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Mostest_Importantest@reddit

The Laws of Thermodynamics are a real nuisance, showing exponential levels of energy costs, trying to put all this exhaust we've already created back into the underground pools we extracted them from.

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neonium@reddit

Also, EROI on renewables is bad, will stay bad, and that needs to be accepted.

Also, FF are a trap that will also end up with impossibly low EROI soon.

We need to transition to a system that respects the fundamental energy budget of the planet, not blow through the last of it to pretend line going up actually even fucking means anything at this point.

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ericvulgaris@reddit

I haven't looked that much into it but ain't the EROI raising for those? Especially solar? Like I know it ain't gas but isnt in the 16-20 range?

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niardnom@reddit

Solar ain't great -- its Systemic / Lifecycle EROI is in the 6–12 range depending on process. Semiconductors have massive input energy costs. Wind is competitive with gas with a Systemic / Lifecycle EROI of 10-35 depending on installation profile. The challenge with EROI is that it considers costs today, not tomorrow when critical metals and minerals extraction costs go up.

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davidclaydepalma2019@reddit

That is what the hopium folks and collapse-unaware people don't wanna see.

All the current calculations are based on our current economy which is still super charged by cheapish and or highly subsidised fossil fuels.

Once that ride is over, everything will change. At the same time, minerals are getting scarer and or more demanded on the market.

I don't say it will be doom by Thursday but the lavish western life (which is also taking over China and India) will not be possible, to name just the most obvious of the Consequences.

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wackJackle@reddit

Are battery systems included to have a eletric grid without FF?

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LastCivStanding@reddit

EROI

there's no thermodynamic reason EROI is limited for renewables. Perovskites could upend the market.

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Globalboy70@reddit

Yep entropy is a real b****!

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SetTheWorldAfire@reddit

Entropy isn't a bitch, she just hates being personified.

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SomeRandomGuydotdot@reddit

It's ok, you can say bitch, we're talking about a few billion people dying. I know my way around cursing and I don't think I've ever found anything that actually conveys how I feel on the topic.

If you can't type the word out, then you should probably find a better phrase instead of self censoring.

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Globalboy70@reddit

Okay some random fucking guy I fixed it see now I can say you're real bitch and it doesn't autocorrect awesome thanks for bitching at me so I could fix that stupid setting.

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collapse-ModTeam@reddit

Rule 1: In addition to enforcing Reddit's content policy, we will also remove comments and content that is abusive or predatory in nature. You may attack each other's ideas, not each other.

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Globalboy70@reddit

I'm using speech to text on my phone to do this so it is what it is.

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BigJobsBigJobs@reddit

My interpretation of those laws:

You can't win.
You can't break even.
You can't quit the game.

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frugalerthingsinlife@reddit

The end result of successful carbon capture looks a hell of a lot like coal. We'd bury it underground.

Yet, we keep moving mountains to dig up coal. And there's no slowing down.

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Slumunistmanifisto@reddit

Yea those damn windmills and solar farms killing birds....

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SimpleAsEndOf@reddit

Trump: I never understood wind. I know windmills very much, I have studied it better than anybody. I know it is very expensive. They are made in China and Germany mostly, very few made here, almost none, but they are manufactured, tremendous — if you are into this — tremendous fumes and gases are spewing into the atmosphere. You know we have a world, right?

He went on: So the world is tiny compared to the universe. So tremendous, tremendous amount of fumes and everything. You talk about the carbon footprint, fumes are spewing into the air, right spewing, whether it is China or Germany, is going into the air.

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SomeRandomGuydotdot@reddit

If we were talking about it looking like coal, then we'd have a chance. Give us a few million years and I'm sure we could draw carbon down.

The way it's lookin' something is going to steal our carbon to steal a phrase.

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namom256@reddit

Here's the capper too. Go look up any carbon capture scheme right now. Whether it's direct air capture, carbon capture and storage, or some proposed artificial photosynthesis method, or any other theoretical method that either works, but is expensive, or doesn't work yet.

Look at any proposal from any company. Then scroll down. Or better yet, hit Find in page and search for the term "carbon neutral". Annnd there it is.

Not a single one of these technologies or systems proposed by a single company wants to capture and permanently store carbon in order to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Because that wouldn't be profitable. All of them want to capture it from the air, convert it into a fuel, and then sell it back to other companies to burn, keeping the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere the same. Carbon neutral emissions. That's the game.

