Your argument makes perfect sense economically, but only provided that offsets are consistently measured, auditable, and trusted. The incentives to cheat are great: billions of dollars for a number the buyer can't measure directly! At this point I personally write off all carbon offsets as performative marketing nonsense -- sometimes unjust, as some of it is real: but I don't have the knowledge or tools to know which. These obstacles can likely be overcome but it will take effort and there will be setbacks.
A greater challenge is getting deep, visceral acceptance by the population with political control. Japan and Germany shut down their nuclear plants because of knee-jerk panic, not careful economic calculation or analysis of risk.
Changing a process to prevent emissions is directly measurable on site and less vulnerable to political whim. If I ran an enterprise that emitted a lot of CO2 my first instinct would be to keep the mob from shutting me down, with the efficiency of mitigation a distant second -- absent a strong popular consensus for carbon pricing.
I'm really excited by the possibilities of carbon capture -- but suspect that the social engineering will be at least as challenging as the physical.
When Germany was blowing up there nuclear power plants, I joined a German sub on Reddit, and asked the people there whether or not they thought this was a wise idea. I got 20 or 30 responses and I think there was only one or maybe two that were in favour of eliminating nuclear. most of the responses thought that that was a really crazy thing to do.
Reddit is generally pretty left leaning, at least that’s what I believe. Who the hell are all these people that are against nuclear power?
Personally, I don’t think that that was a majority decision, I think the party that was in power were attempting to appease their base. A lot like Trump and his mass deportations, or Biden leaving the border open.
Proper measurement of public opinion would go a long ways towards solving these problems, and even when the majority have it wrong in a particular region or country, the larger majority of the world might be able to correct for that.
When it comes to deciding which industries or products should be allowed to continue producing carbon, I think there needs to be a lot more public input into making these decisions.
Maybe we need the concrete, or the steel, and it’s worth the carbon output, but I’m sure there’s a lot of Industries with high carbon costs, that are just not worth it.
An Who gets to decide this stuff, is the real issue.
I find Jack Devanney's concept of a regulatory system for nuclear which balances the incentive for affordability and safety to be very compelling. The Underwriter Certification system requires a nuclear plant to meet regulations chosen by the insurance company in order to get their insurance. The insurance company obviously has an incentive for safety, but they also have a balanced one for affordability as there will be fewer plants to pay for insurance if the regulations are prohibitive.
Nuclear power has been built for 3 cents per kilowatt hour historically. It sounds like the best current performance is about 6 cents per kilowatt hour. 3 cents is the kind of power price that can support substantial electrification.
And if governments subsidised that price in the way they had been subsidising renewables, it's achieveable. By the way, France seems to be doing pretty well running mainly on nuclear, which it has done safely for years, and - I think - sometimes supporting other European countries when needed for back up. So they aren't having the Spain/ Portugal blackout problems where it seemed to just be impossible to stabilise the grid.
You make good points, but the assumption is that the carbon removal really is durable. For example carbon sequestration by planting trees is great and has a whole lot of other benefits. That is, until a fire comes around and returns all that carbon to the atmosphere. Burying carbon underground also works, unless there’s an earthquake in the next 250 years that releases it all.
The point is that there is a risk with carbon removal that it is not as durable as we think it is. Whereas a ton of carbon never emitted has no risk. Obviously, we need to do both, but how do we know that our technology will hold for hundreds of years after we build it?
I’m an accountant too, which is why this kind of thinking makes my blood boil.
The atmosphere may not care where a molecule of CO₂ came from. Molecules are simple creatures. They have no opinions. But people do. Ecosystems do. There are other externalities in the world besides the one you’ve decided to count.
We are not trying to optimize some cosmic carbon ledger. We are trying to leave behind a world that is clean and sustainable.
This is the oldest management failure there is: invent a KPI and soon everyone optimizes the KPI instead of the thing the KPI was meant to represent.
Thinking only in terms of atmospheric carbon isn’t “thinking like an accountant.” It’s thinking like someone who records revenue and forgets liabilities.
