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Why carbon capture needs a reality check
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this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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We definitely shouldn't let corporations to use carbon capture to greenwash themselves but doesn't mean we should stop any research in carbon capture.
The problem is we set a target of "net zero" by <in 2 decades>. So naturally companies will do it the cheapest way that requires the least changes to their business.
We don't need "net zero" we need "as closest to total zero as possible".
If the carbon is properly sequestered after capture, and the energy use is accounted for in emissions, wouldn't net zero be just as good as zero? It's almost always going to be way more expensive to take the carbon back out of the atmosphere than to not emit it in the first place, so I'd think you'd get mostly the same effect.
"net zero" refers to continuing to emit greenhouse gases and fixing the problem some other way. Carbon capture, carbon credits, whatever.
Zero means actually stopping the emissions in the first place.
Except that net zero is mostly being used as an excuse to keep going with your business, emitting away while paying lip service to the idea of reducing emissions in ways that may or may not actually offset the continued emissions.
The first thing we need to do is make carbon credits illegal all around the world.
If they're actually sequestering the carbon fully, like injecting it back underground, then it's equivalent to not emitting in the first place. I think the issue is that the offsetting methods companies are using are not actually sequestering carbon. Like promising to not cut down trees or burying logs insufficiency underground.
The problem is: nobody is doing that and nobody even has a realistic plan to do that.
Ok, but achieving net zero is not an excuse to not go sub zero if possible.
If we let corporatations continue emitting when they could not be, because an equivalent amount of greenhouse gases got sequestered somehwere, then we're stopping at "not making it worse" when we could be going for "great improvement".
A large part of the marketing around "carbon neutrality" is about placating consumer guilt so people will keep buying things they want but don't actually need.
The messaging around this stuff can and will be twisted into something that attempts to maintain the status quo, emitting at full steam, rather than investing in real improvement.
Such as, you know, producing and consuming less in general.
Oh I get what you're getting at now. Yeah if sequestering is limited, you should be using as little as you can. But for applications like rockets, it's much more effective to sequestere CO2 than to try to make something like an electric water rocket.
Totally. But it can and probably will be used as an excuse for why it's ok to pollute land an air with open goldmines so some company can make gold turd sculptures for rich people to place in their homes as a "conversation piece".
When in reality we should be discussing whether some non-essential industries should get to emit anything at all.
That's what the greenwashing mentioned by the person you replied to means. It's the practice of marketing away the downsides of a product that really shouldn't be possible to rub off. Some things are just inherently wasteful and "offsetting" the waste just means something unavoidable is offset a little less.
That if is the biggest issue. These carbon calculations require a lot of math and assumptions and uncertainty to work. In the global economy with many steps along the path from source to sink, every actor has an incentive to make things look better than they actually are. So research on the topic has found a wide variety of issues with carbon offsets and other strategies that aren’t direct reductions of in emissions. So it’s pretty likely that net zero would not actually be net zero. Reducing emissions directly is much easier to verify.
Also, millions die from air pollution every year and net zero doesn’t do anything about that.
No, it wouldn't. Nature is not a bank account where you can do debits and deposits. Because if you emit today and capture tomorrow, the carbon is still out causing harm for a day. And if you emit in a country and capture in another, the carbon would have to travel from origin to capture point. The only carbon capture that is effective is on-sight carbon capture at the place of production. No planting trees, no sucking air out of the atmosphere.