Dear Mike
On terminology, your use of "mitigation" may reflect common usage but has a
problem. Mitigation means slowing climate change, so includes carbon removal.
Restricting mitigation to slowing emission growth wrongly leaves out the main
agenda required for climate stability.
Full implementation of Paris by 2030 would only remove 1% of the 6000 GT of
carbon the world must get out of the air this century to achieve the 2° target,
according to Bjorn Lomborg. I have not seen any refutation of his calculation,
although he is comparing the 14 years of Paris to the 83 years of the century,
so a like for like comparison might be more like 6%, but still effectively
nothing, and risking a Permian Great Dying repeat.
By contrast, my calculation is that a Manhattan/Apollo type project to remove
carbon could remove 200% of emission growth by 2030, putting us back on a path
to retain the stable Holocene climate, addressing the top security threat
facing our planet.
Robert Tulip
From: Michael MacCracken <[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Cc: Douglas MacMartin <[email protected]>; Greg Rau
<[email protected]>; geoengineering <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, 13 November 2017, 5:42
Subject: Re: [geo] Climate science foe Lamar Smith - geoengineering is ‘worth
exploring.’
Hi Peter--Interesting--a couple of questions that might be covered in the type
of assessment that you suggest (and I agree) is worth doing: 1. Were the world
to get serious enough to be taking on the issue in the way you suggest, what
are the relative costs and benefits of investing the same amount of money and
effort on mitigation, so not putting the materials into the atmosphere in the
first place? Would it make more sense to just be investing in CDR research
until the cost-benefit leans to CDR versus mitigation (and considering other
effects, such as job creation, etc. (this point/plateau might vary a great deal
by location, etc.)? 2. Once one captures the C, what does one do with it all?
Where does one put all the captured CO2? What is the cost of
disposal/storage/sequestration, etc. and what are the implications and risks of
the various approaches? Best, Mike
On 11/12/17 6:15 AM, Peter Eisenberger wrote:
Hi Mike ,
The key issue is your sentence "While CDR can get started now, scaling up
seems likely to take a bit of time, though this depends mainly on level of
commitment." . A serious Manhatten Project Level Project or Going to the moon
effort would make an assessment of the time versus commitment level for the
only known solution at this time that can scale -DAC where the carbon is
either stored in a material (carbon fiber or cement and sequestered or
sequestered directly The number of units needed are comparable and less than
many things we already mass produce by sigificant ratios - a shipping container
sized unit of GT technology captures 2000 tpy and is amenable to mass
production . :For 40 giga tonnes pyr capacity one would need 20 million units
-there are currently 17 million shipping containers used in the world . Today
GT has made two such units in a year say which is conservative estimate for
installed capacity for the industry as a whole .To make the 20 million one
would need would take 22 doublings of capacity. If one had a conservative 2 yr
doubling time this would take 44 years and if it was a global emergency so one
had a high doubling time of 1 year it would take us only 22 years to install 40
gigatonnes per year capacity with us making 4 million units per year at the
end - we currently make 60 million new cars per year . The capital cost to make
a DAC 2000 tpy unit is about $500,000 which in the end would cost 2 trillion
dollars or close to 1 % of GGDP at that time and like solar it would create
jobs. My only point is that these are not unreasonable numbers and most
importantly no one has tried to do a serious assessment , yet many make
statements as if it is obvious that the needed capacity cannot be reached in a
timely fashion . But even more significant is that we seem content with a
research effort rather than an implementation effort yet we claim we are in an
emergency . As I am prone to say - the only barrier to CDR to remove the
needed capacity (we know how to do it and that it is affordable) is to decide
to do it.
Peter
On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 4:27 PM, Michael MacCracken <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi Peter--You might be interested that at the hearing Rep. Veasey (ranking
Democratic member on one of the subcommittees at the hearing--see
https://veasey.house.gov) indicated that he would soon be putting forward a
bill pursuing CDR research/efforts. He has a Subcommittee on Energy minority
staffer, Joe Flarida, working on this issue who sounds both quite well-informed
and also interested in getting input ([email protected]). While there
was discussion about might be done on SRM, I did not get the impression that a
bill on that was as far along. On SRM & CDR issue, both are certainly needed.
