[chiffre01]

Before anyone points out that trees already handle this, let me clarify:

We need to pursue all available options simultaneously to effectively combat climate change. This includes:

    Reducing reliance on carbon-based energy to lower emissions.
    Implementing carbon capture and long-term storage solutions to remove excess CO₂ from the atmosphere.

[acc_297]

+ it can be worked out based on photosynthesis efficiency and available surface area that we would need ~4 earths of trees to handle current human CO2 production rate

Planting trees is nice and should be done but isn’t a solution for drawdown

[the-chitmonger]

Fully agree. In my college ecology course, my professor stressed that sequestration/capture, while not ideal, will likely be crucial as our production of greenhouse gases outpaces the rate of absorption by plant biomass and ocean algae.

[OutOfHere]

Sequestration underground doesn't really work. It is based on lies. It will just bubble back up when the Earth's plates move. For capture to work, it has to be reacted with a stable absorber, so it cannot bubble back up into the atmosphere.

[mapt]

This.

We have a worked example for geologically stable carbon sequestration without any novel chemical bonding, and that's storing carbon in compounds that are mostly unhydrogenated carbon by mass, deep underground:

Charcoal. If you aim to sequester carbon without some kind of reactant (and most reactants are incredibly energy intensive to make & stage, burning more CO2 than captured), you have to effectively make charcoal. Growing a forest, pyrolyzing it, and burying the charcoal, is the inverse process of coal mining, and is the default comparator on cost, effort, and materials for any sort of carbon sequestration scheme.

[danbruc]

There is not nearly enough available space on the surface of Earth to make any dent into the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration over any relevant time frame. We burnt through millions of years of sequestrated carbon in a century and some, but we do not have millions of years to do the sequestration again.

[OutOfHere]

If we solve fusion, or even if we exploit space solar on a massive scale, we should in principle have all the energy we need to put the carbon back into charcoal.

[danbruc]

Sure, with enough energy we can do whatever we want, but we just do not have enough clean energy, that is the very problem carbon capture is supposed to address.

[lm28469]

> We need to pursue all available options simultaneously to effectively combat climate change.

lol, all available options as long as we don't actually look at the root cause and just throw more money and tech at it in the hope it automagically stops

hint: infinite growth in a finite system doesn't work

PS: and if you care about results, we've been exploring every solution for quite some time now, you know after all our leaders get together in Paris or other fancy place and talk about clean solutions. Well we've been release more CO2 every year. The only time it dipped was during covid when ... you guessed it ... we had negative growth, aka degrowth. We never had so much sustainable energy production but we also never produced so much co2 and pollution

[nozzlegear]

Degrowth doesn't work either, it's not a solution and nobody will ever go for it. From the abstract of Reviewing studies of degrowth: Are claims matched by data, methods and policy analysis?:

> (2) the large majority (almost 90%) of studies are opinions rather than analysis;

> (3) few studies use quantitative or qualitative data, and even fewer ones use formal modelling;

> (4) the first and second type tend to include small samples or focus on non-representative cases;

> (5) most studies offer ad hoc and subjective policy advice, lacking policy evaluation and integration with insights from the literature on environmental/climate policies;

> (6) of the few studies on public support, a majority concludes that degrowth strategies and policies are socially-politically infeasible;

Source: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S092180092...

[lm28469]

> Degrowth doesn't work either

It's literally the only mathematically viable option. Either you choose it and plan for it or you hit the wall and deal with the consequences. Just take a gpd per capita world map, superimpose it over a pollution per capita world map, and extrapole the impact of china+india+africa living like the average american or even the average european, it just doesn't work out, but it's coming very soon

[nozzlegear]

> Either you choose it and plan for it or you hit the wall and deal with the consequences.

That's the problem though, without a sea change in human behavior, nobody will ever choose it. As the paper I linked points out, degrowth is a political self-own. Nobody likes it, nobody wants it, and hardly anybody has even studied it properly. Planning on hitting the wall and dealing with the consequences is our reality, so studies like the OP have a real and practical use.

[ryandvm]

It's not coming very soon because those populations are going to completely skip the phase where every household has 2 or 3 fossil fuel vehicles.

[lm28469]

Personal transportation is about 15% of co2 emissions. That hardly explains why the average American lifestyle produces literally 10 times more co2 than the average Indian's

[bryanlarsen]

At this point we need net-zero. Degrowth cannot get us to 0, nor can it get us anywhere close to zero.

