I don’t think that’s currently possible, directly, for reals.
You can, however, sequester carbon directly from the atmosphere for short terms (geologically speaking - very long terms when compared to individual human lives). Trees do it pretty good, as do other processes. We could use biofuels or solar energy to drive a carbon sequestering process - essentially, making coal - if we have the will to spend tax dollars on it. It’s not going to be directly profitable so the free enterprise system won’t fund it. Much like other social programs hated by many…
What makes you think @falcor is in here?
Wait, is he right behind me? <checks mirror>
food2gas* brings an own set of issues, it will be impossible to find The One Solution without drawbacks
* not only the literal meaning but also the reallocation of cultivable land. sugar cane monocultures in Brasil are an example for the effects of using plants as fuel
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I know that this is both somewhat off-topic and really long-term, pie-in-the-sky idealism that doesn’t actually help with the nitty-gritty details of “transitioning to a power source that won’t kill the planet, without killing people”…
but I personally hope that, when the materials science sector gets up to the point of being able to make long-chain fullerened graphene (aka carbon nanotubes) for use in construction, we can just use the carbon in the atmosphere that we’ve been pumping there for the last several generations; draw it down and literally sequester it in our construction (and that the resulting megastructures will enable us to build upwards instead of outwards for our cities).
Tangent over 
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A few things:
- The link I provided was just to give an idea of the scale, not because I’m fully committed to that guy’s ideas. It’s already come up that I’m not especially pro-nuclear. I think it’s roughly correct in terms of the scale of the problem, though, and his numbers can be used to inform an analysis of what’s possible with biofuels even if he doesn’t address them directly.
- Again:
No; war, famine, pestilence, and drought are inevitable (all these things happen at a certain rate now under the fossil fuel regime). The question is how to minimize them. Biofuels may be part of the answer, but again I am sincerely skeptical that they can be produced at the scale needed. The universe never promised us that we would be able to continue at our current standard of living indefinitely. Just because we really want some combination of biofuels and/or nuclear to make up the shortfall doesn’t mean it’s really possible. Maybe even if we use biofuels we have to give up on consumer air travel. Maybe we have to go back to using wind for overseas shipping. Maybe we have to give up on having electricity piped into our homes.
3) [quote=“Medievalist, post:138, topic:85183”]
But we could instead start spending some minor fraction of the amount of tax money we currently spend subsidizing polluters
[/quote]
Oil companies are not really subsidized, or rather their subsidies are much less than the taxes they pay. It seems unlikely to me that a biofuel industry could support the tax rate that the fossil fuel industry supports. This is not a nail in the coffin type of argument – just a caution that there are still downsides to the biofuel idea.
4) EROEI analysis isn’t everything, but I think it’s worth looking at. What’s a typical EROEI for the types of biofuels you’re talking about? If it compares favorably to fossil fuels, why isn’t it already in use? According to what I can find (e.g. Energy return on investment - Wikipedia), the EROEI is quite low, meaning a biofuel industry would be much less productive than the fossil fuel industry. This means a great deal more of the total economic output of the world would have to be devoted to energy under a biofuels regime than is currently the case under the fossil fuels regime. But this is the same as saying that biofuels are a great deal more expensive to produce! Assuming this is correct, we necessarily have to give some stuff up to switch from fossil fuels to biofuels, which is really all I’m saying: we need to voluntarily give up some forms of energy use because it will not be as easy to produce energy in the future. Importantly, if this is the case, then your “four horsemen” scenario also applies to a switch to biofuels – the death rate will increase if you devote 20% more of global output to energy production than is currently the case (because this will have knock-on effects that include reduced healthcare for the elderly, diabetics, etc.).
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As usual my viewpoint is somewhat USA centric.
In the United States we pay people not to grow food, using tax dollars to artificially inflate the price of foodstuffs. This is a vast, agriculturally rich, reasonably sparsely populated nation with a highly evolved industrial and technological base.
And many of the new biofuel methods being developed intend to use land that isn’t viable for food crops (which is why Australia and China are also very interested.)
You’re still right, of course. In many other countries, land is too scarce for current generations of biofuels. They’ll have to wait until we optimize the technologies here where land is plentiful.
