[Discussion] Climate Change

This thread is just to post interesting news, thoughts, opinions about climate change.

Prederick wrote:

Isn't part of the issue that it's genuinely kind of insane and not-hugely-sustainable to have a city as large as and with the water demands of Los Angeles where it is?

EDIT: Also, y'know, almonds.

It's actually all about the almonds.

Agriculture consumes 80% of water in California. LA and San Francisco combined use far less water than it takes to grow almonds alone.

The underlying issue is that California--like most of the West--has crazy water rights that date back to the 1800s. Those rights allow farmers to use as much water as they want and pay practically nothing for it.

California's cities, on the other hand, have to pay a lot for their water--about double the national average. Unsurprisingly, this has led to California's cities becoming more and more efficient in their water use. Los Angeles uses less water today than it did in 1970 when there was over million fewer people living in the city.

California's farmers haven't had to become more efficient with their water use. They've even done incredibly environmentally stupid things like expand their production of crops that require a metric asston of water to grow while the state was in a multi-year drought. It was just adding insult to injury to export those crops.

And they insist that building dams is the solution. And this is from people who have ruined aquifers by trying to out drill their neighbors to get to the deeper water first.
Which is why I hold out hope that the advances in splitting hydrogen from sea water could make coastal cities more independent by providing clean energy generators and water. If it is scalable and efficient enough, the cities may be able to sell water to the inland farms.

Nearly 75% of US coal plants uneconomic compared to local wind, solar
*seems to fit here because of the climate change implications.

Nearly three-quarters of existing U.S. coal plants are more expensive to run than building new solar and wind generation, according to a report from Energy Innovation, an organization with a mission to accelerate progress in clean energy.

Local wind and solar could take the place of 211 GW, or 74%, of existing coal-fired generation with immediate savings to customers, concluded the report, released March 25. That figure climbs to 246 GW, or 86%, by 2025 as the coal fleet continues to age and renewable energy undercuts the fuel on costs.

"Coal's remaining rationale was that it was cheap if externalities weren't included, but even that rationale is vanishing," the report said.

Renewable energy generation doubled between 2008 and 2018, the U.S. Energy Information Administration recently noted. Nearly 90% of the increase in U.S. renewable electricity generation has come from wind and solar. Meanwhile, U.S. coal-fired power plants have continued to retire as utilities avoid building any new coal-fired capacity.

farley3k wrote:

Nearly 75% of US coal plants uneconomic compared to local wind, solar
*seems to fit here because of the climate change implications.

Nearly three-quarters of existing U.S. coal plants are more expensive to run than building new solar and wind generation, according to a report from Energy Innovation, an organization with a mission to accelerate progress in clean energy.

Local wind and solar could take the place of 211 GW, or 74%, of existing coal-fired generation with immediate savings to customers, concluded the report, released March 25. That figure climbs to 246 GW, or 86%, by 2025 as the coal fleet continues to age and renewable energy undercuts the fuel on costs.

"Coal's remaining rationale was that it was cheap if externalities weren't included, but even that rationale is vanishing," the report said.

Renewable energy generation doubled between 2008 and 2018, the U.S. Energy Information Administration recently noted. Nearly 90% of the increase in U.S. renewable electricity generation has come from wind and solar. Meanwhile, U.S. coal-fired power plants have continued to retire as utilities avoid building any new coal-fired capacity.

And that is with the PTC phased out and the ITC down to 10%; those will have been the respective tax breaks for wind and solar in the US.

Prederick wrote:

Isn't part of the issue that it's genuinely kind of insane and not-hugely-sustainable to have a city as large as and with the water demands of Los Angeles where it is?

EDIT: Also, y'know, almonds.

This is a super common misconception, but California actually has a super great water supply that is perfect for agricultural use, that sounds sarcastic, but it's not. That said, it's ALSO true that we've broken incentives and have bad regulations that have led to activities like overusing aquifers, that doesn't change the fact that (at least a pre-Climate Change) California is about as perfect for agriculture as you could ask for.

Let's spin the question around on it's head. What other region in America could go practically without rain for 7 years and still produce water-intensive crops throughout that time? I'm guessing it's close to zero regions. Stop the rain in Illinois and I don't see it exporting corn 2 years later, let alone 7.

