This would place the cost of sequestration at… $100 tonne
I did some quick back-of-the-envelope math, and unless I’m mistaken that’s equivalent to about $1 per gallon of gasoline… which is a lot lower than I had expected, honestly.
If that’s all it costs, we should be sinking billions in public funds into this, especially if there’s an R&D component that’s seeking to drive down costs/increase efficiency.
The magnitude of the problem can be challenging to comprehend. There is about 1 Ttonne CO₂ to mitigate, which, at $100 per tonne, would cost $100 trillion USD to fully sequester. Throwing billions of dollars at it would not even start to make the smallest measurable dent in the problem at any scale whatsoever.
However, if the current rate of annual solar panel adoption continues at 26% for the next 18 years, then the global production of energy will be sufficient to pretty rapidly decarbonize the atmosphere at low cost, as the amount of solar energy will be triple that being produced globally from all sources at present.
Now, if that doesn’t happen, then another way to pay for decarbonizing is to bring about world peace and disarmament. The US annual defense budget is ~$800B. If the dividend from world peace was directed to climate mitigation, we could get rapid, dramatic reductions in CO₂ over the course of a century. And we would no longer have the threat of nuclear war looming over human civilization. I find that this idea is generally met with scepticism, but, unlike other government expenditures like healthcare and welfare, war is a highly discretionary expenditure that can be rendered unnecessary by some important people signing some papers.
This is a serious, expensive problem and the solutions, unfortunately, are going to need to be proportionally serious and expensive.
I did some quick back-of-the-envelope math, and unless I’m mistaken that’s equivalent to about $1 per gallon of gasoline… which is a lot lower than I had expected, honestly.
If that’s all it costs, we should be sinking billions in public funds into this, especially if there’s an R&D component that’s seeking to drive down costs/increase efficiency.
The magnitude of the problem can be challenging to comprehend. There is about 1 Ttonne CO₂ to mitigate, which, at $100 per tonne, would cost $100 trillion USD to fully sequester. Throwing billions of dollars at it would not even start to make the smallest measurable dent in the problem at any scale whatsoever.
However, if the current rate of annual solar panel adoption continues at 26% for the next 18 years, then the global production of energy will be sufficient to pretty rapidly decarbonize the atmosphere at low cost, as the amount of solar energy will be triple that being produced globally from all sources at present.
Now, if that doesn’t happen, then another way to pay for decarbonizing is to bring about world peace and disarmament. The US annual defense budget is ~$800B. If the dividend from world peace was directed to climate mitigation, we could get rapid, dramatic reductions in CO₂ over the course of a century. And we would no longer have the threat of nuclear war looming over human civilization. I find that this idea is generally met with scepticism, but, unlike other government expenditures like healthcare and welfare, war is a highly discretionary expenditure that can be rendered unnecessary by some important people signing some papers.
This is a serious, expensive problem and the solutions, unfortunately, are going to need to be proportionally serious and expensive.