Like Queen Victoria, I am not interested in the possibilities of defeat. 
But obviously people will continue to die; I’m talking about taking actions that avoid unnecessary exponential increases in such problems. I have cut my own fossil fuel use by about two thirds while improving my family’s quality of life - if I had other people working with me and aligning their goals with mine, the results would be even better.
Oil companies are the beneficiaries of at least 100 years of government funded research and development, not to mention military contracts, and even today they receive titanic subsidies.
For example: mail delivery. The government has the resources to completely eliminate the use of fossil fuels at the post office. (In fact the post office has used electric vehicles since 1899, and even now about 20% of their fleet is electric.) But they choose not to, instead spending their efforts doing other, less important things - like figuring out how to rape the pensions out of the disabled military vets that staff the back office. They already replace the vehicles regularly, and electric vehicles are cheaper to operate, more reliable, and last longer so using gas vehicles is against the best interests of the public, even when you don’t factor in pollution and noise. It’s a subsidy.
I could go on in this vein for hours. Nearly everything the government does with gasoline and diesel fuel could be done without it - and for the most part, it once was. And although the government could obtain fuel at production cost, it doesn’t - it’s a money funnel feeding oil producers, a subsidy.
It just goes on and on. You can only say fossil fuels aren’t subsidized if you ignore all the huge ongoing benefits of past subsidies and all the unnecessary favoring of dirty solutions to large scale problems like mail delivery and government office heating. I don’t think that’s legitimate - it’s using semantics to hide a fundamental truth, which is that our governments send money to fossil fuel producers when they don’t actually have to.
Going on from there, what about the externalized costs of burning fossil fuels? If I have to pay high medical bills because I work in a gas station, or if an old lady on Medicare gets lung cancer from auto emissions, isn’t that something very similar to a subsidy? The fuel producer is being allowed to pass off a cost of their doing business invisibly to others. The semantic distinction between this and a tax-funded subsidy is real, but not really important. The money still flows from one wallet to another the same way.
Energy Returned on Energy Invested. Fascinating, key factor! I’ve been tracking it for decades. There is a tremendous amount of propaganda and misinformation surrounding this, but if we discount that fake stuff (like ethanol from food crops, and hydrogen) you find that EROEI is getting better and better for pretty much all fossil alternatives, including solar and (especially) biofuels, while the EROEI is actually dropping for petroleum.
It’s hard to judge accurately, though, since you can find a chart or graph that says anything you want to hear.
Anyway, I don’t want to discourage wind or PV power sources, it’s just that for my nation, there truly is no better path forward than biofuels; the Cheney “all of the above” Energy Plan that Obama kept and Clinton intends to keep (it’s right there in the platform, after all) is a recipe for human extinction.
Also, it needs to be translated into Chinese.
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Question how much fuel can remake from microbe digestion of effulent. Also would we have much in the way of energy savings if we used a closed cycle for water so we don’t end up pumping it hundreds of miles.
Oh and by the way this website might help
https://www.withouthotair.com
And while this doesn’t yet seem commercially viable it could solve a lot of the problems with regards to energy storage and distribution.
That’s why I relayed it in the “All the Likes” thread.
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You’ve put some great comments out on this thread Medievalist…but I think you may be understating those “political and social” restrictions. If all of this was free, or at least cheaper than what we now have, we’d be doing it already.
If we can wait until the cost is so low that politicians and marketers can’t ignore it any longer, I guess we’ll be okay.
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Can you be a little more specific about the definition of “voluntary” as you are using the word in this thread?
For example, the OED (electronic version, 2d ed.) defines it as “Performed or done of one’s own free will, impulse, or choice; not constrained, prompted, or suggested by another.” Is that the sense you had in mind?
So if someone suggests them, voluntary choices aren’t voluntary? What?
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It’s just one dictionary definition among many. I’m just asking wysinwyg to explain what s/he means by “voluntary”.
Edit:
Let me clarify, “Voluntary reduction of energy usage” means to me that I, as a citizen of the USA (or France, or New Zealand, or Hungary, or Botswana, or Ecuador, or…) get to decide whether I want to reduce my energy usage, and if so, how much. Now if that’s what wysinwyg means, we are in agreement.
