Well, all the excess got there via the behavior and consumption patterns of billions of people who also reduced the planet's ability to utilize, convert, and store it all by cutting down forests, etc.
One can infer the opposite might also true, that in order for it to simply not get worse, or to worsen more slowly, people who caused this, could stop a lot of what they have been doing. So there is still room for that debate, in my view, all the way down to burping of cows and kelp.
I think what is too often ignored is that these efforts won't remove what is already there unless we can recreate and accelerate the the planet's ability to store and convert it or devise a massive man made process.
The point is, that we do not know how much we can do in the restoring and converting part or how quickly, so it it is still useful to try to add less and reduce damage in the meantime, but the ultimate solutions will likely be in removal, like seeding the oceans with iron which you have mentioned, for one.
They called my article "Earth is absorbing too much sunlight: It’s a waking climate giant". It seems my proposed title Albedo is a Waking Climate Giant used a word totally foreign to public ears, despite being the single most important factor in climate change.
Taking a quantitative approach to policy is extremely difficult for most people. In my Hill article I mention that albedo loss causes about four times more immediate warming than carbon dioxide emissions, according to Global Warming in the Pipeline, a 2023 article by James Hansen and colleagues. This should be a game changer, given that the Pareto 80/20 ratio between warming from albedo feedback and emissions forcing is likely to worsen as clouds evaporate and ice melts.
It means nothing we do about carbon will make any difference to heat, unless there is concerted sunlight reflection driven by an Albedo Accord on the model of the Montreal Protocol.
But this is just my analysis of Hansen's argument. I have not found anyone who takes enough interest to check if this 80/20 ratio is a correct inference.
I agree generally that climate has a lot of 80/20 issues, but these seem hand-picked to give minimum agency to people and voters, and make the problem seem outside of their control.
For individuals, the 80/20 issues are eat less meat, vote for smart climate candidates (basically don’t vote republican), and electrify your home. Open to arguments, but anything else seems relatively minor.
For governments, “do nuclear” is not enough. Solar is the cheapest energy source ever invented by man. Could nuclear be cheaper eventually? Of course. But this is 20 years and would require a pretty radical shift in the way they are built. Batteries are on pace to become as cheap as solar. Both will go down even from there. Carbon capture at scale outside of reforestation remains something of a fantasy, but if you dismiss all smaller level schemes then it will definitely be out of reach forever (things don’t just automatically “scale).
Deus ex machina solutions are in the holy triumvirate of unproductive climate change discussions, along with doomerism and denialism. And this is pretty close to that.
The challenging bit about my beat is that there's so much to unlearn, because so much we've been told is just BS. The idea that who runs the U.S. government has major impacts for climate outcomes is...pretty far up on the list of things to unlearn.
It. Doesn't. Matter. The rate of decarbonization (meaning units of CO2 produced per unit GDP) has been slow and steady since we've been keeping records of this stuff. The pace doesn't accelerate in Democratic administrations and doesn't decelerate in Republican ones. It's super counterintuitive, but it's true. https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-most-amazing-climate-policy-figure
“However, at some point the decline of coal will stop — either because the U.S. has exited coal or the decreasing trend in coal consumption of the past decade is stopped or reversed. At that point, if the decades-long systematic decarbonization of the U.S. economy is to continue, then some other dynamic will have to kick in.”
So we have decarbonized without nuclear and with renewables, but the only solution to further decarbonizing is nuclear and kelp? Sorry your arguments fail by their own logic.
I also have one person and political party in mind who could “stop or reverse” the use of coal.
Reduce your three important items to two: carbon removal at the scale necessary to move the needle is impossible.
As in, even if our technology was at the maximum thermodynamic efficiency, carbon removal would still need to be the largest industry in the world just to offset ~5% of emissions. That’s the best possible scenario; current technology is *many* orders of magnitude away from this limit. Removal doesn’t belong in the equation with emissions reduction or albedo manipulation.
There might be ways to massively accelerate rock weathering at cost of around $1 extra per gallon of gasoline to get rid of CO2 resulting from burning that gallon of gasoline. Certainly worth investigating. However, even if successful, will takes decades to ramp up and reverse existing CO2.
Emission reduction also takes decades. Only albedo reduction helps in the short run. Mass migration doesn't stop warming but will be the only realistic response if albedo reduction fails.
