This is very very useful. Quico is the first writer I have found on Substack exercising and extending carbon economics. I love the supply curve.
In my Restack I use our shared carbon economics to argue that biochar is better than it looks, and describe a prototypical Washoe Forests Carbon Bank.
We turn crappy local currency into TAC values. Because we hold verifiable physical assets (including co-produced locally dispersed biochar) we create, attract, and invest financial TAC assets as well.
The carbon-capture supply curve is obviously of core interest to carbon bankers.
ooooooh, wanna hear more. I'm sort of a phytoplankton zealot, I admit it, just because it never makes sense to me that something like biochar that has to *pay* for energy can compete with something that gets energy for free. But, y'know, I could be wrong...
Phyto-zealotry is fine. I'm a forests zealot. In the carbon crisis we need zeal all around, in the drink and in the sticks.
Up here in the sticks we have become accustomed to char zeal. So we have questions and concerns.
Char shares the phytoplankton approach's permanence. This is a good thing. Forets carbon is persistent; so long as the system thrives the carbon bank increases. The roots of old trees decay slowly, but they do decay. The really good thing about forests carbon is that it is easy to verify, which makes it a geat asset base to support investments in other carbon sinks. Like in The Drink.
The forests biochar makes sense relative to other char systems because it is a biproduct of the pyrolisis associated with disposal of forests biomass that is removed as part of forests stewardsh investments to preserve the existing carbon store and increase its future holdings. We "pay" some atmospheric CO2 today to increase the avoided CO2 through time.
One can design the incinerator for complete combustion, for maximum char, to tar biproducts, whatever.
My general view is that biochar is oversold. We do like and expect char in the forests floor. We get that out of the ground burn that concludes a forests project,. Industrial char involves hauling the biomass feedstock down to the plant, making the char (and presumably generating electricity, and doing Other Stuff), and then what?
I don't think we want to haul the char back up to the forest. Where will we put it? Char is messy when handled. If we made char in the Loyalton facility we could put it on the alfalfa fields and cattle pastures of the adjacent Sierra Valley. Hoprfully Loyalton would not then replace its old nickname of Dogtown (before leash laws the dogs slept in the middle of Main Street) with Chartown for the black dust everywhere.
I don't know whether biochar makes sense within a carbon-efficient system. I am pretty sure that biochaar is an option, that can be evaluated using the standard tools of economic analysis, where we are practicing carbon economy. I do not know whether the permanence of biochar overcomes its costs. Costs measured in net carbon. No free lunch.
I find your arguments for phytoplankton plausible.
Forests recovery produces a carbon bank. Banks like multiple investment options. Phytoplankton seems like something the carbon bankers would like.
We need more carbon bankers!
One of the good things about being a hick in the sticks in California is that there are plenty of wannabe green capiralists in the neighborood. Los Angeles is the natural financial center for the new carbon economy. That is where whe should be directing our
Request for Proposals: Carbon Bankers. Willingness to listen to RUBEs an essential qualification.
Rural Urban Bridge Economist (RUBE), at your service.
In my neck of the woods, the chances of the trees not burning down is greatly enhanced by taking something on the order of ¾ of the trees away, so the other ¼ keeps growing for the next several centuries.
My guess is that it takes a century to get the stem density right. This is a well understood problem in modern carbon-economy forestry.
Outside the Hicks in the Sticks, especially amongst the Marin Magicthinkers, these concepts appear to be as hard to grasp as rocket science. Math is Hard.
Dunno who is burning down the forests intentionally. Like our Washoe friends, neighbors, and partners, we see future forests that look a lot like the pre-industrial first anthropocene forest. Which held a lot of carbon.
This takes work.
As Bill Nye the Science Guy has attempted to explain to his comfortable audiences, in Marin and elsewhere, this shit ain't free.
I don’t understand why the cement example is considered “removal” when it’s just stopping emissions that would have occurred. Phytoplankton and others are absorbing emissions that already occurred.
I’m not saying nobody should do it, I understand your point is about net carbon accounting, but it still seems that these are different types of carbon technologies.
Aside from this is the interaction between the ocean and atmosphere wrt carbon not quite complex? Does this have ramifications for preferability of land (air) vs ocean based tech?
Well because we need cement! From the point of view of a cement producer with a going concern and $100 to spend on decarbonization, the operational question is: do I decarbonize my own process, or do I pay someone else to take carbon out of the atmosphere elsewhere? THIS IS A PURE PRICE QUESTION, or it ought to be…
I understand; I’m not anti-cement. And I understand net zero accounting. My point is just that the technologies are different. I didn’t write it clearly but the cement removal you describe is embedded in the process of making the cement. Intuitively, that’s green cement. You can’t make your green cement to offset the gas burned in my car. Whereas your phytoplankton tech isn’t part of some other process and it can draw down carbon that has already been emitted.
