If you've been tuning into my little weekly
rambling since I started this channel five years ago you'll know that I've regularly talked about
the widening chasm between what we need to do to fix climate change and what we're actually doing
to fix climate change. Here's a chart I've used on several occasions over the years. It comes
from a special report called SR15 published in 2018 by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change. It shows how, rather than continuing to run our societies in the way we've been for
the last century or so, we all apparently need to experience a collective epiphany around about
2023 and realize on mass that allowing average global temperatures to stray more than 1.5 degrees
Celsius above pre-industrial levels would actually be an extremely bad idea indeed. Having made that
discovery we will then essentially need to switch off everything we do that emits carbon dioxide,
which in case you're wondering is pretty much everything we do. Even that won't quite cut
it though. We'll also have to start sucking carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere so
that atmospheric CO2 levels start to fall and we get ourselves back to a nice safe place by
the end of the century with global temperatures stabilized. Just as a quick reality check, here's
how that plan is going so far. Not ideal is it? So has this so-called carbon dioxide removal
strategy got any chance of making a difference? Well that really is a very good question
indeed, and it's one that's now been answered in a comprehensive new study by a team of
eminent scientists from Europe and America. So let's have a look at what they uncovered. Hello and welcome to Just Have a Think. First
things first, carbon dioxide removal is not the same as carbon capture and storage. You
probably already know that but it's worth just quickly clarifying again for anyone who's
not sure. Here's a nice neat definition from the American University in Washington DC. "Carbon
capture and storage or CCS captures carbon dioxide from a smokestack or flu at somewhere like a
coal-fired power plant or a cement factory and then in theory sequesters or permanently stores
that carbon dioxide underground". Carbon dioxide removal or CDR is the process of drawing CO2 gas
directly out of the atmosphere by removing it from ambient air anywhere on the planet either via
mechanical technology or by using nature's own processes and then storing the carbon durably in
soil or in the oceans or in geological formations or even in products like furniture and buildings
that are likely to be around for a long time. This latest research paper, very appropriately
titled The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal, assesses how much CDR is already happening around
the world, how quickly the technology is moving, and whether the world is on track to deliver
what's required. This graphic shows the total amount of CO2 that's currently being sucked out of
our atmosphere per year at the moment. It's about 2 billion tons which is a lot of CO2 but bear in
mind that we humans spew out about 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year
so, you know, there's a bit of disparity there. This grey section represents 99.9% of all CDR
taking place around the world today, and it may surprise you to learn that it's actually coming
from conventional methods including the creation of new forests, the restoration of previously
deforested areas, increases in soil carbon, and the use of durable wood products like
panels and sawn wood used in construction. To properly show you how much CDR is being
achieved by new technologies like bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS, and
direct air carbon capture and storage or DACCS, we have to do some serious zooming in on this tiny
little orangey bit here. It works out to a grand total of 0.0023 gigatons per year. Otherwise known
as 2.3 million tons. It's not just BECCS and DACCS to be fair. This section also covers biochar,
which is essentially charcoal produced from plant matter and stored in soil, and something
called Enhanced Rock Weathering, which is the process of spreading finely ground silicate rock
like basalt onto surfaces to speed up the chemical reactions that happen naturally between rocks,
water and air. I'll leave links in the description section to articles about both those techniques
in case you want to learn more about them. These novel CDR methods are clearly all at a very early
stage in their development and right now there's quite a bit of uncertainty about how much they
would really cost if we scale them up by several orders of magnitude and whether that scaling would
genuinely bring the hoped for benefits or whether it would cause unexpected hazards further down
the line. But the paper also points out that while the more conventional methods are already well
established and can, if done properly, result in positive side effects like improved biodiversity,
they do by definition need a lot of land. And that's a real limitation to how widely they can
be implemented. Plus the carbon removal achieved by trees and soils can be very easily reversed by
unwanted events like forest fires and by extreme weather events brought on ironically by climate
change itself. So the papers authors conclude that while novel methods have big hurdles to overcome
they may represent a more durable form of carbon storage in the long run. But could we perhaps just
do without CDR altogether and simply focus more on the most important priority of burning less fossil
fuel in the first place? Well, that question takes us back to the chart I showed you right at the
start, which tells us that every pathway keeping us below 1.5 degrees of warming relies on carbon
dioxide removal. The research paper offers a similar but more concise version of the chart onto
which they've applied three different scenarios. The first scenario is what would be needed if we
really focused on reducing demand for fossil fuels so that we actually achieve the 48% reduction in
greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 that our global leaders all proclaimed as essential during COP26
in Glasgow in 2021. If we followed that ambitious path then carbon dioxide removal would have to
increase from 2 billion tons a year to something like four and a half billion tons by 2050.