Which would have been absolutely amazing if that's what we'd been doing for fuel since the industrial revolution. But it isn't. And now it's stupid. And people relying on that tech, even if it were feasible to do at scale, fundamentally don't understand that it cannot help us. Simply because there's no profit in taking something valuable out of the air using lots of energy and then burying it.

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takesthebiscuit@reddit

Yes! Give it a fraction of thought and it’s blatantly apparent that’s it’s a non starter

Just look at an oil tanker, half a million of tonnes of carbon. It would take a lifetime of operation for once ccs factory to deal with that and there are thousands of tankers with billions of tonnes of fuel being burned every year

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ConfusedMaverick@reddit

DAC (direct air capture) is never going to happen, it's far too expensive to reverse all that entropy. Hoping that DAC will save us by reversing past emissions (like ipcc reports assume) is deranged.

CCS (carbon capture and storage) isn't as deluded, but it doesn't reverse past emissions, it can only reduce future emissions. For example capturing and storing most of the co2 from a coal fired electricity station is viable, at least on a small scale. It's much easier than DAC, because the co2 in exhaust is massively more concentrated than in the air. It uses maybe a third of the energy in the coal, but you do get, theoretically, low carbon energy from coal that way.

CCS is not a panacea, but it's not bullshit like DAC.

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Texuk1@reddit

As a technical engineering consultant for banks on carbon capture once quipped in a conversation I was involved: “DAC, don’t you mean trees?” 😂

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neonium@reddit

Ya, as EROI drops, we'll also magically suddenly scrounge up the extra energy to sequest decades worth of carbon :/

Deeply frustrating and unserious behavior.

We need to face the reality and accept that capitalism is a dead end, and move away from it. It's childish to try and stick with a system that relies on exponential growth as you start to hit its limits just because it's what we know. What we need, and keep pretending isn't possible, is to accept the scope of the problem and refocus our productive capacity to meeting people's needs as efficiently as possible and building the infrastructure to survive the coming ecological collapse that we've caused, neither of which is possible while running on a brain dead system built to maximize extraction.

The fact we let decaying, scared, and increasingly senile assholes insist that what we really need to do is waste the last of our planets easily accessible resources to fuel their insane lifestyles and paranoia bunkers is absurd. The fact people desperately want to be them, and envy them, is even more embarrassing. They're all deranged, frightened, perverts that are miserable and lonely despite all the incredible excess they consume. Maybe it's time to admit this was a stupid goal to pursue and society to build and back out, while it's only mostly to late.

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AgitatorsAnonymous@reddit

Unfortunately, I think that ship has sailed. There will be no serious moves away from Capitalism until the US collapses, and I suspect the folks in Washington D.C. are probably operating on a "No USA, No livable world" and plan to throw down with everyone rather than ride out our balkanization.

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Less_Subtle_Approach@reddit

I believed this 100% until Bjorn Lomborg said it but now I have doubts. If Lomborg said water is wet I would want to double check.

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wackJackle@reddit

Yeah, what the fuck is happening? Bjorn Lomborg in his miserable life has the right opinion about something for once and he isn't lying for money to kill billions of people? Damn. Is it really him?

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BitOBear@reddit

There's one thing we could do. Grow fast growing weeds. Recover as much nutrients as possible. Bake into charcoal. Go to one of those enormous pit mines. Toss in charcoal. Periodically cover with dirt.

The high tech stuff is unlikely but we already have giant holes in the ability to grow stuff to absorb carbon.

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gentian_red@reddit

You could put EVERY TREE ON EARTH in some sort of mystical no-decomposing hole and it would still be less than how much co2 human race has burned.

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BitOBear@reddit

Did you know that no solution to any problem ever is instant, perfect, nor complete?

Did you notice that I never said "tree"?

Did you notice that the OP was couched in the "wouldn't work" language of general technical impossibility?

Did you give any attention to my mention of nutrient recovery in baking into charcoal as possible indicators that I am aware of practical limitations and the dangers of doing things like creating a barren wasteland by over-farming and whatnot?

