Catastrophic Carbon Removal. How the 'Big Solution' is failing badly.

Carbon Dioxide Removal is our only chance of keeping the atmosphere of Earth at a habitable temperature in the 21st Century. That's what our scientists tell us anyway. And they say we will need to remove billions of tonnes of the warming gas in the coming decades if we are to succeed in this ambitious goal. So what is Carbon Dioxide Removal? Why is it different to Carbon Capture and Storage, and how on earth will we do it?

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Research paper citation
Smith, S. M., Geden, O., Nemet, G., Gidden, M., Lamb, W. F., Powis, C., Bellamy, R., Callaghan, M., Cowie, A., Cox, E., Fuss, S., Gasser, T., Grassi, G., Greene, J., Lück, S., Mohan, A., Müller-Hansen, F., Peters, G., Pratama, Y., Repke, T., Riahi, K., Schenuit, F., Steinhauser, J., Strefler, J., Valenzuela, J. M., and Minx, J. C. (2023). The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal - 1st Edition. The State of Carbon Dioxide Removal. doi:10.17605/OSF.IO/W3B4Z

How it Works : Enhanced Rock Weathering

How it works : Biochar

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[ravensdotter]

"We will go down in history as the first society to not save itself because it isn't cost effective."-Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

[billh]

Since we keep putting our hopes on technology that does not yet exist and kicking the ball down the line, I predict we will soon have to rely on time travel.

[colinlaflamme]

I think seaweed farming may be the best bet to drawdown carbon. Some of the fastest growing plants on the planet, they can be used as food and animal food as well as processed into more stable forms that lock carbon up. There are risks to seaweed farms but bushfires isn't one of them. Would like it if you considered doing a video on the potential for seaweed farming. Thanks.

[owenbevt]

By working as a panning officer pushing better insulation in a couple of city boroughs I think I can probably say I've personally made more of an impact on global carbon levels than to the whole carbon capture industry 😅

[mikewho]

I guess most human beings recognize the ability of big companies / research institutions to essentially "game the system " and simply have big flashy buildings with people in white coats and lots of graphics showing the impending doom - our first step in reducing carbon is to seriously reduce " soft " corruption but i suspect sadly humans as a group are incapable of doing that - but i thank you Dave for tirelessly trying to point out those anomalies

[marcdefaoite]

I've been watching Dave's excellent videos for years now and I always come away better informed. But every so often after watching one of these videos I find I have to sit with what has been presented and have a little cry. This was one of such videos. Doomerism is unfashionable, but the line between doomerism and being realistic is very blurred indeed.

[CplusO]

Hi Dave, thank you once again. As a soil scientist and 30yr veteran of Australia's carbon wars I would like to make 2 points. Firstly we are at war, the fossil fuel industry profits from war and the fertilizer industry was born from war. Since the earliest days the carbon industry has been targeted as an enemy, the list of dirty tricks is long.
My second point is that we have the capacity to store carbon at the scale needed. The state of agricultural and forest soils is heartbreaking. We are also facing what some scientists call phosphorgeddon, where we are simultaneously running out of rock phosphate whilst destroying waterways with too much phosphorus. This is an inflection point, the solutions to climate change are also the solutions to food insecurity. The solutions to climate change are also the solutions to biodiversity loss. The solutions are beautiful and that has to be the message.

[kimwelch]

Our real problem is not a technological one; it is a social or behavioral issue. We have the technology to solve any number of humanities problems including climate change and its cause ecological overshoot. However, as a species we do not have the social capacity to respond in an effective way. You could consider the whole human species to be suffering from an addiction problem where there are no non-addictive support systems to help us stop and no way to clear our system to get sober. That's not even talking about carbon, that's all about the game of wealth and the way it coopts every bit of society's energies. You cannot do anything unless someone makes money off it, and that generally requires subverting the game so the goal is lost. We don't talk about the progress of projects to solve our problem, we talk about how much money we spend or make on them. I've said it before, and I'll keep saying it: As long as we measure our survival in monetary terms, we cannot afford to survive.

[yes]

I've been thinking about how to stay a decent person in all of this mess and realized that actually growing thousand of valuable trees per year and giving it away is not unattainable or particularly time consuming for an ordinary bread eater with a piece of land. I'm still learning grafting but definitely will go for it

[peters]

The emphasis tends to be on co2, but methane is 2 orders of magnitude more potent as a greenhouse gas. Tap the dumps!

[vivalaleta]

There's a growing movement of people going back to abandoned areas and living off the land nurturing. I love this thinking.

[kenmacallister]

When citing research, especially climate-related research, it’s always helpful to not only say who did the study, but also who funded it.

[kk-xjoz]

There is no functioning carbon capture facility today, every single one is actually burning more carbon than they store. Not saying it will never possible to store carbon big scale but it makes no economic sense

[josephmanning]

Thank you for making such complex issues comprehensible to non-scientists like me. Please keep doing it.

[FalkinerTim]

In Australia, the popular press keeps the lid on the information. Everyone pays lip service to the climate crisis but follows with the sentence, "But the reason I have to have a petrol/diesel vehicle is ...". Everyone must take responsibility and not rely on everyone else or governments controlled by the fossil fuel industry.

[gamingtonight]

So sad, that so many people, so much of the time, don't think about the climate crisis....

[SamuelBlackMetalRider]

Mechanical Carbon Removal on a LARGE GLOBAL scale is just impossible. It would require more energy to run than what we produce. Plus the ridiculously massive amount of raw material needed to built such infrastructures. Not enough sand not enough copper etc etc. Just impossible.

[markotrieste]

Thank you Dave, another lovely insight from yours. We are doomed, but it's a consolation to be in such good company.

[richdiana]

If you tell the people how calamitously they're screwing everything up, they will either scorn you or crucify you. I've been trying to educate people about the horrorof human overshoot, they replied with everything up to crucifixion. I've given up on everything but acceptance.

[macmcleod]

1.5C is done. 2.0C is done in 2026.
5.0C is on the table by 2100.

We can afford a lot of carbon removal but the permafrost is already sublimating.

The amount of carbon it could release is beyond our ability to absorb.