A day late, but Monday Message Board is back! Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
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John Quiggin 
Emissions may fall in 2024, but it will keep getting hotter. I plan to keep annoying you all on carbon removal (CDR).
My earlier argument – it’s too hot already, and will keep getting hotter in the best case, so we must have gigatonne CDR to get back to a decent climate – looked a knockdown case to me, but failed to convince JQ or other readers. I propose to bring you three more pretty arguments. They are only loosely connected, so one at a time.
Before we begin, I’ll be using the standard definitions of CCS and CDR as here: https://carbongap.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/The-difference-between-CCS-CCU-and-CDR-and-why-it-matters.pdf. CCS is a subset of CDR. I also recall that nobody, not even me, proposes immediate crash CDR deployment, on the lines I put forward earlier for mitigation. The technology is just too immature. Trump (!) came closest with his trillion-tree plan, or rather bad-faith soundbite. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/articles/president-trump-signs-one-trillion-trees-executive-order-promoting-conservation-regeneration-nations-forests/
What can sensibly be done now is to work up a shovel-ready plan by say 2030, with feasible, affordable and tested technologies, robust mechanisms for delivery and monitoring, and a democratically acceptable scheme of governance and burden-sharing. It will take quite a lot of work and a few billion dollars, but not the trillions of any later full-scale deployment. The pros and cons of the latter are a key issue for the plan., and the future big decision on it.
Argument One is about carbon pricing. Professional and amateur economists like the readers of this blog are much more likely than the general public to endorse carbon pricing. Its adoption would greatly simplify the public policy problem, and avoid heavy-handed micromanagement by the state. Even if politics rules out full-scale adoption, carbon pricing is a good tool for policy analysis. The EU and China have working if incomplete carbon emissions markets, which could be improved, and shadow carbon prices are making their way elsewhere in cost-benefit analyses. Either way, it’s an important part of the policy toolkit.
The central principle is that the excess CO2 molecules in the atmosphere and biosphere do not have birth certificates and should treated equally for policy. I suggest that equal treatment should extend to both sources and sinks: a carbon atom removed has the same value as one not emitted. If we assume that the technologies for both mitigation and removal have normal rising marginal cost curves, leaving out removal is very likely to raise the cost per gigatonne substantially. So analysts should include removal on a par with mitigation.
The above is a plea for methodological coherence and integrity, not a policy prescription. An even-handed analysis could very well find that no CDR solution makes the cut. This is very likely the case today, and almost certainly for CCS, but this could change, and will if the development plan is successful.
A defender of the status quo could rejoin that there can be no obligation on an analyst to include the infinite number of fantasy SF technologies. Sure, but we already have one proven and feasible CDR: Trump’s tree planting. One Australian startup claims that one of its tree-planting drones can deliver 40,000 seed pellets a day ( https://news.mongabay.com/2023/07/new-tree-tech-cutting-edge-drones-give-reforestation-a-helping-hand/ ). An African peasant panting 50 a day with a spade doesn’t cost much either. Some tree planting can surely be done at low cost, and is therefore likely to be included in a least cost carbon plan. The problems are that it won’t scale to the volume required, and is difficult to monitor, but these issues do not affect the analytical point.
A core feature of the development plan is R&D, which by definition cannot be based on known technologies. Research on CDR competes with that on mitigation. Policymakers and entrepreneurs seeking an efficient allocation of R&D budgets have to weigh risk against payoff. The rare low-risk, high-payoff projects come first, but at the margin it’s striking a balance between low risk, low payoff safe bets and high-payoff, high risk long shots. Mitigation technology is much more mature than CDR, and the payoffs to innovation are presumably shrinking as second-best technology (hydrogen cars, rooftop wind, wave, polysilicon PV, concentrating solar) are crowded out by the market winners. A priori a sound R&D policy will include a growing share of higher-risk but higher-payoff CDR projects like seaweed dumping.
More on the next Message Board.
James, I agree with most of this. My (maybe out-of-date) understanding is that non-forestry CDR will cost $200/tonne or more with currently feasible technology. That’s probably the correct social price of carbon, but we are nowhere near it now, even in countries that have a carbon price. So, we should be researching CDR but not with a view to immediate implementation.
