this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.

As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

Recommended actions to cut greenhouse gas emissions in the near future:

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Direct air capture: An expensive, dangerous distraction from real climate solutions (thebulletin.org)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I read somewhere that you could pump CO2 into a saline aquifer and have it stay there indefinitely. Should we be capturing the CO2 from breweries and doing this? Ethanol fuel production? I mean all these plants are doing direct air capture already. If we just route the off gassing underground it would seem like a cheap way to leverage existing technology.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

There are several ways to store CO2 underground, of which the mechanism you describe is one. There remain issues with getting the CO2 from the places you describe to geologically suitable locations.

Above and beyond it, what you've described and the high cost of doing it, this is what we end up with:

Fifteen CCS facilities are currently operating in the United States. Together, they have the capacity to capture 0.4 percent of the nation’s total annual CO2 emissions. An additional 121 CCS facilities are under construction or in development. If all of them were completed, they would increase the nation’s CCS capacity to 3 percent of current annual CO2 emissions.

Those percentages are small in part because CCS is generally used in sectors that have the lowest costs for capturing CO2—such as natural gas processing and ammonia and ethanol production—and those sectors account for a small share of total U.S. CO2 emissions. Almost all CCS facilities recoup some of their costs by using the captured CO2 to force more oil out of partially depleted oil wells.