The 'decarbonisation' theme discussed by Noah Deich has become a central
concept in advocacy for emission reduction, but in my view it is not a good way
to understand the CDR agenda. And the 'moral hazard' of CDR can more usefully
be framed as a moral opportunity.
Thecentral problem of global warming is summarized in the McKibben Stock
PriceProblem (link). This is the fact, as noted by leading climatescientist
Bill McKibben, that the stock prices of leading energy companies all factorin
plans to move enough carbon from the crust to the atmosphere to cook theplanet,
without any remediation strategy. This is not possible, because the business
as usual scenario would lead the world economy to collapse before the
ecosystemscollapse.
Climate stabilityis a prerequisite for economic stability. The solutions to
deliver climatestability are either to either move less carbon into the air
(reduce emissions) or stabiliseit once it is moved (Carbon Dioxide Removal).
Current plans to move carbon without stabilising it are not possible dueto the
constraints of physics. And SolarRadiation Management is more an emergency
tourniquet than a climate solution.
Reducingemissions is the primary focus of global warming politics, supporting
thepremise of decarbonisation of the economy. But emission reduction faces
massive, apparently insurmountable,problems, seen in the steady 2.5 ppm per
decade acceleration of the CO2 emissionincrease rate. The economic
incentivesto burn coal and gas and oil are more powerful than the political
incentives toswitch to sustainable energy. And in any case, emission reduction
still assumesongoing increase in CO2 level in the air. Ongoing increase should
be unacceptable, because we need to drive CO2 levelsdown through negative
emissions.
Political agreements around emission targets are useless, essentially serving
as a cover for failure of will and vision. The political targets of ongoing
warming buildin massive danger of phase shift from the stable Holocene climate
pattern thathas prevailed for the ten thousand years of the growth of human
civilization onour planet. The implication is that theremust be a
technological focus on CDR, or we cook. An end to Holocene stability is an
unacceptablerisk with a planetary population of ten billion people, given the
likelihood it brings of conflict and collapse of civilization and loss of
biodiversity.
In Londonin 1850, the problem of cholera was solved by pumping sewage out of
thecity. Global warming is like a choleraepidemic for the twenty first
century. We need new sanitarians to work out how to pump carbon out of the air
tosolve the problem of global warming. Funding that process means establishing
economic and scalable methods toconvert the harmful extra CO2 into useful
forms. That means finding practical commercial usesfor more than ten billion
tonnes of carbon every year. The only way to do that, in my view, is toapply
solar and ocean energy to grow algae on industrial scale.
This callto focus on algae as a useful form of carbon requires understanding of
thedistinction between carbon storage and carbon utilization. Storing CO2
through geosequestration is notan economic contribution to stopping global
warming. Carbon stored as CO2 has no value, except to help pump up more
fossilfuels. But if CO2 is converted to algae,and the algae is then held in
large fabric bags at the bottom of the sea, we havean enduring resource, a
carbon bank.
The oceanis a perpetual motion machine driven by earth’s orbital dynamics. 1.3
billion cubic kilometers (teralitres) of water move upand down by about half a
meter each tide on average. Tapping a fraction of this energy source
forpumping should be a primary objective for an algae production and CDR
system. Such asystem would not decarbonise the economy, but would enable a
massive increase in thepractical use of carbon. We can applyingenuity and
know-how to create innovative new methods to make good use of carbon stored as
algae for infrastructure, energy and food. An industrial productionsystem that
is largely automated, and that uses oceanic energy to manufacture its
ownreplication resources, can become profitable. Against this objective, ideas
about prices oncarbon, and the strategic model of decarbonisation, are not
helpful. We need a new integratedeconomic and ecological paradigm with a focus
on mining more carbon than weemit.
The stockprices of energy majors can remain realistic only if their factored
carbonreserves can be stabilised once they are burnt into the air. It is
therefore possible to work in cooperation with the fossil fuel industry to
stabilise the global climate., turning their commercial resources and skills to
advantage for new sustainable technology. Decarbonisation wrongly poses the
question in terms of conflict rather than cooperation. CDR is a moral
opportunity, not a moral hazard. The focus should be to mine the produced CO2
out of the air and sea andturn it into useful commodities.
RobertTulip
Disclaimer:My comments here are made in my personal capacity and do not
represent official views of the Australian Government.
