There is a strange kind of logical error where people have a fear of climate change choose depopulation as one of the first solutions.
Firstly what is the climate change problem? There are climate models on supercomputers that predict temperature increase of 2-8 degrees by 2100. They stop right there and do not question the assumption or get the context.
It is not the 40 billion tons per year of CO2 being added each year, that is the main problem. Humanity has added 140 parts per million of CO2 to the atmosphere. Each part per million of CO 2 in the atmosphere represents approximately 2.13 gigatonnes of carbon, or 7.82 gigatonnes of CO 2. This is 1100 billion tons of CO2. Over half of the 40 billion tons of CO2 each year is absorbed by the land and the ocean. 546 billion tons was added into the atmosphere over 30-40 years but this was from 1200 billion tons of emissions.
IF you were to instantly kill half of the people and kept all other consumption stable then in theory this would reduce the increase to 20 billion tons of CO2 per year. In 30 years, there would be 600 billion tons of emissions and 250 billion tons added to the atmosphere. If the people were not killed there would be 1200 billion tons of emissions and 500 billion tons added to the atmosphere. However, another 30 years would add the same amount at half the rate. The current extra CO2 and other gases is already raising the temperature.
Electrifying all cars and trucks will take another 20-30 years but this would remove 25% of annual CO2 generation. This would be half of the effect of killing half of the people in the world. However, if the world got 50-100% richer then both changes would be offset.
Other Options
There are 3 trillion trees in the world. If trees were 40% larger then they would absorb about a trillion extra tons of CO2. This would offset all of the extra CO2 that is still in the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution started over 150 years ago.
If we increased the mass of trees every year by an additional 1% or added 20 billion more trees then we could offset half of the CO2 without removing any people.
Living Carbon is a startup funded with $36 million that just planted a forest of genetically modified trees to absorb more carbon. Living Carbon is a San Francisco-based biotechnology company that produced genetically modified poplars. The new trees are intended to be a large-scale solution to climate change.
The company’s researchers used a crude technique known as the gene gun method, which essentially blasts foreign genes into the trees’ chromosomes. In formal letters to the USDA the company explained what it was doing; the agency replied that, because the resulting trees had not been exposed to and did not contain genes from a plant pest, they were not subject to regulations. The Environmental Protection Agency regulates biotech plants that produce their own pesticides, and the Food and Drug Administration examines anything humans might consume. Living Carbon’s trees do not fit into either of these categories, so they could be planted without any further formal studies.
Donald Ort is a University of Illinois geneticist whose plant experiments helped inspire Living Carbon’s technology. Ort says that greenhouse results may or may not translate to success in the real world. In 2019, Dr. Ort and his team announced that they had genetically hacked tobacco plants to photosynthesize more efficiently. Normally, photosynthesis produces a toxic byproduct that a plant must dispose of, wasting energy. The Illinois researchers added genes from pumpkins and green algae to induce tobacco seedlings to instead recycle the toxins into more sugars, producing plants that grew nearly 40 percent larger.
Science Council Removal of CO2 Options
Here is a NOAA study of removing CO2 from the atmosphere.
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Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement
The ocean holds almost 45 times as much carbon as the atmosphere due to dissolved “alkaline” minerals that naturally enter the ocean through rivers and groundwater over geologic timescales. These minerals are responsible for seawater being slightly basic, and allow seawater to naturally take up CO2 from the atmosphere and store it as dissolved carbonate molecules (predominantly as bicarbonate, or HCO3-). “Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement” refers to efforts to increase this ocean CO2 storage capacity by increasing seawater alkalinity, thereby changing natural air-sea gas exchange into a CDR process. Strategies for increasing seawater alkalinity include electrochemical acid removal and accelerated weathering of alkaline minerals. Notably, seawater alkalinity is stable in the ocean for timescales of many thousands of years, meaning these approaches address both the removal and storage of CO2 by shifting the balance of air-sea CO2 exchange further toward the ocean. Overall, some estimates suggest that the timescale of carbon sequestration by alkalinity enhancement could be 100,000 years. Increasing seawater alkalinity has the co-benefit of mitigating ocean acidification (OA) by elevating pH.
