Slashdot Mirror
Scientists Push For Government Research Program Focused On Sucking Carbon From Air
In a 369-page report, the nation's leading scientific body (consisting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine) is urging the federal government to begin a research program focused on developing technologies that can remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere in order to help slow climate change. It is now believed that in order to avoid significant further warming of the planet, big chunks of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere may need to be removed. The New York Times reports: The panel's members conceded that the Trump administration may not find the climate change argument all that compelling, since the president has disavowed the Paris Agreement. But, Dr. Pacala said, it's quite likely that other countries will be interested in carbon removal. The United States could take a leading role in developing technologies that could one day be worth many billions of dollars.
Right now, there are plenty of ideas for carbon removal kicking around. Countries could plant more trees that pull carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it in their wood. Farmers could adopt techniques, such as no-till agriculture, that would keep more carbon trapped in the soil. A few companies are building "direct air capture" plants that use chemical agents to scrub trace amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, allowing them to sell the gas to industrial customers or bury it underground. But, the National Academies panel warned, many of these methods are still unproven or face serious limitations. There's only so much land available to plant new trees. Scientists are still unsure how much carbon can realistically be stored in agricultural soils. And direct air capture plants are still too expensive for mass deployment. One solution that the National Academies panel recommended was for the United States to set up programs to start testing and deploying carbon removal methods that look ready to go, such as negative emissions biomass plants, new forest management techniques or carbon farming programs.
"At the same time, federal agencies would need to fund research into early-stage carbon removal techniques, to explore whether they may one day be ready for widespread use," reports the NYT.
Right now, there are plenty of ideas for carbon removal kicking around. Countries could plant more trees that pull carbon dioxide out of the air and lock it in their wood. Farmers could adopt techniques, such as no-till agriculture, that would keep more carbon trapped in the soil. A few companies are building "direct air capture" plants that use chemical agents to scrub trace amounts of carbon dioxide from the air, allowing them to sell the gas to industrial customers or bury it underground. But, the National Academies panel warned, many of these methods are still unproven or face serious limitations. There's only so much land available to plant new trees. Scientists are still unsure how much carbon can realistically be stored in agricultural soils. And direct air capture plants are still too expensive for mass deployment. One solution that the National Academies panel recommended was for the United States to set up programs to start testing and deploying carbon removal methods that look ready to go, such as negative emissions biomass plants, new forest management techniques or carbon farming programs.
"At the same time, federal agencies would need to fund research into early-stage carbon removal techniques, to explore whether they may one day be ready for widespread use," reports the NYT.
There are these things called "trees". They take carbon from the air.
How Do Trees Turn Carbon Dioxide into Oxygen? (April 5, 2018 )
Just because CO2 helps plants grow does not mean it's not a pollutant. It is possible for things to have multiple properties, sometimes even conflicting ones.
Water also helps plants grow. That doesn't mean we should welcome flooding.
Just because CO2 helps plants grow does not mean it's not a pollutant. It is possible for things to have multiple properties, sometimes even conflicting ones.
Water also helps plants grow. That doesn't mean we should welcome flooding.
Right, because going from 300 ppm to 400 ppm is equivalent to flooding. Natural variation is far greater than this. Photosynthesis requires CO2 concentrations above about 150 ppm, so right now plants are starved of CO2 and going so high as double what we have now would be beneficial to plant life. There is a point of diminishing returns. There is a point of CO2 becoming a hazrd to animal life and that would be about 5000 ppm, or more than ten times current levels.
We are very far from "flooding" the air with CO2.
No, that's not going to work, for many reasons. It took 33 years for the world population to grow from two to three billion people. It took 14 years from three to four billion people, and 13 for the next billion, and we've added a billion per 12 years since then. In the 50 years since 1974, the world population will have doubled. Asia's population growth has not slowed down. Africa's population has grown past one billion and it's growing at an increasing rate. Whatever you save in energy consumption by changing your lifestyle will be more than eaten up by the rapidly increasing world population. Just to give you a glimpse of what kind of lifestyle changes we're talking about here: People in the US use approximately twice as much energy as Europeans on average. Standards of living are mostly the same, so an energy reduction by half should be doable in the US. On your mark, get set, GO! Do you think you can reduce your energy consumption by half within a decade? And everybody else's in the US? But we know that's not nearly enough. To really make up for the consumption of a world population that doubles within 50 years and wants to live as well as westerners do, the global lifestyle would have to make do with a tiny fraction of today's average energy consumption in the western world. Forcing that kind of change onto people will lead to wars, plain and simple. Ironically, the death toll from these wars would be a big step towards solving the problem, but only the most cynical would choose that path for that reason.
Carbon sequestration is a shitty idea that will take too long to scale up, if it can be scaled up sufficiently at all, but it's still better than telling people to "change their lifestyle", because that has absolutely no chance of working. The solution must involve getting population growth under control globally and reducing the world population to sustainable levels. People don't like to think about that because it incites images of genocide and fascism, but it's necessary, so we better find a way to achieve it that does not involve totalitarianism and war.
Oh good, so all we have to do is wait until after the mass migration of billions due to desertification and coastal destruction from rising sea levels and more powerful storms, the famine, the wars.
Great solution! I think I'd rather skip all that and just stop fucking everything up instead.
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.