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Nov 6, 2023Liked by Joachim Klement

Hello,

The only large scale CCS facility I am aware of is the one Occidental Petroleum is setting up.

And whilst I find it great that someone does it, I am still wondering if it should make me nervous that it is a Oil company.

On a side note. Is there any good research on why we shouldn't just simply plant more trees instead of building these artificial CCS facilities?

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I think the evidence on CCS says it hasn't really worked anywhere yet, and will be difficult to scale.

Whereas the evidence re: trees is that there is a lot of mis-use, malarky and corruption involved. Getting credits for trees you fell in 10 years for instance. Or planting non-indigenous trees all over Ireland, to the detriment of biodiversity and political acceptance.

I'm not a dreamy techno-optimist nerd but in light of the nonlinearity of climate change, I say we need to do massive amounts of both, as well as possible, and hope for the best.

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author

We need to do both as was said by Martin before. I have written about the problems with tree-planting (and counting the trees) before: https://klementoninvesting.substack.com/p/we-need-to-talk-about-carbon-credits

As for CCS, all major oil companies have pilot projects at the moment and the stuff is expected to come online at scale by 2030. Current projections for the amount of carbon sequestered are likely to be wildly optimistic, but we won't be able to abandon fossil fuels ever (at least not as long as we want to have cement and most industrial chemicals, all of which are made out of natural gas to start with), so we need to find a way to sequester the carbon produced in industrial facilities. And CCS is essentially our only hope we have in that area.

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I wasn't quite aware of the described cumulative effects. Thank you for pointing them out. I think they are a BFD.

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First: don't forget the 1.5C was altered in 2018 from the original 2015 Paris number of 2C, as emissions were flattening and an alarmist message was at risk of becoming an optimist one.

Second: global warming is in reality regional warming. With Europe, +2C, and the artic, +3,4C, driving the global number. If the new (degrowth) concept of 'climate justice' ie 'what we (the white west) is doing to them ('the people of color outside the west' - i love modern language) through 'our' emissions is the subject, it's not too hard to show that if we follow that 'reasoning', 'we' are doing 'it' to ourselves - mostly. (While the past decades CO2 has caused a boom in plant growth in for instance the Sahel...).

The study in the post:

To accept the outcomes of these kinds of studies (or better: modelling projects with which modern science is rife and which so often only tell us something about a theoritical state) you have to swallow a lot of 'truths' that may very well be assumptions (climate model's outcomes themselves are the result of an abundance of assumptions), which for instance the IPCC itself doesn't accept nor promotes.

The IPCC working group on climate science (#2) is actually quite conservative while the working group on politics, adaptation etc (#3) ie the working group of ideology - which climate has become - is, indeed, highly political: take for instance this summary of its grand visions of 'systemic change' and other language that has the disctinct reak of Marxism. And no wonder, since the working group's proposals are littered with degrowth concepts:

The Political Agenda of the IPCC - by Roger Pielke Jr.

https://bit.ly/42QxGo4

'transformation is the resulting ‘fundamental reorganisation of large-scale socio-economic systems’ (Hölscher et al. 2018). Such a fundamental reorganisation often requires dynamic multi-stage transition processes that change everything from public policies and prevailing technologies to individual lifestyles, and social norms to governance arrangements and institutions of political economy'.

Actually, a keen eye for sustainability has been detected recently (how convenient) in the work of the great man himself. Not in his Bible(s) but in his notes:

Kohei Saito: ‘Marx in the Anthropocene: Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism’

https://bit.ly/3FQWkeC

The IPCC has detected almost no extreme weather related to climate change, for that see page 90 of chapter 12 (titled Climate Change Information for Regional Impact and for Risk Assessment), of the latest IPCC report AR6. (Any idea how many journo's ((don't)) read these reports? They're mostly fed email-summaries directly from scientists...). In a table of extreme weathers on page 90 it shows you what has been detected in yellow, what is increasing in blue, and what is not in white. Most bars are white:

https://bit.ly/452idBO

This...

'1 ton of CO2 emitted in 1990 causes $4 in global cumulative discounted damages by 2020 and an additional $327 in discounted damages through 2100 (2% discount rate)'

...is always tricky. Especially since climate scientists are often highly ideological (thousands of climate studies are pumped out annually based on a technically absolutely impossible climate scenario/pathway RCP/SSP8.5), and they are bad at statistics.

And at logic. Take damage from 'climate change': in Florida since 1990 the amount of 'wealth' that lies in the direct path of hurricanes is now decimals higher (through demographics and QE obviously).

Now, the IPCC does not state there is an increase in Atlantic hurricanes (despite regular excited news items, there is simply no proof). But when a storm DOES hit land of course the damage is much greater than before (also because Americans build rather flimsy houses). This higher than before damage is almost always brought by nitwit journo's and activist scientists as 'proof' of growing risks from climate change.

The same bad science was on show when western media quoted alarmist climate scientists warning that climate 'deaths' (90% of deaths-from-weather are still caused by cold) would become endemic in Europe, and especially in Hungary.

Now what demograpic is most at risk from the heat? The elderly.

Which continent is rapidly aging? Europe.

Which is the quickest aging nation in Europe? Hungary.

Lousy scientists and hapless journo's...

To round off with the brand new IPCC technical head:

Don't overstate 1.5 degrees C threat, new IPCC head says

https://bit.ly/3Qky3nA

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