I get the point about costing net zero. I’m just comparing categories because in many other ways the two technologies are of a different kind.
I read that as explaining how a removal technology that isn’t viable in general (because the CO2 is too diffuse) can be very viable in some contexts.
Regarding stopping emissions that already occurred, capturing cement and aluminum emissions is better than plankton. In both cases the emission already occurred. With cement/aluminum emission capture it’s just that already means a very short time before. Which is good — the shorter time means the carbon hasn’t been circulating, contributing to the greenhouse effect, before being captured.
I see what you are trying to say with "CO2 removal is the same as not producing that CO2 in the first place", but that is missing the point that CO2 isn't produced in isolation. It is also produced with nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and many other toxic fumes. I would urge caution before you equivalate reducing CO2 production with CO2 removal. Ideally we do both, as only removing CO2 will still leave a bunch of other toxic fumes lying around.
Otherwise, this is a valuable article! Thank you for sharing this; I didn't know phytoplankton was such a great option!
Well sure, it’s just that there are simple and kind of cheap options for cleaning up all pollution _other than_ carbon dioxide. Beijing went from having the dirtiest air in the world to pretty clean air in 15 years, but they haven’t cleaned up their carbon act at all
My biggest questions have to do with the other necessary nutrients. Can phytoplankton growth scale to the needed levels without causing severe nutrient deficiencies in the environment? Also, having nutrients in the captured carbon makes it much more likely that some organism will find a way to bring it back into the biosphere. How do you address these problems?
This gets technical kind of fast. Short version is that the specific type of nutrient intervention we’re working on is designed specifically to solve the nutrient-robbing question you’re alluding to. The long version is here: https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/the-carbon-nfix
Do you want to tell that to the global poor mostly in South Asia and Africa who are now emitting most of the carbon? Economic growth is what has reduced global poverty, and it’s also what will pay for removing the carbon from the atmosphere and oceans, and reducing growth won’t necessarily reduce carbon, the carbon intensity of the world economy has been declining as the economy grows.
We could, but why? Month by month we are bringing down the amount of CO2 emission needed for growth. We'll reach less than zero eventually. BTW, this is not to imply that policy should not be pusihng that CO2/growth ration down.
Phytoplankton emit organic compounds into the air that seed clouds, so it’s theorized that more phytoplankton could mean more and brighter ocean clouds, which bounce solar radiation back out to space before the greenhouse effect can trap it. Hasn’t been proven, but should be easy to measure with existing satellite that already measure ocean albedo.
Thanks for showing the relative cost breakdowns. This is very helpful. For a long time I have thought the effective solution would come from research in Japan. Wishing you every success!
Loved this! Was it perhaps LLM assisted? The ideas are exceptional but I see a lot of speech patterns that look LLM-ese and I feel it hurts the read simply because of aesthetics
Do you consider planting trees "geoengineering"? Few people do. But then, how can you be for more photosynthesis on land, but against it in the ocean? It's just arbitrary.
The reality is that "geoengineering" is a thought-ending cliché — just a word people throw around to avoid having to think through ideas that make them uncomfortable.
Our current civilisation is an active geoengineering project in so many dimensions, not just in treeplanting. The CO2 emissions themselves are obviously a large geoengineering "side effect". CFC-induced ozone layer depletion and its reversal were both geoengineering. The Netherlands is a largely geoengineered country, where the water table and land itself is a human-controlled asset. We have connected rivers and seas with canals, depleted and created lakes, crushed and tunneled and created mountains, interconnected all land masses robustly enough with shipping that unintended land species movement across oceans is a daily occurrence, unbalancing endemic ecosystems. The list goes on, I guess.
This is one of the most relevant things I have read recently
This is very very useful. Quico is the first writer I have found on Substack exercising and extending carbon economics. I love the supply curve.
In my Restack I use our shared carbon economics to argue that biochar is better than it looks, and describe a prototypical Washoe Forests Carbon Bank.
We turn crappy local currency into TAC values. Because we hold verifiable physical assets (including co-produced locally dispersed biochar) we create, attract, and invest financial TAC assets as well.
The carbon-capture supply curve is obviously of core interest to carbon bankers.
