil Fuel Fascists), hell bent to continue profit over planet business as usual, is the TELL that these scientists are not even being 50% reality based in their "technology will save us" speculation.

Yeah, we can just keep burnin' all that fine and dandy fossil fuel that, uh, isn't the root cause of the CO₂ root cause , because we will have lots of fantastic technology in just a decade or so , sucking all that nasty "root cause CO₂" out of the sky and turning it into rocks and other good stuff much, much faster than our loyal servants the Fossil Fuel Industry can sucker get us to pump said "root cause CO₂" into the sky when we burn what they sell us, of course . 

What these scientists are trying to do, while they claim they are "not compensating for the symptoms of climate change",  IS COMPENSATE for the symptoms INSTEAD OF attacking the ROOT CAUSE, which is BURNING HYDROCARBONS. The fact that they make the ridiculous claim that they "aren't geoengineering" based on their convenient definition of the "root cause of Climate Change" (it's like saying the "root cause" of your death by gunshot is not the killer or the gun, it's the bullet. 😈 The killer and/or the gun are mere symptoms. The bullet is the "root cause", so let's start subsidizing bullet collection. Banning bullet manufacturing and the guns that shoot them is merely "compensating for the symptoms") is evidence that they are playing word games to keep from ruffling Fossil Fuel Fascist Feathers.

Enjoy the hopium.  



BY ELIZABETH KOLBERT  • NOVEMBER 15, 2018

SNIPPET:

e360: Your panel looked at techniques like afforestation and better land use, you also looked at enhanced weathering of rock. And you looked at the holy grail, I suppose, which is direct air capture of CO2, where we suck it out of the air and bury it or mineralize it. Where do you see the potential for big breakthroughs here?

Pacala: I think that afforestation, reforestation, changes in forest management, rebuilding the carbon backbone that maintains the fertility in our agricultural soils, and biomass energy with carbon capture and storage using waste biomass can supply material gains.

Negative Emissions Technologies (NETs) range from low-tech, such as planting more trees, to more high-tech options, such as developing machines to scrub CO2 from the air. NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES, 2018

With the direct air capture technologies, 10 years ago you would have said that’s just like a fairy tale. But because of diligent activity by a small number of technical people, there’s been very rapid progress, so much so that knowledgeable people who are not starry-eyed, but just hard-headed, believe that there is a very high probability that a research effort within 10 years would produce direct air capture at less than a dollar a gallon of gasoline. That’s $100 a ton [of captured CO2].

Imagine a scenario where you fly over to Germany and burn aviation gas on the way over, but we have a direct air capture machine that for $100 a ton takes CO2 out of the atmosphere and puts it in the ground to compensate. And the question is, how much did that cleansing of the atmosphere cost in terms of the fuel? The answer is an extra dollar a gallon. So it’s going from say, $2.50 to $3.50 a gallon. Now, aviation biogas, which is the alternative, costs way more than that, and it takes land away from other uses that we need. If you could get [the carbon capture price] down to 50 cents a gallon to solve the carbon and climate problem, how great is that? Our panel thinks direct air capture could be brought into the marketplace in a heavy way within 10 years’ time.

e360: That’s owing to some kind of technological breakthrough, or because we’re just going to bring the cost of these processes down?

Pacala: It’s just cost. It’s an exact analogy to wind and solar. The government should create a market by subsidizing the activity, and then have every super-ambitious person in Silicon Valley who wants to save the world and become the richest person in it, compete with every other such person and drive the costs relentlessly down, and we’ll all be the beneficiaries.


I don’t expect to be surprised with direct air capture, because I think that direct air capture developers will succeed. If there’s a surprise, it’s in the enhanced mineralization area. Underneath our feet are minerals, and because they’ve never been exposed to the atmosphere, they are in a state that would spontaneously bind CO2 and turn it into carbonate minerals: rocks. How much of this rock is there? It’s hard to measure exactly, but some estimates say that something like 1,000 times the amount exists that would be necessary. So we’ve got this resource beneath our feet that we haven’t even known was a resource. Haven’t mapped it, haven’t tried to access it.

e360: One of the points that you also make in the report is that sometimes direct air capture has been put under this rubric of geoengineering, and the report tries to disentangle that. What is the difference between some of these negative emissions technologies and geoengineering?

Pacala: The difference between negative emissions technologies and geoengineering is that negative emissions technologies solve the root cause of the climate problem — too much CO2 in the atmosphere. It simply takes out that CO2. Geoengineering says, “Oh, that CO2 in the atmosphere is changing the climate, so let me try to change the climate in compensating ways, like by injecting sulfate aerosols high in the atmosphere to intersect some of the sunlight to cool the planet down.” The problem is, of course, that we can’t compensate exactly for the C02, so we create other problems when we do that. Moreover, if you keep putting more and more CO2 in the atmosphere, you have to keep adding these geoengineering compounds to the atmosphere to compensate. It’s very much the difference between solving the root cause and trying to compensate for symptoms.



e360: Another point the report makes is that the Trump administration is in the process of revoking the Clean Power Plan, of pulling back on vehicle fuel efficiency standards. This seems like another disconnect.

Pacala: Well, the U.S. is of course a very special case right now internationally. It has decided to take a non-evidence based approach to dealing with the climate problem, and it’s something that in my view is a national disgrace. It’s something that we are going to end up correcting as a people. The ongoing denials of the science, particularly in Republican Party circles, are just something that true conservatives wouldn’t condone. Business people make evidence-based decisions — they have to or they don’t survive.

Full article:

https://e360.yale.edu/features/negative-emissions-is-it-feasible-to-remove-co2-from-the-air

Elizabeth Kolbert is a regular contributor to Yale Environment 360 and has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1999. Her most recent book, "The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History," won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and was based in part on reporting she did for Yale Environment 360.