1/n A $100m carbon removal @xprize cool! But folks who care about climate should ask some hard questions.
Virgin Earth Challenge $25m prize launched in '07 by @richardbranson. Original prize terms were nonsensical: required a $ bn business to win so the $25m would be meaningless
2/n the Virgin (VEC) prize revamped the terms to say winners had to have pathway to giga scale commercial #CDR, but terms remained deeply ambiguous.
On the plus side, VEC helped us raise funds and attention when I was working to found @CarbonEngineer in '09.
3/n On minus side, the VEC prize diverted resources inside @CarbonEngineer, @Climeworks and other competitors.
@richardbranson and team waited until total funding in space was >> $25 m so impact would have been small, then they punted. Result? Not much.
4/n @xprize has fumbled the ball on carbon removal before. The Cosia xprize.org/prizes/carbon prize was partially designed to provide political cover for the Oil/Tar Sands. Focus with focus on fancy products not cost effective carbon mitigation.
5/n result of Cosia @xprize -- some interesting tech but also an over-focus on utilization as a metric rather than cost effective net carbon reductions that stand up to life cycle analysis.
How much did prize hype to protect existing industry boost CCUS?
6/n What next with @elonmusk's $100m? Prizes work well when goal is relevant and easy to measure objectively. The longitude prize was both. So was the original Ansari x-prize. But for carbon removal goal is long run cost and environmental effectiveness at scale.
7/n Much harder to devise sensible prize terms for industrial tech like #CDR. No way to objectively know cost until tech is fully developed at which point prize is too small to be meaningful (the first VEC problem).
One bad result is an political beauty contest between startups
8/n Another bad result is to focus #carbon removal development on criteria that are objectively measurable at small scale but not well aligned with the long-term goals. E.g., an over focus on energy efficiency to exclusion of capital cost or other impacts.
9/n In summary..
We need fast innovation to cut cost and enviro footprint of carbon removal.
2/13 Foley opens with a common ad hominem attack, claiming that folks who argue for SG research do so because they are "unwilling to accept" that the tools to cut emissions are at hand so they want to "counteract climate change *instead of* addressing its underlying causes"
3/13 This attack works by emphasizing the (false) idea that SG is an alternative to rapid decarbonization. It's goal is to make SG research advocates look like defenders of the status quo or even oil companies dupes.
1/5 How to improve models used for solar geoengineering?
New @AGU_Eos paper by the steering committee of the Geoengineering Modeling Consortium (GMRC) What's GMRC? We are a science community consortia anchored at NCAR
3/5 PiG in the GCM? An example, of one of model improvements I happen to be working on. Aerosols or aerosol precursors would most plausibly be released into the stratosphere by aircraft. Observations show that stratospheric plumes are coherent for >10 days.
2/13 This is not personal. Ray, you are an amazing scholar & human. In the early '90s helped me on meridional energy transport. We have enjoyed dinners talking about shared love of the northern wilds. I am jealous of your musical ability, and wish to count you a friend.
3/13 But, Ray, do you truly think our experiment is as bad as if we were helping a crazed dictator get nuclear weapons?
Nuclear weapons threaten to burn us alive without warning. They are machines of death:
Thread #1 debunking solar geoengineering's BS mountain
Search geoengineering & drought, you get's ~0.5 million google hits and 1,696 news articles in Nexis starting with a 1991 Newsweek article.
Must be some facts underneath?
2/7 The '91 Newsweek article reported that US National Academy has endorsed research on solar geoengineering. It mentioned drought as a climate risk and geoengineering as an uncertain and potentially risky way to ameliorate such risks. Other '90s articles have a similar take.
3/7 Yet, most recent articles with "drought & geoengineering" describe drought as a risk of geoengineering rather than climate risk that geoengineering might ameliorate.
This shift must be the result of new science. Right?
1/3 Cheap intermittent solar power can make carbon-neutral hydrocarbons: high-energy fuels that are easy to store and use. My 12 min talk at Royal Society #CodexTalks describes a low-risk fast path to industrial-scale solar-fuels
2/3 Background: Carbon-Neutral Hydrocarbons keith.seas.harvard.edu/publications/c…. Recent work on renewable hydrogen nature.com/articles/s4156…. H2 will win in some markets, but it has many disadvantages as a fuel. The big $$$ is getting to H2, once there, why not go to hydrocarbons with DAC?
3/3 I am *so* proud of @CarbonEngineering, but..
This is NOT about one company. It’s about an energy pathway that could grow to >10% of global primary energy before mid-century, allowing intermittent solar energy to energize heavy transport and other hard-to-decarbonize sectors.