The Gigaton Deep Dive
We need to pull down over ten billion tons (ten gigatons) of carbon every year, just to stop CO2 levels from getting worse.
And there are over a thousand gigatons of CO2 already up in the sky, that will take a thousand years to fall back to earth.
The amounts are hard to picture.
If you filled the National Mall with coal, from the Lincoln Memorial to the Capital Dome, to the height of the Washington Monument, it would be one-tenth of one gigaton.
Give some more thought to the scale of this problem in this deep dive, below.
The Numbers:
4 Billion Tons is approximately the amount of food consumed on earth every year.
4 Billion Tons is approximately the amount of oil pumped out of the earth every year.
8 Billion Tons is approximately the amount of coal burned around the globe every year.
Oil and Coal are mostly carbon, and when they burn, they combine with oxygen to make carbon dioxide (CO2). Even though a single ton of oil might fit in the back of a delivery van, that much oil turns into CO2 that fills the Houston Astrodome.
Fossil fuels burned annually turn into approximately 50 billion tons of CO2 equivalent.
We’ve put around a thousand gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere. It would take around a thousand years for that CO2 to naturally fall back to earth.
According to Hansen, “one watt per meter squared is an enormous forcing to try to overcome. If you wanted to do it by extracting CO2, it’d cost you more than $100 Trillion. It’s not gonna happen.” He cites David Keith for his $100T number.
The Methods
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Healthier forests, peatlands, agriculture, and soils have the potential to capture several tons per year of additional carbon.
It’s essential, but no well-respected scientists seem to say it will be enough.
Learn more, here:
https://nature4climate.org/natures-solutions/natures-pathways/
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Can giant machines capture the tens of gigatons of carbon per year that are needed?
David Keith, who co-founded one of the largest companies doing that work says it’s not feasible at that scale, and would cost over $100T.
The Funding
There has been enormous investment recently in carbon capture technologies. We put that in context.
According to Department of Energy’s Jen Wilcox, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law provides $2.5 billion “to build out the geologic capacity in the United States…. What that means is we expect that we can build out at a minimum of 60 to 65 million tons of CO2 injection per year and all across the United States in regions that aren't oil and gas producers, but they have saline aquifers.” Note that the government at this stage is talking about aiming to capture tens of millions of tons of CO2 - which is far less than 1% of the tens of gigatons of CO2 we would need to pull down every year in order to stop climate change.