Fine. Provided we are talking about rigorous field trials at a scale that will show up deployment problems, which won’t come cheap. Fortunately, even at the prices JQ mentions, there is enough corporate greenwashing money available to fund a few. German enhanced weathering startup InPlanet planned to spread “up to 50,000 tonnes on normal farms in Brazil in 2023 ( https://www.remineralize.org/2023/07/inplanet-takes-on-climate-change-and-advances-sustainable-farming-with-local-soil-remineralizers/ ). Looks a serious operation to me. Importantly, “Brazil also has a well-established rock dust market. Around 55 mines in Brazil produce rock powders certified for agricultural use, and it is estimated that Brazilian farmers have spread rock dust on approximately three million hectares of agricultural land.” We need many more like this. Seaweed dumping is even easier to set up, but much harder to monitor, as the burial processes, whatever they are, take place slowly on the deep ocean floor “where the blind white sea-snakes are.”
I admit I’m not a genius – but are there people who actually argue we *don’t* need to try to remove the excess GHGs? (Speaking of which – what does eventually happen to them – do they fall to the ground, eventually? do they just float forever? Get washed down in the rain?)
As an aside, as someone who finds this entire issue terrifying to the point that I generally do not read or listen about it anymore – except for you, James – I’d also like to see some possible ways to adjust sunlight – just temporarily – by blocking or filtering some of it. Maybe. Whatever it takes that doesn’t kill us. This seems like it could be low risk? Some plastic thing floating in space – we are putting so much garbage up there already! Which we should look at.
And just to see if I understand the chart – basically, CCS is trying to reduce emissions, and CDR is trying to remove the already-emitted GHGs from the atmosphere – to fix past damage? is that right?
From the bleachers, where I live – I would hope that scientific administrators should not have to worry quiiiite so much about budgets. We as a species waste an s-ton of money on things that do not matter. Hasn’t R&D paid off, historically? Also, your contest idea from a ways back seems like it could create excitement, and maybe get the gazillionaires interested. It would be a nice way for them to show gratitude to the rest of us, not to mention to Earth and all creatures.
Ahem … btw, is “peasant” a bad word? I try to work around it, personally – I just say “rural person” or something like that. I’ll tell you, I’ve tried growing tomatoes, and we urbanites have this thing upside down. Maybe just call them a farmer? A grower? But I know you didn’t mean anything. : )
Overall, thanks again for all your work – I always feel a little bit better when I read your words, James. As I tell myself lately, there is hope simply because we really don’t have a choice. So, I do think it will get fixed.
James Wimberley: – “Emissions may fall in 2024, but it will keep getting hotter.”
Yep. The record high Earth Energy Imbalance (EEI) is accelerating global warming. Until the EEI falls back to a zero net energy gain state, then the Earth System will continue to get hotter.
On 4 Jan 2024, James Hansen, Makiko Sato & Pushker Kharecha published their latest communication titled Groundhog Day. Another Gobsmackingly Bananas Month. What’s Up? It included:
<blockquote>Abstract. December was the 7th consecutive month of record-shattering global temperature, driven by the combination of a moderately strong El Nino and a large decrease of Earth’s albedo. The El Nino will fade in the next few months, but we anticipate that the string of record monthly temperatures will continue to a total of 12 and possibly 13 months because of Earth’s unprecedented energy imbalance. By May the 12-month running-mean global temperature relative to 1880-1920 should be +1.6-1.7°C and not fall below +1.4 ± 0.1°C during the next La Nina minimum. Thus, given the planetary energy imbalance, it will be clear that the 1.5°C ceiling has been passed for all practical purposes.</blockquote>
https://mailchi.mp/caa/groundhog-day-another-gobsmackingly-bananas-month-whats-up
Published on 9 Jan 2024 at The Guardian was a piece by Oliver Milman headlined Global heating will pass 1.5C threshold this year, top ex-Nasa scientist says, included:
<blockquote>“We are now in the process of moving into the 1.5C world,” Hansen told the Guardian. “You can bet $100 to a donut on this and be sure of getting a free donut, if you can find a sucker willing to take the bet.”
In a bulletin issued with two other climate researchers, Hansen states that “the 1.5C global warming ceiling has been passed for all practical purposes because the large planetary energy imbalance assures that global temperature is heading still higher”. Hansen has promoted a view, disputed by some other climate scientists, that the rate of global heating is accelerating due to a widening gap between the amount of energy being absorbed by the Earth from the sun and the amount returning to space.</blockquote>
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/jan/08/global-temperature-over-1-5-c-climate-change
Copernicus seems to be the first-out-of-the-gate for a yearly climate review of 2023 with their publication on 9 Jan 2024 headlined GLOBAL CLIMATE HIGHLIGHTS 2023: Copernicus: 2023 is the hottest year on record, with global temperatures close to the 1.5°C limit.
