SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Carnegie Mellon University researchers have found that current forecasts call for the U.S. electric power sector to meet the 2020 and 2025 CO2 reduction requirements in the Paris Agreement—even though the U.S. has announced its withdrawal—and also meet the 2030 CO2 reduction requirements contemplated by the Clean Power Plan—even though it has been repealed.
Despite the absence of a national policy aimed at reducing CO2 emissions, the U.S. is ahead of schedule to meet the short-term and mid-term goals of both the Paris Agreement and the Clean Power Plan, according to a recent viewpoint article published in Environmental Science & Technology.
"A year ago, it looked like our ability to meet these larger carbon reduction targets would have required more proactive steps, such as new regulation or new incentive programs," said Jeffrey Anderson, lead author of the paper and Ph.D. candidate of Engineering & Public Policy (EPP). "However, as renewable energy costs have fallen and are projected to continue decreasing even further, we are now well on the path to achieving even the 2030 goals in the Clean Power Plan."
Based on an analysis of projections from the U.S. Energy Information Administration, these carbon reductions will be met without any additional legislative or regulatory activity, said David Rode, faculty of CMU's Electricity Industry Center. The team also included EPP professors Haibo Zhai and Paul Fischbeck, also a professor of Social & Decision Sciences.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @09:17PM (6 children)
There is also technology. I see two possibilities:
1) Effective CO2 scrubbing is impossible.
2) Effective CO2 scrubbing is possible and will be developed in the foreseeable future.
3) Effective CO2 scrubbing is possible, but will not be developed in the foreseeable future.
We can discard #1 since we already use effective CO2 scrubbing in a whole array of avenues, such as making sure the astronauts on the ISS don't kill themselves with their own exhaust. And we can really also discard #3 for similar reasons. Even current technology deployed in large scale would be sufficient. The problem is money. Yet should even a fraction of the doomsday prophecies start to come true, money would no longer be an issue. Incidentally if politicians actually believed that preventable climate change is costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year, it'd no longer be a problem even today.
Ultimately I think it's a significant issue, but one that turned into a religion thanks to media fearmongering for clicks a - all alongside any more relevant or immediate enemy: it seems human society always needs something to fight against. And politicians are only too happy to play along since it would entail a revolutionary increase the scope, scale, and power of government likely paired alongside substantial increases in taxes.
(Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 09 2019, @09:57PM
No amount of preaching "weather isn't climate" can warm hearts, and extremities, of freezing listeners, and instinct for self-preservation is a strong one.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by JoeMerchant on Saturday November 09 2019, @11:15PM (3 children)
For every gram of CO2 scrubbed on the ISS, multiple tons of CO2 are emitted into the Earth's atmosphere to make that happen.
Not sayin' industrial CO2 scrubbing is impossible, just that the ISS is a monumentally bad example.
"Saving the whales" may turn out to be a more cost effective form of CO2 scrubbing than any we have devised to-date.
Step 1: stop killing the whales.
Step 2: whale population increases exponentially, along with whale poop production.
Step 3: whale poop fertilizes photosynthetic phytoplankton blooms across thousands of square miles of ocean surface, scaling up CO2 capture faster and more massively than munitions production in either World War.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 10 2019, @04:26PM (2 children)
Not a great example. The way CO2 is scrubbed on the ISS is the Sabatier reaction [wikipedia.org]. Add hydrogen to CO2 and you get methane with a byproduct of water. Really really handy for life support systems and also practically free. All you need is a a relatively small amount of hydrogen and then some heat. For the latter, the ISS has this handy little ball of fusion it can do neat stuff with. You get practically free scrubbing, not "tons of CO2 per gram of scrubbing".
It's fun to think about how neat this form of scrubbing truly is. Methane can be used as a rocket fuel (and indeed is the route that SpaceX is going). So the first colonies on Mars will have life support systems that, in the process of giving us breathable air, will also produce rocket fuel and water as byproducts. Stuff like this makes it feel like this entire universe is a game. It's just so unbelievably convenient and coincidental.