Soil Carbon and Biospheric Approaches
Terrestrial systems in the northern hemisphere remove ~1/4 of the carbon emitted to the atmosphere each year through anthropogenic activities including agriculture, forests, and other land-use activities (AFOLU) capable of storing carbon for long periods. However, this sink is particularly challenging to quantify. Regrowth of forests, storage in soils, destruction of biomass by fires, additional impacts of climate change, and other processes need to be better monitored and understood before they can be accelerated to remove additional CO2 from the atmosphere. Changes in agricultural practices could possibly be used to store more carbon in forest trees and their root systems, to retain more carbon in soils, or to convert the biomass to stable forms (e.g., biochar). The practices will likely provide an important pathway for restoration of soil organic carbon as well as reduction of costs for agriculture. However, the longevity of these storage techniques and their broader impacts is poorly understood.
In all of these land-based efforts, monitoring and verification will be essential. Many of these techniques are in their infancy and the widespread nature of soils, forests, and the like make this particularly challenging. Inventory accounting will be necessary to track carbon captured through these systems, but equally important will be top-down approaches, i.e, validation from atmospheric observations, as
well as tracking of adverse effects on soil health.
Macroalgae -Kelp
Macroalgae comprise a diverse group of marine photosynthesizers, many of which grow extremely quickly (centimeters / day), thereby rapidly taking up CO2 from surface waters. It is estimated that 0.17 GT of macroalgal carbon per year, or 11% of total NPP, is currently sequestered globally in nearshore and deep ocean sediments, the majority of which results from naturally occurring (non-cultivated) macroalgae populations.
Ocean Fertilization is Underrated by the NOAA
Nextbigfuture interviewed Jason McNamee, former Director and Operations Officer of the Haida Salmon Restoration project and Scientific Advisor to the World Aquarium and Conservation for the Oceans Foundation. Jason provided a lot of information about processes in the deep ocean (100 miles from the coast) and how more still needs to be learned. Nextbigfuture covered how the 120 ton iron fertilization in 2012 increased salmon catches in 2013 and 2014.
Most people have been hearing warnings about desertification and how the deserts are increasing. Actually the deserts are becoming more green and are producing less dust. This is driving the steady reduction of iron into the oceans by about 1% per year. 42% more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere means that plants in the desert need to breathe less and keep more water. Less dust from the desert means less iron into the ocean. Iron shortage in the ocean is the key factor that is reducing algae and plankton in the ocean.
Many articles want to spin that the Haida were duped. It was not the case based on my direct discussion with people involved in the project. The 2012 work boosted the salmon catch to record high levels by feeding the baby salmon at the right time.
Pink salmon mature in two years. Salmon can add a pound a month if they are well fed in the ocean. 2013 had the largest pink salmon run in 50 years.
An algae bloom was created that was visible from space and it weighed about a million tons. It fed fish and then sank to the bottom of the ocean. The algae bloom was created with a few guys on a Jaws movie sized boat over a few days dumping bags of iron phosphate into the ocean. The lifetime CO2 emissions of 1000 people sequestered in a few days of work by about six people.
There is now $2 million in funding will allow researchers, led by McGillicuddy, to bring more robust modeling to iron fertilization.
Rsearchers will always stress that ocean iron fertilization could never replace emissions reductions. When I speak to the climate researchers they always will downplan the CO2 removal potential because they do not want to let big oil and big industry off the hook. They want to force daily lives and companies to change even if the actual situation could be resolved without the changes.
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
Known for identifying cutting edge technologies, he is currently a Co-Founder of a startup and fundraiser for high potential early-stage companies. He is the Head of Research for Allocations for deep technology investments and an Angel Investor at Space Angels.
A frequent speaker at corporations, he has been a TEDx speaker, a Singularity University speaker and guest at numerous interviews for radio and podcasts. He is open to public speaking and advising engagements.
What idiot said killing a whole bunch of people will somehow save the world? Excuse me, but this IS NOT the way to save the world, it’s many life forms, or certainly us. Only by working together can we deal w/the problems WE MUST deal with. This is not an us-or-them issue. It’s an us or nothing issue. We don’t have a lot of time to prevent Earths climate from going over a “tipping point”. When that happens, no matter what we try to do, the human race and many other species, will go extinct.
We deal w/it ,or we, and a whole bunch of critters go bye-bye forever. WAKE UP!
