Big oil helped shape Stanford’s latest climate-research focus
I&#x27;m not sure how mad to be about this. Honestly, at the moment I kinda think it&#x27;s a good thing on balance.<p>I believe climate change is a huge, urgent concern. And I think it would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our risk mitigation portfolio. If fossil fuel companies, out of self-interest, want to support a legitimate research institution doing that, I&#x27;m not sure I should complain.<p>If Stanford starts spouting propaganda that we can procrastinate on getting off of fossil fuels because their carbon removal technology will solve everything, I will definitely condemn them mercilessly. I assume the fossil fuel companies are already spouting such propaganda or funding someone to do so, since they&#x27;ve been spouting anti-climate risk mitigation propaganda for decades, and I am already condemning them mercilessly for that anyway.<p>I actually think carbon removal could spur renewables development because in theory it&#x27;s a flexible sink for spare power. Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few square miles of solar panels, and run it when the sun shines. We could get a lot of demand for solar panels out of this, and that will encourage the further development of commercial scaling up. And the more renewables scale up, the more I think fossil fuels will be squeezed out of existence because they won&#x27;t be able to compete on price.<p>EDIT: I am open to the possibility that this is completely unrealistic and is just another distraction from the fossil fuel industry. But the arguments need to be made on technical grounds by knowledgeable people. Here is an interview by an expert making that argument: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.protocol.com&#x2F;climate&#x2F;carbon-dioxide-removal-cost-target" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.protocol.com&#x2F;climate&#x2F;carbon-dioxide-removal-cost...</a><p>&gt; Yet ambition and momentum may not be enough to reach that milestone, according to Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer with MIT’s Energy Initiative. He’s been studying carbon capture for over 30 years (even writing a book about it in 2018) and is more skeptical given the capital costs to build CDR plants and the enormous amount of energy they need to run. He sat down with Protocol to talk about why he thinks $100 per ton is “pure fantasy.”<p>By the way, I really liked this quote, and I wish all the &quot;we just need to&quot;-ers would read it:<p>&gt; When people think things are too easy, they won’t address the hard decisions, even though those hard decisions may end up with a better solution. At this point, I don’t know if liming the ocean is a great idea or not, but it has a lot of potential, and we have to look at things like that if we want to get to net zero. And people say capturing carbon dioxide from the air for $100 per ton will get us to net zero. But if it’s a fantasy, it’s not going to get us there.