PROGRESSIVES – CLIMATE – SCRUBBING THE
AIR
COMPILATION AND COMMENTARY
BY LUCY MANESS WARNER
SEPTEMBER 9, 2021
CARBON CAPTURE IS CONSIDERED AN
IMPORTANT PART OF REDUCING OR EVEN REVERSING CLIMATE CHANGE. THE FOLLOWING
BUSINESS IN ICELAND RUNS ITS’ AIR SCRUBBERS ON GEOTHERMAL SOURCES. WHAT PEOPLE
NEED TO UNDERSTAND, THOUGH, IS THAT DRASTICALLY REDUCING THE USE OF FOSSIL
FUELS MUST STILL REMAIN ON THE BURNER, ALONG WITH BOOSTING REFORESTATION AND
RENEWABLES SUCH AS SOLAR AND WIND POWER. IT IS A HUGE PROBLEM AND A COMPLEX
ONE, AND THE TIMING COULDN’T BE MORE CRITICAL THAN IT IS NOW. WHAT WE THOUGHT
WAS IN OUR FUTURE IS ALREADY MANIFEST IN WEATHER TODAY. TODAY’S ARTICLE FROM
CBS IS MOST INTERESTING.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/devices-carbon-dioxide-fight-climate-change/
Iceland rolls out devices to help
capture and bury carbon dioxide in effort to fight climate change
CBS-mornings
SEPTEMBER 9, 2021 / 3:34 PM / CBS
NEWS VIDEO – World’s largest carbon
capture plant, 04:21 min.
Iceland is famous for its stunning
natural beauty, but it's the devices that resemble giant air conditioners that
are making history as the world's first large-scale attempt to directly capture
carbon dioxide and bury it underground.
The Swiss company Climeworks started
operating 96 fans powered by a nearby geothermal plant Thursday.
"As soon as the fans are on,
every ton of CO2 that's removed is a ton that's actually helping, fighting
climate change and not contributing to global warming," Julie Gosalvez, an
executive with Climeworks, told CBS News senior national and environmental
correspondent Ben Tracy.
Gosalvez said the units are compact
and can capture and then store "a lot of CO2."
The carbon dioxide first gets drawn
into collectors and then is processed in a room and mixed with water. Inside a
domed building, it gets injected into the ground and trapped in stone. It can
stay there for more than 1,000 years.
"So how much carbon dioxide is
this thing going to suck out of the air every year?" Tracy asked.
"So the capacity of this plant
is 4,000 tons," Gosalvez said.
That's a drop in the carbon dioxide
ocean. Nearly 40 billion tons of CO2 are now released into the atmosphere every
year, much of it from fossil fuels.
Climate specialists say eliminating
those emissions means abandoning gas-powered vehicles, finding new fuels to
power airplanes, new materials to build buildings and getting all of our
electricity from renewable sources.
Scientists say carbon capture, if dramatically
scaled up, could help buy time. Climeworks has big investors, including
Microsoft, which is also paying to offset its own emissions.
"We do believe that those
companies that have more should do more," said Lucas Joppa, Microsoft's
chief environmental officer.
"Is this in some way just kind
of letting you off the hook, knowing that you can spend money to offset your
emissions?" Tracy asked Joppa.
"I don't believe so,"
Joppa said. "There's no credible economic model that shows the world
achieving a net-zero carbon economy by 2050, which is what the world must do,
without carbon removal playing a significant role in that equation."
A Canadian company is planning to
build a carbon removal plant in West Texas, which it says will remove about 1
million tons of CO2 a year.
United Airlines is a major investor,
but skeptics like climate scientist Zeke Hausfather say carbon removal is still
too expensive and complicated to replicate worldwide.
"And we certainly should not
see it as an alternative to cutting our emissions when we can," Hausfather
said. "So there's no magic bullet for climate change; there's only magic
buckshot. It's thousands of different solutions working together that's gonna
solve the problem."
VIDEO – Carbon capture provides
short-term solution, 5:58 MIN.
The climate crisis is arguably the
biggest challenge humanity has ever faced, and to limit warming to manageable
levels, time is our biggest opponent. While the transition from fossil fuels to
cleaner renewable energy is now gaining steam, the pace is simply not fast
enough to head off the harmful impacts that are already being felt throughout
the world.
The Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) "Special Report: Global Warming of 1.5ºC" —
the international community's benchmark guide to averting climate disaster —
says to reach the goal of staying below 1.5ºC of warming requires "rapid
and far-reaching transitions" in our energy, industrial and other systems
that would be "unprecedented in scale." In other words, the task is
herculean.