Some technologies are better than others, but even in the best case scenario you would need rock weathering on the scale of *all other global mining activity* in order to make a difference. And, all of that activity will need to be 100% subsidized! Mountain grinding companies have no issue with this, and, if you ask them, of course they'll tell you that you should just do as much as possible. But, it's economically and politically nonsensical to do at scale.
Did you read the article and just make a knee jerk response? (If you did read it, then yes, author does mention idea is untested at scale so there may be gotchas, but no, scale is not that big and $1/gallon to offset CO2 is cheap.)
Yes, I read it. The scale is not a “gotcha” and it is unbelievably huge. If you formed your opinion solely based on an interview with rock weathering companies themselves, you should think on it a little more.
Yes the scale is huge, but so what? The scale of human activity to put all this CO2 in the atmosphere is also huge. Mining oil and gas and coal or cutting down trees and then transporting these materials to where they are burned (plus refining oil) is far more effort than mining peridotite, which amounts to tearing up ground and grinding up rocks. Compare with mining copper, gold, nickel, rare earth or other mining for elements, where the desired elements are a tiny percent of the rock. Most of the effort in mining for elements is in the leaching process to extract the elements from the rock. With respect to Portland cement, the effort is in burning the limestone.
Author’s bottom line is about $1/gallon added to current fuel price to account for removing CO2 in that fuel from atmosphere, which is cheap. I'm not sure how to convert gas, coal, biomass, etc to gallons equivalent but a rough guess is a trillion $ per year would suffice to offset all CO2 produced by human activity (but not methane released by melting permafrost or ocean hydrates, which is a bigger danger, IMO). A trillion $ is small in a world economy of $110 trillion in 2024. Your pet proposal of fertilizing the ocean is probably similar cost range and similarly unproven at scale. Pumping SO2 into the stratosphere, which is what we will inevitably do anyway and which has been proved to work every time a major volcano erupts, is also similar cost range.
I know basically nothing about the OP’s pet project, but at least it’s thermodynamically viable. My broader point is that CDR was only included in our climate planning because people thought further emissions reduction is too hard. But CDR at scale is a pipe dream and we should instead face reality on the consumption side instead.
Agree that we’ll end up trying to manipulate albedo in any case.
All of that to say that nuclear energy and carbon storage are the only thing that matters? There is 0 chance that nuclear energy will move fast enough to make a dent in carbon emissions and the size of carbon sequestration you would need doesn't actually scale in a feasible way. While solar has seen exploding growth and coal has dropped dramatically in the US it's always "nuclear is right around the corner". Please. Next you'll tell me that millions of EVs sold each year are a fad and hydrogen is right around the corner.
I agree that the scale issue can make climate discussions focus on relatively insignificant things with higher emotional impact, But the specific conclusion you draw from it doesn't seem valid. What you describe is just tragedy of the commons. The actions of any one small polity (or person) doesn't matter, but as an aggregate they are everything.
If I catch you throwing your trash on the street and criticize you for it, is that actually "not about keeping streets clean" because one person littering is insignificant in the grand sceme of things?
The only way to get around the tragedy of the commons is to set a certain standard of behaviour, hold yourself to said standard and pressure others (carrot and stick) to adopt similar standards. Pointing fingers and demanding that others take action before you do is childish. Clean your own room first, especially when you're in one of the richest countries in the world with some of the highest emissions in the world.
In aggregate, there's probably no way of fighting climate change through encouraging action on individual/state/national level, in part because most people (hint hint) are quick to find excuses for why they shouldn't have to change anything. So I agree that focusing on technological innovation is probably a more fruitful avenue. But I disagree on why.
I don’t understand your assertion that replacing ICE vehicles with EV’s would have no impact on the possibility of catastrophic climate change.
Here is an analysis done by an AI agent that concludes that global average surface temperatures could be reduced or not increased by .1 to 2° C by the end of the century. While that is hardly sufficient to avoid catastrophe it seems indisputable that every additional .1° C of temperature increase increases the risk of tipping point activation and even more extreme weather.
“Replacing ICE vehicles with EVs could reduce global transport-related CO₂ emissions by 30–50% by 2050, with reductions up to 90% in scenarios with clean grids and near-total adoption. This would significantly contribute to limiting global warming, potentially avoiding 0.1–0.2°C of temperature rise by 2100, per IPCC models. However, the full climate benefit hinges on decarbonizing electricity grids, improving battery sustainability, and achieving rapid, widespread EV adoption. Without these, reductions could be limited to 20–40% in many regions.“
Yeah, AI is great at summarizing the conventional wisdom...but that also means it struggles where the conventional wisdom is just wrong.