Berkeley Earth’s Annual Temperature Report is expected to appear on January 12th.
Also, in previous years, James Hansen has provided an annual climate summary of the preceding year around the end of the second week in January.
Global SSTs keep breaking records…
https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_daily/
“G. K.: Geoengineering is briefly mentioned in the Synthesis Report, but not in the Summary for Policymakers. This is a complex debate because geoengineering involves very high risks. It won’t return the climate to its previous state, because there are some regions where it might overcompensate for global warming, and others where it might not work very well. And there is a high probability of undesirable impacts such as alterations in precipitation patterns. In addition, there are unresolved issues concerning international governance. We also explain that we don’t know enough about geoengineering and that more research is needed. In the current state of knowledge, it is clear that it cannot be recommended as a measure against climate change.”
One very cheap, simple, safe and reversible option to increase reflection of solar radiation back into space is to paint roofs white. This won’t fully compensate for the reduction in albedo from the loss of Arctic sea ice but it’s worth doing.
Data
Statista publish a chart of “Average selling price of carbon dioxide removals (CDR) worldwide as of 2023, by method”. The range is very wide, from $1,610 per tonne CO2 for “electrochemical ocean CO2 capture” to $50 per tonne for “microalgae”, both of which look fishy. Enhanced weathering comes in at a more plausible $334 per tonne. These are thin, untraded, noisy and voluntary markets. The credits are not certified centrally but created by vendors with DIY paperwork, sold to buyers who credit them in their annual reports against their own similarly uncertified net zero pledges. Looks to me rather like a Third World street market in used cars. Any market as unregulated as this is open to abuse by the dishonest, and the honest are forced into burdensome over-verification in self-defence. Regulators could lower transactions costs by insisting on uniform standards and independent audit.
Contrast the EU’s ETS hugely larger cap-and-trade emissions market. It was created by EU legislation, so the credits are in theory credible, identical and interchangeable. It is closed not open, and the number of outstanding credits – EUAs, pollution allowances – is steadily reduced. They traded last year between €80 and €100 per tonne CO2. (Source: Ember.) 2022 EUA allowances were 529 mt CO2-eq, at say €90 per tonne, making a total value of €48 bn, source EEA. The forecast, assuming the EU sticks to its announced policy and targets, is that the price will stay in the same range to 2030 and then start to rise as the supply dwindles.
For the time being, we can I think use recent ETS prices as a rough proxy for the marginal cost of carbon mitigation. If this is lower than the price of EUAs, the perfectly rational European firm, in a well-behaved and frictionless economy, will mitigate instead of forced offsetting. Similarly the perfectly rational government etc. will require firms to mitigate so long as this is cheaper (including all social costs) than CDR credits. The same logic applies to companies like Amazon that have made net zero commitments for reputational reasons, and seek to meet them as cheaply as possible.
Getting the cost of CDR down to the cost of mitigation would unlock substantial demand in the voluntary market and is therefore a key objective for CDR entrepreneurs. For enhanced weathering, this involves cutting costs by a factor of 3 or 4. This looks a very doable medium-term objective, and is much less than the historical price reductions achieved by renewable mitigation technologies.
I have left out the links to evade moderation, but you should be able to locate the sources by copying and pasting text into the search engine.
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The decision in the US to allow exchange traded funds (ETFs) to effectively deal in Bitcoin opens up access to cryptocurrencies to Joe Average. Already moves are afoot to list these funds (or provide local equivalents) here in Australia.
It is a public policy issue since so much wealth is tied up in cryptocurrencies. Yesterday the volume of transactions in Bitcoin was $56b. A collapse in the value of such tokens would have major financial implications. IMHO a collapse is more than likely although these things can stretch out for a long time,
Two comments. First, it is interesting that listing ETFs should provide a surge in Bitcoin values. The initial promise was that these currencies eliminated the need for intermediaries but individuals face high transactions costs (related to fraud, security etc) of holding cryptos. Second, the surge in Bitcoin values began a while back (around November 2022) and proceeded as interest rates grew. A bit weird although maybe insiders knew about the move to allow ETFs in Bitcoin.
But my main point is that the world has changed. Joe Average or his superfund can invest, with low transactions costs, directly in a crypto. The much heralded “market-broadening” scares me.