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hope is a radical act
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this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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It's never too late, obviously.
However
It is VERY important to get the size of Themis problem. We've been dumping CO2 by extracting energy since the start of the industrial revolution, and without going into details, if you want to extract that CO2, it will take about the same amount of energy we've spent for the last ~250 years. Converting and storing and losses might double that.
We'll be able to generate more and more energy in the future (yay fusion, hopefully!) but basically, we can spend 50% of the world's energy budget on this and it will still take one or more centuries to get CO2 levels restored back to pre industrial levels.
And ALL that energy must be carbon free, or you're doing it for nothing.
This is an absolutely enormous problem that will be fixed, but none of us will see it 100% fixed in our lifetimes
That's worrysome, and is indeed an enormous problem - probably the biggest problem humanity has ever faced.
What bothers me about this situation is that it makes easy measures that "buy time" look like a good idea. Like dimming the sky with particulates, or increasing sulfur emissions. Both of which will cause environmental damage on their own, and screw with renewable solar and wind, but it'll keep the global solar gain down. I'm not a fan of these kinds of approaches either and would love to see everyone do a hard pivot to dramatically less fossil fuel and more renewable, fission, and (eventually) fusion power.
Meanwhile, short of converting CO2 into carbonates, graphite, and diamond, I don't know of any sequestration methods that seem anywhere near as permanent. What's kind of sad is that even gaseous sequestration would probably work okay-ish in old gas wells that aren't fracked, but there's probably not nearly enough such storage to make the difference.
I think the "buying time" solutions do work, and will be needed, but indeed will be abused as cheap end-all solutions by idiots, as always.
Storing CO2 directly in the ground, I think, is a really bad idea. if it escapes you lose all the energy invested in harvesting it. You'll need to convert it into Graphite or plastics. The problem though is again that were talking truly ginormous amounts. Think a square kilometer cube of graphite, we'd need hundreds of those. If that were to catch fire, we're all effed, so your still need to store it safely somewhere.
This ignores exponential scaling. Most of the marginal carbon in the atmosphere was added recently; the early Industrial Revolution is a rounding error compared to what we're pumping out now.
Similarly, with exponentially scaling technologies, capturing the carbon (somehow) could also accelerate incredibly quickly, with the right technologies and investment.
Even ignoring fusion, the Earth gets a lot of energy from the Sun. We could solve this problem within a decade once we figure out the technology and political will to get it done.
Yeah, no. Even with our help, even with having all our energy being carbon neutral, and not adding any additional carbon into the air, spending over half our energy budget, earth co2 levels would take decades, or more around a century to get back to normal.
And remember that CO2 comes from more places that are hard to stop. Concrete emits CO2, airplanes likely won't ever become electoral and will always emit CO2, same likely for large cargo trucks.
Fusion must be ignored because that has been "juuuust around the corner" for 5 decades now. Big strides were made recently, but it still will likely be decades away at best and then building a commercial reactor in the multi GW ranges will also take another decade.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of our energy still is carbon based and will continue to be so for the coming decades.