There's a surprisingly heated expert debate about this: producing an electric car and battery is surprisingly carbon-costly, enough that under some circumstances EVs emit _more_ than ICEs. The debate gets *very* involved but the upshot seems to be that EVs' carbon edge, where it exists, is often smallish and easily overwhelmed by lots of other things. Which means in many scenarios even overnight mass-EV adoption may not really make much difference one way or another.
Let me be clear: there are really good reasons to get an EVs. They're slick, they don't cause local air pollution, they're so much quieter, and also probably last longer. Climate is just not on that list.
Your assertions that EV replacement of ICE vehicles would have little benefit for the Climate would be more convincing if they were backed up by a reference or two
What if new production methods can be developed to make EVs significantly less carbon-costly, shifting that balance dramatically enough so that mass EV ownership does start to move the climate needle?
I take your point that we should get serious about serious solutions, but it seems that a simultaneous promotion of even fledgling climate initiatives helps to keep the door open to potentially pivotal innovations that would otherwise go undiscovered.
I pay taxes in Vermont and think the Climate Superfund Act will endup costing taxpayers alot and will probably never be successful. The state is already hiring consultants to identify the carbon majors and will spend to defend the law from litigation . Like laws that mandate all electricity by generated by renwables, these state sponsored climate superfund laws are not the answers we need. Hold your nose, here is a defense of the Act
I mean, it is a dumb idea. Of course. Some things that aren’t climate are dumb, and this is one of them. Other things that aren’t climate are smart. There are lots of things that aren’t climate. Almost nothing is climate, really.
Well, all the excess got there via the behavior and consumption patterns of billions of people who also reduced the planet's ability to utilize, convert, and store it all by cutting down forests, etc.
One can infer the opposite might also true, that in order for it to simply not get worse, or to worsen more slowly, people who caused this, could stop a lot of what they have been doing. So there is still room for that debate, in my view, all the way down to burping of cows and kelp.
I think what is too often ignored is that these efforts won't remove what is already there unless we can recreate and accelerate the the planet's ability to store and convert it or devise a massive man made process.
The point is, that we do not know how much we can do in the restoring and converting part or how quickly, so it it is still useful to try to add less and reduce damage in the meantime, but the ultimate solutions will likely be in removal, like seeding the oceans with iron which you have mentioned, for one.
Hi Quico, again a great commentary. I explore related themes in my article recently published in The Hill https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/5357702-albedo-loss-global-warming/
They called my article "Earth is absorbing too much sunlight: It’s a waking climate giant". It seems my proposed title Albedo is a Waking Climate Giant used a word totally foreign to public ears, despite being the single most important factor in climate change.
Taking a quantitative approach to policy is extremely difficult for most people. In my Hill article I mention that albedo loss causes about four times more immediate warming than carbon dioxide emissions, according to Global Warming in the Pipeline, a 2023 article by James Hansen and colleagues. This should be a game changer, given that the Pareto 80/20 ratio between warming from albedo feedback and emissions forcing is likely to worsen as clouds evaporate and ice melts.
It means nothing we do about carbon will make any difference to heat, unless there is concerted sunlight reflection driven by an Albedo Accord on the model of the Montreal Protocol.
But this is just my analysis of Hansen's argument. I have not found anyone who takes enough interest to check if this 80/20 ratio is a correct inference.
I agree generally that climate has a lot of 80/20 issues, but these seem hand-picked to give minimum agency to people and voters, and make the problem seem outside of their control.
For individuals, the 80/20 issues are eat less meat, vote for smart climate candidates (basically don’t vote republican), and electrify your home. Open to arguments, but anything else seems relatively minor.
For governments, “do nuclear” is not enough. Solar is the cheapest energy source ever invented by man. Could nuclear be cheaper eventually? Of course. But this is 20 years and would require a pretty radical shift in the way they are built. Batteries are on pace to become as cheap as solar. Both will go down even from there. Carbon capture at scale outside of reforestation remains something of a fantasy, but if you dismiss all smaller level schemes then it will definitely be out of reach forever (things don’t just automatically “scale).
