The article states it very clearly: the technology does not actually exist. When people talk about how carbon capture will be necessary to reach net zero, they’re talking about a speculative technology, not a real one.
But it’s a very appealing speculation. So appealing that fossil fuel companies and heavy polluters are using simply the idea of it to make the public complacent and avoid conversations about how seriously we need to transform society to avoid total collapse.
And it would be a mistake to assume that some kind of engineering wizardry will make the technology suddenly feasible on a timeline that lets us avoid collapse if we just throw enough money at it (which we’re not even doing at the moment). Fossil fuel companies prey on the public’s “science optimism”, the comforting belief that science can magically solve our problems.
But scientists and engineers still need to contend with the laws of physics and so far entropy has always had the upper hand on us. It would be delusional to think that’s going to change any time soon.
The only realistic answer forward is to massively transform society or go extinct. If you believe that we can’t get a handle on these polluting industries in a rapid time scale (and you may very well be right) then brace yourself for extinction.
You’re making your own misconceptions and possibly desires the enemy of reality.
The technology doesn’t yet exist at the scale necessary to offset even modest levels of residual emissions.
Let me repeat the important part:
at the scale necessary
You’re making it sound like we need to figure out a problem like nuclear fusion from scratch. Scaling up something that already exists is a lot easier. It’s still difficult, but definitely possible, although it seems kind of dumb to remove the CO2 instead of preventing its release in the first place.
Scale is everything in engineering and nuclear fusion is a good example.
It took 10 years to go from the first nuclear fission bomb to the first nuclear fission power reactor. Not bad, right? Because while the heat produced by nuclear fission is very high, it’s still at a scale that can be handled by ordinary materials on Earth.
Meanwhile it took 70 years from the first nuclear fusion bomb to the first nuclear fusion reactor capable of breaking even (meaning it could output as much energy from the reaction as what needs to be input into it to maintain the reaction). That’s still not a viable technology, even after 70 years. It’s not guaranteed to become economically viable even if progress has been made. Only an absolute fool would stake the continued existence of all civilization on something as risky as nuclear fusion.
Before you let predatory industries exploit your science optimism, ask yourself: What do you actually know about carbon capture and its difficulties?
There’s already decades of history of carbon capture filtration efforts (capturing carbon directly from exhaust with a filter) that have utterly failed to reach any useful effectiveness levels (typically falling below 10%) despite enormous investments.
Pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere itself is utterly deranged with how low the concentration of carbon dioxide is (it doesn’t actually take a very high concentration of CO2 to heat up the planet). The energy spent on running the giant vacuum would be more than the power generated by the fossil fuels that put the carbon in the atmosphere in the first place. That’s just the laws of thermodynamics, and clever engineering isn’t going to fix it.
And then even once you’ve captured the carbon, where do you put it? It will still be a gas so what happens if your storage leaks? Where is there even space to fit the billions of tons that we need to store? You know the brilliant idea the carbon producers have? We should pump that CO2 under the same shale rock that we frack oil out of, then seal up the hole with more shale rock. Given how fracking is known to cause all sorts of gas and oil leaks already because of how much damage it does to the bedrock, they must think we’re absolute morons to believe we can safely store carbon dioxide in previously fracked caverns.
People trying to promote carbon capture to you are taking your for an absolute fool. Regrowing forests (not just planting trees but resuscitating forests that we’ve destroyed with their original biodiversity) is by far the most effective carbon capture technology in existence but it still can’t nearly keep pace with our carbon production. It’s absolutely necessary but not at all sufficient.
Transform society or go extinct. Those are your only real options and the sooner you come to terms with it the better chance we actually have at surviving as a species.
Oh what rubbish, and so much of it too. Where to start? An uncontrolled nuclear reaction vs controlling a sustained plasma reaction with electromagnets or crazy lasers? You gtfo with that absolute crap comparison. 70 years, lol, yeah 70 years of tangentially related technological development. It was a very cute attempt at using my own example against me.