Did you consider for even a moment that I might be aware of the thermodynamic unreasonableness of the technological solutions otherwise offered when I talked about fast growing plant material, given that one of the technical impossibilities we face is that it would otherwise take more total energy to recreate the carbon dense materials then we got from burning the carbon dense materials in the first place, and therefore I might just have actually been aware of the scope, scale, and multi-century time span it would take to basically unburn all that carbon?

How about noticing that I didn't require the hole to be magically decay proof, cuz you know I mentioned that whole baking things in to charcoal thing, as if I understood the biological necessity and the role of decay in keeping carbon in the carbon cycle.

Cuz it seems to me like you're assuming that everybody has no sense of scale but you, and then you don't actually notice what people are saying when you've got the opportunity to go all uppercase on people on the internet.

I'll tell you a little secret, thinking through a problem practically can lead you to even slightly fractionally useful measures from time to time.

So since you do seem to need special attention here to meet your IAP...

We could begin begin (re)concentrating atmospheric carbon by the same methods that concentrated it in the first place. Wes need to find the right organisms. Wes need to have a plan to prevent decay. We'd need to have a plan to counter the unwanted sequesteration of important chemical components that we do value like the phosphorus and potassium we would lose by growing such organisms. And it would only work in plant growth time scales.

But throwing up hands and doing nothing at all is the continued waste in the name of childish learned helplessness.

But you're not actually the smartest person in the room. You should learn that at some point. It'll do wonders for your mental outlook.

It turns out that there's all sorts of things that could also be done that some people are already working on doing. Like restoring wetlands and peat bogs and permafrost and otherwise reestablishing the cycles that we have so thoroughly interrupted in the last 150 years or by the important.

And sure, I'm not the smartest person in the room either. I was foolish enough to give the internet credit when I somewhat sarcastically use the word just to compare a very simple idea to the overcomplicated technological carbon sequestration ideas that people are passing around, and imagining for even a moment that I would be spared in the experience of having somebody like yourself come by and pull out the caps lock key.

So I guess I have a lesson here too.

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cr0ft@reddit

Probably can't be done. Not only from a cost perspective but sheer volume. The amount of air to process in Earth's atmosphere is an incomprehensible number. CCS was always a bullshit red herring to keep people quiet.

"Affordable" matters more than "the survival of humankind". We're insane as a species and deserve to go extinct.

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mahartma@reddit

Yeah, the little schemes are always cute until you get into the "several Giga-something per year, every year" part.

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potencularo@reddit

Carbon Capture & Storage is an industry smokescreen and has never proven to work.

We need to stop wasting money on this snake oil scheme until there is a proven solution demonstrated - and taxpayers should not be footing the bill to find such a solution.

Stop wasting taxpayer money on B.S. Oil & Gas smokescreen like CCS.

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Sinilumi@reddit

Honestly, I think many people on the far right have a more realistic understanding of what an actual green transition would require than the political center. I believe that critics of so-called renewables and people who take environmental issues very seriously are both right.

I don't have the technical expertise necessary for judging the potential of "green" technologies by myself. However, our terrible track record makes me think that the critics are right. If it was actually possible to maintain our lifestyles by easily replacing fossil fuels with renewables and use carbon capture to substantially reduce CO2 levels, surely our track record would be far better. The fact that people like Simon Michaux are arguing for a position they would prefer to be untrue also makes their claims more believable.

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Radiant-Visit1692@reddit

Yeah, consider that the US invaded Iraq in '03 purely to secure their energy future/economic advantage. Whether you call them the 'right', or the US military industrial complex or merely the govt of the time, well before any global attempts to reduce emissions began to publicly fail they were planning for the reality of what always was/is going to play out: our energy requirements were going to keep growing, and those requirements were going to be met primarily with coal, oil and gas. The renewables conversation has its place, and develops as it can, but as a percentage it is a sideshow.

That's why James Lovelock (an environmentalist) came out and said 'build nuclear now or we are lost". Because he'd reached the same conclusion as the US energy dept and the energy multinationals: there's no turning out the lights voluntarily, there's no sincere discussion of putting limits on the economy, so the status quo will prevail.

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gentian_red@reddit

"its ok, we'll capture it later. i mean its harder to capture than not releasing it at all and we can't do that, but we will totally capture it later guys, promise..."

