The Carbon Footprint Problem
by the numbers
Once again, we are going through the yearly dance of having a major conference of all the nations that matter, in an effort to come to some agreement to reduce humanities carbon foot print, in an effort to reduce global warming.
And once again, humanity will fail to live up to their commitments. And the planet will continue to warm up.
The planet has been getting warmer since at least the sixties. Regardless of all the science, some of it with admittedly with cooked books, the US navy has been monitoring the thinning arctic ice since the invention of the nuclear powered submarines. And the ice has been getting measurably thinner since the sixties.
So I don't want to hear about Soviet weather stations going off line, or "it's the sun", or weather stations that were in the country, but now are next to a bus station. Or any other justifications for ignoring the problem.
There are really only two questions:
Can we do something?
Should we do something?
There are two major green house gasses of note. Carbon and Methane. Methane is about 80 times more effective in trapping heat, but is not as long lasting. About 20 years. One estimate that methane is 25% of the current global warming problem. Half of methane emissions is from natural sources. The human emissions of methane are the coal and gas industry, 37% in the US. Followed by agriculture, 36% in the US, then we are down to Landfills and other. See Here...
Then we have CO2. That is the long term problem. But it has been a long term problem for many decades. So it's kind of a immediate problem now.
Here is the scope of the problem. Between 36 and 43 billion tons, we'll call it 40 for round numbers, was emitted in 2019, depending on the source. About 5 billion of that was from the USA. Work that out overall, and we are talking more than a trillion tons since WWII, 700 billion since the year 2000.
The end game to this problem is controlled fusion, and with that, make everything electric. But fusion is about 50 years from now. And we thought that 50 years ago, so the greenhouse gas problem would be taken care of itself. So while fusion is the ultimate answer, it's not going to save us in the short run.
So what can we do? Most items mentioned, like buying an electric car, is largely pointless. The amount of carbon saved has been described as "a rounding error." If we were to magically replace all the cars and heavy vehicles with electric, today, that would be nice, but probably would collapse the electric grid. So we need to build up the grid.
Obviously, solar and wind can mitigate the problems, In the US, the current capacity is around 9%. Where the electric grid infrastructure is no where near where it needs to be to get electricity from windy and sun drenched areas to where it is needed. Yes it can do the job, but it's not going to get there in time. Once again, we need to build up the grid.
Nuclear can get us there, but the anti nuke assholes would never let us implement that.
Here is a road map to the future.
Build gas fired electric plants. We can actually build these quite fast. Small ones in about a year. With each one built, we take a coal fired plant off line. The US has around 250 of these. 40 of which are huge and generating most of the CO2 for the whole country.
The difference in CO2 is amazing. Coal emits 915 grams CO2 per kilowatt hour of electricity produced. Natural gas 436 grams, more than half. 60% of the worlds CO2 emissions is coal. Get the world off of coal, and world wide emissions of CO2 can drop 12 billion tons per year. From 40 billion, that is really significant.
While we are doing that, build nuclear reactors. And continue with improving the grid to be able to run renewable sources.
Then we have the carbon in the air problem.
We can plant trees, a lot of trees, but there is insufficient ground space to plant them. For the average first world person, we are talking 7 acres of trees per persons lifetime. Count 700 million of US and Europeans, that is 4.9 billion acres of forest. Currently there is about 10 billion acres of forest in the already world covering 31% of the landmass of the planet, which is 36.8 billion acres. So where are we going to plant an additional 4.9 billion acres of trees?
That remaining 36.8 billion acres includes mountains (24%) and desert (33%). So half of the 36.8 is not available for reforestation.
Then you have to factor in the the remaining 6.3 billion people in the world.
Trees are nice, they feel good, and there is no reason not to plant more, but they are NOT the answer.
This is an industrial sized problem, and will require an industrial sized solution. Technology is being tested in Iceland, The ORCA project. Which scrubs CO2 out of the air and makes rocks out of it. Where it can be buried.
The process takes a lot of energy to scrub CO2 from the air, but the ORCA plant is located where they run off of geothermal. The test plant is being set up to remove 4,000 tons of CO2 a year.
Off course it will need to be scaled up. But the advantage of this method is we can build the plants where there are renewable sources of energy. CO2 is everywhere. Put one next to solar collectors in the Sahara. No grid issues. Just transportation to a near by hole to drop the rocks in.
If we can scale a single plant up to 100,000 tons a year, then we only need 4,000 of them to remove the current load. With replacing the coal fired with gas fired plants, of which there are less than 2,000, we reduce the total CO2 load by 12 billion tons, and the amount of carbon in the atmosphere will actually be reduced.
So the answer to the question is "Can we do something", is a yes.
Off course this roadmap simplifies the over all problem. There are still many pitfalls.
Is there enough natural gas to support the switch over. In the US, yes, in China? I don't know. Either way would require unrestricted fraking to achieve.
Is there enough Uranium? Anti-Nuke enthusiasts will say no. Pro Nuke will say yes. There is actually enough power to be found in nuclear waste that has been building up over the decades to have a good start. But that requires "breeder" reactors, also capable of creating plutonium. Which is another problem. But nuclear is not the final answer, but it is a way to bridge to the final answer, so it doesn't have to be 100%. But every one built can take a gas fired plant off line, which will reduce the carbon foot print.
Then there is the design of "smart grids" to transfer power.
And we would have to dramatically scale up the renewable energy production.
The carbon capture systems being tested in Iceland is still in the experimental stages. So that would require 7-14 years before any realistic numbers of them could be designed and start to be built.
This all costs a lot, and who pays? Obviously the first world nations, because they are the only ones that can.