I love your work. Thank you.
ooooooh, wanna hear more. I'm sort of a phytoplankton zealot, I admit it, just because it never makes sense to me that something like biochar that has to *pay* for energy can compete with something that gets energy for free. But, y'know, I could be wrong...
Phyto-zealotry is fine. I'm a forests zealot. In the carbon crisis we need zeal all around, in the drink and in the sticks.
Up here in the sticks we have become accustomed to char zeal. So we have questions and concerns.
Char shares the phytoplankton approach's permanence. This is a good thing. Forets carbon is persistent; so long as the system thrives the carbon bank increases. The roots of old trees decay slowly, but they do decay. The really good thing about forests carbon is that it is easy to verify, which makes it a geat asset base to support investments in other carbon sinks. Like in The Drink.
The forests biochar makes sense relative to other char systems because it is a biproduct of the pyrolisis associated with disposal of forests biomass that is removed as part of forests stewardsh investments to preserve the existing carbon store and increase its future holdings. We "pay" some atmospheric CO2 today to increase the avoided CO2 through time.
One can design the incinerator for complete combustion, for maximum char, to tar biproducts, whatever.
My general view is that biochar is oversold. We do like and expect char in the forests floor. We get that out of the ground burn that concludes a forests project,. Industrial char involves hauling the biomass feedstock down to the plant, making the char (and presumably generating electricity, and doing Other Stuff), and then what?
I don't think we want to haul the char back up to the forest. Where will we put it? Char is messy when handled. If we made char in the Loyalton facility we could put it on the alfalfa fields and cattle pastures of the adjacent Sierra Valley. Hoprfully Loyalton would not then replace its old nickname of Dogtown (before leash laws the dogs slept in the middle of Main Street) with Chartown for the black dust everywhere.
I don't know whether biochar makes sense within a carbon-efficient system. I am pretty sure that biochaar is an option, that can be evaluated using the standard tools of economic analysis, where we are practicing carbon economy. I do not know whether the permanence of biochar overcomes its costs. Costs measured in net carbon. No free lunch.
I find your arguments for phytoplankton plausible.
Forests recovery produces a carbon bank. Banks like multiple investment options. Phytoplankton seems like something the carbon bankers would like.
We need more carbon bankers!
One of the good things about being a hick in the sticks in California is that there are plenty of wannabe green capiralists in the neighborood. Los Angeles is the natural financial center for the new carbon economy. That is where whe should be directing our
Request for Proposals: Carbon Bankers. Willingness to listen to RUBEs an essential qualification.
Rural Urban Bridge Economist (RUBE), at your service.
with forests, the first thing is to not cut them down or burn them down intentionally. If only this modest target would be reached...
In my neck of the woods, the chances of the trees not burning down is greatly enhanced by taking something on the order of ¾ of the trees away, so the other ¼ keeps growing for the next several centuries.
My guess is that it takes a century to get the stem density right. This is a well understood problem in modern carbon-economy forestry.
Outside the Hicks in the Sticks, especially amongst the Marin Magicthinkers, these concepts appear to be as hard to grasp as rocket science. Math is Hard.
Dunno who is burning down the forests intentionally. Like our Washoe friends, neighbors, and partners, we see future forests that look a lot like the pre-industrial first anthropocene forest. Which held a lot of carbon.
This takes work.
As Bill Nye the Science Guy has attempted to explain to his comfortable audiences, in Marin and elsewhere, this shit ain't free.
I don’t understand why the cement example is considered “removal” when it’s just stopping emissions that would have occurred. Phytoplankton and others are absorbing emissions that already occurred.
I’m not saying nobody should do it, I understand your point is about net carbon accounting, but it still seems that these are different types of carbon technologies.
Aside from this is the interaction between the ocean and atmosphere wrt carbon not quite complex? Does this have ramifications for preferability of land (air) vs ocean based tech?
Well because we need cement! From the point of view of a cement producer with a going concern and $100 to spend on decarbonization, the operational question is: do I decarbonize my own process, or do I pay someone else to take carbon out of the atmosphere elsewhere? THIS IS A PURE PRICE QUESTION, or it ought to be…
I understand; I’m not anti-cement. And I understand net zero accounting. My point is just that the technologies are different. I didn’t write it clearly but the cement removal you describe is embedded in the process of making the cement. Intuitively, that’s green cement. You can’t make your green cement to offset the gas burned in my car. Whereas your phytoplankton tech isn’t part of some other process and it can draw down carbon that has already been emitted.
I get the point about costing net zero. I’m just comparing categories because in many other ways the two technologies are of a different kind.
