What people are not getting is that we can’t turn this back – the CO2 to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years,” said Rahmstorf. “Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.”
the CO2 to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years
A few years ago I was thinking about this debate around nuclear power.
While nuclear power plants create a lot of electricity without carbon, they have this super scary spent fuel nuclear waste that lasts thousands of years!
And then, all of a sudden I saw it: *CO2 dumped in the atmosphere lasts 10X longer than nuclear waste . *
we can’t make it get better again
I think this is fundamentally flawed logic. We have carbon capture technology and it improves every day. Deciding that things are fucked and the best we can do is return to cave people and ride out the storm is defeatist and should be considered disgusting behavior. Imagine if we’d done the same with the ozone layer.
Fixing the ozone layer was a technically tractable problem.
The climate change and carbon capture don’t have any workable at-scale solution. And until we can find a massive energy source that’s not fossil fuels we have no theoretical method of capturing the amount of carbon necessary on a meaningful time scale. This is because of the basic physics, like it’s a law of nature we can’t avoid that limits us technologically.
When the original fossil fuels were burned, you had a high quality energy material that was really in a concentrated form. When the fuel was used it released heat and energy and the resulting emissions were released into the atmosphere where it diffused down to a trace concentration level of ~400 parts per million.
So setting aside the technology needed to do carbon capture, we can basically do a napkin sketch of the scale of energy needed. Basically, there are three main costs to the project.
- you need to capture the carbon. This will be a thermodynamic cost that’s around as much energy as was released from the fossil fuels in the first place (just running backwards)
- you need to take the entire earths atmosphere and filter out the carbon from everything else. There is an absolute theoretical minimum energy needed to handle this amount of CO2 and concentrate it that’s probably 200kw/h per ton if you use machines for direct air capture (not growing plants etc). With the current CCS tech that we have developed, it literally costs more energy to run this one step than what the original fossil fuels released
- by now you have tons and tons of carbon and it has to be stored somewhere which would be a physical feat with a scale that’s on par to the combined industrial activities of the current civilization. Massive mines, drilling and digging deep into the ground, giant containers moving around, pipelines being built etc
The exact numbers don’t exactly matter but this is a way bigger way more industrial and way more energy intensive process than everything humans have ever done in history all put together.
Oh yeah… One other pesky detail:
- we need to do this super fast also. Many things that could happen slowly over centuries are easy. But doing this in a decade or two is very very complicated and has huge power costs
So what happens in this area is that people point at a small staircase that goes to the second story of a house and say… “We know how to build stairs, we just need to start doing it if only our leaders and fossil fuel corporations…”
No, you can’t take stairs all the way to SATURN That’s SO FAR BEYOND realistic that there is no point in anyone wasting any time or money or resources on even pretending to try.
So people drop “we have carbon capture technology, we just need to do it” they say this as if the tech that we developed simply existing means everything hard is solved.
Not only is that not the hard thing, the HARD issue makes it seem incredibly unlikely we can do it without discovering an energy source.
Is there some reason nuclear fission can’t be leveraged as a form of energy? Or, I guess I should ask, what are the potential energy sources we might be able to leverage?
I’m just struggling to believe we’re all just fucked and nothing can be done, I can’t accept that.
Not enough minerals. All the uranium and thorium that has been prospected would not come close to being enough to fuel carbon capture.
To be clear here, for carbon capture we would have to produce ten times more energy than the entirety of human civilization consumed over the past two centuries, within a handful of decades. Current green energy infrastructure - including the massive solar power boom of the past couple years - is less than 1% of the size it would need to be.
Then what can we do? What can I do?
On a personal level: prepare a bug-out bag and practice migration; hoard enough food to last triple your household a couple weeks; get used to poverty; vote for the leftmost viable candidate in every election and primary;
learn useful skills for a disrupted society such as first aid, de-escalation, crisis counseling, safely preparing nearly bad food, physical endurance and practical strength, mending, DIY, public speaking, herding large groups of people, recognizing “authorities” and other groups’ hostile intentions, violence, transformative justice, etc. ;
organize with local anarchists/leftists and wean yourself off the capitalist economy; learn to take care of your own emotional state and how to cope in a healthy way with huge amounts of stress; learn languages that will prove useful in mass migration; etc.
We are human. For millions of years our ancestors have lived through cycles of plenty and famine, surviving plagues and crop failures and massive droughts. We have evolved to handle crises such as this.
You need to look for hope outside of the physical material realm.
For example, people can care more, write more beautiful books and plays, invent a super cool new game that’s better than chess, come up with all kinds of wonderful creative stuff…there is no limit to human empathy, meaning, quality of experience etc.
Like, right now in the united states around 60% of the population is semi illiterate and most people are uneducated. There is an absolute ton of progress that can be made on the human development side. There is almost an endless number of things that need someone to care about them.
A lot of our “stuff” doesn’t make us happy, it’s just dopamine.
Things could be so much better if we could slow down.
Edo period Japan was reasonably rich, culturally.
maybe. until we have one that takes less energy than what it took to create the co2 its kinda useless until we are 100% off fossil fuels.
If it wasn’t for that pesky thermodynamics.