“Money doesn’t smell” was always a cynical phrase. Turns out, some things do. The atmosphere may not care whether emissions come from a cow or a smokestack, but the rest of us have to live with everything else that comes with them.
Good points but the fiddle is too small for people to hear. The media doesn't care unless their publisher gets a big bonus. $10 a ton is great in a non-existant currency that trades their $1 for $40 - $80 US $ to make it average $600 $US a ton.
Long ago, I read a sci-fi book* in which a character discovered a threat to human existence. The public ignored all the evidence. A political friend of the character told him, “unless you give them a solution to the future impending crisis, the public will be unwilling to accept that this crisis is on the way.”
What I love about your work is you are unabashedly staring at the potential catastrophe of global warming and the benefits to humanity of steel, concrete, flight, and economic growth generally. And that has led you to look for a solution that actually allows for people everywhere to flourish.
Which means it could bridge the gap between those that are concerned about global warming and those are concerned about restrictions and job losses of decarbonizing our economy and those in developing countries who need growth now to raise people out of poverty.
CO2 is saturated and has been since around 100 ppmv. It also bears a logarithmic relationship to temperature. Therefore, doubling atmospheric CO2 will only raise the troposphere by about 0.7 degrees C.
Thank you Quico, the simple arithmetic you describe is anathema to the emotive hostility that drives climate activism. Net zero means carbon sinks equal carbon sources. It can be achieved at any level of emissions as long as sinks are expanded. But expanding sinks is vastly better than reducing sources, because it has a trajectory to net negative, the requirement to cut CO2 levels. My view is that marine permaculture will become the main carbon industry because the natural falling of seaweed to the abyss provides long term storage that can be profitably implemented by growing seaweed for fertiliser, fuel and food. Not paying $10 a ton but removing carbon at a profit. Only prevented by stupid emotive hostility, the moral hazard argument that this undermines the rationale for subsidies of renewable energy.
Your argument makes perfect sense economically, but only provided that offsets are consistently measured, auditable, and trusted. The incentives to cheat are great: billions of dollars for a number the buyer can't measure directly! At this point I personally write off all carbon offsets as performative marketing nonsense -- sometimes unjust, as some of it is real: but I don't have the knowledge or tools to know which. These obstacles can likely be overcome but it will take effort and there will be setbacks.
A greater challenge is getting deep, visceral acceptance by the population with political control. Japan and Germany shut down their nuclear plants because of knee-jerk panic, not careful economic calculation or analysis of risk.
Changing a process to prevent emissions is directly measurable on site and less vulnerable to political whim. If I ran an enterprise that emitted a lot of CO2 my first instinct would be to keep the mob from shutting me down, with the efficiency of mitigation a distant second -- absent a strong popular consensus for carbon pricing.
I'm really excited by the possibilities of carbon capture -- but suspect that the social engineering will be at least as challenging as the physical.
When Germany was blowing up there nuclear power plants, I joined a German sub on Reddit, and asked the people there whether or not they thought this was a wise idea. I got 20 or 30 responses and I think there was only one or maybe two that were in favour of eliminating nuclear. most of the responses thought that that was a really crazy thing to do.
Reddit is generally pretty left leaning, at least that’s what I believe. Who the hell are all these people that are against nuclear power?
Personally, I don’t think that that was a majority decision, I think the party that was in power were attempting to appease their base. A lot like Trump and his mass deportations, or Biden leaving the border open.
Proper measurement of public opinion would go a long ways towards solving these problems, and even when the majority have it wrong in a particular region or country, the larger majority of the world might be able to correct for that.
When it comes to deciding which industries or products should be allowed to continue producing carbon, I think there needs to be a lot more public input into making these decisions.
Maybe we need the concrete, or the steel, and it’s worth the carbon output, but I’m sure there’s a lot of Industries with high carbon costs, that are just not worth it.
An Who gets to decide this stuff, is the real issue.
Interesting. How feasible is 10$ per ton? how far to get there?
We’re working on it!
https://www.edf.org/media/edf-launches-new-research-program-phytoplankton-carbon-solutions
yeah I read your other article on this a day or two ago.