Like Kazar stated, the California coast is not a desert, it's a Mediterranean zone (albeit a little on the lower end of that zone for rainfall). So right off the bat think Greece, olives, grapes, etc, etc, we're not talking about a desert, we've got a lot of food that grows well in those regions. But here is the great part, it's got deserts right next door. Eastern California? Desert. Arizona, Nevada, Utah? All deserts. Those places are all deserts because the mountains in California steal their water. They then pack it all up in mountain lakes and (especially) millions of square miles of snowpack that slowly release the water, acting like a natural system of reservoirs that dwarfs anything made by man. That's crucial because most of the time excess precipitation can't be stored for later, but the mountains mean that there are a lot of lakes and natural systems in between the source and the users to store water, and if the excess precipitation comes down as snow that's an even better buffer.

farley3k wrote:

Nearly 75% of US coal plants uneconomic compared to local wind, solar
*seems to fit here because of the climate change implications.

In the long run it makes sense. Once you have the wind turbines and solar arrays setup, other then the cost of maintenance it is free energy. With coal, you have to mine it, transport it and then burn it, with each part of the line needing it's own maintenance. I think the main reason it was cheaper is that solar and wind was a relatively new technology so it hadn't been innovated on yet. Now that we have decades of research and practical use, it only makes sense that it would become cheaper.

farley3k wrote:

Nearly 75% of US coal plants uneconomic compared to local wind, solar
*seems to fit here because of the climate change implications.

The authors also acknowledged that the report does not include an analysis of grid impacts and alternative sources of reliability services that would be necessary to shut the plants down in practice.

That's all you really need to know about that study. This sort of pie-in-the-sky "analysis" does not help.

Yonder wrote:
Prederick wrote:

Isn't part of the issue that it's genuinely kind of insane and not-hugely-sustainable to have a city as large as and with the water demands of Los Angeles where it is?

EDIT: Also, y'know, almonds.

This is a super common misconception, but California actually has a super great water supply that is perfect for agricultural use, that sounds sarcastic, but it's not. That said, it's ALSO true that we've broken incentives and have bad regulations that have led to activities like overusing aquifers, that doesn't change the fact that (at least a pre-Climate Change) California is about as perfect for agriculture as you could ask for.

Let's spin the question around on it's head. What other region in America could go practically without rain for 7 years and still produce water-intensive crops throughout that time? I'm guessing it's close to zero regions. Stop the rain in Illinois and I don't see it exporting corn 2 years later, let alone 7.

Like Kazar stated, the California coast is not a desert, it's a Mediterranean zone (albeit a little on the lower end of that zone for rainfall). So right off the bat think Greece, olives, grapes, etc, etc, we're not talking about a desert, we've got a lot of food that grows well in those regions. But here is the great part, it's got deserts right next door. Eastern California? Desert. Arizona, Nevada, Utah? All deserts. Those places are all deserts because the mountains in California steal their water. They then pack it all up in mountain lakes and (especially) millions of square miles of snowpack that slowly release the water, acting like a natural system of reservoirs that dwarfs anything made by man. That's crucial because most of the time excess precipitation can't be stored for later, but the mountains mean that there are a lot of lakes and natural systems in between the source and the users to store water, and if the excess precipitation comes down as snow that's an even better buffer.

I've lived in Southern California (Anaheim Hills, mid to late 1980s), and nearly everyone thought of it as a desert back then too. Your explanation of why it's not is the best I've read. Thank you, Yonder.

Aetius wrote:
farley3k wrote:

Nearly 75% of US coal plants uneconomic compared to local wind, solar
*seems to fit here because of the climate change implications.

The authors also acknowledged that the report does not include an analysis of grid impacts and alternative sources of reliability services that would be necessary to shut the plants down in practice.

That's all you really need to know about that study. This sort of pie-in-the-sky "analysis" does not help.

It does help because the authors made clear that "the purpose of this report is to act as a conversation primer for stakeholders and policymakers where the math points to cheaper options that could replace coal plants at a savings to customers."

It's a classic policy white paper whose sole purpose is to arm people and groups pushing for cleaner and renewable energy with information that can challenge the narratives of utilities and the coal lobby.

I mean didn't you think it odd that the analysis focused on the cost effectiveness of renewables within a 35-mile radius of existing coal plants?

