“When you’re among young people, it’s hard for them to understand how long we’ve known all the basic facts about climate change,” said Rahmstorf, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research who has worked on the topic for 35 years. “Even when I started as a PhD student in the 1980s, it was very clear that our emissions were causing global warming and all the consequences it would have.”
Yet even as Europe’s leaders acknowledge the scale and cause of the problem, they have weakened the very rules in place to stop it from getting worse. Two weeks ago, the European Commission proposed watering down the continent’s emissions trading system, a form of carbon market widely hailed as its most successful tool to cut pollution.
“What people are not getting is that we can’t turn this back – the CO2 to a large part remains in the air for thousands of years,” said Rahmstorf. “Some people think we can wait and, when it gets too bad, then we reduce emissions and things will get better again. People don’t realise that we can’t make it get better again. We can only prevent it from getting much worse.”
A study Rahmstorf co-authored in 2023 found ExxonMobil’s predictions of global heating over the following decades to have been mostly accurate, as skilful as independent academic and government models, and also very much at odds with its public statements on the matter.
I would argue this is where carbon capture should come in. But before you slam the downvote button…
What carbon capture is being hailed as a solution for is exactly the wrong use. Carbon capture is currently being seen as a way to continue polluting because - “hey, look, we’re pumping carbon into the air but where taking it out of the air elsewhere, making it net zero”. Essentially, it’s being used as an excuse to not reduce or eliminate emissions, which just pushes us down the path we’re on.
IMO, carbon capture does have a use - to try to fix what we’ve already fucked up. We’ve done a lot of damage with fossil fuels, and we’ll never really get to the “before times”. But we can use carbon capture to try and fix what little we can.
I wish I had an article on-hand at the moment. We’re able to remove like 5% of annual, ongoing emissions at most with carbon capture. And, as you say, carbon capture is primarily used as a reason to delay the transition away from fossil fuels by its proponents. So the solution is not “Carbon capture, but don’t slam the downvote button just yet,” it’s "reduce and stop burning fossil fuels (first, second, third, fourth, etc.), and then and only then does carbon capture become relevant. We need to be careful about discussing carbon capture since, as we agree, “carbon capture” is primarily a fossil fuel industry speaking point. After all, (created) confusion about a so-called “carbon tax” completely beat us as an electorate and slowed our progress away from FF
I have not seen a carbon capture that takes less energy that what we got from the burning the carbon. as long as that is the case carbon captures has no use until we are 100% not using fossil fuels.
I highly doubt we will ever be close to having a carbon capture system that uses less energy than was gained through burning the carbon, but the biggest advantage of burning carbon isn’t the efficiency. The biggest advantage for fossil/carbon-based fuels is that it is relatively easy to “transport” the energy. In the case of gas, for instance, a couple of gallons of “energy liquid” that can easily be taken just about anywhere can drive you a hundred miles. Without, you’re stuck with batteries or similar - which means systems need to change. Car usage needs to be drastically reduced. Railroads need to invest in catenaries. And we need better systems to store large amounts of power to compensate for when there is less power from renewables.
So essentially, the idea of carbon capture (if we set aside the corporate bullshittery for a moment) in order to offset burnt carbon is not a question of energy efficiency, but of keeping the advantages of burning carbon while using more energy to give it “green credentials”. Thing is, though, companies generally talk about building those facilities, but at the same time fight tooth and nail against carbon pricing. If companies actually took as much carbon out of the air as they put into it, burning fossil fuels would become prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of use cases (which should be the trend), forcing them to pivot away - the precise thing they’re trying to avoid.
ahh. see carbon capture that actually creates fuel is even more rare of a thing from what I have seen. I don’t see any problem with creating it and burning it as much as creating it with fossil fuel energy to begin with. This is why we need to be basically completely off fossil fuel for it to start making sense. At that point using solar and wind energy to sequestor the carbon may be alright but even green energy is just sorta a energy multiplier of other energy and creates waste.
By the time we start going after the companies and the greedy old fucks that are responsible for this rapid decline they’ll all be dead and we’ll be left with a slow roasting hellscape.
*by the time - have you been outside this summer?
I mean, that’s the point of the article - it’s going to get much worse than this.
Yes smartass i HAVE been outside and i work for a textile company so imagine over a hundred machines producing heat while it’s 40+degrees outside and the AC was busted so a comfy 40+ outside and 50+ inside, an absolute fucking dream.
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But the Canadian economy… But China… But the Alberta separatists… But Trump…
I’ve read papers talking about co2 warming the planet from back in the 1890’s somewhere.
We’ve known this for multiple generations and even a century later we stubbornly refuse to stop co2 production because shareholders.
Fuck humanity, I guess
We made was not focusing on mitigation and adoption. We spent decades messing around with fake protocols and accords and targets that politicians used make it seem like they were doing something when they weren’t.
If we had spent the same time and money getting ready for climate change we would be a million times better off. In the future, and they’re not too distant future mind you, the technology will finally advance to the point where we can begin to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. But we’re not there yet and we’re not talking governments and people into giving up their jobs and lifestyle until we can offer them technology but doesn’t require that. That’s just a simple fact
We should have been talking about climate change but we should have been doing something completely different. By now we could easily have deployed forest fire technology to allow us to identify and smother fires effectively and we just don’t have it yet and we’re only now getting serious about making that happen.
In the future, and they’re not too distant future mind you, the technology will finally advance to the point where we can begin to reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. But we’re not there yet and we’re not talking governments and people into giving up their jobs and lifestyle until we can offer them technology but doesn’t require that. That’s just a simple fact
We’ve had this technology for decades already. Trains / Buses for transportation, local bikes, solar and wind power for electricity. Sure, this wasn’t 100% carbon neutral and still is not, but we’ve had the opportunity to heavily reduce our fossil fuel dependence for decades without compromising on lifestyle.
We haven’t got the technology now, never mind in the past
Even if we eliminated every single car and switched to buses and trains and every single one of those buses and trains was electrically driven and there were no fossil fuels, which at this point in time is pretty much impossible, it would still only reduce fossil emissions in the transportation sector by about 40%. The rest would still be there, and that doesn’t address any of the other sources of carbon such as power generation which would be necessary to provide all of that electricity so we’d lose about half the benefit right there.
Right now we couldn’t come close, to be blunt we couldn’t even make a significant difference as near as I can tell. Which is why politicians keep making great promises to make the public happy and then fail to deliver
Which is why we should have been worrying about adoption and that’s where our focus should be today. Absolutely we should also be putting energy and resources into developing the next generations of technology that we will need to eventually eliminate fossil fuels, but that isn’t going to save us in the short term
We need massive advances in battery technology more than anything else. When it becomes as easy, efficient and cheap to store electricity as it is to store oil then this fight is over. And we need for environmental groups to get behind "not perfect’ solutions. For now the latest nuclear tech is amazingly safe and pollution free but many such groups still fight it tooth and nail, even though it could massively cut fossile fuel use.
But while we wait to get there, we need to be doing what is necessary to adapt. Changing laws about making cooling options mandatory in new buildings and homes, having detection and firebomber capacity to deal with wildfires properly, figuring out how to deal with water issues etc etc.
We can’t stop climate change right now. We can’t even substantially slow it down. The day will come but it’s not here
