Interesting, thanks for that perspective! (Though I calculate the price as $998 per ton–did I get the math wrong? Wouldn’t be the first time.) Do you remember where you saw the advertised prices of ~$100/ton? I agree there’s a big difference in the practicality of implementation there, but I wonder if they’re charging more with the intent of using the profits to grow. I’d be OK with that. If there’s one thing we can usually count on with new technology, it’s that the price tends to come down over time. Especially when a product is popular enough to inspire competition. And even if what they’re charging now is so high only Bill Gates could afford to trap a meaningful amount of carbon, I like that they have plans starting at $8/month, which is within a lot of ordinary people’s budgets.
You are going to get whatever the developing world decides you are going to get. Your decision to offset a flight is of negligible help and if it helps distract you from taking more impactful measures then it is actively a hindrance.
NB, if it’s all up to the developing world, what could we do anyway (or be distracted from doing)?
Buy less, build less, waste less, procreate less. It isn’t that transport isn’t a part of it. It certainly is but no need to fixate on it to the exclusion of other, less fashionable and mundane activities.
Here’s an example. Last month I made a policy change at work that *increased *the number of flights taken by individuals, Quelle horreur! But the reason I did it was to put people in the right places to ensure that we didn’t have to move tons of material through a convoluted and wasteful route instead. The savings in time, money and emissions are immense but I had to fight against a corporate policy that seeks to minimise the flights of people.
Are there carbon offset programs that sequester carbon for that price that are available for private individuals to use?
I ask because although I’m far from an environmental fanatic, I recently decided that I should bite the bullet and use carbon offset for any future flights that I take. This is a relatively easy commitment for me to make at the moment, since with two small children we don’t have any foreign holidays planned for the next couple of years, and I’ve never flown more than 2-3 return trips a year in the past anyway. But then I read that tree planting, which I understand is often touted as offsetting carbon emissions, is actually carbon neutral over the lifetime of the tree, so in effect is just another way of passing carbon debt on to future generations. So what are the alternatives?
To the wider point, I also wonder what more I can do - we are a family of 4 (which is already too many/a bit selfish, I suspect) with no intention of adding to this, have one car between us, try to minimise our heating and lighting, I commute by bicycle, make an effort to avoid using the car for short journeys, very rarely buy new clothes or electronics, reuse and recycle as much as I can. Where else should I be looking? I don’t want to just sit back in satisfaction at a job well done, nor throw up my hands and say there’s no point in doing more because of China’s emissions.
Ah, I see what you’re saying. That “if” is definitely a problem. The goal, then, should be to offset carbon emissions in addition to other actions, not instead of other actions.
Yes, the carbon from one flight is negligible, in the same way that my one vote is negligible. And if I vote instead of engaging in political organizing, thinking that voting completes my civic responsibility, it can be actively a hindrance, in the same way that carbon-offsets are actively a hindrance if they are a replacement for broader actions.
But neither votes nor carbon offsets are useless. They are a tiny piece of the solution to an enormous problem.
Well-put, LHOD. I have no kids and don’t plan on any; I’m pretty sure I can remember to use birth control while also buying carbon offsets. 
NB, I can tell the flying thing sticks in your craw. But the only relationship between flying and this program is how the numbers are expressed. The tree huggers have raised the public consciousness about the environmental impact of air travel–to the annoyance of many, including you, and incidentally including a travel blogger I follow who makes a persuasive case that shitting on frequent fliers is racist because we don’t all have grandmas who live just over the river and through the woods; immigrants have to fly to see their extended family. But because that’s the thing well-meaning, well-off white folks feel guilty about right now, this company is framing its carbon sequestration in those terms. The carbon you emit flying is no different than the carbon you emit buying stupid crap from China. They could just as easily add buttons to their website to allow you to pay $X/month to sequester Y% of the average carbon generated annually by a US consumer with a cell phone and an occasional Amazon or Wish habit. All they would have to do is crunch the numbers. And the same objections you raised to the idea of “fly less” could apply equally to “buy less,” “procreate less,” etc. I just replaced my 4-year old work cell. I don’t have the option of working where I do and not having a company-issued iPhone, but I declined several opportunities to upgrade over the years because the phone still worked. But it finally kicked the bucket, so I had to trade it in. I could go work somewhere else, maybe for an old-school attorney who doesn’t care for electronic leashes. But I’d still need a computer to practice law. The appellate court in my jurisdiction only accepts e-filing now, and the superior courts are all going that way too. There’s a limit on how much we can reduce what we buy and do, and we probably need to do more than cut back.
Here’s a brief overview of the costs of direct-air capture.
To be clear, they weren’t advertising the price in the sense of the weekly circular from the grocery store where there’s an implied committment to actually sell you the service at the advertised price. They advertised it in the sense of hyping their technology to get their name out there. Carbon Engineering is the one that really showed their work, but Climeworks gave a non-committal “we’re-on-the-path-to-100-bucks-a-ton…”
As for the price per ton, let’s use the explorer subscription. It removes 85 kg for $96. 85 kg is either .085 tons or .093 tons depending on whether you’re using a 1000 kg ton (metric ton) or a 2000 lb ton. So it’s either 96/.085 ($1129) or 96/.093 ($1032) to remove a ton at their rates. Feel free to tell me if my math looks wrong!
