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Oil and gas companies want the sky to be vacuumed.
(i.imgur.com)
I didn't read the article but I did scan it and I saw this...
Oil and gas companies lobbied for the direct air capture money to be included in the law, arguing that the world could continue to burn fossil fuels if it had a way to clean up their planet-warming pollution.
Are gasoline powered commuter vehicles really at the center of the climate problem? I was under the impression that most emissions came from the commercial and military sectors.
Hot take: Scrubbing carbon out of the air is good, and we should absolutely be learning how to practically deploy that technology. It may not pan out, but we’d be fools not to pursue it. You can do lots with carbon dioxide if you have enough clean energy, including synthesize non-fossil carbon fuels. When draft animals and water mills powered the most advanced human industries, the technological implications of fossil fuel combustion were unthinkably distant. It is not impossible that we stand in a similar position in relation to the implications of fusion power. Techno-optimism can be used as a conservative political force, but the optimism itself is not always unwarranted. If people are able to develop useful and helpful technologies under capitalism within the imperial core, the technologies themselves can be useful despite the social relations driving their development.
I looked it up and about 50 billion tons of CO~2~ are released each year. They're patting themselves on their backs for their plan to reduce CO~2~ emissions by a whole 0.04%. Climate change has been solved, everyone!
Ha that’s actually a lot higher than I’d have guessed. The Times’s centering of personal vehicles in their explanation both exaggerates the direct impact of this project, and perpetuates the narrative of climate change being a crisis of people’s personal habits.
And they're 100% going to use this as an excuse to not scale back the burning of fossil fuels in the slightest. Because they'll try literally anything else before going after capital.
Edit: wait nvm, they already directly said that lmao
dammit where's our guillotine emojis when you need them
I think on the Internet we call that “mask off”. Notice that they use the term “fossil fuels” instead of “carbon fuels”. They have no vision of participating in an energy revolution that replaces fossil fuels. I could swear there was a trans flag guillotine emoji.
That's a bingo.
Less fucking cars would cut down emissions so much more, but car treats go vroom vroom.
The thing is there isn’t really any “center” of the climate problem. It’s a billion different things. Just about every part of the global economy is at least a little bit underwritten by fossil fuels.
Yeah the commercial and military sectors contribute a lot, but not overwhelmingly so, and also “commercial” isn’t even that useful of a category since it groups a lot of different things together (it could mean production of anything from medical equipment to children’s toys).
This has a good chart showing how diffuse it all is: https://www.vox.com/2014/10/22/18093114/where-do-greenhouse-gas-emissions-come-from
I love a good river chart. Thanks!
Uhm it's called a "Sankey diagram", sweetie!
yeah carbon capture is good as long its not literally powered by fossils, the real challenge is fighting for it to be sequestered, not 'neutrally' re-released, or to drive/excuse further expansion of fossil industries
but this initiative probably will be firmly on the side of doing those bad things, and probably hooked to a coal plant for maximum irony
What's the difference between fossil fuels and "non-fossil carbon fuels"? Is there some other way to get energy out of carbon than combustion? Also how does carbon factor into fusion tech, when IIRC fusion uses hydrogen as fuel (technically deuterium and tritium)?
We can store energy as fuel by using catalysts to make methanol from CO2 and hydrogen. The methanol burns fine, but it can be further catalyzed into gasoline. Right now most free hydrogen is made by burning natural gas, and a lot of CO2 is generated by burning fossil fuels. But it’s possible to obtain hydrogen though water electrolysis, and CO2 from the atmosphere. These processes of non-fossil carbon fuel synthesis take lots and lots of energy.
Looking at the lithium battery phenomenon from mine to landfill, it doesn’t seem to me that it’s a very good idea to use that technology for vehicles. Lead acid batteries are great for fork trucks, where the extra weight is a feature rather than a drawback. Grid electric is just better than everything else if you’re in the grid. For things like tractors, rural service vehicles, logging equipment, etc., The superior energy density of carbon fuel just makes it really practical. Also internal combustion engines are made of easily recyclable metals, and our infrastructure for recycling those metals is already in place.
I work in food processing, not in the energy sector. I’m not a futurist hype guy or a chemical engineer. But I find this stuff really really interesting, and it’s my admittedly inexpert opinion that non-fossil carbon fuel combustion has a place in a future where earth’s climate is managed socially.
Btw we already have a massive amount of internal combustion vehicles laying around, but the capitalist auto industry would much rather sell you an entire new vehicle than convert an old one to use another fuel/energy source.