--
Back to Earth, costs for CO2 scrubbing are now starting potentially fall below the $100 [digitaljournal.com]/ton benchmark. We currently emit about 26 gigatons of CO2 per year using fairly liberal metrics. The net atmospheric increase is about 15gigatons. A gigaton is a billion tons. So you're looking at the possibility of starting to go 0 atmospheric increase for $1.5 trillion. While that's not a one-time fee, it's also not a yearly fee. You'd simply need to maintain the equipment, pay the employees, etc. Not sure what the annual cost would be, but since the world GDP is in the ballpark of $80 trillion, you're looking at a cost of 2% the world GDP even for the first 'huge' cost.
And its getting exponentially cheaper over time. That $100 is about an order of magnitude below the expected cost around a decade ago. I'd say climate change would be an interesting example to study on the effects of societal radicalism, but it's hardly new. The witch trials, the red scares, blah blah - we constantly, as a society, tend to lose our shit over things that often times literally don't even exist (not implying the earth is not warming). The only thing that's different today is most people are too arrogant to realize it's possible we're engaging in the same dumb human behaviors as we always have.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday November 12 2019, @02:40AM (1 child)
I think you miss the point, entirely. How much CO2 was emitted in the launching of the ISS modules? In the design of them? Remember to count the emissions of the designers' cars as they drive to work, planes as they fly to conferences, etc. How much CO2 is emitted every day by the ground support crew of the ISS? Point being: you can't just look at the micro scale of a process: hey, I take a drop of this and get that - what did it take to make that drop? To transport it to the point of use? To dispose of the byproducts in its production? How many people labor in its production, and what's their CO2 emission profile while they are performing that labor?
Agreed, and as I said, industrial CO2 scrubbing _is_ possible, but do remember that your initial $1.5 trillion cost of installation likely represents an additional CO2 emission in the ballpark of 1.5/80 of the current annual global CO2 emission to get the system going, and your annual costs of operation are going to continue to add to CO2 emission at least until they can be powered from green sources. 1.5/80 is a great ratio, less than 1.9%, very doable, but for perspective consider that the US military annual budget is less than $700B per year, and all Hollywood movie and TV production comes in somewhere under $30B per year, so shaking loose more than double that combined amount is going to upset a lot of people.
Also, while you might be able to scrub your first ton of CO2 for $100, as you try to scale that up to 15 billion times the capacity, many of the things you used in that first ton of scrubbing simply won't be available in 15 billion times the quantity at any price, at least not until additional resources and infrastructure are developed - and that infrastructure development may well cost more than $1.5T (in both money and CO2 emission) to accomplish.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 12 2019, @06:04AM
Three things there:
1) Your figures looked at just the US paying. That's very disingenuous. This would be a global payment, probably amortized over time (e.g. - in case of a build up as opposed to ultra-rapid deployment). Even in the case of an ultra-rapid deployment, you're looking at a US share of about $400 billion, a small fraction of what we wasted in Iraq, for one year.
2) We should not be scrubbing today. Scrubbing becomes much cheaper each year that passes. This is in real costs (the cost of scrubbing) as well as relative costs as nations grow wealthier. Scrubbing should only happen when climate change starts to reach a near critical level. The thing I think we might debate is when that is. Should we try to prevent Miami from flooding? If you do so then you lose the benefit of warming increasing arable lands in other areas, creating new valuable Arctic shipping lanes (and generally improving the Arctic as a whole), and so on. I think the point we would probably agree on is if/when somewhere like Bangladesh starts to become meaningfully inhospitable. Nobody wants a couple hundred million displaced Muslims running about who may take the flooding to be a sign of the end of times.
3) You're shifting the goalposts on the ISS. You specifically said, "For every gram of CO2 scrubbed on the ISS, multiple tons of CO2 are emitted into the Earth's atmosphere to make that happen." You obviously were not talking about the entire footprint of the entire space program. Even if you count the entire space program your statement is equally absurd. Each day we breathe out on the order of a kilogram of CO2. Suffice to say we're not emitting millions of tons of CO2 per astronaut per day. A single launch entails 1000 tons of CO2 for some metric of absurdity there.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 10 2019, @03:35AM
CO2 scrubbing for life support is a very different situation than say a coal power plant. There's many orders of magnitude less CO2 processed on the ISS and energy inefficiency is not important for the ISS situation. Power generation requires a great deal of energy efficiency in the process.
Money not being an issue doesn't mean it'll happen. There's other resources at stake too. More likely is just fossil fuel power being discontinued except on small scales. But then again, maybe they will figure out how to push that CO2 through something, like say an algae farm to scrub it.