The United States is offering grants and tax credits to help develop technology to remove carbon dioxide from the air. This is the most difficult way to deal with carbon dioxide, our greatest source of global warming.

Carbon dioxide is currently 412 parts per million of the Earth’s atmosphere. in 2000, it was 370 parts per million.

The mass of the atmosphere is 5.1480 × 10¹⁸ kilograms. That means that it contained 1905 x 10¹² kg carbon dioxide in 2000 and contains 2121 x 10¹² kg now. To get back to 2000 levels, which were way above what we had before the Industrial Revolution, we would have to remove 216 x 10¹² kg.

The biggest plant to date captures 4000 tonnes (4 x 10⁶ kilograms) per year. We would need 54 million of such plants to remove  the excess over the year 2000 in one year. If you spread it out, you can do with fewer plants, but don’t forget that we are adding to the total every year.

Plus that carbon dioxide has to be sequestered somewhere so that it can’t get back into the atmosphere.

We need everything we can do to decrease atmospheric carbon dioxide. The bills passed by Congress last year do more than has ever been done before to deal with global warming. We need more. Which is yet one more reason to vote Republicans out of office. We can’t afford their culture war distractions.

Graphic credit

Cross-posted to Lawyers, Guns & Money

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that we must institute big changes in the next three years to keep the planet’s climate anything like what we’ve got now. They believe we can halve emissions by 2030.

I don’t write much about climate change for a number of reasons, but it is always nagging me, in the back of my head. We’re at a point where we must act now. Sadly, we’ve got a bunch of distractions. Big distractions.

This is the alien invasion. This is the global tragedy that should bring us all together. But we see how that worked with a global pandemic. Business as usual while people sickened and died. The sickness and death continues while too many want to ignore it. This is a solvable problem, if we would put much less funding into it than we do into war.

Read More