So, many experts say drastic times
call for drastic measures, arguing that technology like climate geoengineering
should be part of the solution toolkit. Proponents say that while switching to
renewable energy, driving electric vehicles and restoring forests can get us
far, that's simply not enough. The IPCC agrees, and cites one specific type of
geoengineering — carbon capture and sequestration — as a necessary part of the
suite of solutions.
While carbon capture — a process of
trapping, compressing and then storing away harmful emissions to keep them out
of the atmosphere — has its share of detractors, the climate community
generally accepts that it will be necessary, though the extent to which it can
and should be used is hotly debated.
But that debate pales in comparison
to the controversy provoked by another proposed type of geoengineering known as
Solar Radiation Management, in which humans would artificially dim the sun.
That idea is loaded with compelling physical and ethical considerations which
will be explored below.
Carbon capture
Since the Industrial Revolution, the
burning of fossil fuels has released 1.6 trillion tons of heat-trapping
greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide (CO2) has increased by 50%
— at a pace 100 times faster than it naturally should. As a result, our planet
is now warming 10 times faster than it has in 65 million years. The scale and
speed is unprecedented.
Despite advances in clean energy
like wind and solar, the world still gets 80% of its energy from fossil fuels.
Because it is integrated into almost every nook and cranny of modern life, the
challenge of eliminating carbon from our energy system is monumental. And even
if humanity can significantly slow or even stop emitting carbon pollution,
carbon dioxide will remain in the atmosphere for hundreds or even thousands of
years. The only way to reduce greenhouse gas concentrations is to pull the
carbon back out of the atmosphere.
In order to do that, there are
natural solutions like forest restoration as well as technical solutions like
carbon capture systems.
A 2017 research paper, led by the
Nature Conservancy, found that natural climate solutions like restoring
forests, wetlands and grasslands can, in a best-case scenario, provide 37% of
the CO2 mitigation needed to keep humanity below the upper goal (2ºC of
warming) of the Paris Agreement. That's significant, but not enough.
Chad Frischmann, the senior director
of research and technology at Project Drawdown, a climate solutions
organization, prefers if society concentrates on developing ways to get nature
to do the work.
"Overall, these natural forms
of 'carbon capture' are tried, true and cost effective. More importantly, they
have a ton of cascading benefits to agricultural productivity, biodiversity,
and the health of the planet," he said.
But carbon capture specialists like
Dr. Julio Friedmann, a global energy policy expert from Columbia University —
known as @CarbonWrangler on Twitter — believe technological solutions should
have a bigger role to play because even if we shift to clean energy there are
certain industrial processes, like cement and steel making, that cannot easily
be decarbonized.
As is clear from his Twitter handle,
Friedmann is bullish on carbon removal — not as a replacement for other
solutions, but as a complement to them.
"CO2 removal is one mitigation
strategy. It is a mitigation strategy like efficiency, renewables, electric
vehicles. It is just one of the many things that we will do," he said.
"But if we do everything we know how to do today there's always this fat
residual 10 billion tons a year that we have no solutions for."
Carbon capture — often referred to
as CCUS, for carbon capture, utilization and storage — is an industrial process
by which carbon dioxide is absorbed during power generation and industrial
processes and stored away, typically underground, sometimes utilized for
enhanced oil recovery or used in certain manufactured goods.
Globally, there are about 50
large-scale CCUS plants, including 10 currently operating in the U.S.
PHOTOGRAPH -- Operations Inside The
NRG Energy Inc. Coal Power Plant ; A pipe installed as part of the Petra Nova
Carbon Capture Project carries carbon dioxide captured from the emissions of
the NRG Energy Inc. WA Parish generating station in Thompsons, Texas, in 2017.
The project, a joint venture between NRG Energy and JX Nippon Oil & Gas
Exploration Corp., reportedly captures and repurposes more than 90% of
its own CO2 emissions. LUKE
SHARRETT/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY IMAGES
A less common but growing method is
called direct air capture (DAC), in which carbon dioxide is sucked right out of
the air through the use of large fans. There are currently only 15 DAC
facilities worldwide which capture only 9,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year.
Some larger facilities are planned. The Swiss company Climeworks is building a
DAC plant in Iceland capable of capturing 4,000 tons, and the American
petroleum giant Occidental plans a much more ambitious facility in the West
Texas Permian Basin which it says will capture 1 million tons of CO2 a year.