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vicxvr@reddit

Paging Children of Kali

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thearcofmystery@reddit

This snivelling grifter Lomborg has been shielding the fossil fuel industry for twenty years and even though he is intelligent enough to know he has sold the world out to burn for a few dollars, he still tries this holier than thou rational economic man facade - and while in this case he is correct - its because the ‘market’ has mispriced the ecological services od the planet that keep us all alive and partly because bad actors like him have made sure it does - he is a class traitor and ecological criminal of the worst sort.

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extinction6@reddit

Bjorn Lomborg Declares “False Alarm” On Climate Hysteria

This week, a conversation with Bjorn Lomborg, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, the president of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, and one of the foremost climate experts in the world today. His new book, False Alarm: How Climate Change Panic Costs Us Trillions, Hurts the Poor, and Fails to Fix the Planet, is an argument for treating climate as a serious problem but not an extinction-level event requiring such severe and drastic steps as rewiring a large part of the culture and the economy.

https://www.hoover.org/research/bjorn-lomborg-declares-false-alarm-climate-hysteria

"one of the foremost climate experts in the world today"

False alarm everyone. Everything is fine, the thermometers are all wrong.

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Key_Pace_2496@reddit

Even if we had a viable carbon sequestration technology there is absolutely no way we can scale it to what we need. Last year alone we pumped 82.4 TRILLION pounds of CO2 into the atmosphere. That's JUST carbon dioxide and doesn't include any of the other greenhouse gasses humans produce.

Even if we were to somehow hit net zero emissions it wouldn't matter because of all that we have produced already as we have no realistic way to remove that.

In short, we're royally fucked...

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niardnom@reddit

Yep. Even if fusion was viable today using a pinch (it's not anywhere close), it would take decades to achieve the scale required to offset current fossil fuel production, much less capture carbon already in the environment. 513 exajoules of fossil energy per year is a shit ton of carbon to capture and process just to achieve net zero. For reference, total energy used by mankind is currently ~618EJ and rising.

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Radiomaster138@reddit

Part of me thinks why the opposition to colonize Mars and not Venus is facing the same damn elephant in the room. Runaway green house gas destroying an entire planet.

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Key_Pace_2496@reddit

Bro we can't even terraform our own planet. There is no way in hell we're colonizing another world in any meaningful capacity.

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will_begone@reddit

We're doing a great job of terraforming Earth into a hothouse.

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Hilda-Ashe@reddit

*venusforming

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Key_Pace_2496@reddit

It being done unintentionally is the key difference.

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Chickenbeans__@reddit

Collapse awareness will be leading the zeitgeist after this year. Between the marine heatwaves and the forest burns it’s becoming excruciatingly clear that this mass extinction includes us

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Texuk1@reddit

I don’t share your optimism - collapse awareness will always remain in shadow of human consciousness. It is instead expressed indirectly through our politics, social organisation and scapegoating.

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FYATWB@reddit

In short, we're royally fucked...

Naw man haven't you heard? We are going to nuke the ocean floor and then bing bang boom problem solved.

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SomeRandomGuydotdot@reddit

Exercise for the reader, what is the estimated mass of carbon stored in trees.

Fuck around and find out I guess.

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jiayux@reddit

lol they are not even pretending now

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tjackson_12@reddit

I really don’t understand the logic behind our pumping it into the ground? How does that trap it?

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Texuk1@reddit

The only existing use case is injection as part of advanced oil recover - basically you pump it back into the well underground increasing the pressure to release more oil. The question of whether it’s permanently trapped is open question but I’m less familiar with the decommissioning process. From my research I think some sort of bioengineered crops are the way to go. Think giant bamboo that grows 10feet in a day. Country size plantations with harvesters run by electricity from nuclear. Compression and then permanent storage underground. The thing is this wouldn’t stop the problem unless we ceased entirely the carbon economy and switched to an economy focused solely on carbon sequestration. As in 80% of industrial activity ceased and redirected to bio/geo engineering projects. Looking at the state of politics it’s clear this will never happen.