Then you really broke down the carbon capture and storage bit into its itty bitty steps to make it sound soooooo big and impossible. You’re a master of disingenuous rhetoric. Here’s a source with the opinions of several scientists discussing the topic. They make it sound hard, but not impossible to do.
You’ve ended two comments on “transform society of go extinct” or something to that effect. You seem very invested in the other side of this supposedly impossible problem we have. Perhaps you should open up to the possibility of compromise, cuz I wager we’re going to get a bit of societal transformation and a bit of CO2 capture. It’s not going to be all one or the other.
Lastly, you’ll get a lot further with people when you use honey instead of vinegar.
Nature is a paywalled journal and I’m not going to spend money to be proven right when the headline says it all: Climate experts are divided over whether CDR is a necessary requirement or a dangerous distraction from limiting emissions.
Why do you think that division exists? Because scientists can be bought out by industry interests. One side understands the problem and the other side is saying whatever’s needed to get a paycheck.
We’re past honey or vinegar. The only honey in this situation is to ignore the problems and keep living our normal comfortable lives until everything irrecoverably falls apart around us.
My guess is that they will get serious about it right about the same time as a dense pockets of CO2 begin to roll across the planet and suffocate everything in their path.
Don’t forget, they want to decrease the number of people living on the planet. Their eyes glisten with the idea of cheap real estate and scared people willing to do their every bidding.
No? If real estate prices fall because demand falls because the number of potential home buyers fall, they don’t benefit. A reduction in demand due to fewer buyers is a net zero for them, actually it’s a loss if they are holding real estate.
They want MORE people making LESS money each and prices of things to be MORE. This enables maximum extraction of wealth from individual workers until we get back to company towns and functional slavery.
You’re making fantasy the enemy of reality.
The article states it very clearly: the technology does not actually exist. When people talk about how carbon capture will be necessary to reach net zero, they’re talking about a speculative technology, not a real one.
But it’s a very appealing speculation. So appealing that fossil fuel companies and heavy polluters are using simply the idea of it to make the public complacent and avoid conversations about how seriously we need to transform society to avoid total collapse.
And it would be a mistake to assume that some kind of engineering wizardry will make the technology suddenly feasible on a timeline that lets us avoid collapse if we just throw enough money at it (which we’re not even doing at the moment). Fossil fuel companies prey on the public’s “science optimism”, the comforting belief that science can magically solve our problems.
But scientists and engineers still need to contend with the laws of physics and so far entropy has always had the upper hand on us. It would be delusional to think that’s going to change any time soon.
The only realistic answer forward is to massively transform society or go extinct. If you believe that we can’t get a handle on these polluting industries in a rapid time scale (and you may very well be right) then brace yourself for extinction.
I believe scale to be a problem but carbon capture already exists so I’m not sure what you mean by “speculative technology.”
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.estlett.2c00296#
You’re making your own misconceptions and possibly desires the enemy of reality.
Let me repeat the important part:
You’re making it sound like we need to figure out a problem like nuclear fusion from scratch. Scaling up something that already exists is a lot easier. It’s still difficult, but definitely possible, although it seems kind of dumb to remove the CO2 instead of preventing its release in the first place.
Scale is everything in engineering and nuclear fusion is a good example.
It took 10 years to go from the first nuclear fission bomb to the first nuclear fission power reactor. Not bad, right? Because while the heat produced by nuclear fission is very high, it’s still at a scale that can be handled by ordinary materials on Earth.
Meanwhile it took 70 years from the first nuclear fusion bomb to the first nuclear fusion reactor capable of breaking even (meaning it could output as much energy from the reaction as what needs to be input into it to maintain the reaction). That’s still not a viable technology, even after 70 years. It’s not guaranteed to become economically viable even if progress has been made. Only an absolute fool would stake the continued existence of all civilization on something as risky as nuclear fusion.