Collectively all these CCUS and DAC facilities
have the capacity to capture about 40 million tons of carbon dioxide yearly. It
sounds like a lot, until you consider that each year humans emit almost 40
billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere —1,000 times more than we
can capture — to say nothing about all the CO2 that is already up there as a
result of the Industrial Revolution.
To put it bluntly, critics say CCUS
and DAC are not ready for prime-time and may never be. The processes are very
expensive, they consume copious amounts of energy themselves — often,
ironically, produced by burning fossil fuels — and their capacity is just a
tiny fraction of what's needed.
Frischmann said, "They will
never scale to the level necessary to offset fossil fuel emissions, and will
take 20 years of 20% annual growth to even start making a dent in the
atmosphere. Highly unlikely rate of growth."
He's also concerned about the moral
hazard of promoting carbon capture as a solution, because he says these
"false silver bullets" mean emitters can keep emitting with the
promise that technology will suck up all their pollution. "Attention to
them now allows fossil fuel companies, and their cronies, to continue
business-as-usual with the promise of a Band-Aid that is not materializing
anytime soon," Frischmann said.
But Friedmann disagrees. He believes
good policies can help carbon capture scale up quickly.
"It's not a technology
challenge, it's a finance challenge," he said. "It's helpful to think
about these things like solar in 2002. Solar electricity in 2002 was expensive,
not mass produced. And then there was this set of policy and innovation pushes
that really dropped the price and helped commercialization."
He also feels that mopping up our
mess is a moral responsibility.
"If you accept that we should
remove CO2 from the air and oceans, it is essentially a way of addressing prior
wrongs. It's a way of the Global North announcing its intentions to clean up
its mess and say we are going to do this so the Global South doesn't have
to."
PHOTOGRAPH -- Operations At A Carbon
Engineering Direct Air Capture Pilot Facility ; Technicians inspect the direct
air capture system at the Carbon Engineering Ltd. pilot facility in Squamish,
British Columbia, Canada, on Nov. 4, 2019. JAMES MACDONALD/BLOOMBERG VIA GETTY
IMAGES
Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman), a NASA
climate scientist, says he supports the concept of carbon capture and thinks we
should keep researching it, but he is "extremely skeptical it will ever be
possible or helpful." He thinks it should not be included in planning
until we know it can be done at scale.
Kalmus puts it colorfully: "I
feel the IPCC stepped way out of bounds in normalizing it in greenhouse gas
budgets and scenarios. They may as well have included genies, fairies, and
pixies in their scenarios."
Kalmus shares a concern with many
others in the climate community that focusing on carbon capture will distract
us from the real work of getting off fossil fuels.
He said, "The most compelling
'con' to me is that it will be used by politicians, decision-makers, and the
public to reduce the urgency and delay timescales for addressing what is surely
the greatest emergency facing humanity."
But clearly the two arguments are
not mutually exclusive: carbon capture can both be used as a delay tactic and
also be a necessary part of the solution.
President Biden's ambitious climate
agenda aims to bolster the U.S. carbon capture capacity, not only to clean up
the environment but also to create jobs. His $2 trillion infrastructure plan
includes funding for carbon recapture plants. This is a rare area of agreement
for Democrats and Republicans and may be a necessary inclusion to help garner
support across the aisle. It's even won support from the United Mine Workers of
America, which backed incentives for using carbon capture technology along with
measures to protect jobs in coal country.
Solar geoengineering
If the idea of artificially dimming
the sun to minimize global warming seems like science fiction, you wouldn't be
alone in that opinion. It is certainly fraught with potential dangers and
unknowns. But the concept is actually rather simple technologically, and
relatively inexpensive. The challenges are not so much technical or financial,
they are political and ethical.
Proponents like Bill Gates say solar
geoengineering could buy humanity time to transition over to renewable energy.
Opponents argue there are a multitude of concerns about the potential
consequences.
Solar geoengineering proposals go by
various names, including Solar Radiation Management (SRM) and Stratospheric
Aerosol Intervention (SAI).
The idea is to fly specialized
planes into the stratosphere, more than 50,000 feet above Earth's surface, and
unload small aerosol particles (like sulfates) which would block some of the
sunlight from reaching the Earth. Because atmospheric winds are all connected,
the suspended particles would circulate the globe. Less sun equals less
heating. Theoretically, the amount of cooling could be controlled by managing
the amount and distribution of aerosols the planes deliver. As long as the
particles are up there, the cooling would continue.
