Carbon capture plant in Canada

[ManaMan]

I hope this is the real deal. I really don't think the world will take any serious actionI on climate change untilit's too late. We'll need some way to mitigate the emissions already made. This sounds promising and even Bill Gates is backing the effort.

[Don]

I'm pretty sure the laws of thermodynamics have to be violated somewhere if you can take CO2 you get from err, burning fuel, and then turn it back into fuel in a net positive manner. It seems like they're just using energy elsewhere (solar maybe?) and sweep the cost under the rug. Now if you got a source of cheap renewable energy sure you can do that but then why turn it back into a fuel when you already need cheap energy somewhere? If you're converting it to a fuel just for the sake of showing off I think you'd be better off converting the CO2 to carbonic acid and then make Coke and that'd have a better ring to it. I'm pretty sure a beverage company will buy in with the idea of 'drink coke, fight global warming' or 'this coke is made with 100% captured carbon dioxide'.

[Julius Seeker]

It sounds like it's wind powered. I could be wrong, the article showed the mechanism, but didn't really go into detail. If it is wind power, it doesn't break the first law; it's using one energy form to help a machine condense waste product into another usable energy form.

But yeah, your right, with the way energy tech is going, it would be better just to use the wind power to generate electricity for other use.

[Don]

I said I assume there was some mention of a cheap renewable energy somewhere, otherwise this wouldn't even get past the law of thermodynamics. Looking at the numbers involved this seems to be more of a party trick than anything that'd affect global warming in a significant way, and if they do have enough wind or whatever power to be able to support doing this they could just use that instead of burning the fossil fuel in the first place. I did some reading and one of the problem with carbon capture, besides being expensive and using up a lot of energy, is that suppose you did suck out all the CO2 out of thin air, where do you put it? It's just going to go back into the air if you don't got a long term solution and solutions are generally unreliable, expensive, energy intensive, or all of the above.

I remember a guy giving a lecture on global warming saying that it is a nonissue for people who can afford air conditioning. No matter how bad most parts of the world get it's not going to be worse than trying to live in say Las Vegas which is literally a desert and propped up by modern technology. So if you have a source of free energy global warming isn't a problem at all, and these carbon capture technology seems to require to have a very cheap source of free energy elsewhere, but if you had that you can easily mitigate any potential problem by just using that source of energy to replace our current ones. Okay sure gasoline has a very high energy density and is easy to store/transport, but I'm pretty sure if we invented some miracle source of renewable energy overnight, people will be able to figure out how to replace our existing stuff with it.

[Oracle]

Also in Canada:

http://saskpowerccs.com/

[Julius Seeker]

I said I assume there was some mention of a cheap renewable energy somewhere, otherwise this wouldn't even get past the law of thermodynamics. Looking at the numbers involved this seems to be more of a party trick than anything that'd affect global warming in a significant way, and if they do have enough wind or whatever power to be able to support doing this they could just use that instead of burning the fossil fuel in the first place. I did some reading and one of the problem with carbon capture, besides being expensive and using up a lot of energy, is that suppose you did suck out all the CO2 out of thin air, where do you put it? It's just going to go back into the air if you don't got a long term solution and solutions are generally unreliable, expensive, energy intensive, or all of the above.

I remember a guy giving a lecture on global warming saying that it is a nonissue for people who can afford air conditioning. No matter how bad most parts of the world get it's not going to be worse than trying to live in say Las Vegas which is literally a desert and propped up by modern technology. So if you have a source of free energy global warming isn't a problem at all, and these carbon capture technology seems to require to have a very cheap source of free energy elsewhere, but if you had that you can easily mitigate any potential problem by just using that source of energy to replace our current ones. Okay sure gasoline has a very high energy density and is easy to store/transport, but I'm pretty sure if we invented some miracle source of renewable energy overnight, people will be able to figure out how to replace our existing stuff with it.

If the renewed CO2 is used, it prevents the usage of other CO2. That's where the difference is made.

The guy giving the lecture has less place delivering any kind of lecture on global warming than an elementary school girl. First of all, rationally stupid, Las Vegas requires a great deal of outside support from productive regions in order to function; cities like that wouldn't be able to exist; it wouldn't be like living in Vegas, but rather more like living in the Sudan - where society lacks the access to air conditioning without the support of productive outside regions. Global warming creates rising sea levels, which in turn deteriorates fresh water sources significantly - this not only creates huge problems for residential regions, but also will severely impact industry and food production. Second, global warming leads to climate change, which not only leads to severe and immediately destructive weather patterns, but also the destruction of wildlife and domestic crops alike - i.e. the coffee industry is already taking a large hit just due to slight changes over the past few decades, and it's expected to continue to degrade. If you've read Thomas Malthus, then you know what comes next; this is the Malthusian dilemma with the twist of a negative production rate on food - and also the twist of more factors coming into play: such as the deterioration of infrastructure, which will mean a decline in food transport, but also tech that people have come to depend on, like computers, refrigerators, and air conditioners.

[Don]

Looking at the numbers in the article you'd need millions of these plants which would either be powered by some miraculously new type of energy that'd already solve everything, or you'd need some kind of unbelievably large scale of renewal energy which would also solve most of the problem in the first place. The 'have air conditioning' is another way of saying wealthy (at least, compared to the guys who are likely to suffer from global warming). It's silly to talk about global warming when you're one of the guys with the air conditioning because the best thing you can do is send your air conditioning (wealth) to someone who needs it but then you'd be suffering. Until then you're just doing the equivalent of paying the climate change indulgence by planting a tree somewhere to make up the fact that you have air conditioning. Thomas Malthus's theory has been proven to be completely wrong since he failed to take account of technology, and while there is no reason to believe technology will inherently keep up with an arbitrarily large population, there's also plenty of evidence that population growth slows down in countries that are sufficiently advanced. The reason why the doomsday scenarios aren't taken seriously is because as long as you're part of the air conditioning crowd you're absolutely not in any danger from climate change short of some catastrophe that renders most of the Earth uninhabitable, because people are already living in places like Las Vegas or Qatar that shouldn't be hospitable without being propped by air conditioning.

In fact if you look at Qatar it's a good example of why arguments of being hospitable to your environment is stupid. They're building a bunch of advanced environmental friendly cities in a place where you'd have an average temperature of 100+ F even without any climate change. If you're supposed to be hospitable to the environment you should just pack up and leave because nobody in their right mind should live there, but since Qatar has a western level of wealth they can prop up a supposed eco-friendly environment in a place that you shouldn't be living at all. It's not a sin to have money but you can't talk about how to save the world when you're not willing to give up your air conditioning, and the threats of doom is nonsense to guys who have air conditioning. If the sea level rises the guys with money will just build around it. If crop falls they'll just move it elsewhere and prop it up with fertilizers. California being a major agricultural power is a perfect example of this hypocrisy. I know they say California has great soil and a dry environment for growing stuff but you can't seriously say the best place to grow food is in a place that has very little freshwater such that you got to import all your water from elsewhere.

Modern society is pretty much all propped up by technology and the only question is do you have enough air conditioning for everyone (you do not, at least not yet). And sure you can say the western worlds are getting all the technology stuff at the rest of the world's expense, except the food and other stuff produced by the western economy is also propping up a lot of other nations in the world. Before global warming was a thing people had famines too and back then people just died and that helps keeping any potential human-induced global warming under control but that'd hardly be an ethical solution now. The way we're producing food might not be in the best interest of a sustainable policy but without it you'd have millions of people immediately dying from hunger.