That's not an environmental thing. That's a jobs thing. That's a signal to politicians that their local dirty coal-fired plant can be replaced with cleaner alternatives and they won't have to take the political heat for people losing their jobs because there'll be all these new clean energy jobs that just so happen to be in commuting distance of the old power plant.

And it's really not as "pie-in-the-sky" as you make it out. There's a big ass push right now in Colorado to switch to carbon-free energy sources over the next several decades. The state's largest utility, Xcel Energy (who announced plans to be carbon-free by 2050), put out an RFP for new generation capacity in 2017 and received 430 proposals, over 80% of which were renewables or some combination of renewables plus storage. And those proposals were far cheaper than expected.

It should be of no surprise that the "Coal Cost Cross-Over" report included a entire section about Colorado and made specific points about how state policy makers can sell the conversion from coal to renewable energy production.

Aetius wrote:
farley3k wrote:

Nearly 75% of US coal plants uneconomic compared to local wind, solar
*seems to fit here because of the climate change implications.

The authors also acknowledged that the report does not include an analysis of grid impacts and alternative sources of reliability services that would be necessary to shut the plants down in practice.

That's all you really need to know about that study. This sort of pie-in-the-sky "analysis" does not help.

In all fairness grid impacts and reliability services (e.g. storage) are starting to go through some regulatory flux. Ultimately neither will offset the LCOE for coal being out of whack high compared to many alternatives.

As for impacts to the grid DERs will have a much more substantive effect. And as for storage utilities are working on the various state regulators to change the way they are considered so their roll a replacement capacity and not just a back up system is recognized.

OG_slinger wrote:

It's a classic policy white paper whose sole purpose is to arm people and groups pushing for cleaner and renewable energy with information that can challenge the narratives of utilities and the coal lobby.

Then it does a poor job, because it doesn't consider all the costs involved - and the costs they didn't consider are substantial, probably moreso than the power generation. If someone tried to use this report make an actual argument for switching over to renewables, they'd look foolish.

I mean didn't you think it odd that the analysis focused on the cost effectiveness of renewables within a 35-mile radius of existing coal plants?

Not at all, because that part actually makes sense. The last thing you need when switching to renewables is to add on the cost of expanding the grid to connect your new power sources.

That's a signal to politicians that their local dirty coal-fired plant can be replaced with cleaner alternatives and they won't have to take the political heat for people losing their jobs because there'll be all these new clean energy jobs that just so happen to be in commuting distance of the old power plant.

Here's the problem - they can't, at least not for the cost this paper discusses. Not even close, in fact. That's why it will be ignored by policy makers, and anyone who tries to use it to influence policy will only damage their own credibility.

The economic case for renewables (and nuclear) is very, very easy to make, and getting easier every year. You don't have to be disingenuous or ignore critical factors.

Aetius wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:

It's a classic policy white paper whose sole purpose is to arm people and groups pushing for cleaner and renewable energy with information that can challenge the narratives of utilities and the coal lobby.

Then it does a poor job, because it doesn't consider all the costs involved - and the costs they didn't consider are substantial, probably moreso than the power generation. If someone tried to use this report make an actual argument for switching over to renewables, they'd look foolish.

I mean didn't you think it odd that the analysis focused on the cost effectiveness of renewables within a 35-mile radius of existing coal plants?

Not at all, because that part actually makes sense. The last thing you need when switching to renewables is to add on the cost of expanding the grid to connect your new power sources.

That's a signal to politicians that their local dirty coal-fired plant can be replaced with cleaner alternatives and they won't have to take the political heat for people losing their jobs because there'll be all these new clean energy jobs that just so happen to be in commuting distance of the old power plant.

Here's the problem - they can't, at least not for the cost this paper discusses. Not even close, in fact. That's why it will be ignored by policy makers, and anyone who tries to use it to influence policy will only damage their own credibility.

The economic case for renewables (and nuclear) is very, very easy to make, and getting easier every year. You don't have to be disingenuous or ignore critical factors.

Yes, because the one thing we’ve learned since 2016 is that being disingenuous or ignoring facts and critical information never works.

And it's not like coal is really that cheap, they just happen to ignore all the costs they don't want to talk about. Like how much does it cost to lower the CO2 level on a global scale.