Deus ex machina solutions are in the holy triumvirate of unproductive climate change discussions, along with doomerism and denialism. And this is pretty close to that.
The challenging bit about my beat is that there's so much to unlearn, because so much we've been told is just BS. The idea that who runs the U.S. government has major impacts for climate outcomes is...pretty far up on the list of things to unlearn.
It. Doesn't. Matter. The rate of decarbonization (meaning units of CO2 produced per unit GDP) has been slow and steady since we've been keeping records of this stuff. The pace doesn't accelerate in Democratic administrations and doesn't decelerate in Republican ones. It's super counterintuitive, but it's true. https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-most-amazing-climate-policy-figure
“However, at some point the decline of coal will stop — either because the U.S. has exited coal or the decreasing trend in coal consumption of the past decade is stopped or reversed. At that point, if the decades-long systematic decarbonization of the U.S. economy is to continue, then some other dynamic will have to kick in.”
So we have decarbonized without nuclear and with renewables, but the only solution to further decarbonizing is nuclear and kelp? Sorry your arguments fail by their own logic.
I also have one person and political party in mind who could “stop or reverse” the use of coal.
Your work is unbelievably good. Keep going.
Reduce your three important items to two: carbon removal at the scale necessary to move the needle is impossible.
As in, even if our technology was at the maximum thermodynamic efficiency, carbon removal would still need to be the largest industry in the world just to offset ~5% of emissions. That’s the best possible scenario; current technology is *many* orders of magnitude away from this limit. Removal doesn’t belong in the equation with emissions reduction or albedo manipulation.
This is true for 99 out of 100 carbon removal techniques. I’m working on the other one ;)
There might be ways to massively accelerate rock weathering at cost of around $1 extra per gallon of gasoline to get rid of CO2 resulting from burning that gallon of gasoline. Certainly worth investigating. However, even if successful, will takes decades to ramp up and reverse existing CO2.
https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/a-review-of-massively-scalable-enhanced
Emission reduction also takes decades. Only albedo reduction helps in the short run. Mass migration doesn't stop warming but will be the only realistic response if albedo reduction fails.
Some technologies are better than others, but even in the best case scenario you would need rock weathering on the scale of *all other global mining activity* in order to make a difference. And, all of that activity will need to be 100% subsidized! Mountain grinding companies have no issue with this, and, if you ask them, of course they'll tell you that you should just do as much as possible. But, it's economically and politically nonsensical to do at scale.
Did you read the article and just make a knee jerk response? (If you did read it, then yes, author does mention idea is untested at scale so there may be gotchas, but no, scale is not that big and $1/gallon to offset CO2 is cheap.)
Yes, I read it. The scale is not a “gotcha” and it is unbelievably huge. If you formed your opinion solely based on an interview with rock weathering companies themselves, you should think on it a little more.
Yes the scale is huge, but so what? The scale of human activity to put all this CO2 in the atmosphere is also huge. Mining oil and gas and coal or cutting down trees and then transporting these materials to where they are burned (plus refining oil) is far more effort than mining peridotite, which amounts to tearing up ground and grinding up rocks. Compare with mining copper, gold, nickel, rare earth or other mining for elements, where the desired elements are a tiny percent of the rock. Most of the effort in mining for elements is in the leaching process to extract the elements from the rock. With respect to Portland cement, the effort is in burning the limestone.
Author’s bottom line is about $1/gallon added to current fuel price to account for removing CO2 in that fuel from atmosphere, which is cheap. I'm not sure how to convert gas, coal, biomass, etc to gallons equivalent but a rough guess is a trillion $ per year would suffice to offset all CO2 produced by human activity (but not methane released by melting permafrost or ocean hydrates, which is a bigger danger, IMO). A trillion $ is small in a world economy of $110 trillion in 2024. Your pet proposal of fertilizing the ocean is probably similar cost range and similarly unproven at scale. Pumping SO2 into the stratosphere, which is what we will inevitably do anyway and which has been proved to work every time a major volcano erupts, is also similar cost range.
I know basically nothing about the OP’s pet project, but at least it’s thermodynamically viable. My broader point is that CDR was only included in our climate planning because people thought further emissions reduction is too hard. But CDR at scale is a pipe dream and we should instead face reality on the consumption side instead.
Agree that we’ll end up trying to manipulate albedo in any case.
I’m skeptical, but would be happy to be wrong. Are you referring to ocean photosynthesis?
of course!
