I think you're half right, in that COP didn't actually accomplish all that much. And a new multi-lateral future does create new opportunities for action on climate.
For example-- if one is no longer kowtowing to Washington, DC, then solar power energy is cheaper than coal or natural gas for global energy, because energy projects can just buy cheap Chinese panels without having to be US permission.
Similarly, cheap BYD and BYD imitator cars can replace the gas guzzlers American auto is pushing, and the overpriced US/EU electrics that keep electric vehicles a 'luxury.' You can see this in places like India, where electric tuktuks with hot-swappable batteries are replacing the old gas models, and are just cheaper to operate.
So there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that will reduce emissions ahead in terms of technology that can be super-charged without having to drag the development through the US. Europe and the US may still try to protect their domestic auto manufacturing, but it's clear the Chinese mean to compete on price and better technology. Africa, Asia, and South America don't have to play by US rules in the post-breach world, so they are free to benefit from cheaper and better technology in Chinese developed goods that further electrification. Solar and wind are getting affordable enough that US/EU subsidy to fossil fuel technologies cannot incentivize their incumbency on a global scale.
That new world order is also one where the EU is incentivized to get energy independent-- neither dependent on Russian gas and oil, nor on US LNG. They have no incentive not to take advantage of Chinese Solar panel production, to roll out robust renewable energy production to wean off of US LNG dependence.
Carbon capture and storage? There is a clear answer, but it means redefining how environmentalists tend to calculate carbon capture. And that's simple; we have to start counting carbon captured by biological process and then buried deep enough not to re-emit as carbon capture.
So for example, a world without fossil fuels is a world where petrochemical feedstocks need to be replaced by some renewable source for plastic production. So in concept, if we say find a process to produce plastic feed stocks from renewable biological sources-- the carbon in that plastic would be removed from atmospheric circulation. So, for example, if we made PVC from biologically sourced ethanol (industrializing say the dehydration of ethanol to ethylene using activated alumina, one of several possible routes), then converted that ethylene into PVC, all of the carbon in that PVC would be carbon captured from the atmosphere by biological processes. That would be 'captured' carbon that was highly useful (as useful as PVC is today). We could call that 'captured.'
But if we went a step further-- and then instead of landfilling or burning that PVC produced from biological ethanol, we buried it deep enough that it would not re-emit even when it eventually did decay into simpler organic molecules, that would be a full carbon capture.
We have, in fact, an abundance of places we could store that carbon-- say for example in former oil and natural gas wells. For example-- there are many old oil fields that are losing containment, because they were capped in the early 1900s using outdated technology with basically no oversight. They are leaking toxic water that is mixing with ground water, and in general making inhabited parts of the world uninhabitable (some of this is happening in say, the San Diego suburbs). So to clean up those environmental disasters, these old fields need to be drained, have the water treated, and then re-filled, to be capped by competent technology. This filler could as easily be our carbon-capture PVC disposal as the sand/water combination currently used.
But it's even simpler than that, even. Because if we're just filling old wells that needed draining to prevent toxic water from poisoning the ground water supply, we don't need to make PVC, we can just make and use a filler material made from biomass, like say Sargassum from the Atlantic Sargassum bloom. There's nothing saying it has to be silica sand, it could be some form of carbon.
There are many other applications that could be applied, and applied basically profitably, if we just started recognizing that biologically sourced carbon is ultimately carbon pulled from the atmosphere, and therefore that burying biomass *is* carbon capture when that burial prevents the buried biomass from circulating carbon back into the atmosphere. Locking biologically sourced carbon into useful plastics is another useful path for removing carbon from atmospheric carbon cycles.
At a fundamental level-- this is just reproducing the natural burial of carbon through geological processes with an industrial process. Bury biomass, cover with enough dirt that the carbon stops circulating into the atmosphere through biological processes, repeat.
