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."
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/climate-geoengineering-carbon-capture-sun-dimming-controversy/
Carbon capture and "dimming" the sun: Climate geoengineering poses technical and ethical dilemmas
BY JEFF BERARDELLI
APRIL 23, 2021 / 10:20 AM / CBS NEWS
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."
*Extreme Drought Drops Reservoir Water Levels
*U.S. slightly surpasses 1936 record for hottest summer ever, NOAA says
*Solar farm view from above
*Biden wants to grow solar power tenfold in 15 years
*A polar bear (Ursus maritimus) on the pack ice north of ... ; Polar bears are inbreeding as ice melts away, scientists say
*Container Cargo freight ship Terminal in Hongkong, China; Shipping industry group backs putting a price on carbon
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Jeff Berardelli
Jeff Berardelli is a meteorologist and climate specialist for CBS News.
Fracking In California Under Spotlight As Some Local Municipalities Issue Bans
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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