[lm28469]

See the problem is that we want to continue doing everything in the exact same way without giving up on any single little eccentricity we have no matter how ridiculous and how stupidly unsustainable they are, not a single damn thing

Degrowth is also stopping to eat tomatoes in the middle of January instead of importing them from the other side of the world, or not eating fucking salmon when you live in South Africa, or not using a 3000kg car to move you 80kg ass around the street to go shopping. Or things like not living in the desert and relying on AC and artificial rain to keep you alive because you would physically die if you were to experience the outside world for more than an hour

[bryanlarsen]

And by making all of those changes you'll lower carbon emissions by about 10%.

OTOH, switching to zero-carbon electricity and zero-carbon transportation would lower carbon emissions by 60%.

[lm28469]

> switching to zero-carbon electricity and zero-carbon transportation would lower carbon emissions by 60%

Is the 0 carbon mining and 0 carbon steel in the room with us right now ?

What about the 0 carbon asphalt ? 0 carbon tires ? 0 carbon cement to build your 0 carbon power plant ? 0 carbon plastic to build your 0 carbon solar panels ?

fyi steel is still made with coke, 1700s century style, and nothing is even close to ready to replace it, and you need it in virtually every car and building

When you actually look into it you will quickly realise it raises way more questions than it brings answers. And then you realise we already mined all the easy shit, now it's getting harder and harder to find the good stuff, harder meaning more energy intensive, it also means more soil to go through which means more chemicals to use (and guess what, most of it is petrol derivates), which means more tailing dams, more pollution, more wild life ecosystems destroyed, &c.

Anyone looking into the problem with an ounce of good faith cannot reach a conclusion as simple as yours. If you're still at the "electric cars " will save us I envy you, life was simpler back then

[bryanlarsen]

IMO, my solution is far less simple and hand-wavy than yours is. I can point to several books with solutions on how to get from my 60% solution to a full zero-carbon future.

There is no degrowth based path that gets us to 0 carbon except for degrowth to 0 humans.

[weego]

We can throw about causation arguments till the rivers dry up. Will it get us anywhere? Doing something will always win against doing nothing because we're fighting over who has the most virtuous opinion.

[lm28469]

> Doing something will always win against doing nothing

Yeah, like we used to pray our gods for more rain, it certainly doesn't hurt, proving it is useful is much more difficult though.

We focus on co2 because it's the only thing we can pretend to be able to tackle a little bit while ignoring the rest like ocean acidification, massive global collapse of wildlife, including insects, rainwater being unsafe to drink pretty much everywhere in the world, micro plastics polluting the entire planet and virtually every single living organism, PFAs, increase in chances of world wide simultaneous crop failure, &c.

99% of what we're doing is green washing or wishful thinking (or sinking, when it comes to co2), the truth is that we won't be able to sustain the western lifestyle much longer, especially not when China, India, and Africa are coming for their slice of the cake

If you think 3000kg EVs transporting 80kg of meat and niche carbon sinking tech will save us I have a bridge to sell you.

[Workaccount2]

The papers lead author stated that 200g of the material can absorb as much CO2 in a year as a tree.

[danbruc]

Optimistically [1] 200 g can capture 250 kg carbon dioxide per year, at the expense of heating the material almost 28,000 times from ambient to 60°C. And that still leaves you with 139 m³ of carbon dioxide gas, what do you do with that?

[1] 2.05 mmol/g at half capacity equals 45 mg/g per cycle, and ignoring heating and cooling times one can fit 27,976.6 cycles into a year. Overall that is 1.262 kg/g/y.

[lm28469]

Cool, we only produced 37 000 000 000 tonnes of co2 in the last 100 years

[danbruc]

That is last year alone. Over the last 100 years it is probably more like 50 times that.

[lm28469]

Indeed, that's per year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions

[lm28469]

According to studies about batteries we should have electric planes since 2010 and we should be able to recharge any battery instantly regardless of their size. Ah and these batteries would be very cheap too

And that's if:

- the study can be replicated

- the study wasn't altered to boost publishing metrics

Remember super conductivity at room temperature from a few months back ?

[mapt]

What is that supposed to mean?

According to their calculations, they're getting 1-2mmol/g adsorption. That means 44-88g of CO2 captured per kilogram of adsorbent.

[danans]

My guess is that it means that the material can be reused by capturing/releasing/sequestering multiple times, and that number reflects how much C02 it can capture given how many cycles can be completed in one year.