But I just have this sneaky suspicion that what s/he means by “voluntary” might turn out to be at the individual level something that I would define as “compulsory”. I hope to be proved wrong.
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I have to fit in the format, so some eliding of detail is necessary. I’m already posting lots of tldr; walls o’ text!
But you asked… here’s one political/social issue. I can give you more if you want!
The EPA says gasoline lawnmowers produce as much toxic air pollution in one hour of operation as a car produces over a 100 mile trip. We’ll ignore the oil and noise issues, and focus on the enormous health costs of lawnmower air pollution.
Electric lawnmower total cost of ownership is lower than gas mowers over time. This is not just because of the higher durability, reliability and lower maintenance requirements of corded mowers - it’s true of battery mowers, too. It was about 50 cents an acre versus $2.50 an acre the last time I checked, probably even better now.
The upfront cost of an electric lawnmower is much higher than a gas one. This is primarily because of the economies of scale of the existing production facilities - mostly because we buy more, they are cheaper. The bigger the mower, the worse the difference in cost - riding mowers are extremely costly in electric, and since they are necessarily battery driven, they have periodic high battery replacement cost.
Unfortunately, there is no federally regulated system of mortgages and insurance for lawnmowers. Thanks to Congress, you can buy a house and pay out the same amount of money you’d pay in rent, instead of paying the whole cost up front. In the end you’ll pay more than that lump sum, but if you do it right your final cost will be far lower than paying rent for 30 years.
If our society valued breathable air like we value home ownership the politicians would institute an electric mower finance and insurance program overnight. Assuming no “favored dealers” provisions in the program, market competition will continue to drop the up front price of electric mowers, but the loss of economies of scale would raise the price of gas mowers, and in twenty years our children wouldn’t need the federal sponsorship any more.
So why aren’t we doing this? It would be cheaper and better for everyone except oil barons and gasoline mower producers, so why not? It’d save health care dollars, particularly in medicare, and make people happy, except irrational people who hate environmentalism and anything labeled “Green”.
And there’s your answer, in two parts, political and social.
The previously mentioned oil barons and gasoline mower producers are also known as political contributors, and their stockholders sit in nearly every seat in congress.
And the previously mentioned people who hate anything labeled “Green” are the vast numbers of Americans who are convinced that “environmentalists” are bad people. Green equates to dirty, impractical hippy in their minds- you can see it even here at bOINGbOING again and again, where we’re actually pretty tolerant of dirty hippies. Some people here even believe, quite honestly, that we don’t have safe nuclear power because of environmentalists. These counterfactual beliefs are part of people’s tribal identities, tied up with their sense of patriotism and self, and since they have no logical basis they are extremely difficult to counter.
Enfin, these restrictions exist in the human mind rather than in technology or economics.
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Or we could ditch loud/painful, wasteful, generally useless lawnmowers, and the laws that mandate them.
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In my area we have ticks that carry Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever and Lyme Disease (two different kinds of ticks). The only effective means of control I’ve found are frequent mowing or guinea fowl… and if you think lawnmowers are loud, painful and useless, you probably haven’t met a guinea fowl! 
Ugly buggers just never shut up, and while they can apparently stand up to fox and cats the coyotes will take them.
Nonetheless I agree with you about the laws! From local lawnmower regulations all the way up to the federal Price-Anderson Act, many of our laws are based on obsolete values and mistaken ideas.
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Just the way the Republicans like them! 
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Uh, I’m pretty sure getting to a CO2 neutral society does not necessitate any of the above strictures. (Several countries, with special energy resources, are already or nearly there.) But it certainly is what the conservatives use to scare anyone who even suggests dealing with climate change. You know, why even make small adjustments, when it inevitably leads to world government and atheism?
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I’ve been hammered with backup beepers, which are too loud for me to measure, and then lawnmowers, leafblowers, etc., which have been 50 to 75 decibels from in here, all morning.
The things are so loud that even with my best ear protection, I can’t walk if I’m near them, and the building shakes when it’s too near them. The cut grass gets bagged too.
Lyme was high on the list of possible causes of my symptoms; after the antibody test, it’s still not ruled out. So I understand your concerns about ticks, but fuck this pain.
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