To Air is Human, To De-Carbonize Divine

 

Heirloom Carbon, Central California

To put it mildly, the United States, a leader in the climate change battle, is still failing terribly. And boy are the consequences horrific and wildly expensive. Here is the light explanation of the problem and how trickles of budget allocations, each penny officially opposed by the Republican Party that still marginalizes the impact of climate change, are being spent:

“A new federal report says the climate crisis is being felt in every corner of the US and will worsen over the next 10 years with continued fossil fuel use. The Fifth National Climate Assessment, a congressionally mandated report due roughly every five years, warns that even though planet-warming pollution in the US is slowly decreasing, it's not happening nearly fast enough to meet the nation's targets. Later … President Biden [delivered] remarks on the report and is expected to unveil more than $6 billion in funding to strengthen climate resilience ‘by bolstering America's electric grid, investing in water infrastructure upgrades, reducing flood risk to communities, and advancing environmental justice for all,’ an administration official said.” CNN RSS Feed, November 14th.

But the government has been tracking the hard dollar cost of inadequate climate change controls for some time: “The U.S. has sustained 373 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2023). The total cost of these 373 events exceeds $2.645 trillion… In 2023 (as of November 8), there have been 25 confirmed weather/climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each to affect United States. These events included 1 drought event, 2 flooding events, 19 severe storm events, 1 tropical cyclone event, 1 wildfire event, and 1 winter storm event.” The Government’s National Centers for Environmental Information (within NOAA), November 8th. While a very few of these disasters would have occurred (perhaps not as ferociously) even without climate change, we are facing trillions of additional losses in the very near terms from clear climate change disasters. The rising costs are actually not linear but dramatically exponential.

Americans also face inane and misinformed solutions to the energy cost crisis, with increasing domestic oil production high on the GOP list. Unfortunately, as I have blogged before, even if we didn’t know that fossil fuel was the source of most climate change, we should also know that we do not control the price of oil… anywhere. We produce as much oil as Saudi Arabia Russia do, but since oil is a global commodity, when its in short supply (usually because OPEC+ cuts back its production), the price goes up. If we produce more oil, then OPEC+ cuts back even more. Oklahoma and Texas oil producers charge the global price for oil… no discount for their fellow Americans. Producing more US oil does not mean cheaper prices at the pump. So, stop the stupidity! The only real solution is to wean ourselves off oil in general and all fossil fuel eventually.

But if we cannot eliminate emissions, just reduce their continued accumulation in the ozone layer, we are still going to be strangled with continued and increasing climate change disasters. We actually need to remove CO2 from the air before it floats up to seal our greenhouse effect. Can we? As Adele Peters, writing for the November 9th FastCompany.com declares: “Across the street from a farm in California’s Central Valley, a gleaming new three-story structure is now quietly pulling CO2 from the air. [pictured above]

“Run by a Bay Area-based startup called Heirloom, it’s the first commercial ‘direct air capture’ facility in the U.S. Each year, it will capture as much as 1,000 tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, one early step in the company’s plans to scale up to millions of tons a year. To permanently store the CO2, it will be injected into fresh concrete at concrete plants—a step that also shrinks the carbon footprint of concrete. The startup is selling carbon removal as a service to companies including Microsoft and Stripe.

“As the world works to cut emissions, carbon removal is also necessary to have any chance of meeting climate goals. ‘The climate science is clear—it’s really a math problem at the end of the day,’ says Heirloom CEO Shashank Samala. The world has already put so much CO2 in the atmosphere that in order to hit net zero, ‘we need to also remove CO2 from the atmosphere on the order of billions of tons,’ he says.

“Heirloom’s system speeds up something that happens naturally: limestone absorbing CO2 as it forms. The company starts by heating up existing limestone in a kiln running on renewable energy. That process extracts CO2 and leaves behind a mineral powder. Then the powder is put in trays outside, where it acts like a sponge, sucking up CO2 and reforming it into limestone. An automated system, designed by engineers who came from such companies as Tesla, monitors and moves the huge stacks of trays. When it’s ready, the limestone goes back in the kiln, where the CO2 is extracted and can be permanently stored. The design can be scaled up by adding more stacks of trays.” There are, and I am sure, there will be other technologies that can accomplish the same feat, but we need to start using them now! Everywhere!

I’m Peter Dekom, in the world of the dire need for CO2 removal from the atmosphere, the “yes we can!” has to be “and we must… immediately and widely!”