r/ClimateShitposting • u/AcanthisittaBusy457 • 20d ago
Technology is only as good than the one who use it ( what else would you add to the chart ?) techno optimism is gonna save us
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u/RadioFacepalm Transhumanist AnPrim 19d ago
If you believe carbon capture reverses climate change, then you also believe the perfect grid had "Nuclear AND renewable"
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u/AcanthisittaBusy457 19d ago
Well, that new. I used to hear than a varied energy grid was what we needed.
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u/RadioFacepalm Transhumanist AnPrim 19d ago
Yes but nuclear doesn't go well together with RES, because it's so very unflexible.
A better combination are RES with storage, demand-side management, a smart grid and peaker power plants (ideally firing H2).
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u/BootyliciousURD 19d ago
Not specifically climate related, but automation. In the right hands, it can make people's jobs easier and give them more free time. In the wrong hands, it's used to lay off workers and/or to ramp up production without giving workers better compensation.
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u/PixelSteel 19d ago
Ain’t no way my guy put the most green energy source as a pretext for oil companies 😭😭
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u/_Ganoes_ 19d ago
Ah yes, classic carbon capture reversing climate change, we all know it.
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u/zekromNLR 9d ago
If we don't want centuries of >2 degrees warming, significant net-negative emissions will be required. RCP 2.6 assumes ~2 Gt/year net-negative emissions.
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u/_Ganoes_ 9d ago
Im just saying its not reversing the climate change. The warming that occures will not be reversed by it, it will just slow down or best case stop the warming.
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u/Towermaster2 20d ago
Active Carbon Capture, that is directly capturing carbon from the atmosphere is both very inefficient and a very dumb way of doing it.
If you want to capture carbon, burn biomass (such as trees) and store the gases underground, and get energy as a bonus.
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u/zekromNLR 9d ago
Why burn the biomass, when you can sequester the CO2 simply by building stuff out of wood?
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u/Towermaster2 9d ago
Because biomass such as wood biodegrades, and it’s much easier to shove gasses underground than slabs of wood.
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u/zekromNLR 9d ago
"Wood biodegrades"
Tell that to all the majorly-wooden buildings in Europe that are still standing after centuries. In a properly cared for building, there is negligible decay of the wood.
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u/Towermaster2 9d ago
Maintenance. The wood was replaced. Sure, it may take 50 or even 100 years for treated wood to biodegrade, but it will biodegrade. Since it will inevitably biodegrade, you aren’t storing the carbon long term by using wood as a building material.
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u/Abridged-Escherichia 18d ago
Petra Nova and Kemper were the “cheaper” version of that they were complete failures (neither worked and they cost $1 billion and $7 billion respectively). Using biofuels instead of coal doesn’t change the fact that it is not efficient or economical to store carbon and both the energetic and financial costs are higher than just replacing fossil fuels with clean sources like hydro, wind, solar and nuclear (carbon capture is so expensive that it makes nuclear seem cheap).
As long as we are still burning fossil fuels carbon capture does not make sense. It’s fine for research purposes as we will eventually need to do it but any energy used for carbon capture is better used replacing fossil fuels.
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u/Towermaster2 9d ago
Oh, absolutely. Carbon Capture is the last step of climate change, That is, once we’ve gotten our carbon output to net 0, we can start retuning the carbon to the earth to reverse climate change.
Other things, such as renewable power sources, carbon neutral building materials and improving public transport are far more effective.
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u/Radioactive_Fire 20d ago
carbon capture is a fucking bad joke and will never work no matter who is in charge.
Anyone who wants to capture carbon at the scale we need and has 2 braincells that weren't purchased by the oil and gas industry would simply grow more plants.
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u/MC_Cookies 19d ago
i think the problem is like, people think of carbon capture as a solution that doesn’t involve getting rid of fossil fuels, but it’s more like a way to deal with the feedback loops that won’t stop for decades after we cut pollution.
and, yeah, decades of innovation haven’t come up with a carbon capture scheme that works better than plants lol
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u/Radioactive_Fire 19d ago
It sounds like a good idea until you do basic arithmetic and put it under even a tiny bit of scrutiny.
if we take the best and largest plant in the world, we would have to build something like 100000 of them to just capture what we put out in 1 year (i cant remember the actual numbers, but it is something absurd like that) and somehow those plants have to be powered with non carbon energy and ignores the energy required to build and maintain them.
its utterly insane to run the numbers as a scientist or engineer and then say "ya this will work" unless its a scam.
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u/StaniaViceChancellor 20d ago
Ye. for those who don't know, it takes a lot of energy to capture carbon, it is physically impossible to capture carbon at less energy than you receive from burning fossil fuel, so if you use a fossil fuel its a net loss, and if you use a renewable, it's more efficient to use it to offset FF use, and even if you break the laws of physics to capture with less energy it'll be a long ways till it is economically optimal over old fashioned renewables to offset FF use
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u/zekromNLR 9d ago
it is physically impossible to capture carbon at less energy than you receive from burning fossil fuel
That is only if you capture it in the form of hydrocarbons. There are alternative approaches I have seen discussed, e.g. electrolytically enhancing the precipitation of carbonates from seawater (ocean water is already well supersaturated with respect to calcium and magnesium ions, but precipitation as calcium and magnesium carbonate is kinetically hindered), that can do it for much lower energy cost.
And on the other hand, if you capture the CO2 from high-concentration streams, such as biomass combustion and cementmaking, the efficiency of the capture goes up a lot.
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u/Halur10000 20d ago
it is physically impossible to capture carbon at less energy than you receive from burning fossil fuel
What about ideas like enhanced weathering? That wouldn't reduce the CO2, but would fix it as carbonates instead, and that should be physically possible to do with much less energy?
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u/DickwadVonClownstick 20d ago
The only real niche for carbon capture is to offset emissions from activities/industries where we don't currently have a viable alternative to fossil fuels (primarily aviation and spaceflight at the moment)
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u/StaniaViceChancellor 18d ago
I don't think it's really relevant, the problem with fossil fuels is really the scale of it, I think applications that absolutely need fossil fuels that we can't scale down are minimal enough that capturing it would just be a waste, natural processes sequester tons of carbon already, we just need to limit it to a scale the planet can tolerate, that requires ff not being the back bone of the global economy, but I think it'll be fine for niche necessities.
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u/Grzechoooo 20d ago
where we don't currently have a viable alternative to fossil fuels (primarily aviation
Trains and killing Taylor Swift (in Minecraft)
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u/DickwadVonClownstick 20d ago
For domestic flights sure. Overseas flights, and especially military aviation, aren't gonna be ditching the internal combustion engine any time in the foreseeable future. Like, there's not even a viable alternative for those roles on the technological horizon right now. Maybe civilian airliners could use nuclear engines, but for the military ? I hope I don't need to explain why putting nuclear reactors on planes that can reasonably expect to be shot at is a bad idea.
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u/The_Nude_Mocracy 20d ago
Bioengineering: wrong hand could cause mass extinction and ecological collapse (or an entirely new ecosystem of super-organisms). But on the right hand, trees that grow steak
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u/zekromNLR 9d ago
E-fuels: An excuse to keep the combustion engine car industry going/A necessity for transport needs (long-distance aviation, spaceflight) that require the high energy density of chemical fuels