Yesterday, I posted about geoengineering the oceans as a promising form of carbon capture. But why do we need carbon capture at all? Can’t we just conserve our way out of global warming?No.Here are a couple of reasons why the *only* way to avert climate disaster is to start removing carbon from the atmosphere:1. The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is ca. 120 years. What that means is that if all sources of CO2—man-made, forest fires, vulcanism, etc—ceased worldwide starting tomorrow, it would take 120 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop by half. So conservation isn’t enough to reverse the march to climate crisis. Suggesting that carbon capture is just a distraction from having Americans drive less is, to put it gently, hopelessly and tragically
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Joel Eissenberg considers the following as important: AI and atmospheric carbonization, carbon capture, climate change, Featured Stories, US/Global Economics
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Yesterday, I posted about geoengineering the oceans as a promising form of carbon capture. But why do we need carbon capture at all? Can’t we just conserve our way out of global warming?
No.
Here are a couple of reasons why the *only* way to avert climate disaster is to start removing carbon from the atmosphere:
1. The half-life of CO2 in the atmosphere is ca. 120 years. What that means is that if all sources of CO2—man-made, forest fires, vulcanism, etc—ceased worldwide starting tomorrow, it would take 120 years for atmospheric CO2 to drop by half. So conservation isn’t enough to reverse the march to climate crisis. Suggesting that carbon capture is just a distraction from having Americans drive less is, to put it gently, hopelessly and tragically naïve.
2. The global anthropogenic sources of CO2 will only expand. 3rd world nations want the economies that the industrialized nation built with burning coal, oil and gas, and it is futile (and arrogant) to admonish them to forego improving their standard of living to that of the industrialized world. And that’s not just energy consumption for transportation, agriculture and HVAC, it’s the massive and growing consumption of energy from computers:
“Every time you do a Google search, it consumes not only the energy required to power your laptop and your router but also to maintain the Google data centers that keep a chunk of the Internet running. That’s not a small amount of power. Cumulatively, in 2019, Google consumed as much electricity as Sri Lanka.
“Worse, a search powered by ChatGPT, the AI-powered program, consumes ten times more energy than your ordinary Google search. That’s sobering enough. But then consider all the energy that goes into training the AI programs in the first place. Climate researcher Sasha Luccioni explains:
“Training AI models consumes energy. Essentially you’re taking whatever data you want to train your model on and running it through your model like thousands of times. It’s going to be something like a thousand chips running for a thousand hours. Every generation of GPUs—the specialized chips for training AI models—tends to consume more energy than the previous generation.
“AI’s need for energy is increasing exponentially. According to Goldman Sachs, data centers were expanding rapidly between 2015 and 2019, but their energy use remained relatively flat because the processing was becoming more efficient. But then, in the last five years, energy use rose dramatically and so did the carbon footprint of these data centers. Largely because of AI, Google’s carbon emissions increased by 50 percent in the last five years—even as the megacorporation was promising to achieve carbon neutrality in the near future.”
Carbon capture isn’t the enemy of conservation. The world needs *both* carbon capture and conservation if it is to avert climate disaster and resource wars that threaten to destroy human civilization in the next thirty years. This isn’t the time for virtue signaling. Are there risks associated with geoengineering? Sure. But there is a risk bordering on certainty that if we rely solely on the hope that somehow the world will dial down energy consumption, catastrophe will follow.