It’s gonna take 3-5 years but I think we can do it
Absolutely agree. And don't forget nuclear power which doesn't produce CO2...
I find Jack Devanney's concept of a regulatory system for nuclear which balances the incentive for affordability and safety to be very compelling. The Underwriter Certification system requires a nuclear plant to meet regulations chosen by the insurance company in order to get their insurance. The insurance company obviously has an incentive for safety, but they also have a balanced one for affordability as there will be fewer plants to pay for insurance if the regulations are prohibitive.
Nuclear power has been built for 3 cents per kilowatt hour historically. It sounds like the best current performance is about 6 cents per kilowatt hour. 3 cents is the kind of power price that can support substantial electrification.
And if governments subsidised that price in the way they had been subsidising renewables, it's achieveable. By the way, France seems to be doing pretty well running mainly on nuclear, which it has done safely for years, and - I think - sometimes supporting other European countries when needed for back up. So they aren't having the Spain/ Portugal blackout problems where it seemed to just be impossible to stabilise the grid.
You make good points, but the assumption is that the carbon removal really is durable. For example carbon sequestration by planting trees is great and has a whole lot of other benefits. That is, until a fire comes around and returns all that carbon to the atmosphere. Burying carbon underground also works, unless there’s an earthquake in the next 250 years that releases it all.
The point is that there is a risk with carbon removal that it is not as durable as we think it is. Whereas a ton of carbon never emitted has no risk. Obviously, we need to do both, but how do we know that our technology will hold for hundreds of years after we build it?
I’m an accountant too, which is why this kind of thinking makes my blood boil.
The atmosphere may not care where a molecule of CO₂ came from. Molecules are simple creatures. They have no opinions. But people do. Ecosystems do. There are other externalities in the world besides the one you’ve decided to count.
We are not trying to optimize some cosmic carbon ledger. We are trying to leave behind a world that is clean and sustainable.
This is the oldest management failure there is: invent a KPI and soon everyone optimizes the KPI instead of the thing the KPI was meant to represent.
Thinking only in terms of atmospheric carbon isn’t “thinking like an accountant.” It’s thinking like someone who records revenue and forgets liabilities.
“Money doesn’t smell” was always a cynical phrase. Turns out, some things do. The atmosphere may not care whether emissions come from a cow or a smokestack, but the rest of us have to live with everything else that comes with them.
Good points but the fiddle is too small for people to hear. The media doesn't care unless their publisher gets a big bonus. $10 a ton is great in a non-existant currency that trades their $1 for $40 - $80 US $ to make it average $600 $US a ton.
Long ago, I read a sci-fi book* in which a character discovered a threat to human existence. The public ignored all the evidence. A political friend of the character told him, “unless you give them a solution to the future impending crisis, the public will be unwilling to accept that this crisis is on the way.”
What I love about your work is you are unabashedly staring at the potential catastrophe of global warming and the benefits to humanity of steel, concrete, flight, and economic growth generally. And that has led you to look for a solution that actually allows for people everywhere to flourish.
Which means it could bridge the gap between those that are concerned about global warming and those are concerned about restrictions and job losses of decarbonizing our economy and those in developing countries who need growth now to raise people out of poverty.
*I wish I remember the title or author
CO2 is saturated and has been since around 100 ppmv. It also bears a logarithmic relationship to temperature. Therefore, doubling atmospheric CO2 will only raise the troposphere by about 0.7 degrees C.
Thank you Quico, the simple arithmetic you describe is anathema to the emotive hostility that drives climate activism. Net zero means carbon sinks equal carbon sources. It can be achieved at any level of emissions as long as sinks are expanded. But expanding sinks is vastly better than reducing sources, because it has a trajectory to net negative, the requirement to cut CO2 levels. My view is that marine permaculture will become the main carbon industry because the natural falling of seaweed to the abyss provides long term storage that can be profitably implemented by growing seaweed for fertiliser, fuel and food. Not paying $10 a ton but removing carbon at a profit. Only prevented by stupid emotive hostility, the moral hazard argument that this undermines the rationale for subsidies of renewable energy.