Most current carbon accounting doesn't allow for this acknowledgement, because the coalition that held together COP was so anti-plastic that plastic as a carbon sink was not a politically feasible path. Similarly the simple burial of carbon captured from biomass is not really a sexy technology that removes C02 directly from the air.
There will never be a more cost-efficient machine for removing CO2 from the air than the humble chloroplast. We should stop wasting money trying to out-invent nature. And maybe in the post-COP world we can.
"We have, in fact, an abundance of places we could store that carbon-- say for example in former oil and natural gas wells."
OK, sure, but think about what this kind of thinking leads to. To store carbon in a depleted oil field you need to build a whole complex industrial infrastructure to move literally BILLIONS of tons of material around. The scale of the operation is gargantuan and inevitably makes costs balloon. Just moving biomass is expensive, because mechanically transporting stuff costs money.
This is why I favor phytoplankton carbon solution. Because you're right, the humble chloroplast *is* the best solution, but I don't want to be in the business of physically moving around billions of tons of dead chloroplasts. I want the chloroplasts to capture CO2, die, then sink to the bottom of the ocean and stay there for 100,000 years. This radically simplifies the process and leaves you with a genuinely affordable ton of long-term removals.
Your storing-carbon-in-old-oil-wells startup is never going to be able to beat my let-chloroplasts-sink startup, because ours is always going to be radically cheaper and much much simpler.
We need to remove billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere; roughly we can estimate the volume of that carbon by the volume of fossil fuel that has been burned.
These old depleted oil fields are environmental projects that are already being funded, because again they are a health hazard to communities that were built on top of them. So the costs incurred by the carbon capture are only the cost of replacing the sand that would otherwise be used as filler (which is bought) and the cost of producing a carbon filler made from biomass.
It’s a win-win where an existing ecological disaster is unfolding (the leakage of these ~100 year old oil fields into ground water) and carbon is stored outside of the atmospheric carbon cycle.
Moreover— the same technology that is currently being used to extract oil and natural gas could be used to drill new storage for carbon storage beneath bedrock and the water table, at a lower cost than deep water storage, and more permanently. Burying solid carbon ash derived from burning biomass as fuel is also less energy intensive than capturing gaseous atmospheric carbon, and then converting it to frozen dry ice carbon for deep sea burial. Burning the biomass provides its own energy source, while generating dry ice is extremely energy intensive. There is also potential industrially useful by-product, such as the production of potash/lye, depending on the chosen biomass feedstock.
Newly drilled storage can be sited such that it also produces sand for sale, or other industrially useful crushed rock.
Moreover the replacement of fossil fuel derived feedstocks for ‘petrochemicals’ with biomass derived feedstocks for the production of plastic is another process that could be done with economic advantage and scale. Industrial ethylene consumption alone is 177 million tonnes a year, that is basically 151 tonne potential carbon sink (removing the hydrogen mass from the ethylene total mass).
It’s also a potential solution for the disposal of plastic waste, most of which ends up as co2 generating landfill. If we were to safely and permanently bury plastic waste below bedrock and the water table, we would be removing carbon from the atmosphere and reducing plastic pollution simultaneously, especially if we fully convert plastic feedstocks to biomass sources.
When I first ran across your writing, you were advocating various ways of atmospheric brightening. I haven't seen you address that solution strategy lately (unless I've missed it). Have you run into objections to it? I can see that it is potentially more dangerous than CDR if done wrong. But also it seems potentially more effective if done properly in incremental steps with rigorous monitoring for both main and unintended side effects. What are your current thoughts about atmospheric brightening?
Well, it's a couple of things. First, just reporting on Marine Cloud Brightening convinced me that the science is still ten years out. But second, as I learned more about phytoplankton carbon it just struck me as fundamentally better: cheaper, more elegant, more technologically straight-forward, and addressing the core of the problem rather than just the symptoms.