Before you let predatory industries exploit your science optimism, ask yourself: What do you actually know about carbon capture and its difficulties?
There’s already decades of history of carbon capture filtration efforts (capturing carbon directly from exhaust with a filter) that have utterly failed to reach any useful effectiveness levels (typically falling below 10%) despite enormous investments.
Pulling CO2 out of the atmosphere itself is utterly deranged with how low the concentration of carbon dioxide is (it doesn’t actually take a very high concentration of CO2 to heat up the planet). The energy spent on running the giant vacuum would be more than the power generated by the fossil fuels that put the carbon in the atmosphere in the first place. That’s just the laws of thermodynamics, and clever engineering isn’t going to fix it.
And then even once you’ve captured the carbon, where do you put it? It will still be a gas so what happens if your storage leaks? Where is there even space to fit the billions of tons that we need to store? You know the brilliant idea the carbon producers have? We should pump that CO2 under the same shale rock that we frack oil out of, then seal up the hole with more shale rock. Given how fracking is known to cause all sorts of gas and oil leaks already because of how much damage it does to the bedrock, they must think we’re absolute morons to believe we can safely store carbon dioxide in previously fracked caverns.
People trying to promote carbon capture to you are taking your for an absolute fool. Regrowing forests (not just planting trees but resuscitating forests that we’ve destroyed with their original biodiversity) is by far the most effective carbon capture technology in existence but it still can’t nearly keep pace with our carbon production. It’s absolutely necessary but not at all sufficient.
Transform society or go extinct. Those are your only real options and the sooner you come to terms with it the better chance we actually have at surviving as a species.
Oh what rubbish, and so much of it too. Where to start? An uncontrolled nuclear reaction vs controlling a sustained plasma reaction with electromagnets or crazy lasers? You gtfo with that absolute crap comparison. 70 years, lol, yeah 70 years of tangentially related technological development. It was a very cute attempt at using my own example against me.
Then you really broke down the carbon capture and storage bit into its itty bitty steps to make it sound soooooo big and impossible. You’re a master of disingenuous rhetoric. Here’s a source with the opinions of several scientists discussing the topic. They make it sound hard, but not impossible to do.
You’ve ended two comments on “transform society of go extinct” or something to that effect. You seem very invested in the other side of this supposedly impossible problem we have. Perhaps you should open up to the possibility of compromise, cuz I wager we’re going to get a bit of societal transformation and a bit of CO2 capture. It’s not going to be all one or the other.
Lastly, you’ll get a lot further with people when you use honey instead of vinegar.
Nature is a paywalled journal and I’m not going to spend money to be proven right when the headline says it all: Climate experts are divided over whether CDR is a necessary requirement or a dangerous distraction from limiting emissions.
Why do you think that division exists? Because scientists can be bought out by industry interests. One side understands the problem and the other side is saying whatever’s needed to get a paycheck.
We’re past honey or vinegar. The only honey in this situation is to ignore the problems and keep living our normal comfortable lives until everything irrecoverably falls apart around us.
If you’ve chosen honey you’ve chosen extinction.
Omg you. “I’m not going to read it and the scientists that disagree with me are bought and paid for.”
If you have access to the journal then share the information that supports the case you’re trying to make.
If you don’t have access and won’t share anything that actually supports your case then you’re just talking out of your ass and deflecting.
deleted by creator
My guess is that they will get serious about it right about the same time as a dense pockets of CO2 begin to roll across the planet and suffocate everything in their path.
Don’t forget, they want to decrease the number of people living on the planet. Their eyes glisten with the idea of cheap real estate and scared people willing to do their every bidding.
No? If real estate prices fall because demand falls because the number of potential home buyers fall, they don’t benefit. A reduction in demand due to fewer buyers is a net zero for them, actually it’s a loss if they are holding real estate.
They want MORE people making LESS money each and prices of things to be MORE. This enables maximum extraction of wealth from individual workers until we get back to company towns and functional slavery.