The magnitude of the problem can be challenging to comprehend. There is about 1 Ttonne CO₂ to mitigate, which, at $100 per tonne, would cost $100 trillion USD to fully sequester. Throwing billions of dollars at it would not even start to make the smallest measurable dent in the problem at any scale whatsoever.

However, if the current rate of annual solar panel adoption continues at 26% for the next 18 years, then the global production of energy will be sufficient to pretty rapidly decarbonize the atmosphere at low cost, as the amount of solar energy will be triple that being produced globally from all sources at present.

Now, if that doesn’t happen, then another way to pay for decarbonizing is to bring about world peace and disarmament. The US annual defense budget is ~$800B. If the dividend from world peace was directed to climate mitigation, we could get rapid, dramatic reductions in CO₂ over the course of a century. And we would no longer have the threat of nuclear war looming over human civilization. I find that this idea is generally met with scepticism, but, unlike other government expenditures like healthcare and welfare, war is a highly discretionary expenditure that can be rendered unnecessary by some important people signing some papers.

This is a serious, expensive problem and the solutions, unfortunately, are going to need to be proportionally serious and expensive.

Tree planting is not a viable strategy for decarbonizing the atmosphere on human time scales.

“Planting a billion hectares of trees won’t be easy,” he said. “It would require a massive undertaking. If we follow the paper’s recommendations, reforesting an area the size of the United States and Canada combined (1 to 2 billion hectares) could take between one and two thousand years, assuming we plant a million hectares a year and that each hectare contains at least 50 to 100 trees to create an appropriate treetop canopy cover.” (NASA)

This is not to say that we shouldn’t plant trees. We should, but the idea that tree planting will result in reductions of greenhouse gases over the course of a single human life time on the order of the ~teratonnes of anthropogenic CO₂ is fantasy. If we want to re-establish a stable climate sooner than 1,000 years, we will have to pump the carbon back to the place where it came from: underground. Thus, CCS.

This piece is just propaganda. One wonders what would be expected:

To date, it has received $281 million in taxpayer dollars via Department of Energy grants. According to the Department of Energy, it has stored more than 2.8 million metric tons of carbon dioxide since 2011.

This would place the cost of sequestration at… $100 tonne, which is pretty much the price that everyone else has estimated for carbon capture and sequestration, as discussed in articles like this. How much was sequestration of 2.8 million tonnes of CO2 supposed to cost?

“Carbon capture project captures almost no carbon”. Really? Because 2.8 megatonnes doesn’t seem like “no carbon” to me. Was it that “it only caught 10% of the carbon produced on the site”? Well then, maybe it should have been $2.8B of taxpayer dollars to capture 28 MTCO₂. What would the headline have been then? “Carbon capture project costs taxpayer $2.8B for almost no carbon”?

I want the cost of sequestration to be lower just like anyone else, but doing nothing is a terrible strategy to learn how to reduce costs.

If you don’t want taxpayers to pay for it, change the laws and make the price of carbon emissions >$100 tonne. Then ADM will have to pay their own sequestration costs. If you don’t like sequestration because it’s expensive, then what’s the plan for decarbonizing the atmosphere and reducing global temperatures after emissions are zeroed out? If your plan for a carbon neutral world is “endure global warming for thousands of years until the carbon gets sequestered in soil”, that’s fine, but you can’t blame people for wanting to see things get cleared up on the order of decades.

This project was a success, insofar as it accomplished what it set out to accomplish as a publicly funded demonstration of the technology. The fact that the site emitted other carbon that wasn’t captured is irrelevant.

The fear of feedback loops is reasonable, but may not be inevitable. The reason complex life exists on this planet, in part, is that the biosphere evolved to prevent runaway climate change. As the life forms grew more varied and complex, the tools for maintaining a viable atmosphere also increased. So the Precambrian extinctions are attributed to changes that extremely primitive life forms couldn’t adapt to. Once life moved onto land, and trees, grasses, and flowers evolved, the number of ways for life to adapt went way up.

It should say something that the most recent mass extinction event (I mean, before the anthropocene), was caused by a giant asteroid and a decade(s?)-long winter, rather than a change in solar luminosity or runaway GHG shift.

With the advent of humans, this planet now has tools available for GHG and solar radiation management (SRM) that were unthinkable by nature. SRM with sulfur dioxide and air capture of CO₂ allow for the rapid reshaping of the climate almost as fast as fossil fuel combustion. As a result, the tools to stabilize the climate are available and their use is inevitable. The longer we wait to use them, the worse the problem gets and the more people are harmed, but given the unheard-of capacities that we’ve developed to stave off runaway global warming, I do not believe that humanity will choose extinction over GHG management and SRM.

Most of these thoughts come from Gaian Bottleneck Theory, which you can read more about here. You may be right, but I’m hoping you are wrong (no offense).

That was what happened to our data on the “family computer”. My parents were not happy with me that day.