There is also a less talked-about
option called Marine Cloud Brightening. It's somewhat similar in that particles
are injected, but this time into clouds to make them brighter, whiter and more
able to reflect sunlight back into space before it heats the Earth. Proposals
suggest spraying sea salt aerosols from vessels into marine clouds. Those
particles would act as condensation nuclei allowing more cloud droplets to
form, blocking more sun. Here the impacts here would be more regional, not
global.
Both types of solar geoengineering
are explained below, in an illustration from the Union of Concerned Scientists.
GRAPHIC DEPICTION – How might solar
geoengineering cool the earth? [Compares Marine Cloud Brightening (MCB) with
Stratospheric Aerosol Injection (SAI)] solar-g.png , UNION OF CONCERNED
SCIENTISTS
Scientists know SAI could lower
temperatures because a natural version of it is on display for all to see and
measure when big volcanoes, like Mout Pinatubo in the Philippines, erupt and spew
sulfates high up into the stratosphere.
In 2001, Pinatubo injected about 15
million tons of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere, where it formed a hazy
layer of aerosol particles composed primarily of sulfuric acid droplets. This
blocked enough sunlight to reduce the planet's temperature by 1ºF over the
course of 1 to 2 years.
Photograph -- Mount Pinatubo volcano
; A giant mushroom cloud of steam and ash exploding out of Mount Pinatubo
volcano during an eruption on June 12, 1991.
ARLAN NAEG/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
"The technical challenges for
stratospheric aerosol geoengineering are not great, all that is needed is a
new, high-altitude jet that could carry tons of material into the lower
stratosphere, about 60,000 feet up," explains Peter Irvine, a professor of
solar geoengineering at University College London.
Specialized planes would be needed
because the air is much thinner at that high altitude. Irvine believes it's a
cost-effective option to consider given the severity of the crisis facing the
planet.
"Developing and running a fleet
of such aircraft would cost a few billion dollars per year initially, which is
small compared to the projected damages of climate change or to the costs of
decarbonizing the economy," he said.
A 2018 paper estimates the upfront cost
for development of one such aircraft would be $2 to $3 billion, and maintaining
a fleet of planes making 4,000 worldwide missions per year would cost around $2
to $2.5 billion per year over the first 15 years.
Frischmann says it's the
affordability that scares him.
"It is cheap, and this is
scary. There are any number of billionaires, corporations or small states with
the wealth to inject enough sulfate into the stratosphere to cause irreparable
damage. Chilling thought," he said.
The damage that might be caused by
tampering with the atmosphere is debatable and unknown because there simply
hasn't been much real-world research done. That's partly because any
atmospheric modification, or even the consideration of it, is highly
controversial.
A major concern among many climate
scientists is the chance of unintended consequences from artificially cooling
the Earth with aerosols. Could it cause floods in one nation and droughts in
another? Will it weaken the ozone layer? Will it hurt species or ecosystems?
Could it be used unilaterally as a weapon by one nation to inflict climate
damage on another? Some of these hypotheticals may be more likely than others,
but these are questions that can only be answered by research.
Its ability to raise alarm was on display
a few weeks ago. A very small research project called SCoPEx, by a group of
Harvard researchers, which was scheduled for this summer, was just postponed
until at least 2022. To illustrate how divisive the concept is, the team wasn't
even spraying any aerosols — just testing equipment. Regardless, Swedish
environmental organizations and the Indigenous Saami Council sent a letter
demanding the project be canceled, calling the plan a real moral hazard and
saying the technology entails risks of catastrophic consequences. The Harvard
advisory committee put it on hold, pending further societal engagement.
While Irvine is bullish on SIA's
"potential to reduce the risks of climate change if used as a complement
to emissions cuts," he is quick to point out that a much better
understanding is needed: "We don't know enough about its potential, limits
and risks to make recommendations on whether or not to deploy it. Research is
needed to better understand its potential physical consequences, as well as to understand
the broader social and political challenges it poses."
In 2019, the U.S. government
allotted $4 million for stratospheric monitoring and research efforts. The
program includes assessments of solar climate interventions such as proposals
to inject material into the stratosphere.
