Who is going to pay to sequester the carbon?

I read an article that talked about carbon ‘reduction’ (the article isn’t really relevant to this post, so I won’t distract you with a link) and decided to climb up on my soap box for a few minutes and rant about the idiocy of our situation. From the ‘green’ perspective, the only solution appears to be crashing our economy back into the stone age by eliminating the use of fossil fuels. The other side, of course, adamantly refuses to even consider the possibility that fossil fuels could be contributing to human impact on our globe. Me, I try to advocate for rational discussion (pointlessly, of course, except for the slight possibility of impacting my dear reader(s)) because I think there are vastly more important and pressing issues to worry about (number one, for me, is the sterilization of our oceans via over fishing) than fossil fuel usage and am pretty attached to our current economy and really don’t have any desire to retreat to a cave and live off the land (and deal with the piles of stinky corpses, since, naturally, about 95% of our population would have to die to achieve that end).

Because there seems to be no room for rational middle ground discussion there is also no room for discussion on cost/benefit tradeoffs. Some babble about geo-engineering as if it is something new (it is not, we are doing it as I write this) and somehow more dangerous than what is already happening (it isn’t). We have cut down huge swaths of forests over our globe (and continue to do so in many locations, but, perhaps a bit surprisingly, many places in Europe and lots of places in the US have net increases in forest each year). Humans have already seriously de-stabled most ecosystems around the world by eliminating apex predators (and failing to pick up the slack (or, worse, moving down the food chain, in the case of the ocean)) and our crop mono culture may produce more target crop per acre, but it dramatically decreases the overall biological carrying capacity of the land. All this has gone on at the ‘same time’ (though farming started millennia ago and, as I read once (but can’t seem to find the citation), actually tracks the increase in CO2 better than fossil fuel usage) and given the vast scale (global!), this is geo-engineering. So, the idea that we might spray sulfur aerosols high in the atmosphere in order to mimic the effects of a cooling volcano eruption (there is fairly convincing evidence that a series of such was what triggered the ‘little ice age’) seems to me to be well on the table.

Of course, any ‘mitigation’ strategy (presuming, naturally, that we pick the correct ’cause’ and not some meaningless confounding issue (personally, I lean toward fossil fuels as a ‘meaningless confounding issue’)) has to be paid for somehow. While, in principle, the act of mitigating warming might be considered something very beneficial to the globe and species, the reality is paying for such requires a form of tax since it does not have any inherent value to the economy or society, certainly not in the immediate term. Sure, you could ask for volunteers, but in my experience few people with the resources to make a difference are interested in ponying up and everyone else has too small an amount to matter (unless somehow aggregated, something that itself costs money). I am perfectly happy to ‘sequester’ carbon at $108 per ton (the amount of value I could get selling it as fuel), but the going rate appears to be about 1/10 of that. So, where the hell is my incentive to even explore the idea of sequestration? I would be skeptical of any business proposal to sequester when the alternative is more profitable (according to my calculations, $10/ton isn’t profitable by any stretch of the imagination and thus is currently nothing more than a huge boondoggle to extract dollars from tree huggers and put them into the pockets of the 1%).

Now, if we, as a society, were to assign some sort of tax onto carbon (again, I think this is a bad idea and addressing the wrong problem) and levy it uniformly somehow, then take the proceeds from that and pay it to _anyone_ who can sequester the resultant product (as opposed to lining the pockets of the most politically connected) where people can bid (where the lowest bid wins) in an open market, then I think there might be something that could be useful. As people view the potential for profit move into the sequestration business one should expect the price to drop (just like any other competitive market (competition being the key!)), so the tax should cover an increasing amount of carbon removed from the atmosphere. Keep in mind, though, that the price for the sequestered carbon _must_ be higher than selling the carbon as a fuel or there is no possible way to expect anything but a gamed system designed to enrich the least scrupulous. Of course, one has to ensure that the carbon actually _stays_ sequestered or there really isn’t any point, but I also believe that the carbon should not be so incredibly ‘sequestered’ that it becomes hugely expensive to extract later on, once (as I believe) we realize that CO2 from fossil fuels wasn’t actually a problem after all and we are now freezing our asses off. (Sort of like the idiotic idea of encasing our nuclear ‘waste’ in such a way it becomes uneconomical to extract and refine. That stuff should be considered as gold because it is actually a perfect fuel if we (as a brain dead idiotic society) were not so dead set against reprocessing it. I will now step down from my nuclear energy soap box.)

Alas, I see no room for rational discussion of anything. The subject is entirely polarized between the ‘back to the caves’ Greens and ‘there are no problems’ denialists and the no-mans land in between is impenetrable because to be seen there is to be shot by both sides. Irrationality prevails and our society continues its trundle down the road to extinction because one way or another the climate of our planet is going to dip into its ‘normal’ state of an ice age in just a few thousand years and we all gunna die if we can’t come to grips with it. Since we, as a society, can’t agree on anything even when it is just a few months away (fiscal cliff, anyone?), how the hell can we agree on actions for something that won’t take effect for generations?

Author: Tfoui

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