Not being born =! killing them
Collapsing birth rates and aging populations will save the planet.
However they will totally eff over capitalism as an economic system.
Everyone loves trees. As an environmental engineer I am by training and temperament a tree hugger. And “just plant more trees” is often proposed as a solution to global warming.
More back of the envelope calcs based on the same accumulation of CO2 in the atmosphere of 13.76 billion tons per year:
Annual CO2 sequestration per typical tree (using oak trees as baseline average)
= 48 lbs of CO2 per tree
Annual CO2 sequestration per typical forest area
= 500 trees per acre or 320,000 trees per square mile (Ohio State University reforestation standard)
= 24,000 lbs of CO2 per acre
= 12 tons of CO2 per acre
= 7,680 tons of CO2 per square mile
Total area required
= 1,791,667 square miles to sequester all excess CO2
or approx. 2.7 x area of Alaska
or approx. 0.6 x area of Australia (about the size of the outback)
or approx. 0.5 x area of Canada
Number of trees required
= 573,333,333,333 new trees or 573.3 billion new trees
= 3,000.0 billion existing trees worldwide
= approx. 20% increase in the number of trees worldwide required to sequester excess CO2
World population
= 7.44 billion people
= 77 new trees per human
The tree planting alone would cost about $1 million dollars per square mile. or $2 million if you assume a 50% survival rate for newly planted trees.
https://techcrunch.com/2022/02/25/should-we-be-growing-trees-in-the-desert-to-combat-climate-change/ or a total of $3,583,334,000,000 or $3.6 trillion.
But you will have to grow trees in areas that don’t normally have trees because forested areas are…well…already forested.
This will require a massive irrigation effort.
Capital cost of irrigating a square mile (assume we concentrate on the desert areas of the Australian outback)
Assume a more efficient drip irrigation system, the capital costs are $500 to $1.200 per acre.
Using $1,000 per acre (installation costs in a remote areas being higher than average) or $640,000 per square mile.
A total irrigation system capital cost of $1,146,667,000,000 or $1.2 trillion.
Our baseline oak trees require about 100 gallons of water per day or almost 40,000 gallons per year.
At 320,000 trees per square mile and 1,791,667 square miles of new forest = 23,000 trillion gallons per year (23 quadrillion)
That’s almost 8x the volume of Lake Superior (3.2 quadrillion gallons) required annually.
So the water will have to be desalinated ocean water.
It currently costs approximately $32 million to build a 2.5 MGD (912,5000,000 gallons per year) seawater desalination plant.
We will need over 25 million of them, at a total capital cost of $804 trillion.
So the total up front capital costs (planting trees, installing irrigation systems, building desalination plants – neglecting the costs of long distance pipeline and pumping systems required to transport desalinated sea water from the coast to the interior of the outback) = $810 trillion.
World GDP (2020) was 85.11 trillion.
So total capital costs to sequester CO2 using trees would be 9.5x world GDP
Limiting your capital costs to only 5% of GDP annually (world military expenditures each a year = 2% of GDP) would require about 200 years to complete the project.
Annual operating costs are essentially the cost of desalination (again, ignoring things like pumping operations, maintenance, etc.) = $2 to $5 per 1000 gallons
Assume $3 per 1,000 gallons with advanced Israeli technology = about $69 trillion
About 80% of world GDP annually.
Conclusion: Not practical.
Sorry to sound cynical, but from what I’ve seen over the last three decades is the real ‘first’ response to climate change is calls for central planning of wealth confiscation and redistribution at the hands of self-proclaimed experts whose supporters pillory anyone who questions their revealed truths. The experts then fly to conferences on private jets to discuss how we, but not them, can sacrifice for the greater good.
As they say on Instapundit, ‘I’ll believe its a crisis when the people who tell me its a crisis start acting like its a crisis.’
The geoengineering research is good to see though. May help terraforming other planets in the future.
“Electrifying all cars and trucks will take another 20-30 years but this would remove 25% of annual CO2 generation.”
Electrifying vehicles would do nothing, maybe even increase CO2, depending on how the electricity is generated. Why do people keep treating electricity like it magically appears in electrical outlets?