Do you have any posts documenting why you believe the science on atmospheric brightening is still ten years out? Similarly, do you have any posts on why CDR is "fundamentally better: cheaper, more elegant, more technologically straight-forward"? Given the critical importance of short-circuiting the global warming trajectory and the consensus that brightening would bring results quicker and cheaper than CDR (at least from what I've read (including your posts)), I would think these statements need to be backed up with hard facts and sound logic. Please post links if you have already done so. I'm anxious to understand your change of heart. If not, could you post your reasoning for these positions? Don't get me wrong. I love your work. I just don't understand the reasons for your change of heart and would like to do so.
for this piece: https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-next-climate-conversation-is/ I talked to a lot of scientists and the consensus was "Yeah, this should be something we can work out, but here's a list of things we still have to discover before we can be sure we can make it work..." and then they'd go on to list everything from just fundamental cloud microphysics to problems with nozzle design, with uncertainties about moving between scales (from microscopic to cloud scale to weather system scale to regional scale to global scale) to uncertainty about the impact on rainfall... it was a lot. In principle it's all solvable, but it won't be solved quick.
With phytoplankton-approaches, there's just a lot less uncertainty. There's still some, for sure. But mostly they're engineering problems, not basic science problems, so it all feels more real...
That piece and your comments were very helpful in understanding the issues you described with cloud brightening. Are you aware of any good references for the phytoplankton approach? Thank you. Best wishes, Gordy
I appreciate this piece. I've just started writing a piece about my sadness that environmental issues aren't even barely on the radar given the authoritarian crisis the US is experiencing. And too many environmental/climate activists are still on the we can grow our way out of climate change and ecological collapse through massive scaling up of renewables. I don't believe that but unfortunately humanity just can't even begin to ponder, "How much is enough?"
This is exactly the kind of thinking that I turn to you for, I will be sharing this with my family and friends.
Extremely impressive thinking.
I really hope you get the support you need.
Thank you
Hard agree
The US base of Trump has been alternately trembling and cynically acclaiming the coming of the Rapture. Alas, it was a typo.
I think you're half right, in that COP didn't actually accomplish all that much. And a new multi-lateral future does create new opportunities for action on climate.
For example-- if one is no longer kowtowing to Washington, DC, then solar power energy is cheaper than coal or natural gas for global energy, because energy projects can just buy cheap Chinese panels without having to be US permission.
Similarly, cheap BYD and BYD imitator cars can replace the gas guzzlers American auto is pushing, and the overpriced US/EU electrics that keep electric vehicles a 'luxury.' You can see this in places like India, where electric tuktuks with hot-swappable batteries are replacing the old gas models, and are just cheaper to operate.
So there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that will reduce emissions ahead in terms of technology that can be super-charged without having to drag the development through the US. Europe and the US may still try to protect their domestic auto manufacturing, but it's clear the Chinese mean to compete on price and better technology. Africa, Asia, and South America don't have to play by US rules in the post-breach world, so they are free to benefit from cheaper and better technology in Chinese developed goods that further electrification. Solar and wind are getting affordable enough that US/EU subsidy to fossil fuel technologies cannot incentivize their incumbency on a global scale.
That new world order is also one where the EU is incentivized to get energy independent-- neither dependent on Russian gas and oil, nor on US LNG. They have no incentive not to take advantage of Chinese Solar panel production, to roll out robust renewable energy production to wean off of US LNG dependence.
Carbon capture and storage? There is a clear answer, but it means redefining how environmentalists tend to calculate carbon capture. And that's simple; we have to start counting carbon captured by biological process and then buried deep enough not to re-emit as carbon capture.
So for example, a world without fossil fuels is a world where petrochemical feedstocks need to be replaced by some renewable source for plastic production. So in concept, if we say find a process to produce plastic feed stocks from renewable biological sources-- the carbon in that plastic would be removed from atmospheric circulation. So, for example, if we made PVC from biologically sourced ethanol (industrializing say the dehydration of ethanol to ethylene using activated alumina, one of several possible routes), then converted that ethylene into PVC, all of the carbon in that PVC would be carbon captured from the atmosphere by biological processes. That would be 'captured' carbon that was highly useful (as useful as PVC is today). We could call that 'captured.'
