alt Hacker News> direct air capture is the primary escape hatch
We MUST MUST MUST stop burning things. Stop it.
- We are still mining and burning coal. This is incomprehensible. US, AU, etc Eg: https://www.nacoal.com/our-operations
- We are still subsidizing oil to around $1T/year, not counting oil wars.
Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables. It would be cheaper than the oil subsidy.
Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another.
Replies
> We MUST MUST stop burning things.
Yes, we must. It is so rare to see someone saying this in public. Thank you for this simple clarity.
Stop burning everything! Fossil fuel, wood, plastic, garbage, paper. Stop making methane.
We only need solar energy at 1 dollarcent or eurocent (it will get much cheaper still!!) and a little batteries for the convenience of using electricity when the sun does not shine.
In the north and south you need more solar panels in the winter than in the summer by a factor of 50. But that pays it back in summer when you have a squanderable abundance of free and clean energy. We can store that surplus energy in purifying drinking water, melting iron ore or aluminum [5], melting reusable plastics or purifying silicon ingots.
Storing surplus heat or cold in the ground is another luxury, because it is more expensive than 1 dollarcent or eurocent solar running a heatpump.
Wind and hydro are also more costly than solar so they are another luxury with worse environmental costs than pure solar cells.
We need to build Enernet, a peer to peer electricity net and internet between all buildings with power routers. for around 100 dollar per building. You buy and sell your house surplus solar electricity to the neighborhood where it can be stored in car batteries. See my Fiberhood white paper [2].
[1] Enernet: Squanderable abundance of free and clean energy - Bob Metcalfe https://youtu.be/axfsqdpHVFU?t=1565
[2] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Merik-Voswinkel/publica...
[3] Amory Lovins https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v02BNSUxxEA
[4] Saul Griffith on the one billion machines that will electrify America https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEOPx2X-EtE
[5] 101 million machines away from a zero emission Australia https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ8-uAhG-zs
> Otherwise it doesn't make sense to put CO2 into the air with one hand and take it out with another.
I agree that it doesn't make sense, but I also want to challenge the engineering assumption that an extremely relatively inefficient solution should be ruled out.
If direct air capture worked and simply required absurd amounts of carbon-free power, say from nuclear, it would mean that we no longer have to fight political battles against the entrenched incumbents. They could simply emit whatever our elected politicians let them get away with, and DAC would soak it up.
I completely acknowledge that it seems somehow egregious to do it this way. I am an efficiency-minded person and would hope that we could do it the efficient way. But given all the ugly constraints and lack of progress so far, should we really expect this to be solved the way an efficency-minded engineer might prefer?
If we get to that level of desperation though, I would hope that we could simply pay the emitters to install carbon capture.
What I don't think will work is a politics of rage, righteous or otherwise. I don't recall any incidents in history where a politics of rage led to cool-headed, efficient technocratic solutions. The perennial problem is that the same politics of rage is equally accessible to your opponents, and it spirals down from there towards disorder and violence.
Stopping burning fuel now will return us centuries in the past, I suppose to about 1700. Twenty years ago it would return us to 1500. Then a handful of people had heating in their homes and a horse to travel. This will happen again if we stop burning now.
This is why it's clear we will never do anything to slow the progression of climate change.
By far the most effective an immediate solution to limiting the damage of climate change is to simply to keep fossil fuels in the ground.
People talk about the economic pain of doing this, but that economic pain is nothing compared to the impact of unmitigated climate change.
Even though this would be painful, it is also by far the easiest and fastest to implement solution. It would take fantastically more time and resources to scale up direct air capture (even if it existed in a scalable format today) to come anywhere near addressing this problem.
> Yes it will take some grid and storage upgrades (US) and continue to embrace renewables
This is not exactly true, we would have to experience global economic collapse in order to reduce our fossil fuel use. 80% of energy is not spent on electricity globally and this is non-electricity usage is where most of the fossil fuels are consumed and this drives most of the global economy. There's a good reason there are multiple wars being fought over for oil.