Democratic Candidate John Delaney's Vastly Unusual Climate Change Plan - Polidicks

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/23/2020-candidate-john-delaney-pitches-vastly-unusual-climate-change-plan Maryland congressman and long shot 2020 candidate John Delaney wants to scale up technology to capture the carbon dioxide pollution heating the planet, and transport it in pipelines crisscrossing the country. Polluting facilities from America’s industrial regions in the midwest and Gulf South would send their carbon to Texas to be used in oil drilling operations. The federal government would use the money currently going toward fossil fuel subsidies to help fund the effort. He also backs a tax on carbon pollution that he says could cut emissions 91% by mid-century. Environmentalists are likely to oppose the plan because it would allow the continued use of fossil fuels and because it would require a vast network of new pipelines. But Delaney said international science shows humans will have to pull carbon from the atmosphere – in addition to rapidly slowing emissions – to avoid the worst of climate change. Article calls it "unusual" but I call it insane.

"so like, carbon dioxide is heating up the planet? I know! Let's bottle it and pipe it into our homes to heat them up!" this is like an idiotic cartoon character's idea of solving climate change, my god. Did he consult any scientists whatsoever?

Insane, but entirely correct However the only way to actually fix the problem is to eliminate the generation of more emmisions. Without that anything is a fruitless effort. It's like trying to clean spaghetti off the floor when you have hundreds of tiny goblins spilling more out than you can pick up

And what are we going to do with all that carbon dioxide, use it to carbonate our fucking sodas?

Every time I see all these big tech ideas to Solve The Climate Change I can't help but wonder who's gonna make the money off the tech and how the technology compares with something as simple as planting trees

Delaney has proposed achieving the vast majority of US pollution reductions with a tax on carbon. The money collected would be returned to Americans who might have to pay more for gasoline, electricity and other goods. That would cut pollution from electricity and transportation. At least he plans to instate a carbon tax. I think algae farms are a more viable way to pull carbon out of the atmosphere than just capturing it and storing it in pipes (to presumably do nothing with because we don't have any way to use it). He's also pro-nuclear.

Finding a productive use for carbon dioxide is an area of interest right now, actually. Both from a strict climate-change-prevention stance ("if we find a way for rich fucks to profit off carbon sequestration, they'll fund it") and from a pragmatic stance ("carbon sequestration is going to be necessary, so assuming someone else figures it out and saves humanity, we'll have lots of cheap CO2, what could we do with that?"). Many of the uses are simply reverse-burning - with energy, you can turn CO2 and H2O back into oxygen and hydrocarbons, and use them either for fuel (which would make it carbon-neutral not carbon-negative, but a carbon-neutral gasoline would be a fast way to reduce automotive carbon pollution) or as a starter for plastics. There's also research into using them for concrete, which if cheap enough could use up a large amount of our CO2. If we're pulling out as much CO2 as we ought to be, I think we'll still have quite a surplus, but it's a start. And there's lots of methods for simply storing it (though we're not sure about how stable they are over the long term... but sweeping this problem down the road a few thousand years will be well worth it). Trees aren't a great way of lowering CO2 levels for two reasons. First, when the tree dies, the CO2 gets released again, so you can't use the replanted trees for lumber or anything - you're not just planting trees, you're turning areas back into forest, or you're harvesting the trees to sequester somehow. Second, trees simply aren't big enough to pull much CO2 out. There's not enough land area. Think of the timescales - the oil we burned was the carbon of millions of years' worth of trees and plants, there's no way that even covering the continents in trees would make a dent in that. It's still worth doing - at this point, every little bit helps, and it's not like reforestation wasn't a good idea for other reasons already, but it's not a complete solution.

Figure out an industrial process that can re-use it chemically in a different form. Maybe use it to synthesize fuels iono.

Thought I'd plug this since it's related to using plants as a carbon sink: The Climate Foundation is planning to construct a seaweed permaculture that will help suck up CO2, lower the ocean's acidity, and promote growth of fish populations. I learned about this through r/climateoffensive's fundraiser and plan to donate to it once I move. I encourage others to chip in as well because it looks pretty neat.

This is not completely true. Old forests stroe a shitload of CO2 in the soil due to soil building up.

Time to compress it all into diamonds. Rich people love diamonds, surely they'll fund that, right?

Diamonds don't exist any more. Millennials killed them.

god damnit there is no ccs to scale up, you're working against thermodynamics. At best, you get a plant running on renewables but the vastly easier way to prevent global warming ia to just not burn that fuel to begin with.

Repost: source: Do 'mechanical trees' offer the cure for climate change? Using this quote: SKH expects its two-year pilot, possibly in California, to capture about 36,500 metric tons of CO2 a year, it said - the equivalent of nearly 7,750 vehicles driven for a year. We get a figure of 464.5 kg per car per year. The article specifically states the number of mechanical trees is 1,200 to suck up 36,500,000 kg of carbon over a period of two years so I halved the carbon to 18,250,000 kg to get a one year figure which gives us 15,208 kg of carbon sequestered per mechanical tree per year. The Common oak tree from my googling can absorb 900 kg of carbon over 40 years so about 22kg of carbon per year I'll use that as an average for my estimate. That means it would take 691 oak trees to replicate just 1 of these mechanical trees in carbon capture and 1 of these mechanical trees can theoretically support 32 cars so at a minimum we'd need 3,125,000-ish mechanical trees to make up for all the cars on earth. As for production and upkeep I can't say because I don't know the patent numbers and I'm too lazy to convert cars into energy to get an idea of manufacturing costs but on the surface it looks like they more than make up for their production.

Forests do a lot more then keeping carbon in trees, currently vegetation accounts for 30% of our carbon uptake reducing the carbon in our atmosphere by about 88 ppm. (State of the Climate 2018, CSIRO, pg. 21). While those figures seem impressive I'd like to see how they actually pan out after their trial run.

I'm waiting for a candidate to come in and say: "Hey! I hear Carbon DIoxide is bad news. It sounds like die, and that's bad! So all we have to do is get rid of the DI! But why even have to get rid of both (that's right, I know 'di' means two!), when we only need to get rid of one to change it! So we get all of the carbon dioxide and change it to carbon monoxide, and pump it all into everyone's houses so they can experience my winning plan themselves!"

carbon dioxide isn't evenly mixed throughout the atmosphere, so just putting x number of them somewhere doesn't mean they will work

the subject of that post was to ask the question of how manufactured carbon capture "trees" compare to real trees in terms of carbon collection and sequestration not how they should be distributed.

This is a plan that needs to be coupled with renewables. Any climate plan needs funds for carbon capture sequestration (ccs), but it is a part of a broader plan not a panacea

Seems like an inconsequential problem to solve, really.