Colorado River deadline passes with no deal on voluntary water cuts
KEY POINTS
- The seven states that rely on the drought-stricken Colorado River failed to meet a Jan. 31 federal deadline to strike a deal on voluntarily cutting their water use.
- After negotiations reached a standstill, six of the seven states — Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming — submitted a “consensus-based modeling alternative.”
And also much natural gas comes out of the ground with a lot of CO2 in it and has to be removed to be saleable. In fact, there are places you can drill in Texas where you get almost pure CO2 and when people started doing EOR with CO2 that is where they got the CO2.
You seem to assume that the amount of carbon pushed down is roughly identical to the amount of additional carbon brought up. Is that just a hopeful symmetry reflex or do you know any numbers? (I don't)
Trees are a temporary store of carbon. When they die and rot, the carbon is re-released. (Turning them into building materials makes this overall process take longer, of course.)
A properly managed newly grown forest will continue to be net-carbon-negative for at least 4-5 decades or more, and after that net-zero if not burned or reduced in size.
We need to sequester large amounts of carbon in the next two decades to avoid falling off the cliff of greater than 2 or 2.5 degree warming.
Ergo, planting well-thought out forests in large quantities, which has no known downsides, and large upsides is one of the actions we must do.
Not to mention that trees have excellent effects on local climate, on local pollution, on local human health, which are all great reasons besides carbon capture for planting more trees.
This entire topic isn't about direct air capture (which I consider mockworthy myself, what if we had a field of science studying self-repairing, self-replicating capture devices - oh wait, botany!) but about burn site sequestration which isn't remotely as bad (but still bad I think: hydrocarbon leftovers have a long term storage problem just as bad as nuclear, it's just happens to be even better at hiding in plain sight)
Run carbon capture off renewables. Use oil for gas for vehicles.
We don't care if carbon capture stops at midnight or doesn't run on a still day. As long as the average yearly carbon capture is slightly greater than carbon production.
Millions of vehicles could still be used and not replaced. We still have real and meaningful issues with electric vehicles that may not be resolvable. Battery chemistry is extremely reliant on very gnarly chemicals with their own environment issues.
About 19.64 pounds of carbon dioxide (CO2) are produced from burning a gallon of gasoline that does not contain ethanol. About 22.38 pounds of CO2 are produced by burning a gallon of diesel fuel.
Just think of the numbers involved to scale this to the planetary usage of fossil fuels.
I suspect it's the combination of the defensive medicine effect (if something does go wrong, no one wants to be the one to take responsibility for having said no to a system that someone else will argue (true or not) that that system could have stopped the event), the belief that the security theater aspect makes customers feel safer, the belief that more data and whiz-bang technology is always better, and the decision makers don't have the technical expertise to understand that it is not getting them much in terms of increased security, and they can always make some money on the side by selling the data that they collect.
