>"An economic contraction, or what Gaia theorist James Lovelock calls a “sustainable retreat,”
Yeah I would expect someone making this argument to quote a "Gaia theorist"..
To force the majority of humans to self limit (i.e. voluntarily limit their own quality of life) requires an authoritarian government to force people to behave unnaturally en masse.
It may be the only solution, but it seems far from conclusive that that is the case right now. Also it seems counterproductive and extremely short sighted to make the blanket statement that the problem is impossible to solve with technology when so many problems throughout history have been solved by technology.
I don't think that degrowth would have to limit quality of life - many of the things that we spend tremendous amounta of fossil fuels on, like commuting, are not things we want to do, but that we have to do primarily due to really bad planning and systems that don't need to exist. For the last two years a bunch of people stopped commuting and while WFH doesn't work well for some of us (if it weren't a pandemic, the same change could've come with local co-working spaces), that has not hurt quality of life while having a great impact on co2 production.
Other solutions exist that still allow us to live good lives, but the real barrier is entrenched and stubborn systems resistant to change. Even simple things like the urbanism movement being implemented would help a great deal, but getting American urban planning to change course is like trying to push a boulder up mount everest, it would seem.
In my mind, we should aim to solve climate change however we can, while minimising lifestyle harm. But if its a choice between the irreversible destruction of the environment we live in and my lifestyle changing somewhat, I'll choose the latter.
For more than two decades politicians, academics and industrialists have promised great things from carbon capture and storage, or CCS. But after years of trial and error and multiple project cancellations due to prohibitive costs, this highly expensive technology stores less than one-tenth of one per cent of global emissions a year. Even JP Morgan in its 2021 annual energy report sarcastically notes that the “highest ratio in the history of science appears to be the number of academic papers written about CCS compared to its real life implementation.”
The energy ecologist Vaclav Smil considers CCS a ridiculous endeavour because it will never scale up fast enough to make a dent in global emissions. The global economy now produces about 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Tackling 10 per cent of that problem (roughly four billion tonnes) would require the same infrastructure that now supports the entire global oil industry, which produces four billion tonnes of oil a year.
Like carbon capture and storage, direct air capture doesn’t scale up very well. Researchers recently calculated that if the world deployed direct air capture using a chemical reaction that relies on caustic soda to break down CO2 emissions to water and sodium carbonate, it would require a new mining industry.
Just to capture 25 per cent of global emissions, it would need a system of extracting caustic soda that is 20 to 40 times greater than current global production. And this system would consume 15 to 24 per cent of the world’s primary energy spending to get the job done.
The technology also has a big footprint. An industrial factory, powered by natural gas and capable of removing just one billion tonnes of carbon out of the 37 billion tonnes emitted per year, would occupy an area five times greater than Los Angeles. If powered by solar energy such a factory would require a landmass 10 times greater than Delaware.
In other words don’t expect a direct air capture unit in your backyard soon. One group of researchers concluded that the technology “is unfortunately an energetically and financially costly distraction in effective mitigation of climate changes at a meaningful scale.” Another recent study concluded that carbon capture and storage and direct air capture projects emit more carbon than they remove or store.
Dig1t|4 years ago
Yeah I would expect someone making this argument to quote a "Gaia theorist"..
To force the majority of humans to self limit (i.e. voluntarily limit their own quality of life) requires an authoritarian government to force people to behave unnaturally en masse.
It may be the only solution, but it seems far from conclusive that that is the case right now. Also it seems counterproductive and extremely short sighted to make the blanket statement that the problem is impossible to solve with technology when so many problems throughout history have been solved by technology.
beaconstudios|4 years ago
Other solutions exist that still allow us to live good lives, but the real barrier is entrenched and stubborn systems resistant to change. Even simple things like the urbanism movement being implemented would help a great deal, but getting American urban planning to change course is like trying to push a boulder up mount everest, it would seem.
In my mind, we should aim to solve climate change however we can, while minimising lifestyle harm. But if its a choice between the irreversible destruction of the environment we live in and my lifestyle changing somewhat, I'll choose the latter.
macanchex|4 years ago
For more than two decades politicians, academics and industrialists have promised great things from carbon capture and storage, or CCS. But after years of trial and error and multiple project cancellations due to prohibitive costs, this highly expensive technology stores less than one-tenth of one per cent of global emissions a year. Even JP Morgan in its 2021 annual energy report sarcastically notes that the “highest ratio in the history of science appears to be the number of academic papers written about CCS compared to its real life implementation.”
The energy ecologist Vaclav Smil considers CCS a ridiculous endeavour because it will never scale up fast enough to make a dent in global emissions. The global economy now produces about 37 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Tackling 10 per cent of that problem (roughly four billion tonnes) would require the same infrastructure that now supports the entire global oil industry, which produces four billion tonnes of oil a year.
Like carbon capture and storage, direct air capture doesn’t scale up very well. Researchers recently calculated that if the world deployed direct air capture using a chemical reaction that relies on caustic soda to break down CO2 emissions to water and sodium carbonate, it would require a new mining industry.
Just to capture 25 per cent of global emissions, it would need a system of extracting caustic soda that is 20 to 40 times greater than current global production. And this system would consume 15 to 24 per cent of the world’s primary energy spending to get the job done.
The technology also has a big footprint. An industrial factory, powered by natural gas and capable of removing just one billion tonnes of carbon out of the 37 billion tonnes emitted per year, would occupy an area five times greater than Los Angeles. If powered by solar energy such a factory would require a landmass 10 times greater than Delaware.
In other words don’t expect a direct air capture unit in your backyard soon. One group of researchers concluded that the technology “is unfortunately an energetically and financially costly distraction in effective mitigation of climate changes at a meaningful scale.” Another recent study concluded that carbon capture and storage and direct air capture projects emit more carbon than they remove or store.