this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024

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Why carbon capture needs a reality check (youtu.be)

submitted 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Carbon capture as a solution where you use power to filter out CO2 from the atmosphere is ONLY a viable strategy if we can make 100% carbon free power.

Until then you'd use 100 CO2 generating power to (after all losees) capture 30 CO2, it's dumb. If you use a solar powered system instead, you still are losing as now someone else that could have used your solar power is using 100 CO2 while you pull only 30 out...

Once everything runs on CO2 free power, THEN it makes sense to start carbon capture, until then it's only playfully pretending while making the situation actively worse.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago

Again, has this not been bs on repeat for decades now?

Don't worry about our pollution, look at this thing we made that makes the mess we made okay. It'll work this time, really

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

We need to invent carbon capture!

Meanwhile: trees

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Trees doesn't work either, they die and release all that carbon back into the atmosphere

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Trees do work though...

Buy land that is not forested
Plant trees
Is forest and love trees replace dead trees
Wow look consumed carbon

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

The goal is to harvest them to use them in construction work. A house frame can stay as is for over a hundred years or more, enough to regrow the trees harvested twice or more. We just need to make the harvesting process less energy intensive...

[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

We definitely shouldn't let corporations to use carbon capture to greenwash themselves but doesn't mean we should stop any research in carbon capture.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (2 children)

The problem is we set a target of "net zero" by <in 2 decades>. So naturally companies will do it the cheapest way that requires the least changes to their business.

We don't need "net zero" we need "as closest to total zero as possible".

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Even if we hit total zero tomorrow that still wouldn't save us, at this point. We need negative. Corporations and capitalism aren't gonna get us there, though.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

If we hit next zero tomorrow it would prevent the vast majority of human suffering from climate change.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

And since that just isn’t possible, we’ll also need net negative.

None of this should diminish the urgency if stopping greenhouse gas release.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

If the carbon is properly sequestered after capture, and the energy use is accounted for in emissions, wouldn't net zero be just as good as zero? It's almost always going to be way more expensive to take the carbon back out of the atmosphere than to not emit it in the first place, so I'd think you'd get mostly the same effect.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

No, it wouldn't. Nature is not a bank account where you can do debits and deposits. Because if you emit today and capture tomorrow, the carbon is still out causing harm for a day. And if you emit in a country and capture in another, the carbon would have to travel from origin to capture point. The only carbon capture that is effective is on-sight carbon capture at the place of production. No planting trees, no sucking air out of the atmosphere.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

That if is the biggest issue. These carbon calculations require a lot of math and assumptions and uncertainty to work. In the global economy with many steps along the path from source to sink, every actor has an incentive to make things look better than they actually are. So research on the topic has found a wide variety of issues with carbon offsets and other strategies that aren’t direct reductions of in emissions. So it’s pretty likely that net zero would not actually be net zero. Reducing emissions directly is much easier to verify.

Also, millions die from air pollution every year and net zero doesn’t do anything about that.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (2 children)

"net zero" refers to continuing to emit greenhouse gases and fixing the problem some other way. Carbon capture, carbon credits, whatever.

Zero means actually stopping the emissions in the first place.

Except that net zero is mostly being used as an excuse to keep going with your business, emitting away while paying lip service to the idea of reducing emissions in ways that may or may not actually offset the continued emissions.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

The first thing we need to do is make carbon credits illegal all around the world.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

If they're actually sequestering the carbon fully, like injecting it back underground, then it's equivalent to not emitting in the first place. I think the issue is that the offsetting methods companies are using are not actually sequestering carbon. Like promising to not cut down trees or burying logs insufficiency underground.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 weeks ago

The problem is: nobody is doing that and nobody even has a realistic plan to do that.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Ok, but achieving net zero is not an excuse to not go sub zero if possible.

If we let corporatations continue emitting when they could not be, because an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases got sequestered somehwere, then we're stopping at "not making it worse" when we could be going for "great improvement".

A large part of the marketing around "carbon neutrality" is about placating consumer guilt so people will keep buying things they want but don't actually need.

The messaging around this stuff can and will be twisted into something that attempts to maintain the status quo, emitting at full steam, rather than investing in real improvement.

Such as, you know, producing and consuming less in general.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Oh I get what you're getting at now. Yeah if sequestering is limited, you should be using as little as you can. But for applications like rockets, it's much more effective to sequestere CO2 than to try to make something like an electric water rocket.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Totally. But it can and probably will be used as an excuse for why it's ok to pollute land an air with open goldmines so some company can make gold turd sculptures for rich people to place in their homes as a "conversation piece".

When in reality we should be discussing whether some non-essential industries should get to emit anything at all.

That's what the greenwashing mentioned by the person you replied to means. It's the practice of marketing away the downsides of a product that really shouldn't be possible to rub off. Some things are just inherently wasteful and "offsetting" the waste just means something unavoidable is offset a little less.