Scenario two is based on focusing predominantly on renewable technology to get us out of jail
with a resultant 31% reduction in emissions by 2030. Making that work would require an increase
in CDR up to 8 billion tons a year by mid-century. And then there's the third scenario which
considers what we'd need to achieve if we really went all in on carbon dioxide removal with
a 33% reduction of atmospheric greenhouse gases by 2030. In that case we'd be looking at almost 10
billion tons of carbon dioxide removal per year, with a margin of error that could take us
up to more than 14 billion tons a year. If you add all that up, which the authors of this
paper kindly did for us, then the news is that all pathways limiting warming to 1.5 or 2 degrees
will involve carbon dioxide removal during the 80 years between 2020 and 2100 that range from 450
billion tons to as much as 1,100 billion tons. So the next question might reasonably be -
what's the plan? Well, it'll probably come as no surprise at all to hear that the authors
found there was a major gap between how much CDR is actually being planned by nations around the
world and how much will actually be needed to stay within the crucial warming limits. The sum
total of the nationally determined contributions or NDCs pledged by every one of the 196 nations
that signed up to the 2015 Paris climate agreement is an additional 0.1 to 0.65 billion tons
per year of carbon dioxide removal by the end of this decade. That's shown by the
two grey sections in this next chart, one representing total CO2 that current policies
would remove by 2030 and the other one showing the total removed by mid-century. If we then
overlay the three scenarios from the last chart it's pretty clear that things are going to go very
pear-shaped in the coming decades unless there's a serious ramp up in government action on carbon
dioxide removal. Even in the best case scenario, where we all miraculously experience that epiphany
I mentioned right at the start of the video, we'd still be missing about 2 billion tons
of CDR by 2050. To get a gauge of current thinking on the subject the reports authors
went through what I imagine was an extremely painstaking process to identify where the balance
of research has been progressing over the years. When the IPCC published their very first climate
assessment report back in 1990 nobody was talking about removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
In fact you'd have been considered a bit of a lunatic if you'd even suggested such an outlandish
notion back then. But as the years rolled on and we continue to completely ignore the warnings
and recommendations of subsequent increasingly alarming climate assessments, so the concept of
CDR gained traction and the number of research publications started to follow what looks like
a bit of an exponential curve. Today, as our knowledge of the pros and cons and the various
CDR techniques has improved significantly the most researched area is actually biochar representing
the big purple section followed closely by soil carbon sequestration in general, again shown in
dark green. By contrast the report found that of the roughly 4.1 billion dollars of direct funding
currently in place, the vast majority- about 3.5 billion dollars- is being ploughed into proposed
direct air capture demonstrators in America. Now the authors of this paper are very careful
not to cast any aspersions whatsoever on the various direct air capture companies currently
operating around the world, so what I'm about to say is purely my point of view and does not
represent the views of the paper's authors. But in my humble opinion what's happening in the real
world is that innovation in CDR is morphing into intellectual property that can be used by existing
big businesses, many of which are based in or have close links with the fossil fuel industry, to
create profitable new enterprises. Purchases of carbon credits for removed carbon dioxide reached
about 200 million dollars between 2020 and 2022, most of which came from DACCS. Two of the
biggest DACCS companies operating today, Carbon Engineering and Global Thermostat, are
either using their sequestered CO2 for enhanced oil recovery, which eeks out otherwise unavailable
pockets of oil from depleted oil seams, which of course then gets burnt and releases all
its carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, or they're combining carbon dioxide with hydrogen to
make hydrocarbons that they can sell as so-called Net Zero fuels. Meanwhile the report highlights