PHOTOGRAPH -- Fracking In
California Under Spotlight As Some Local Municipalities Issue Bans* [SEE il
post article below for this title] ; The sun rises over an oil field over the
Monterey Shale formation where gas and oil extraction using hydraulic
fracturing, or fracking, is taking place on March 24, 2014 near Lost Hills,
California. DAVID MCNEW / GETTY IMAGES
A year ago, Irvine and Dr. David
Keith, another well-known expert in solar geoengineering, published a paper
looking into the effectiveness and potential side effects of SAI. In a
geoengineering model study, the team found that halving warming with
stratospheric aerosol geoengineering could potentially reduce key climate
hazards and would have limited regional side effects. But a limited model study
is not nearly enough to base these monumental decisions on.
Recently, solar geoengineering
supporters got a boost from a powerful scientific organization. Given the
urgency of the risks posed by climate change, the National Academy of Sciences
recommended that the U.S. government should cautiously pursue a research
program for solar geoengineering, with funding in the $100 to $200 million
range over 5 years.
But even if solar geoengineering
worked to cool temperatures, it would do nothing for the problem of ocean
acidification, because it does not address the root cause of the warming — the
carbon dioxide which traps heat and dissolves in the ocean to make waters more
acidic.
For all these reasons, many in the
climate community believe the cons outweigh the potential pros.
"In short, do not try to fix a
global, catastrophic problem with a Band-Aid that no one knows will work as
intended, or knows what long-term unintended damage can be done to the
planet," said Frischmann.
Kalmus sees the value in researching
solar geoengineering, but says the fact that we are even contemplating it
evokes visions of a dystopian future. He goes further by discussing what is likely
the most risky aspect of SAI.
"Solar geoengineering has an
even darker aspect which is that the moment society stopped doing it, for
whatever reason, there would be a rapid spike in global mean temperature, which
is an extraordinarily dangerous prospect," he said.
In other words, if the world used
SAI to hold down temperatures for 30 years, and then stopped, almost
immediately temperatures would spike the whole 30 years worth of warming in a
year or two — with possibly devastating consequences for ecosystems and species
that could not immediately adapt.
"It is a last resort lever to
be pulled under the most dire circumstances for life on the planet. There is
not a scenario where I see this as needed," Frischmann urges. As an expert
in solutions, he points instead to a more holistic set of changes we could make
to energy use, industry, transportation, agriculture and other sectors that are
supported by research.
Kalmus sees resorting to extreme
geoengineering solutions as lazy and selfish.
"Saying either 'we'll figure
out and do carbon capture later this century' or 'we'll cool the planet with
aerosols' is negligently irresponsible, and basically says, 'We old people can
keep consuming and polluting, we'll force our kids to pay the price.' It's
intergenerational genocide."
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First published on April 23, 2021 /
10:20 AM
© 2021 CBS Interactive Inc. All
Rights Reserved.
Jeff Berardelli
Jeff Berardelli is a meteorologist
and climate specialist for CBS News.
PHOTOGRAPH – OIL DRILLING EQUIPMENT – (Photo by
David McNew/Getty Images)
MCKITTRICK, CA - MARCH 23: Pump
jacks and wells are seen in an oil field on the Monterey Shale formation where
gas and oil extraction using hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is on the verge
of a boom on March 23, 2014 near McKittrick, California. Critics of fracking in
California cite concerns over water usage and possible chemical pollution of ground
water sources as California farmers are forced to leave unprecedented expanses
of fields fallow in one of the worst droughts in California history. Concerns
also include the possibility of earthquakes triggered by the fracking process
which injects water, sand and various chemicals under high pressure into the
ground to break the rock to release oil and gas for extraction though a well.
The 800-mile-long San Andreas Fault runs north and south on the western side of
the Monterey Formation in the Central Valley and is thought to be the most
dangerous fault in the nation. Proponents of the fracking boom saying that the
expansion of petroleum extraction is good for the economy and security by
developing more domestic energy sources and increasing gas and oil exports.
(Photo by David McNew/Getty Images)
WHO ARE IL POST?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Il_Post
Il Post
From Wikipedia, the free
encyclopedia
Il Post is an Italian on-line daily
newspaper, founded and directed in 2010 by Luca Sofri. The editorial staff
includes journalists Arianna Cavallo, Francesco Costa, Luca Misculin, Elena
Zacchetti, Giulia Balducci and Emanuele Menietti, as well as contributions from
Luca Sofri and a number of other collaborators. The business model is based on
revenue from advertising, since reading the newspaper is free and requires no
registration; the newspaper is also sponsored by a group of investors of whom
the main partner is the Banzai company, an Italian Internet holding company
that controls the graphic design, technological aspects and advertising
revenues.
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