While CDR can get started now, scaling up seems likely to take a bit of time,
though this depends mainly on level of commitment. SRM is indeed not a
long-term approach, but it can be an approach that I think could be applied
early in low deployment levels while mitigation and CDR are building up and
getting emissions toward zero. I think this notion of waiting decades to get
started makes little sense, because of the climate change and impacts that will
occur in the interim, the shock that sudden and significant SRM deployment
would induce, and that by that time it would be nice to have mitigation and CDR
phased up a good bit (so CO2 emissions down, or at least no longer rising).
Ultimately, we of course prefer having CDR be the dominant approach--for me the
question is having a comprehensive effort that recognizes what needs to get
done and what the capabilities are and deployments can be over time. Mike
On 11/11/17 2:24 PM, Peter Eisenberger wrote:
Hi Doug, I wish your statement was factually true but I can provide if you
want many examples of people adovcating SRM using the status of CDR to justify
its need . Furthermore with all respect even your statement that CDR is in the
same state -eg need for research as CDR is just factually incorrect . CDR is
ready to be implemented , it does not carry the risk of unintended consequences
, and as opposed to SRM it can address the climate challenge whereas the best
SRM can do is provide more time to address it. This is why I wrote that I too
support research on SRM but do so making clear that CDR is both a higher
priority and more advanced by far than SRM If we were as we should be all on
the same team focussed on addressing the threat we all agree exists than all
who support research on SRM would also make clear that it is a lower priority
than CDR . Furthermore as i wrote the failure to do that will result in a
diffusion of effort so that we will make incremental progress on many fronts
without a commtted response on any single effort thus unwittingly delaying the
critical large scale effort needed while we do research and thus losing
precious time we can ill afford to do . Unfortunately this is not an academic
issue and in the future experts will look at what we have done and what was
really known at the time and come to their own conclusion. I hope we do not
have to wait for that judgment and somehow develop the internal capability to
develop a consensus on a prioritized plan to address the threat we face. At
this time we need to go beyond letting a thousand flowers bloom which in itself
is paradoxical with the argument that we have no time to waste .
I of course am willing to be shown that my logic is flawed and engage in
respecful dialogue with you or anyone that would argue against 1 that CDR is
higher priority than SRM , and 2 we need to have an internal effort to develop
a prioritized program for addressing the threat we face. Peter
On Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 10:02 AM, Douglas MacMartin <[email protected]>
wrote:
Peter - I think that the risks of future climate change are sufficiently
concerning that it would be premature to stop all research on some options on
the assumption that other options are 100% guaranteed to suffice. I think
that pretty much everyone who thinks we need to research SRM also thinks we
need to research CDR quite aggressively. So when you try to set things up as an
“us vs them” framing, I don’t think you are doing justice to anyone’s
perspective that I know (and I think I can safely say that I know pretty much
everyone who works on SRM). Relax; we’re all on the same team, and this isn’t
a competition. Doug From: [email protected] m
[mailto:geoengineering@googleg roups.com] On Behalf Of Peter Eisenberger
Sent: Saturday, November 11, 2017 12:46 PM
To: Greg Rau <[email protected]>
Cc: [email protected] m
Subject: Re: [geo] Climate science foe Lamar Smith - geoengineering is ‘worth
exploring.’ The sophisticated opposition to climate change initiated by
George Bush Senior is to appease by supporting imcreased knowledge and thus
avoid the need to act. This is just the most awkward and least nunanced of
this pattern -or may I say another example of how far from knowledge based our
political dialoque has become . I have stated my view that those who
make the case for SRM by diminishing the status and potential for CDR to
address the challenge of climate change are unwittingly playing into the
hands of those opposed to action. A coordinated community focussed on the
threat and not their individual idea would insist that CDR be funded and
aggressively pursued before pursuing SRM - or at least would begin every
interaction with the statement that CDR is a much higher priority. On
Sat, Nov 11, 2017 at 9:21 AM, Greg Rau <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> http://grist.org/briefly/clima te-science-foe-lamar-smith-
> says-geoengineering-is-worth- exploring/
>
>
“Despite Smith’s endorsement of geoengineering, his opening statement made it
clear that he’s still unwilling to talk about the reasons why the technology
is being researched in the first place: “The purpose of this hearing is to
discuss the viability of geoengineering … The hearing is not a platform to
further the debate about climate change.”
GR Just in case the climate change hoax is a hoax?
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