Electrification of transportation is for the most part a variant of “not in my backyard” or NIMBY exportation of the problem to another location still on planet earth. Where does the electricity come from? I think you hit the nail on the head Brett. Add to that all the issues of mining lithium, disposal, putting out EV fires (24K gallons of water on average) cobalt mining, etc, and EVs are actually worse for the economy given the state of EV tech today.
That said, I don’t understand the war on natural gas. Yes, it produces CO2, but is far cleaner than other fossil fuels. US progress to date on CO2 coals has been made by replacing coal et al with natural gas. Seems a good interim solution.
Brett Bellmore poo pooed the idea that we could make natural gas in large quantities from solar but there’s a company that is founded to do just that. “If” the price of solar panels keeps coming down as they have, then it will be a done deal. They have extensive papers on the economics, environmental and other facts on this. It looks persuasive. The payback on these solar farms is expected to be fairly quick like fracking operations are now. The price of solar cells is very close to what they need to be to do this economically. A couple more years of the same decreases in price would likely be satisfactory.
Methane from solar
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/
Cost-Solar Cheaper than Coal in 3-5 Years? GE and First Solar Think So
“… in an interview with Bloomberg, GE’s global research director Mark M. Little said that their thin film solar PV (now at 12.8% efficiency) could be cheaper than fossil fuel and nuclear electricity in 3-5 years….”
https://rameznaam.com/2011/06/09/solar-cheaper-than-coal-in-3-5-years-ge-and-first-solar-think-so/
“…solar cells that are in pre-production are already at the $1 / watt manufacturing price threshold that would allow cheaper-than-fossil-fuel solar energy…”
https://rameznaam.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/Solar-Costs-2010-2020-vs-Fossil-Fuel-Cost-Range.jpg
https://rameznaam.com/2020/05/14/solars-future-is-insanely-cheap-2020/
I’ve driven across the US several times and lived in the desert in Las Vegas. There’s an insane amount of nothing that could have solar installed that would shade the desert and make it more productive than the scorched clay and rocks as it is now.
Lots to read,
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/10/20/the-future-of-energy-reading-list/
“…Solar PV panels are falling in price by about 15% per year, so in any given market just a few years separates solar electricity price parity…”
“…The US is anomalously agriculturally productive, but even so, several states worth of land are devoted to ethanol production – all of which can be substituted by Terraform’s solar synthetic product with 20x less land consumed….”
https://terraformindustries.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/image-4.png
“…Even more than ethanol, enormous tracts of land are used to produce livestock feed. Terraform Industries is pioneering direct solar synthesis of molecular fuel, and natural gas is just the first in a long line of reduced carbon products which will soon include gasoline and kerosene and eventually include starches, fats, and proteins…”
https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terraformer-environmental-calculus/
I can’t remember where I first heard of these blogs, likely here. “If” the psychopaths that appear to be running things can be reined in, then we can look forward to a very energy rich planet with plenty of food and added living space. The people at the WEF deserve nothing but our contempt. Forget eating bugs. There’s a path where we can all eat steak. There’s plenty to go around for everyone with even the slightest investment, and will likely happen without their ridiculous interference.
All this depends on the lowering of solar panel prices, and the odds of this appear to be very, very high that prices will continue to decline. At some point, with not much more in the way of price decline, solar will be, and maybe already is, the lowest cost energy source. If Perovskite solar cells, possibly combined with silicon, can be made to work, it will certainly accelerate this.
I’ve actually been following that. Their business model is dependent on staggeringly massive subsidies. From their own site:
“October 2022: We crunched the impact of the IRA on our business model. The 45V green hydrogen PTC is worth nearly $32/kcf, and the 45E green electricity PTC is worth another $13.50/kcf. There are a bunch of other state and federal subsidies for carbon capture, low carbon fuel, etc and in aggregate they accelerate our profit margins by about a decade – which is to say we would be very profitable if in production today.”
All of their anticipated profit and then some is subsidy, they have a seriously negative ROI without them.
But the subsidies can’t scale, they’re only affordable because the market being subsidized is still small.
They’re just subsidy farmers in denial.
Just to put those subsidies into context, the RETAIL price of natural gas is only about $20/kcf. RETAIL!
I repeat, they’re just farming subsidies, not doing anything genuinely economically sane.
