66
Can We Engineer Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis?
(www.nytimes.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
66 points (97.1% liked)
Climate - truthful information about climate, related activism and politics.
5244 readers
492 users here now
Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades:
How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world:
Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:
Anti-science, inactivism, and unsupported conspiracy theories are not ok here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The numbers presented are funny.
Discussing Occidental's plants:
Which then they say they plan on building more of said plants:
The annual amount captured magically doubles bringing it up to 0.000001 billion metric tons per plant and 0.0001 billion metric tons total annually.
It really seems like we should listen to the Vicki Hollub, Occidental’s chief executive, when they state the real purpose of direct air capture which could:
This is ignoring their main usage of that 0.0001 billion metric tons is for oil extraction thus increasing the 36 billion metric tons.
In other words shame on the NYT for burying the lead and being deceptive with their numbers.
(@facedeer, I'd be curious to get your take on this article)
It's NYT so they'd be using the American billion. So 1 billion = 1000 million.
So 100 plants * 1 million would be 0.1 billion metric tons. Still far short of the 36 billion metric tons per year.
I think it's best to think of oil like the illegal drug industry. Better to focus on reducing demand, and the supply will drop. Electric cars, better transit, replacing power plants will reduce the amount of oil being burned, and if you do that the oil industry can't sell something no one is buying.
But all that being said I'm mostly in agreement with you. This technology alone isn't going to solve global warming. We have to stop using fossil fuels and do it fast.
But some things aren't very simple. The airline industry puts about a billion tons of carbon into the air, and while there are ways they improve efficiency, it's hard to beat kerosene for energy per kilo. Hydrogen is an option eventually, but it's going to be quite awhile for that to happen.
At any rate, there is the problem of the carbon that's already in the atmosphere from a century of fossil fuel use. It's not really going anywhere until we suck it out. So this kind of tech will be needed to fix that at the very least.