Our brains melt on contact with unfamiliar scales.
We can sort of imagine a ton: it’s about what a small car weighs. Multiply that by a thousand and we’re lost. Kiloton, megaton and gigatons all sound like just fancier and fancier ways of saying “a lot.”
A shocking portion of our climate debate is just people passionately espousing nonsense either because they’re lost amid the big numbers or, more often, because they’re betting you will be
I get pitches about carbon dioxide removal techniques that claim to scrub of carbon out of the atmosphere “at scale” all the time.
Ask “at what scale” and 99 times out of 100 it turns out they mean kiloton scale.
Press them a little, and you often get an answer in the form “if x, y and z happen, we could take this to megaton scale” — where x, y and z are some combination of political sorcery and technological miracle-making.
It enrages me.
Look, we’re adding the equivalent of 53 gigatons of CO₂ to the atmosphere each year, and each year we add a bit more than the year before.
A recent report from researchers at Oxford University shows we’ll need to remove 7-9 gigatons per year from the air to have a meaningful impact. We’re currently removing 0.0023 gigatons per year.
“You don’t get it,” people sometimes say, “you have to take a thousand shots on goal!”
Which sounds nice and all, but is nonsense. Iterating a thousand different design tweaks on a teaspoon isn’t going to get you any closer to draining the Pacific.
There’s a risk of being too polite, too unwilling to call bullshit on appeals to your presumed innumeracy.
That politeness comes at a cost. Carbon dioxide removal technologies with no plausible path to gigaton scale are draining talent, attention and funding from proposals that do have a credible path.
If your CDR startup’s plan works at kiloton-scale, you may well convince an investor somewhere that enough corporate sustainability departments are going to want to buy into it to bring it to megaton scale.
That might be enough to engineer a multimillion dollar exit; your bank account will surely thank you for it. But don’t lie to yourself: what you’re developing is not a climate solution. It’s a solution to the PR problems of chief sustainability officers.
Hat tip to my colleague Micah Brown for the animation up top.