high profile press releases from various companies and industry groups announcing their intentions
to scale up CDR activity in a way that implies we could actually achieve the mid-century targets
we looked at just now. Not just with DACCS but also with biochar and BECCS. The trouble is,
as the authors of this paper point out, in order to genuinely achieve those claims the carbon
dioxide removal industry would have to scale up by five orders of magnitude. That means getting
10 times bigger, then 10 times bigger again, then 10 times again, 10 times again, and 10 times
again! I'll let you draw your own conclusion from that statistic. The conclusion that the research
team draws from all this analysis is that the coming decade will be a crucial time for new
CDR technologies. Essentially, say the authors, if we don't get a move on now and start hitting
some serious targets in the next few years, then we really will have left ourselves with
an impossible task during the second half of this century, which is of course when our kids
and grandkids will be busy mopping up after us. Now this is perhaps one of the most contentious
and emotive topics of conversation currently bubbling away as part of the overall climate
debate. I'm quite sure a good many of you will have an opinion on the validity or otherwise
of carbon dioxide removal techniques and how you think we should proceed in future. If you do,
then I'll be down in the comments section below here over the next couple of days and I'll be very
interested to read your thoughts. That's it for this week though. A huge thank you, as always,
to the channel's Patreon supporters, who keep me on the straight and narrow and allow me to keep
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out. As always, thanks very much for watching, have a great week, and remember to
just have a think. See you next week
The following submission statement was provided by /u/BabyLlama-Drama:
SS: A really great explainer on the state of a technology which the IPCC and other bodies have said is essential to saving humanity from total destruction: direct air capture and carbon sequestration. Many of the largest companies in the space of the emerging technology are creating products from jet fuel, to carbonation in drinks, to enhanced oil recovery services.
None of these close the carbon cycle, but just add extra steps in releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Without further extreme advancements in DAC all optimistic predictions surrounding climate change are off the table.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/11xral4/how_carbon_removal_is_failing_badly_the_two/jd4f0cn/
SS: A really great explainer on the state of a technology which the IPCC and other bodies have said is essential to saving humanity from total destruction: direct air capture and carbon sequestration. Many of the largest companies in the space of the emerging technology are creating products from jet fuel, to carbonation in drinks, to enhanced oil recovery services.
None of these close the carbon cycle, but just add extra steps in releasing carbon into the atmosphere. Without further extreme advancements in DAC all optimistic predictions surrounding climate change are off the table.
Yes, carbon capture technology is a scam. I thought we all knew this?
no nation that matters is serious about climate change
Cop28 will be hosted by the UAE, a petrostate – and the Cop28 president is Sultan Al Jaber, whose day job is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
Also see: Seize the Means of Carbon Removal: The Political Economy of Direct Air Capture by Andreas Malm and Wim Carton
Why is captured carbon not being properly sequestered to take it out of the cycle completely and reduce the overall amount of CO2? It's pretty simple. No profit in that. It's akin to burying money, and who is going to do that? The secondary problem is that even if it was being removed, the scale of the problem is magnitudes beyond anything we can possibly do. Simple reason for that too. It's far easier to get energy out of the carbon by burning it and letting it disperse into the air than it is to use other sources of energy in great amounts to filter it back out of the air and then put it back in the ground or in some permanent form. It's called entropy.
8 billion clueless morons blighting a planet.
Call a spade a spade, guys. That's carbon recycling, not removal.
(And calling it that wouldn't make it better.)
lol stupid monkeys