Because! He OWNSeconomies! Why should he have to make gobs of money in a different way when he is making more money than God now? Unfair I tell you! No science!
The points they’re making are not wrong. We should be paying attention to the lifecycle emissions of green energy facilities (that isn’t the same thing as not building those facilities). And we should be putting more resources into development of direct CO2 capture; the argument raised in the article, that CO2 capture is bad because it will draw attention from the green transition, is laughably stupid.
If we could somehow pull the carbon out of the atmosphere, bind it up into a solid rock, and bury it deep underground away from bacteria and fungi that would metabolise it back into the air that would be really good.
In the mean time we should focus on not digging up exactly that aka coal.
trees don’t fix carbon long term because they eventually rot. Coal/oil are the only natural ways in sizeable quantities and because organisms that can digest shit exist now.
Wood frame buildings are standing for hundreds of years, some of it might need to get replaced every now and then but if a couple of 2x4 last 70 years and it takes 50 to grow a tree that provides us with more than the number that needs to get replaced, it’s a net positive.
Good question. The answer technically is maybe! however a few caveats.
Charcoal washes away into the ocean where it mysteriously disappears www.sciencedaily.com/releases/…/130419160715.htm it seems to enter the carbon cycle rather than get fixed. So maybe we could prevent that if we buried it very deep and sealed it in. Remember we are looking for a centuries long solution.
In practice: charcoal compacted has a density of like 1.5 g/cm3 coal is about 1.8. They’re both mostly carbon, we would need to bury a loooot of charcoal. We have dug up and burned tens of billions of tonnes, that is a lot of charcoal to bury and not just in the sort of open cut surface mines coal is usually excavated from.
Further making charcoal costs energy, even if you fuel it with the wood you’re processing. It’s a staggeringly expensive prospect to make billions of tonnes. There are around 280 billion tonnes of carbon that need fixing, that is just atmospheric. Significant portions are dissolved in the ocean and would start to come out as we reduced atmospheric carbon.
Carbon fixation is an unimaginably large project, we would need cheap fusion and decades to make it practical. Essentially you want to reverse the energy consumption of everyone on earth for the last 200 years, it just isn’t realistic.
For the few thousands of years we’re pretty much stuck with whatever we emit. Barring massive technological changes that are unforseeable
I mean, all life on Earth is basically carbon based and that’s how oil formed in the first place, organic matter burried deep and left there for a very long time. We’d just have to find a way to put organic matter in the places we extract oil from now.
Living things already pull carbon out of the atmosphere (via plants, for instance - plants pull carbon from the air and nitrogen from the soil, and along with water build up all manner of sugars and proteins. animals then eat those and they become the building blocks for the animal’s body). They also put some back as byproducts of metabolism - CO2 for higher organisms, methane for some bacteria. Living things just go through a cycle and none of the carbon remains locked away, as it was in the case of oil deposits. All that oil was at some point huge hunks of living, breathing, eating, multiplying beings. So we wouldn’t actually need to form it into a solid rock before disposing of it.
I don’t know, maybe we can just dig an extremely deep pit and shove all our organic waste down there. Or make some very sturdy concrete tombs (similar to nuclear waste, minus the lead) and just seal it all away, but it’d have to be completely sealed so as not to seep into the environment around it. Or deep enough so that it won’t contaminate groundwater if it does.
It’s not so much that carbon capture will draw attention from the transition, it’s that the transition will be blocked by the desire $$$ from greedy fucks don’t give a shit about any transition whatsoever:
“Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman said Monday that the country would oppose any COP28 text that calls for reducing global fossil fuel consumption.”
This isn’t some qualified plan to offset emissions with carbon capture, it’s a qualified plan to continue as is while throwing shade on renewables and continuing to throw some pocket change at unicorn tech like carbon capture that has seen virtually no advancement in the 20 years it’s been touted so that people feel like we’ll eventually have some magical fix for all the problems we’ve created.
This isn’t some qualified plan to offset emissions with carbon capture, it’s a qualified plan to continue as is while throwing shade on renewables and continuing to throw some pocket change at unicorn tech like carbon capture that has seen virtually no advancement in the 20 years it’s been touted so that people feel like we’ll eventually have some magical fix for all the problems we’ve created.
saying it again, louder, for the people in the back. this guy’s entire job is to sell oil. if tossing pocket change to some random tech that sounds fancy is gonna let him sell more oil… he’s going to do it.
I dunno, I think it’s certainly possible that intentionally adding resistance to wind could cause unforeseen effects on high and low pressure systems. It’s something that should be studied and understood not immediately dismissed, that’s how we ended up in this situation with petrochemicals