Standing up for a Sustainable World最新文献

{"title":"Carbon capture from ambient air: a brake on climate change?","authors":"C. Henry","doi":"10.4337/9781800371781.00050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/9781800371781.00050","url":null,"abstract":"Within the next ten years, it could prove a perilous disaster to go on increasing the stock of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere. Humankind, however, has not yet curbed increasing volumes of emissions, and doesn’t seem determined to do so. How to avoid being squeezed? The only way, which doesn’t itself tinker with essential climate mechanisms – as geoengineering projects might do (Barrett, 2012) – is to capture CO2 from the atmosphere, and then dispose of it in various available ways. Capturing CO2 from air and storing it – direct air capture and storage, or DACS – would be an essential complement to avoiding doom on the planet; a complement, definitely not a substitute for reducing the emissions. Driving DACS costs down is thus worth research and development efforts on par with the Apollo Program, as was already laid down 20 years ago in a visionary paper (Lackner et al., 1999). This is all the more justified as, climate change being a public bad, DACS is a public good,1 for the provision of which you cannot rely on market mechanisms for raising adequate financial resources, even if you can rely on them to organize some form of competition, via reverse auctions, between providers.2 It is often argued that more broadly switching to a sustainable global development trajectory requires an “Apollo Program” of sorts. As long as sustainable development is considered in its globality, Richard Nelson, who along with Kenneth Arrow pioneered the economics of innovation, strongly disagrees: development stems from a broad diversity of decentralized endeavors. Nelson (with Sarewitz), however, also argues that there is one domain of R&D that calls for an Apollo Program, and that is CO2 capture and storage (Sarewitz and Nelson, 2008). Nature itself captures CO2 from ambient air. Silicates of calcium or of magnesium are significantly more reactive with ambient CO2 than are other minerals, the reaction forming stable solid carbonates; hence, the name mineral carbonation. They are found at higher densities in several kinds of rocks, particularly basalt and peridotite (Krevor et al., 2009). Natural weathering of such rocks fosters mineral carbonation. Peridotite is particularly productive; unfortunately, while abundant deep underground, it is relatively rare on or near","PeriodicalId":256332,"journal":{"name":"Standing up for a Sustainable World","volume":"92 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127055737","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}