Last edited Wed Apr 6, 2022, 08:26 AM - Edit history (2)
1. Non-representative data points - Yes, Norway's new car sales are now between 80 and 90% EV. Norway's citizens earn enough to afford EVs and those purchases are substantially subsidized. Norway, a developed nation powered in large measure by hydropower thanks to its mountainous terrain is also home to the world's #8 oil company, Equinor. Even in a country with a generally strong environmental ethic, relatively transparent government and widespread knowledge of likely future climate impacts, Equinor continues to explore for new oil and gas deposits and will drill 25 new wells in 2022.
2. Ignoring fundamental data points - Every year, year after year, atmospheric CO2 content continues to increase. It's currently around 420 ppm, will likely peak this year in May around 423 or 424, before reaching its annual low in October or November. Next year, it will peak in May somewhere around 426 or 427 ppm, and so on. And each ppm weighs 2.13 billion tons. Strangely, this trend and these numbers specific to carbon dioxide never make it into the video.
Carbon is entering the atmosphere not just from our activities (obviously) but from previously untouched natural reserves. Tropical and boreal forests contain huge amounts of carbon, but will not contain them for much longer as logging and warming continue unabated. The Brazilian Amazon is approaching tipover – the point at which its capacity to store and distribute moisture through plant transpiration will be lost and the forest will become much more susceptible to fire and drought. Why? Massive clearcutting for ranching, soybean farming and mining.
Carbon currently locked in permafrost totals about 1,600 billion tons – twice the amount in the atmosphere now. But as permafrost warms and melts, bacteria go to work on intact organic matter buried and frozen in those soils. Scientists are not sure of when large-scale releases will really begin to take off, but the pace of melting and change across the Arctic continues to accelerate. This process will also release methane, a substantially more powerful greenhouse gas, though shorter-lived than CO2.
3. Carbon Capture is Bullshit – FutureGen , first proposed by the George W. Bush administration, never even got off the ground. The Kemper Project, underwritten by the Southern Company, blew through its budget and was eventually scrapped and replaced by a conventional natural gas plant. Petra Nova , which is the only recent project to approach “viability”, was constructed for $1 billion on one of four power generators in Thompsons, Texas - the oldest and dirtiest coal power plant in the state. The energy it required was so large that it required a separate, dedicated natural gas power plant, and the project shut down in May 2020 during the pandemic when oil prices collapsed. It has not yet restarted.
More to the point, Petra Nova and most other large-scale CCS projects operating worldwide are designed for EOR – Enhanced Oil Recovery. In other words, the carbon dioxide they capture and store is then pumped to dying oil fields to increase the internal pressure of those fields so that we can keep on pumping and refining and burning gasoline and diesel and home heating oil.
Beyond that, plenty of plants and plans are on the books. There are, however, problems. If you scroll through the map linked here - https://www.catf.us/2020/07/ccus-interactive-map/ - you’ll notice lots of dots representing CCS plants. Click on them, and you’ll notice two things coming up pretty often in the listings. One is “Storage – Enhanced Oil Recovery” as mentioned above. The others are “Status – Unavailable” or “Status – FEED”. “Unavailable” clear – we just don’t know how serious a project this is. “FEED” means “front-end engineering design” – IOW, they’re working their way through how the project the project” will be powered, how much carbon it should store and (essentially) whether it will make sense or even work.
We're at 1.2C above pre-industrial levels. Record fires in the American West, the sixth full-scale bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef since 1998 (four of them since 2016) and the worst drought in 1,300 years in the Southwest. That's at 1.2C. What does 3C look like? 3.5C? I'll go out on a limb and say much, much worse.
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