Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.
The current US government is systematically attacking anything which tries to "reduce the effects of climate change" and claims it's mostly all a scam.
So no.
But what probably also isn't included but should is environmental damage.
Running low quality "temp." gas turbines non stop isn't without filters etc. isn't just bad for the climate, it's a air pollution which can directly affect anyone in it's path with not only increased chances for lounge cancer but also much more short term effects like asthma, and increased chances of asthma attacks ending deadly. Especially if the weather prevents easy dispersion (like it tends to do in winter). It's not that long ago (<80y) that the west had acid rains, and deadly smog accidents exactly from this kind of negligent shit. And if we look at Asia this is sometimes still a topic today (but has gotten much better compared to just ~20 years ago).
it's an example for how environmental damages killed a lot of people not so long ago and people just "forget and ignore". I'm not saying it's the same kind of damage. It still is damage, and can kill.
No MBA pencil pusher wants to run an inefficient local turbine. It's just that the timeline and upper cost bound of doing that is less crap than having a "real utility" build more power at "real utility scale" and run you a wire because the latter is subject to all manner of delay and cost overrun.
And there's no inherent physical or economic reason for it to be that way. We made it that way. The metaphorical local turbine is less worse specifically because people like you, saying the exact same things you're saying right now have saddled the "real utility scale" generation, and more importantly, the wire to the big industrial consumer who'd pay for it with all sorts of requirements.
It costs tens of thousands of dollars of lawyers and engineering over years just to dump a concrete culvert in a ravine where it crosses a power line clearing and fill over the top, all because of the red tape. Say nothing of the cost to do all the legal paperwork to get the utility cut in the first place. Now multiply by every mile the wire has to go, add in the wires, etc, etc. For an industry that might boom and bust in 2, 5, 10yr dumping a fuel guzzling turbine in your parking lot at 5x the cost per watt starts to look pretty good.
The MBA pencil pusher would pay a billion for 1 unit of electricity if it increased their market cap by a trillion. The margin is so fat and the percieved upside so great that 9 figure signing bonuses have been thrown around.
Of course this will all change, but I doubt we will see tech companies opening power plants anytime soon with their associated balance sheet dragging 1% return on equity.
The only realistic way to "bear the cost" of CO2 emissions is paying for getting atmospheric carbon back into the ground. Right now that seems difficult to do at scale. The best way I know is making charcoal and burying it. Offsetting 1kWh needs on the order of 200g of wood turned into charcoal and buried.
I suggest it’s easier to leave to carbon in the ground in the first place. Carbon capture promises are unrealistic. But if you want to go with charcoal it’s probably best to get wood from coppicing.
I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable. As I understand it, the lumber industry has optimized the ability to grow massive amounts of fast growing pine as quickly as possible. So this isn't suggesting that we start clearcutting forests, it's suggesting that we start growing massive amounts of lumber with the explicit purpose of converting it to charcoal and burrying it.
it actually is a bad idea if you look into the details
trees aren't just carbon, they are bio mass/nutrition
and if you constantly remove bio mass you sooner or later run into issues
(Which we already do in some places, e.g. when over using fields (see US dust storms), or with some managed Forrest getting increasingly more unstable not just because of warmed climate but also because of removing dead treas leading to an interruption of the natural nutrient recycling (and insect habitats) leading to Nutrition deficiency in the long run.)
but we do have working carbon removal technologies, they are just not cheap
hence why you want companies to pay for them, it gives them a huge reason to reduce emissions instead
The point of turning the trees into Charcoal is to return all the non-carbon elements to the environment and remove any metabolic activity from releasing that carbon.
The USA currently produces about 70 million tons of paper per year, which is about half carbon by weight. We produce about 2 gigatons of lumber per year, which is again about half carbon, all absorbed from the atmosphere.
Unfortunately, we produce like 40 gigatons of CO2 per year. So we would have to scale lumber work dramatically. It's also not a clean industry itself, reliant on heavy machinery running on gasoline or diesel, and turning that wood into charcoal would require massive refineries.
IMO more effective bets are figuring out how to artificially induce massive blooms of algae and plankton in parts of the ocean to essentially recreate the conditions that lead to the hydrocarbon deposits in the first place. There's some work on this right now, but like any massive engineering and ecological tampering, there will be tradeoffs and downsides. I also don't know how you prevent the dead plant matter from decomposing and releasing the carbon.
Algae blooms are typically the sign of something very wrong with an aquatic ecosystem (usually human-induced). This is in addition to the issues it causes in the rest of the local ecosystem by drastically reducing the light, nutrients, and oxygen available to other aquatic life.
I can't believe these ideas are being seriously suggested. Is it a win if we reduce CO2 but make the planet uninhabitable for other reasons?
You would have to do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans.
Maybe then the negative effects won't be life ending.
