let's talk CO2.
everyone knows it's driving climate change. Arrhenius knew in 1898 and published it. Exxon knew in the 1970s and ignored it. It's not debatable. Climate change due to greenhouse emissions is a real phenomena. People can ignore it, media can attack it... and it will still happen.
we currently hover around 450 parts per million (0.045%) by-volume concentrations in atmospheric air. This is a high % of CO2 relative to historical trends, but unfortunately an extremely low concentration when it comes to chemical processes. This low concentration makes it challenging to do... anything with CO2. Additionally CO2 is a low-energy, stable molecule... there are virtually no compounds that react with CO2 spontaneously (which means the reaction requires no energy input). So even if one were to concentrate CO2, what would they do with it? Well, the current answer is... a Well. Run that shit thru a compressor to pressurize it, turn it into a liquid, and pump it so far underground that the pressure is high enough to keep it a liquid... alright.
So how would one concentrate CO2? right now companies like Exxon are exploring amine-based gas absorbers, which use liquids that CO2 likes to dissolve inside but other gasses do not. Once the CO2 is dissolved, you can boil the liquid to release all the CO2 and almost nothing else... This is best done at the source of the CO2 generation, where CO2 might be in the range of 5 - 15% by-volume instead of 0.045%. Here's why this is important to companies:
Imagine u want to capture 100 liters of CO2... to get that from ambient air, it would require a minimum of ~2.2 million liters of air. At 5% CO2 by-volume, you would only need to treat 2000 liters. And it's way way less expensive to design/build a train to move 2000 people compared to a train that needs to move 2.2 million people. This is a gross oversimplification... but it brings me to my first tangent:
COST and DOLLARS
You know what CO2 isn't? Valuable.
You can't sell it. You can't make anything from it. It's worthless. That's how CEOs and boards and people who control the money see CO2: something worthless. And when something is worthless, there's no revenues to collect, there's no profit to be made. Regardless of where you stand on the viability of capitalism as an economic system, this is a problem it cannot solve. There is only money to be lost and none to be made.
This is a problem that cannot be solved by private entities. It must be solved by governments. Governments must force companies to reduce CO2 emissions. Enough of the bullshit with carbon credits and tax incentives and focus on consumers that generally do nothing - put a maximum limit on Tonnes of CO2 per year that any site can emit, just like regulatory agencies do to acids, particulate matter, metals, organics, etc etc. It's going to cost money and resources - who will pay is another story (ethically it should be the soulless corporations who knowingly created this mess, realistically it will be the taxpayers, and currently it's no one).
Now tied into this - limitations to current technologies. We are years away from any CO2 removal technologies that can be used at-scale (this is my day job). And even if the technology was here today, it alone wouldn't be enough. Why? Well, let's talk emissions sources and emissions rates:
So here we can see 75% of emissions come from energy generation. There are three parts to this - energy as HEAT, energy as COMBUSTION, and energy as ELECTRICITY.
Energy as heat is something like an industrial kiln (ie for cement production) or blast furnace (ie for steelmaking) or separation tower (ie for oil processing). Heat generation is the goal.
Energy as combustion covers things like internal combustion engines in your car, ships, etc.
Energy as electricity covers steam turbines, gas-fired turbines, combined cycle plants, and boilers.
Why does this matter?
ENERGY AS HEAT: generally you're looking to produce heat at temperatures or rates that aren't possible with induction (electric heating). Efficiencies can vary wildly from 0% - 95%. Stuff that isn't operating at 50% efficiency or above is low-hanging fruit that can be increased greatly with existing technologies to lower fuel consumption. Largely shown as the "energy portion used in industry" section of the graph.
ENERGY AS COMBUSTION: these engines generally operate at 30-40% efficiency. Largely the transportation portion of the graph
ENERGY AS ELECTRICITY: Large-scale turbines operate at 55-65% efficiency. It's the rest of the energy section of the graph
I really want to address this BECAUSE these 3 are the big focus of most educated (neolib) people's CO2 reduction campaigns. I don't know how many times I've seen "EVs are moving us in the right direction so FAST" and it's not right at all. In the slightest. Because the only gains you can ever receive is the increased efficiency of producing your energy using a turbine (at ~60%) vs an engine (~35%). Let's do the math here: 1 - (35% / 60%) = 42.2%. If we switched every single mode of transport to use electrical energy, we are going to reduce emissions in this sector by 40%. But you know what? That's still a fucking shitload of CO2. Like... imagine you only clean up 40% of your dog's crap... honestly almost as bad as doing nothing.
For the areas that already use electricity, like buildings (aka people) and manufacturing, there are no potential reductions in CO2 by changing energy sources. You need to design differently to consume less energy. For buildings, this can be LEED certifications but for other items in this group, it's just not possible. And this brings me to my next point - you could decrease emissions by 99% at the creation point and it will still be greater than none. If you put a bucket under your sink and slowly lowered the flow coming the tap, that bucket will still eventually overflow.
To decrease CO2 emissions, we need to remove it from the atmosphere. As we covered earlier, technology will probably never exist to remove CO2 from air due to the low concentrations.
We need to plant trees and cultivate forests to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. And we need to plant enough to absorb more than we emit. That's a
shitload of trees - as shown in the graph, we emitted 50 billion
tonnes of CO2 in 2016. A single mature tree captures about 0.045
tonnes of CO2 over its lifetime. Even if you cut the 2016 emission rate in half (a lofty goal), that is 555
billion trees per year. And that's on land that already doesn't have trees. AND we need to do it while emitting minimal amounts of CO2.
anyway im tired and got shit to do so here's the sparknotes version because i cant finish the rest rn
- CAPITALISM CANNOT SOLVE CLIMATE CHANGE, ONLY GOVERNMENTS CAN
- WE MUST CAPTURE CO2 AT THE SOURCE AND IMPROVE INDUSTRIAL EFFICIENCIES TO PREVENT MORE CO2 FROM ENTERING THE ATMOSPHERE
- WE MUST REMOVE CO2 FROM THE ATMOSPHERE BY CULTIVATING TREES AND OTHER BIOMASS
- WE MUST REDUCE CONSUMPTION OF GOODS TO REDUCE PRODUCTION AS EFFICIENCY GAINS ALONE CANNOT GET US TO A POINT WHERE TREES CAN CARRY US ACROSS THE FINISH LINE
- THIS IS ANTI-THETICAL TO CAPITALISM AND THE CONCEPT OF INFINITE GROWTH
- NUCLEAR POWER IS GOOD
- BIOMASS FUEL IS NOT GOOD RIGHT NOW
WE ARE CURRENTLY NOT ON THIS PATH
ASK ME ANYTHING RELATED TO THIS,AND I SHALL PROVIDE the... ANSWER!!!