But if we went a step further-- and then instead of landfilling or burning that PVC produced from biological ethanol, we buried it deep enough that it would not re-emit even when it eventually did decay into simpler organic molecules, that would be a full carbon capture.
We have, in fact, an abundance of places we could store that carbon-- say for example in former oil and natural gas wells. For example-- there are many old oil fields that are losing containment, because they were capped in the early 1900s using outdated technology with basically no oversight. They are leaking toxic water that is mixing with ground water, and in general making inhabited parts of the world uninhabitable (some of this is happening in say, the San Diego suburbs). So to clean up those environmental disasters, these old fields need to be drained, have the water treated, and then re-filled, to be capped by competent technology. This filler could as easily be our carbon-capture PVC disposal as the sand/water combination currently used.
But it's even simpler than that, even. Because if we're just filling old wells that needed draining to prevent toxic water from poisoning the ground water supply, we don't need to make PVC, we can just make and use a filler material made from biomass, like say Sargassum from the Atlantic Sargassum bloom. There's nothing saying it has to be silica sand, it could be some form of carbon.
There are many other applications that could be applied, and applied basically profitably, if we just started recognizing that biologically sourced carbon is ultimately carbon pulled from the atmosphere, and therefore that burying biomass *is* carbon capture when that burial prevents the buried biomass from circulating carbon back into the atmosphere. Locking biologically sourced carbon into useful plastics is another useful path for removing carbon from atmospheric carbon cycles.
At a fundamental level-- this is just reproducing the natural burial of carbon through geological processes with an industrial process. Bury biomass, cover with enough dirt that the carbon stops circulating into the atmosphere through biological processes, repeat.
Most current carbon accounting doesn't allow for this acknowledgement, because the coalition that held together COP was so anti-plastic that plastic as a carbon sink was not a politically feasible path. Similarly the simple burial of carbon captured from biomass is not really a sexy technology that removes C02 directly from the air.
There will never be a more cost-efficient machine for removing CO2 from the air than the humble chloroplast. We should stop wasting money trying to out-invent nature. And maybe in the post-COP world we can.
"We have, in fact, an abundance of places we could store that carbon-- say for example in former oil and natural gas wells."
OK, sure, but think about what this kind of thinking leads to. To store carbon in a depleted oil field you need to build a whole complex industrial infrastructure to move literally BILLIONS of tons of material around. The scale of the operation is gargantuan and inevitably makes costs balloon. Just moving biomass is expensive, because mechanically transporting stuff costs money.
This is why I favor phytoplankton carbon solution. Because you're right, the humble chloroplast *is* the best solution, but I don't want to be in the business of physically moving around billions of tons of dead chloroplasts. I want the chloroplasts to capture CO2, die, then sink to the bottom of the ocean and stay there for 100,000 years. This radically simplifies the process and leaves you with a genuinely affordable ton of long-term removals.
Your storing-carbon-in-old-oil-wells startup is never going to be able to beat my let-chloroplasts-sink startup, because ours is always going to be radically cheaper and much much simpler.
We need to remove billions of tons of carbon from the atmosphere; roughly we can estimate the volume of that carbon by the volume of fossil fuel that has been burned.
These old depleted oil fields are environmental projects that are already being funded, because again they are a health hazard to communities that were built on top of them. So the costs incurred by the carbon capture are only the cost of replacing the sand that would otherwise be used as filler (which is bought) and the cost of producing a carbon filler made from biomass.
It’s a win-win where an existing ecological disaster is unfolding (the leakage of these ~100 year old oil fields into ground water) and carbon is stored outside of the atmospheric carbon cycle.