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tropical58@reddit

The thing with CCS is that first you javevyo capture it. There are two main sources. When natural gas is delivered to the surface from subsea wells it is under extreme pressure and quite hot. To minimize the risk of pipeline ruptures and explosions, the well is "stepped: incteasing in diameter as it gets closer to the surface. Here monoethyglocol is injected to prevent any water in the gas forming ice and blocking the pipes. When the gas is piped ashore for processing it is still under pressure from the ocean but the gas expands further and the flow speeds up. Once ashore the gas is fed into expansion tanks which allows the gas to cool rapidly. Small droplets of oil are condensed out of the flow, collected in the base of the tank and piped away for further distillation. It is then expanded again and basically centrifuged to split the gas from the co2 by weight. Some gas reserves can be up to 40% co2 and most producers simply vent this into the atmosphere. In some oils fields, the gas is piped back to wells at the periphery of the deposit which maintains well pressure as the co2 pushes the gas out the exit well. In Australia even though extraction contracts require a percentage of sequestration, this has not been happening. Removing atmospheric co2 is not complex but is a costly exercise. Basically blowing air across filters that are wetted with various types of ammonium which captures the co2. In order for this to have any significant impact on the ppm of atmospheric co2 the scale would need to be staggeringly large. So there is little investment in doing so.

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jbond23@reddit

Even a stopped clock is occasionally right. CCS is a boondogle.

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SoulTired3@reddit

You can’t clean something without getting something dirty.

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tossedmoose@reddit

Oh lord. Is this a manufactured fallout (on elons behalf)? Is this how the folks pulling the strings in the background get trump out and their guy (Vance) in?

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0r0B0t0@reddit

Imagine you are in your garage doing some work, you want to listen to music so you turn your car on, but you don’t want to die so you also run an air purifier. That’s basically the premise of carbon capture.

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Pythia007@reddit

Do I agree with Lomborg!?! CCS is a boondoggle.

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phinity_@reddit

bUt TeChNoLoGy WiLl SoLvE iT

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HarryMudd-LFHL@reddit

My solution is to plant billions of trees, then when they’re fully grown, sink them to the bottom of the ocean.

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SomeRandomGuydotdot@reddit

Exercise for the reader, what is the estimated mass of the carbon in ALL trees on the earth.

I, mean, to quote Bill Gates, "Are we the science people or not?"

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imminentjogger5@reddit

Even Sid Meir saw that coming. Carbon Capture projects do nothing to lowe CO2 emissions

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Last_410_ad@reddit

You can see the tides rise in real time in Civ I believe.

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AlphaState@reddit

I see we're at the "we could have done something about it, but it's too late now" phase.

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JackBlackBowserSlaps@reddit

Ya, we know

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StatementBot@reddit

The following submission statement was provided by /u/Konradleijon:

Bjorn Lomborg, a prominent fossil fuel advocate, believes carbon capture and storage (CCS) is too expensive to be viable. He argues that the technology, favored by the oil and gas industry, will always be a net cost and that building the necessary infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive. Despite growing skepticism from conservatives and fossil fuel advocates, Canada is still pushing ahead with CCS projects, with the oil and gas industry seeking government subsidies

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/collapse/comments/1l4f5dy/carbon_capture_not_going_to_happen_top_fossil/mw8js03/

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Konradleijon@reddit (OP)

Bjorn Lomborg, a prominent fossil fuel advocate, believes carbon capture and storage (CCS) is too expensive to be viable. He argues that the technology, favored by the oil and gas industry, will always be a net cost and that building the necessary infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive. Despite growing skepticism from conservatives and fossil fuel advocates, Canada is still pushing ahead with CCS projects, with the oil and gas industry seeking government subsidies

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extinction6@reddit

"Bjorn Lomborg, a prominent fossil fuel advocate" Thanks for helping to kill everything on the planet Bjorn.

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Anastariana@reddit

It was never going to. Anyone with a high school level of chemistry or physics knew it was all bullshit.

It was always a (hah) smokescreen for pumping more and more carbon.

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TrickyProfit1369@reddit

Its just a money making scheme masqerading like some panacea to climate change. Just like carbon credits, just like taking advantage of subsidies by just raising the price of the technology (heat pumps in europe). Also a ruse to continue the status quo.

No wonder, its easier to be financially successful by ignoring the consequences/externalities of your business. If there is and oppoturnity to make money and fuck over everybody else, then someone is going to take it. If there is a way to do the business more ecologically, its probably more expensive or time intensive.

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Gunnarz699@reddit

r/noshitsherlock