Why do we need carbon capture?
Yesterday, I posted about geoengineering the oceans as a promising form of carbon capture. But why do we need carbon capture at all? Can’t we just conserve our way out of global warming?
No.
Here are a couple of reasons why the *only* way to avert climate disaster is to start removing carbon from the atmosphere:
1. The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is ca. 120 years. What that means is that if all sources of CO2—man-made, forest fires, vulcanism, etc—ceased worldwide starting tomorrow, it would take 120 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop by half. So conservation isn’t enough to reverse the march to climate crisis. Suggesting that carbon capture is just a distraction from having Americans drive less is, to put it gently, hopelessly and tragically naïve.
2. The global anthropogenic sources of CO2 will only expand. 3rd world nations want the economies that the industrialized nation built with burning coal, oil and gas, and it is futile (and arrogant) to admonish them to forego improving their standard of living to that of the industrialized world. And that’s not just energy consumption for transportation, agriculture and HVAC, it’s the massive and growing consumption of energy from computers:
“Every time you do a Google search, it consumes not only the energy required to power your laptop and your router but also to maintain the Google data centers that keep a chunk of the Internet running. That’s not a small amount of power. Cumulatively, in 2019, Google consumed as much electricity as Sri Lanka.
“Worse, a search powered by ChatGPT, the AI-powered program, consumes ten times more energy than your ordinary Google search. That’s sobering enough. But then consider all the energy that goes into training the AI programs in the first place. Climate researcher Sasha Luccioni explains:
“Training AI models consumes energy. Essentially you’re taking whatever data you want to train your model on and running it through your model like thousands of times. It’s going to be something like a thousand chips running for a thousand hours. Every generation of GPUs—the specialized chips for training AI models—tends to consume more energy than the previous generation.
“AI’s need for energy is increasing exponentially. According to Goldman Sachs, data centers were expanding rapidly between 2015 and 2019, but their energy use remained relatively flat because the processing was becoming more efficient. But then, in the last five years, energy use rose dramatically and so did the carbon footprint of these data centers. Largely because of AI, Google’s carbon emissions increased by 50 percent in the last five years—even as the megacorporation was promising to achieve carbon neutrality in the near future.”
Carbon capture isn’t the enemy of conservation. The world needs *both* carbon capture and conservation if it is to avert climate disaster and resource wars that threaten to destroy human civilization in the next thirty years. This isn’t the time for virtue signaling. Are there risks associated with geoengineering? Sure. But there is a risk bordering on certainty that if we rely solely on the hope that somehow the world will dial down energy consumption, catastrophe will follow.
AI is killing us with CO2
well, we don’t have to cut CO2 in the atmosphere in half, but it would be a good idea to slow down the rate we are adding to it enough to allow natural carbon sinks to keep with how much we are adding.
we do not need to keep adding more and more CO2 to live decent and happy lives, and the developing world does not have to develop the way we have developed to live decent and happy lives.
relying on Big Science to let us keep gorging on high energy consumption, and further destroying the planet by “geoengineering” is how we got here in the first place.
i guess “naive” is the gentle way to say “ignorant.”
Like taking salt out of the ocean …
@Ten,
Ca. 3.5% of sea water is dissolved salts. 0.04% of the atmosphere is CO2. So you’re off by nearly two logs.
The solution to the problem is stop burning fossil fuels
Metaphors on three levels: 1) we can capture it, whoopie! 2) we might even find something to be done with it though like water gases have tendency to find a way out and 3) the sheer scale of what would be necessary staggers the imagination. And it all comes back to finding a way, better still a way to make money off of it to keep doing what we are doing. The solution to the problem is stop burning fossil fuels. If we were to put as much money time and effort into figuring out how to do that as we do figuring out how to do more of the same we might survive
All else is smoke and mirrors, same-o same-o
@Ten,
Looks like you either didn’t read or didn’t understand my post.