Moreover— the same technology that is currently being used to extract oil and natural gas could be used to drill new storage for carbon storage beneath bedrock and the water table, at a lower cost than deep water storage, and more permanently. Burying solid carbon ash derived from burning biomass as fuel is also less energy intensive than capturing gaseous atmospheric carbon, and then converting it to frozen dry ice carbon for deep sea burial. Burning the biomass provides its own energy source, while generating dry ice is extremely energy intensive. There is also potential industrially useful by-product, such as the production of potash/lye, depending on the chosen biomass feedstock.
Newly drilled storage can be sited such that it also produces sand for sale, or other industrially useful crushed rock.
Moreover the replacement of fossil fuel derived feedstocks for ‘petrochemicals’ with biomass derived feedstocks for the production of plastic is another process that could be done with economic advantage and scale. Industrial ethylene consumption alone is 177 million tonnes a year, that is basically 151 tonne potential carbon sink (removing the hydrogen mass from the ethylene total mass).
It’s also a potential solution for the disposal of plastic waste, most of which ends up as co2 generating landfill. If we were to safely and permanently bury plastic waste below bedrock and the water table, we would be removing carbon from the atmosphere and reducing plastic pollution simultaneously, especially if we fully convert plastic feedstocks to biomass sources.
When I first ran across your writing, you were advocating various ways of atmospheric brightening. I haven't seen you address that solution strategy lately (unless I've missed it). Have you run into objections to it? I can see that it is potentially more dangerous than CDR if done wrong. But also it seems potentially more effective if done properly in incremental steps with rigorous monitoring for both main and unintended side effects. What are your current thoughts about atmospheric brightening?
Well, it's a couple of things. First, just reporting on Marine Cloud Brightening convinced me that the science is still ten years out. But second, as I learned more about phytoplankton carbon it just struck me as fundamentally better: cheaper, more elegant, more technologically straight-forward, and addressing the core of the problem rather than just the symptoms.
Do you have any posts documenting why you believe the science on atmospheric brightening is still ten years out? Similarly, do you have any posts on why CDR is "fundamentally better: cheaper, more elegant, more technologically straight-forward"? Given the critical importance of short-circuiting the global warming trajectory and the consensus that brightening would bring results quicker and cheaper than CDR (at least from what I've read (including your posts)), I would think these statements need to be backed up with hard facts and sound logic. Please post links if you have already done so. I'm anxious to understand your change of heart. If not, could you post your reasoning for these positions? Don't get me wrong. I love your work. I just don't understand the reasons for your change of heart and would like to do so.
for this piece: https://www.persuasion.community/p/the-next-climate-conversation-is/ I talked to a lot of scientists and the consensus was "Yeah, this should be something we can work out, but here's a list of things we still have to discover before we can be sure we can make it work..." and then they'd go on to list everything from just fundamental cloud microphysics to problems with nozzle design, with uncertainties about moving between scales (from microscopic to cloud scale to weather system scale to regional scale to global scale) to uncertainty about the impact on rainfall... it was a lot. In principle it's all solvable, but it won't be solved quick.
With phytoplankton-approaches, there's just a lot less uncertainty. There's still some, for sure. But mostly they're engineering problems, not basic science problems, so it all feels more real...
That piece and your comments were very helpful in understanding the issues you described with cloud brightening. Are you aware of any good references for the phytoplankton approach? Thank you. Best wishes, Gordy
The Substack reader voice calls CDR “commander” and it is hilarious. I was very confused for a minute 😂
I appreciate this piece. I've just started writing a piece about my sadness that environmental issues aren't even barely on the radar given the authoritarian crisis the US is experiencing. And too many environmental/climate activists are still on the we can grow our way out of climate change and ecological collapse through massive scaling up of renewables. I don't believe that but unfortunately humanity just can't even begin to ponder, "How much is enough?"
I think a $10 ton of long-term CDR solves the problem. And I think a $10 ton of long-term CDR is going to be a reality in the next five years.