I think they’re in denial about that, but I doubt the people funding them fail to understand it.
The biggest problem with human over-population is the ongoing mass extinction of other species. We change the environment so fast with technology that the evolution can’t keep up. The result is that we lose somewhere between 100 – 10000 species per year. The exact number is impossible to tell but they are not coming back. The extinction rate is said to be 100 – 1000 times higher now than historically from what has been derived through geological records. We are literally in the middle of the sixth mass extinction.
At some point, the food chains will collapse and higher life forms will die out (human beings included).
I think economics has to change to fix depopulation.
No one, or at least a no significant part of the population that are not having babies are doing so because of climate change.
It’s economics. I’m a elder millennial. I have two kids but I got lucky and am relatively financially secure due to equity in a start up that I worked for that went to exit. Even at that, job insecurity has been horrendous all of my career in fintech. My kids are over 10 years old, and many of my friends just have 1 kids or are waiting until they are more secure or their careers are more developed.
Nobody wants to have kids when they are one paycheck away from sleeping in their car and in many modern cities where we all choose to live mostly due to jobs available, goods prices rise with salaries, kids education is expensive, daycare is expensive, apartments are completely unaffordable to buy…
Not asking for communism, but if the result of capitalism is that in 100 years north Korea has a higher population than the USA. Will it be considered that capitalism had been a success?
I agree. Economic self-interest has been perhaps the most powerful motivator of human behavior for the last several thousand years. Across multiple cultures, it’s wealth (be it it’s acquisition, manipulation, or “keeping it”) that has been the primary “motivating” factor for most humans, for a very long time. And why? (oh please) The people who “do that” better then you own your a**. And everyone else who doesn’t “do that” as well. As for population decline, North Korea may have a higher population over time.
But seriously? Lots of starving people living in a toilet, are still lots of starving people living in a toilet. Absolutely NOT a win in my book.
NoKo’s birth rates are collapsing as well.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/13/1218999673/north-korea-confronts-a-modern-day-challenge-a-declining-population#:~:text=According%20to%20United%20Nations'%20assessments,world's%20lowest%20rate%20of%200.78.
North Korea confronts a modern-day challenge: a declining population
According to United Nations’ assessments, the average North Korean woman has 1.79 children over her lifetime, a rate that falls short of 2.1 needed to maintain the population.
There are good data showing that CO2 has risen following global temperature increase, ie CO2 is a following, not a leading indicator.
The chemistry of ocean acidification with increasing CO2 is a required result of the carbonic acid buffer system.
A group ironed the ocean off the Queen Charlotte Islands and were tormented and fined for their efforts to improve the salmon run (it did work!)
The solar cycle should be considered before adopting ill-conceived plans to mess with natural processes, let alone extorting tax dollars from the citizenry to support same.
A little warming will be quite beneficial for the Canadian climate. Water management is not a government forte, but as Brian has noted, Canada has opened the borders to immigration as unsupportable with our current infrastructure and housing as the US open border invasion.
Review the recent US court case demonstrating the error of the “hockey stick” climate model, although the defendants were charged a million dollars for hurting the inventor’s feelings.
That CO2 is not a current climate driver because it has risen after prior temperature increases is one of the oldest tropes on the web. If you don’t understand the Science, stop thinking you’ve got something useful to offer.
I don’t believe you. The graphs that show,
“…There are good data showing that CO2 has risen following global temperature increase..”
are simple enough to read. It doesn’t take magic or deep thought to see the facts, nor is it “science” to ignore them. Is the best that you can do is to pretend higher social status instead of giving some sort of real evidence. I expect this is the case. The debacle that is the vax program and numerous other big “SCIENCE” frauds shows that this “presumed” social statue is very worn and frayed and in many cases nonexistent.
Myself, when people try to shut people up by pretending establishment SCIENCE has the final word, I don’t believe them. It covered and packed with corruption. Maybe they learned science at Epstein’s island. Some did.
Look at the cancer industry where there are numerous cases of people using anti-parasitical drugs to defeat cancer but the “SCIENCE” establishment wants nothing to with it because it will cut into drug company profits. The whole establishment SCIENCE is littered with these faults, and I believe global warming is much the same. The whole farce seems to only be designed to impoverish people and further control them by reducing energy supplies and cutting off resources.