For DAC, sadly, no. I’m really hoping that will change this decade. But if you’re willing to look at other forms of offsets (soil sequestration programs, forestry, etc), there are several that seem to be well reputed and are way, way under $100 / ton. See here if you’re interested.
This is not true - wealthy nations like China, the United States, Japan, and Germany have a lot more sway over the global political economy and industrial policy than developing nations like Indonesia, Egypt, Nigeria, and Vietnam.
Well I’m sure everything will be fine then. I’m sure the developing world will happily forgoe economic progress for the next 50 years, India’s recent emission doubling will be merely a blip and China will voluntarily half its emissions and scale back its industrial expansion to 1970’s levels.
I don’t share your optimism.
You seem really invested in the idea that a Nigerian has more politico-economic power than a German, to the point where your responses to my posts are non sequiturs - why?
Thanks, Do Not Taunt! I really appreciate your contributions.
Google is now of course suggesting a ton of articles on the subject for me. One of them gets at the point about carbon capture being a feel-good solution that could distract us from cutting emissions, though it focuses on trees:
I never said that at all but populous developing nations with a current low per capita emission profile have the potential to expand their footprint immensely, even keeping their emissions flat over the next 30 years is a challenge whilst still allowing them to raise their standard of living to something approaching a western ideal.
You can set policies till the cows come home. Getting people to follow that policy fully and quickly is another thing entirely and my opinion is simply that developing nations are less likely to do so, they have other more immediate fish to fry.
I sincerely hope that I’m wrong and you are right but I’ve been reading and following the science and political manouvering on this for nearly 30 years and nothing in that time convinces me that, absent a technological magic bullet or far more drastic societal changes than seen so far, pretty serious effects can realistically be avoided.
Sorry for bumping the thread. I’ve been meaning to reply to this for a while, and then life intervened. So finally getting back to typing up some thoughts here.
First, I share the skepticism of your cite around tree-planting as a method for offsets. But perhaps for different reasons than the portion you quoted here. He objects that “such thinking could encourage us to continue spewing carbon at a moment when emissions need to decline rapidly now.” But I don’t agree about that. Don’t get me wrong - it’d be great if emissions started declining rapidly right now. But they aren’t going to (at least not without coronavirus destroying the economy.)[sup]*[/sup] And consequently, making policy choices as if that were a reasonable outcome is not a wise path. What I think is far more realistic is that we’ll have a long plateau of emissions, as developed economies (eventually including China) decrease their emissions, but developing economies ramp up theirs. A plateau of emissions still means increasing concentrations. But eventually, that plateau ends, emissions decline begins, and ultimately between lower emissions, natural sinks (existing trees, deep oceans, chemical weathering of rocks, etc.), and artificial capture and sequestration, we see atmospheric concentrations decline. It’s that concentration peak that we should all be focused on minimizing, and if that concentration peak occurs 20-30 years from now (it’s unlikely to be any sooner, and will probably occur even later than that), trees planted today can have a very real effect on lowering peak concentration.
All things being equal, removing a ton of CO[sub]2[/sub] from the atmosphere today is better than doing it 20 years from now, even if they both have the same effect on the ultimate peak concentration. But whatever the value is of shaving that ton of CO[sub]2[/sub] off of peak concentration, that dwarfs the increased value of taking that ton out now rather than 20 years from now. So adding a ton of CO[sub]2[/sub] into the air today, and pulling it out 20 years from now isn’t free, but the cost is very low compared to the cost of emitting that ton and doing nothing about it. So in that sense, tree planting as a means of CO[sub]2[/sub] offsets is pretty good.
So what are my objections to tree planting offsets? Your cite above goes into a lot of reasons, and it is a very good, short article, and I encourage everyone to read it. But there are two reasons that I personally find to be most compelling. For one, we don’t know that those trees are going to stay planted. There are likely to be a lot of incentives for bad actors in the future to remove those trees, not to mention the risk of natural fire, etc. And even if they all stay planted, it’s an inherently limited sink: there’s only so much land where we can plant trees, and we may very well need some of that land to expand farms to feed a growing population. DAC avoids both of these problems. There are no incentives to release the sequestered CO[sub]2[/sub], and the sink size, while not infinite, is gated by (1) energy needed for the capture and (2) sequestration sites. We obviously need to scale up renewable energy sources for #1, so that’s not a solved problem, but it is a solvable problem: we’ve barely tapped the renewable energy potential of the environment. As for #2, I understand it is in the multi-teraton range, and that’s just based on a USGS analysis of the United States. For context, humanity has emitted in the range of 1.2 teratons of CO[sub]2[/sub] cumulatively ever, and is currently on a teraton / 25-year pace. So a sink that can sequester 2 teratons would be a huge deal. I don’t think afforestation offers that.
So does that mean I think we should attempt a massive scale up of DAC now? No - even at $100/ton, that’s way more expensive than doing things like retiring stationary fossil fuel usage (power plants and buildings) early and replacing with emission free electricity and heating, etc. If it costs $50 to not emit a ton of CO[sub]2[/sub] now, or $100 to pull it out now, let’s just not emit it. But I do think we’re going to need DAC eventually - we’ve probably already overshot - and we should invest now in making DAC cost-effective so we can scale it later in the century when it’ll be the most cost-effective arrow left in the quiver.
(*) Early estimates are that China’s CO[sub]2[/sub] emissions are down by a quarter over the past two weeks, due to coronavirus.