From: Greg Rau <[email protected]>
To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]>; geoengineering
<[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, 2 November 2014, 5:15
Subject: Re: [geo] Does CDR provide “moral hazard” for avoiding deep
decarbonization of our economy? | Everything and the Carbon Sink
I'd be a little careful about the argument made here that CDR will continue to
be too expensive to seriously compete with emission reduction. As I've said
before (OK, like a broken record), some 18 GT of CO2/yr are currently being
removed from the atmosphere via natural CDR, enough to actually seasonally
reverse air CO2 growth, and enough to save the planet from a more rapid climate
catastrophe. And did I say for a cost of $0.00? Is it really unthinkable that
we could very cost-competitively up this CDR quantity while we also strive to
reduce emissions? And, shouldn't this natural CDR, rather than way too
expensive BECCS, be the poster child for what is possible?As the article in
effect concludes, isn't there is a moral hazard in continuing to think that
emissions reduction will solve the problem singlehandedly and in time, and
therefore why wait to seriously evaluate CDR ideas and potential?Greg
From: Andrew Lockley <[email protected]>
To: geoengineering <[email protected]>
Sent: Saturday, November 1, 2014 2:14 AM
Subject: [geo] Does CDR provide “moral hazard” for avoiding deep
decarbonization of our economy? | Everything and the Carbon Sink
Poster's note : see images on Web
https://carbonremoval.wordpress.com/2014/10/24/does-cdr-provide-morale-hazard-for-avoiding-deep-decarbonization-of-our-economy/Everything
and the Carbon SinkNoah Deich's blog on all things Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
Does CDR provide “moral hazard” for avoiding deep decarbonization of our
economy?OCTOBER 24, 2014No. But the fact that some environmentalists question
the value of developing Carbon Dioxide Removal (“CDR”) approaches for this very
reason merits greater analysis. The “moral hazard” argument against CDR goes
something like this: CDR could be a “Trojan horse” that fossil fuel interests
will use to delay rapid decarbonization of the economy, as these fossil
interests could use the prospect of cost-effective, proven, scaleable CDR
technologies as an excuse for continuing to burn fossil fuels today (on the
grounds that at some point in the future we’ll have the CDR techniques to
remove these present-day emissions).The key problem with this “moral hazard”
argument is the hypothesis that “cost-effective, proven, scaleable CDR
solutions” are poised to proliferate at greater rates than GHG emission
mitigation technologies (such as renewable energy and energy efficiency) that
are required to decarbonize our economy. Today, CDR solutions remain largely in
their infancy. Installed bio-CCS plants can be counted on one hand, for
example, and not a single commercial-scale Direct Air Capture project has been
built to date. Renewable energy, however, has had a considerable head start on
CDR technologies on reducing costs. Take solar PV systems as an example. As the
chart below shows, solar PV panels have dropped in cost from over $75/W to
under $0.75/W over the past four decades.Source: Costofsolar.comThis cost
reduction in the price of solar PV panels happens to be exactly what economic
theory would predict. Learning curve models show that that costs of energy
technologies come down in a predictable fashion as cumulative installed
capacity increases. The graph below shows learning curve estimates for a range
of energy technologies.Source:
http://energy.jrc.ec.europa.eu/Pages/ArticlesETD.htmSo what does this mean for
the “moral hazard” argument against developing CDR solutions?For this “moral
hazard” argument to be valid, we would have to believe that CDR approaches will
be able to not only catch up to other renewable technologies in cost within a
short-time frame, but then continue to reduce costs more quickly. Otherwise,
renewable technologies will continue their inevitable march down their cost
curve, and will continue displacing fossil sources in our energy mix.Suggesting
that CDR approaches will outpace other decarbonization technologies doesn’t
seem particularly plausible. This is because the technologies that have the
“steepest” learning curves are usually those that can be manufactured and
installed in assembly-line type manners (like solar PV panels or fuel cells,
for example). Most CDR technologies do not fit this mold — for example, large
scale bio-CCS projects frequently require many bespoke designs to fit
particular plants/geographies. Direct air capture and small-scale biochar
pyrolyzers fit this assembly-line model better, but there is no reason to
expect these technologies to come down cost curves more quickly than their
renewable complementors.In fact, this learning curve analysis would suggest
that CDR faces the opposite of a “moral hazard” problem — because CDR remains
so far behind other renewable technologies, we will keep building more and more
renewables and neglect to develop CDR, which will seem expensive by comparison.
Neglecting CDR in this fashion would be fine if we didn’t need negative
emissions as a society. But if we find that negative emissions are necessary in
a few decades, and we haven’t started developing CDR technologies? Then we are
like to find that the initial CDR deployments are incredibly expensive and thus
not politically viable. So there is a strong argument to be made for us to
start developing CDR technologiestoday alongside renewable energy technologies,
so that if/when we need to start removing carbon from the atmosphere, we have a
suite of viable solutions to do so.In conclusion, it’s simply not worth
worrying about a “moral hazard” problem that we won’t have for at least
decades, and are most likely to never have all — especially when the problems
of not developing CDR solutions today could be much more severe.
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