But how else do we sequester bulk carbon dioxide? You probably aren't going to engineer something more effective than plant matter. So yes, you seed a gigantic algae bloom out in the ocean, it does a lot of bad stuff to a part of the ocean, and maybe it nets out positive.
But hey, don't worry, nobody lets me make important decisions, so not exactly "seriously suggested". Smarter people than I will have a clear list of pros and cons to this plan, and will make a much smarter decision, which might be followed by politicians maybe.
But there's no carbon capture option that doesn't do something dramatic and somehow damaging. Any plan will be industrially the inverse of burning all that oil. Pulling it out of the air will be the largest industrial project we have ever done and require more electricity than extracted from all the oil we burnt ever. To grow trees to do it would require 1000x the lumber industry we have now. Sun shades can keep us cool but not take the carbon out of the air. Aerosol injection is going to have it's own externalities. "Crush a bunch of rock and let it chemically absorb the CO2" is extremely limited.
There's no clean option out of this anymore. There's no magic button. We could stop all carbon production today and we will still have significant impact.
> do it basically "out to sea", far enough away from humans that whatever negative effects are able to diffuse throughout the entire oceans
this is not how it works, like at all
pretty much all oceans are already at risk of ecologically collapsing even without climate change, and will be majorly affected by it (both directly and indirectly)
just because they are big doesn't mean thy can just compensate whatever you throw at them.
A huge problem being damage being not very visible to the average human until catastrophic (so humans are prone to not take actions). Like we already have gigantic dead zones all over the oceans.
Many effects of climate change fall into the "live will get very shitty but still survivable category".
But an ocean dying can lead to a chain reaction leading to a mass extinction event. Like not just a lot of animal dying, but a something like noticeable more then 50% of species going extinct. That includes most to all of humanities food supply.
Theoretically humans might be able to survive this, practically we are still speaking about a non negligible 2 digit chance for human extinction (not necessary directly by that, but other catastrophes like volcanoes, plagues or meteors still happen)
this are the kind of solutions with a high potential of having worse outcomes then not doing them
It is such an unreasonable idea! Ignoring the loss of biomass (and the fact that there would be no way to implement this scheme without providing a very unwelcome financial incentive to cut down trees wherever they are found), you'd use as much CO2 in the machinery required to cut the trees down and dig a big hole! Unless you're suggesting we do it all by hand? In which case, the picture of a crazed, doomsday cult is complete. I suppose at least it involves less murder than the Aztecs and their sacrifices.
completely ignoring all existing technologies related to that topic to spout obvious nonsense about "cutting down trees and burying them" (which would bind active bio mass which isn't a grate idea, also that won't produce oil anyway not that this is relevant for the discussion)
various ways to reduce the carbon in the air do exist (and without trees)
and the carbon can be both recycled for other usage and literally placed in the earth, too
it is not rally a solution for climate change as it's very expensive to do. But this also makes it a good idea to "make companies pay for it" (at least if their carbon-equivalent output goes above a certain threshold). Because if they have the choice between very expensive carbon removal or reducing carbon output for a much cheaper price they will do the later; But in emergency/outlier situations they still can do the former, just at a very high price.).
It's too controversial now, but one day we will recognise the current narrow-minded obsession with CO2 as the Western civilisation-wide doomsday cult that it is.
Quite the opposite - I'm asking people to take a wider view of the changes that humankind is making to the planet. Given those changes, a viewpoint that concludes with people asking for vast numbers of trees to be cut down, burned (or charred, at least), and buried has some fundamental problems.
You don't HAVE to make it into charcoal, but it will take up way more volume if you don't and contains tons of volatiles like methane that will come out and may make the ground less stable to simply bury with dirt as it partially rots.
Theoretically you could harness some of those volatiles for some energy production, but at the very least use those volatiles to heat the wood and make it charcoal for basically free.
Nuclear power is a pain to build and maintain and un-build once it gets to old to reliable run it (the later part is commonly overlooked in cost calculations).
It is also a ~50 year investment.
This makes it not very attractive for companies and is why most nuclear power is state sub-ventioned.
Theoretically the US had something similar to a state bank to help companies to finance exactly such projects, but Trump/DOGE defounded it for publicity reasons which makes it even less likely for private nuclear power plants.
Many "we will use nuclear power" statements do rely on mini reactors. But AFIK pretty much all mini reactor projects have ended in dead ends so far. With promised at best working out on paper (and quite often not even there).
So my guess is: They will claim they want to use Nuclear and might even intend to do so. But in the end look at their balance sheets and risk calculation and go "nah, lets do coal/gas/oil". There probably will be some single public co-investment into a nuclear power plant which "happens" to also be government sponsored to keep up the pretense.
Increasing natural gas generation is of course disastrous policy with a major death toll from the climate disaster, there needs to be a rampdown of fossils use and production.