I read that as explaining how a removal technology that isn’t viable in general (because the CO2 is too diffuse) can be very viable in some contexts.
Regarding stopping emissions that already occurred, capturing cement and aluminum emissions is better than plankton. In both cases the emission already occurred. With cement/aluminum emission capture it’s just that already means a very short time before. Which is good — the shorter time means the carbon hasn’t been circulating, contributing to the greenhouse effect, before being captured.
I see what you are trying to say with "CO2 removal is the same as not producing that CO2 in the first place", but that is missing the point that CO2 isn't produced in isolation. It is also produced with nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide, and many other toxic fumes. I would urge caution before you equivalate reducing CO2 production with CO2 removal. Ideally we do both, as only removing CO2 will still leave a bunch of other toxic fumes lying around.
Otherwise, this is a valuable article! Thank you for sharing this; I didn't know phytoplankton was such a great option!
Well sure, it’s just that there are simple and kind of cheap options for cleaning up all pollution _other than_ carbon dioxide. Beijing went from having the dirtiest air in the world to pretty clean air in 15 years, but they haven’t cleaned up their carbon act at all
My biggest questions have to do with the other necessary nutrients. Can phytoplankton growth scale to the needed levels without causing severe nutrient deficiencies in the environment? Also, having nutrients in the captured carbon makes it much more likely that some organism will find a way to bring it back into the biosphere. How do you address these problems?
This gets technical kind of fast. Short version is that the specific type of nutrient intervention we’re working on is designed specifically to solve the nutrient-robbing question you’re alluding to. The long version is here: https://www.onepercentbrighter.com/p/the-carbon-nfix
Or we could just change our behaviour and stop insisting on economic growth and endless consumption at all costs
Do you want to tell that to the global poor mostly in South Asia and Africa who are now emitting most of the carbon? Economic growth is what has reduced global poverty, and it’s also what will pay for removing the carbon from the atmosphere and oceans, and reducing growth won’t necessarily reduce carbon, the carbon intensity of the world economy has been declining as the economy grows.
We could, but why? Month by month we are bringing down the amount of CO2 emission needed for growth. We'll reach less than zero eventually. BTW, this is not to imply that policy should not be pusihng that CO2/growth ration down.
All hail plankton.
Another benefit could be albedo gain through the Mcb of DMS. Cooling while drawdown actually expedite drawdown.
could you explain Mcb DMS?
Marine cloud brightening by dms ccn aerosols emitted by some phytoplankton.
so i still got to google dms ccn... ok.
Phytoplankton emit organic compounds into the air that seed clouds, so it’s theorized that more phytoplankton could mean more and brighter ocean clouds, which bounce solar radiation back out to space before the greenhouse effect can trap it. Hasn’t been proven, but should be easy to measure with existing satellite that already measure ocean albedo.
Be careful you don’t overdo it and cause a new ice age!
That would be nice. It would show we could do it. We could always taper down or burn a few extra fossils if we overshoot global cooling.
The new overshoot problem?
Thanks for showing the relative cost breakdowns. This is very helpful. For a long time I have thought the effective solution would come from research in Japan. Wishing you every success!
Nevada County, California is exploring this. Goddess I love this place.
Loved this! Was it perhaps LLM assisted? The ideas are exceptional but I see a lot of speech patterns that look LLM-ese and I feel it hurts the read simply because of aesthetics
CO₂ is 0.04% of the air
Uh…we’d either freeze to death when the ambient temperature dropped or die of starvation when all the plants died?
Respectfully, and you are a good writer, why would anyone want to remove CO2 from the Earth's system(s)?
In addition, how about plankton engineered to produce much more calcium carbonate in their shells?
Not in favor of any large scale geoengeneering projects.
Do you consider planting trees "geoengineering"? Few people do. But then, how can you be for more photosynthesis on land, but against it in the ocean? It's just arbitrary.
The reality is that "geoengineering" is a thought-ending cliché — just a word people throw around to avoid having to think through ideas that make them uncomfortable.
Our current civilisation is an active geoengineering project in so many dimensions, not just in treeplanting. The CO2 emissions themselves are obviously a large geoengineering "side effect". CFC-induced ozone layer depletion and its reversal were both geoengineering. The Netherlands is a largely geoengineered country, where the water table and land itself is a human-controlled asset. We have connected rivers and seas with canals, depleted and created lakes, crushed and tunneled and created mountains, interconnected all land masses robustly enough with shipping that unintended land species movement across oceans is a daily occurrence, unbalancing endemic ecosystems. The list goes on, I guess.
But geoengineering - the works of mad men, eh?