Looks like you haven’t looked at my website (that’s Ok), it’s pretty heavy on AI is killing us. I almost linked you. And I am literally one month short of twenty-five years trying to get people to pay attention to what’s going on in the atmosphere. There’s nothing in your post that’s new to me
CC will not do what needs to be done, and we will not do what needs to be done until we stop chasing short-term fixes to keep doing what we’re doing. We have to stop doing what we’re doing
Or we’re not gonna’ make it …
@Ten,
“we will not do what needs to be done until we stop chasing short-term fixes”
This is correct. And carbon capture/geoengineering are not short-term fixes. Moreover, carbon capture isn’t the enemy of conservation. The world needs *both* carbon capture and conservation. The world simply will not stop doing what we’re doing, so we have to do something different. Or we’re not gonna make it.
Ten Bears
I have been reluctant to support you because I can’t think of a gentler way to say it. I get tired of being censored and in this case I think the protagonist makes my case better than I could.
Foruntately the kids aren’t listening.
and the concentration of gold in seawater is .005 parts per billion (or some other utterly meanngless number, other than being much lower than the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere).
by the logic implied above, it should be much easier to take gold out of seawater than it is to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. after all, there is so much less of it.
the error is not entirely “quantitative reasoning,” it is also the complete failure to apply “verbal reasoning” to understand what the word “like” means in context.
sort of thing that could get a person elected to Congress.
Alas, carbon capture and storage is baloney. See for example this article in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/jul/29/carbon-capture-pollution-louisiana-cancer-alley
“The history of CCS has largely been one of “underperformance” and “unmet expectations”, the International Energy Agency said in 2023.
Climate scientists agree that the only way to curtail further catastrophic global heating is to radically cut greenhouse gas emissions by transitioning off fossil fuels, yet CCS depends on fossil fuels, emits greenhouse gases and can be used to extract more oil.
Three-quarters of the carbon currently captured in the US is used to extract hard-to-reach reserves, known as “enhanced oil recovery”. Data on carbon storage – which must be permanent to be effective – is entirely self-reported by corporations, with no independent oversight in place to check for leaks or verify company claims, according to research by the Environmental Integrity Project (EIP).
“Every dollar invested in CCS rather than renewable energy is a wasted dollar … It’s a scam,” said Charles Harvey, professor of environmental engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Harvey co-founded the first private CCS startup 15 years ago but has since said that he was wrong – that CCS technology is inefficient and cannot deliver. … “
Bob:
The IEA seems to believe it has merit while we are trashing our atmosphere with TBTOTF 4-wheel devices to get around the neighborhood. IEA
How do they compare to The Guardian’s beliefs and doctrine?
Another View: Carbon Capture/Direct Air Capture: Role in Addressing Climate Change?
@Bob,
I guess you didn’t read your link. It says *nothing* about carbon capture by fertilizing the ocean with iron or carbon capture by de-acidifying the ocean, both forms of carbon capture that I wrote about. There isn’t a single carbon capture technology, Charles Harvey’s assertions nonwithstanding. I’m sorry his little business venture failed, but his failure isn’t proof that some of the proposed modalities cannot work.
I remember my dad, an MIT-trained chemical engineer, informing me that solar energy could never be economicallypractical or compete with coal. I’ve been a longtime collector of failed prophecies, and I’ll add Harvey to the list that includes my dad.
Climate scientist *do not* agree that the *only* way to curtail further catastrophic global heating is to radically cut greenhouse gases, a practical impossibility. Cutting greenhouse gas emissions is certainly important, but there’s already too much CO2 in the air, and the half-life of CO2 is 120 years. Even if all anthropogenic greenhouse gas production ended tomorrow, there are other sources that will continue (vulcanism, thawing permafrost) and the current warming is leading to the melting of methane clathrates, releasing methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. It is unrealistic to believe developing nations like China and India will simply stop generating CO2. Carbon capture and/or geoengineering is an essential part of the mix or else human civilization as we know it ends.
we’ve already made large scale changes to the carbon dioxide and oxygen concentrations of the atmosphere that human life evolved under…i am not so sure i’d want to embark on an attempt to make large scale changes to the chemistry of the ocean, too….humanity has a history of overlooking unintended consequences..
@rjs,
So your argument is that since humanity has screwed things up badly, we shouldn’t try to fix the problem?