| I'd love to hear people's proposals for this. There's of course natural methods such as reforestation and soil building, but I have a feeling that we'll want to augment that with more synthetic means. Carbon chains, or in the simplest case, methane, are expensive to produce, as one might expect. By far it's better to never have burned that fossil fuel than to try to reclaim it from the atmosphere or ocean. Setting a $80/ton CO2 carbon tax (Exxon's internal estimate for new project planning) or even a $40/ton CO2 carbon tax (Shell's internal estimate for new project planning) is an obvious step. When even the fossil fuel companies are using this tax level in their internal estimates, it's just stupid that our government and political leaders aren't pushing for that or double or triple it. My personal hope is that by 2040 we will have lots of excess electricity from solar and wind because we overprovision them. And we'll overprovision them because they will be the cheapest electricity, and we need enough of them such that at their low point of output they still meet our needs. In that case it seems that we may have cheap intermittent electricity. At that point we can start making hydrogen, then combining it with CO2, to start getting rid of greenhouse gases. Some people think that we'll be able to take methane (natural gas) and make hydrogen and precipitate out the carbon as graphite. that's probably the easiest form of carbon to dispose of, whereas a liquid like methanol or even diesel is going to pose lots of problems. It seems that CO2 in the oceans is going to be a bit more easy to remove than atmospheric CO2. So it seems that there are all sorts of chemistries that would be useful for that. But still, we need a carbon tax to fund such carbon sequestration activities. Without a market mechanism, there's not going to be much investment. We need to both do research, then develop them into large industries really quickly. Carbon tax, carbon tax, carbon tax. Don't vote for anybody or any party that doesn't advocate for it. This is the biggest single issue for our children and their economy. |
What I want to know is there any concrete plan to build something that will remove excess CO2 from the air and ocean that can be built by the government. Build this is going to go over a whole lot better than tax this.