All of that to say that nuclear energy and carbon storage are the only thing that matters? There is 0 chance that nuclear energy will move fast enough to make a dent in carbon emissions and the size of carbon sequestration you would need doesn't actually scale in a feasible way. While solar has seen exploding growth and coal has dropped dramatically in the US it's always "nuclear is right around the corner". Please. Next you'll tell me that millions of EVs sold each year are a fad and hydrogen is right around the corner.
A truly amazing piece, you have described exactly why I went into nuclear engineering
Extraordinary writing every time! Thank you, Quico!
I agree that the scale issue can make climate discussions focus on relatively insignificant things with higher emotional impact, But the specific conclusion you draw from it doesn't seem valid. What you describe is just tragedy of the commons. The actions of any one small polity (or person) doesn't matter, but as an aggregate they are everything.
If I catch you throwing your trash on the street and criticize you for it, is that actually "not about keeping streets clean" because one person littering is insignificant in the grand sceme of things?
The only way to get around the tragedy of the commons is to set a certain standard of behaviour, hold yourself to said standard and pressure others (carrot and stick) to adopt similar standards. Pointing fingers and demanding that others take action before you do is childish. Clean your own room first, especially when you're in one of the richest countries in the world with some of the highest emissions in the world.
In aggregate, there's probably no way of fighting climate change through encouraging action on individual/state/national level, in part because most people (hint hint) are quick to find excuses for why they shouldn't have to change anything. So I agree that focusing on technological innovation is probably a more fruitful avenue. But I disagree on why.
I don’t understand your assertion that replacing ICE vehicles with EV’s would have no impact on the possibility of catastrophic climate change.
Here is an analysis done by an AI agent that concludes that global average surface temperatures could be reduced or not increased by .1 to 2° C by the end of the century. While that is hardly sufficient to avoid catastrophe it seems indisputable that every additional .1° C of temperature increase increases the risk of tipping point activation and even more extreme weather.
“Replacing ICE vehicles with EVs could reduce global transport-related CO₂ emissions by 30–50% by 2050, with reductions up to 90% in scenarios with clean grids and near-total adoption. This would significantly contribute to limiting global warming, potentially avoiding 0.1–0.2°C of temperature rise by 2100, per IPCC models. However, the full climate benefit hinges on decarbonizing electricity grids, improving battery sustainability, and achieving rapid, widespread EV adoption. Without these, reductions could be limited to 20–40% in many regions.“
Yeah, AI is great at summarizing the conventional wisdom...but that also means it struggles where the conventional wisdom is just wrong.
There's a surprisingly heated expert debate about this: producing an electric car and battery is surprisingly carbon-costly, enough that under some circumstances EVs emit _more_ than ICEs. The debate gets *very* involved but the upshot seems to be that EVs' carbon edge, where it exists, is often smallish and easily overwhelmed by lots of other things. Which means in many scenarios even overnight mass-EV adoption may not really make much difference one way or another.
Let me be clear: there are really good reasons to get an EVs. They're slick, they don't cause local air pollution, they're so much quieter, and also probably last longer. Climate is just not on that list.
Your assertions that EV replacement of ICE vehicles would have little benefit for the Climate would be more convincing if they were backed up by a reference or two
What if new production methods can be developed to make EVs significantly less carbon-costly, shifting that balance dramatically enough so that mass EV ownership does start to move the climate needle?
I take your point that we should get serious about serious solutions, but it seems that a simultaneous promotion of even fledgling climate initiatives helps to keep the door open to potentially pivotal innovations that would otherwise go undiscovered.
Well sure. (Originally, I was calling out not so much EVs themselves as the tedius wars about their lifecycle carbon intensity.)
I pay taxes in Vermont and think the Climate Superfund Act will endup costing taxpayers alot and will probably never be successful. The state is already hiring consultants to identify the carbon majors and will spend to defend the law from litigation . Like laws that mandate all electricity by generated by renwables, these state sponsored climate superfund laws are not the answers we need. Hold your nose, here is a defense of the Act
How a Climate Superfund Works - Conservation Law Foundation https://share.google/ChXeA1ibpWs5JXNfj
I mean, it is a dumb idea. Of course. Some things that aren’t climate are dumb, and this is one of them. Other things that aren’t climate are smart. There are lots of things that aren’t climate. Almost nothing is climate, really.