this post was submitted on 28 Feb 2024
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It's never too late, obviously.
However
It is VERY important to get the size of Themis problem. We've been dumping CO2 by extracting energy since the start of the industrial revolution, and without going into details, if you want to extract that CO2, it will take about the same amount of energy we've spent for the last ~250 years. Converting and storing and losses might double that.
We'll be able to generate more and more energy in the future (yay fusion, hopefully!) but basically, we can spend 50% of the world's energy budget on this and it will still take one or more centuries to get CO2 levels restored back to pre industrial levels.
And ALL that energy must be carbon free, or you're doing it for nothing.
This is an absolutely enormous problem that will be fixed, but none of us will see it 100% fixed in our lifetimes
That's worrysome, and is indeed an enormous problem - probably the biggest problem humanity has ever faced.
What bothers me about this situation is that it makes easy measures that "buy time" look like a good idea. Like dimming the sky with particulates, or increasing sulfur emissions. Both of which will cause environmental damage on their own, and screw with renewable solar and wind, but it'll keep the global solar gain down. I'm not a fan of these kinds of approaches either and would love to see everyone do a hard pivot to dramatically less fossil fuel and more renewable, fission, and (eventually) fusion power.
Meanwhile, short of converting CO2 into carbonates, graphite, and diamond, I don't know of any sequestration methods that seem anywhere near as permanent. What's kind of sad is that even gaseous sequestration would probably work okay-ish in old gas wells that aren't fracked, but there's probably not nearly enough such storage to make the difference.
I think the "buying time" solutions do work, and will be needed, but indeed will be abused as cheap end-all solutions by idiots, as always.
Storing CO2 directly in the ground, I think, is a really bad idea. if it escapes you lose all the energy invested in harvesting it. You'll need to convert it into Graphite or plastics. The problem though is again that were talking truly ginormous amounts. Think a square kilometer cube of graphite, we'd need hundreds of those. If that were to catch fire, we're all effed, so your still need to store it safely somewhere.