Yonder wrote:

I did the math awhile ago and large shipping vessels require waaaaay more power than filling their surface to the brim with solar panels would ever generate, similar to how you could never run a pickup truck by putting a solar panel over the bed.

As of last September, there were three commercial testbed ships operating with rotor sails. They are hoped to decrease fuel usage initially by 10% with just one or two on a large vessel, but if these are successful, they will come into much wider use in the next ten years. Several companies are making them now, the most significant of which seems to be Norsepower.

New Immersive Mixed Reality

IMAGE(https://media.boingboing.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/1433cbCOMIC-who-acknowledges-climate-change.jpg)

Shot

Chaser:

IMAGE(https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D3ysg-DUcAEcUgV.jpg)

Honest to God, being this willfully stupid has to be so freeing. Like, just say something moronic, and then double down on it with something even more idiotically inaccurate because partisanship and also LOL.

This is the freest man that has ever lived.

He has a bachelor's of electrical engineering and a master's of mechanical engineering from MIT...

OG_slinger wrote:

He has a bachelor's of electrical engineering and a master's of mechanical engineering from MIT...

High INT, low WIS?

Tanglebones wrote:

High INT, low WIS?

Yup. And based on the video he either has low CHA as well or he rolled a 1 on the Persuasion check.

OG_slinger wrote:

He has a bachelor's

BUT I'LL BET HE'S MARRIED WHAT A FRAUD

Prederick wrote:

Thomas Massie being a dumb

A day later, and he's still digging his heels in on it on Twitter. Weirdly, it's probably the right call, the worst thing he could do among his supporters is admit that he was wrong.

Instead, double and triple down, and at some point in the future probably just say in an interview that he was just trolling to trigger the libs.

Prederick wrote:
Prederick wrote:

Thomas Massie being a dumb

A day later, and he's still digging his heels in on it on Twitter. Weirdly, it's probably the right call, the worst thing he could do among his supporters is admit that he was wrong.

Instead, double and triple down, and at some point in the future probably just say in an interview that he was just trolling to trigger the libs.

MasterCard should do a commercial featuring the responses in that thread.

I don't know if I posted this story before, but I remember seeing it and thinking it was good.

Far-Right Climate Denial Is Scary. Far-Right Climate Acceptance Might Be Scarier

Mostly because I can imagine the abovementioned Rep. pivoting, without a hint of shame, from "It's not real" to "it is real and it will take drastic measures to secure our borders from climate refugees".

For now, much of the global far right does not believe in the dire effects of climate change. But there’s reason to think those effects are already making people believe in the far right. Some scholars argue that climate played a pivotal role in triggering the Syrian civil war — and thus, much of the migrant crisis that fueled the resurgence of right-wing nationalism in much of Europe. Even if that thesis is wrong, there is no question that climate change will condemn far more people to statelessness than events in Syria have. It isn’t hard to imagine how the climate migrants’ losses could become the nationalist right’s gains.

Hungarian president János Áder, an ally of far-right prime minister Viktor Orbán, recently called for more aggressive efforts to combat climate change because worsening ecological conditions will “trigger migration.” Given the Orbán government’s fundamental opposition to mass immigration — and the ostensible popularity of such opposition within Hungary — Áder’s acceptance of the link between the climate and migratory pressures doesn’t just function as an argument for reducing carbon emissions. It also serves as one for empowering border enforcement hardliners. After all, if you accept the climate science, then this migration problem is only going to get worse — which means that only unsentimental nationalists can be trusted to protect our people from the huddled masses to come.

Beyond the issue of immigration, there is a significant amount of political science research positing a correlation between material abundance and liberal pluralism. Such research suggests that in circumstances of scarcity, people might naturally gravitate toward more conformist and authoritarian attitudes and social structures. A nasty, brutish, and hot world — routinely upended by massive storms and agricultural failures — may be one in which mass publics are less tolerant of social difference, and more eager to submit to a political leviathan.

Anyway, I thought of that article after seeing this one this evening:

Climate Chaos Is Coming — and the Pinkertons Are Ready: As they see it, global warming stands to make corporate security as high-stakes in the 21st century as it was in the 19th

Even if the Pinkertons couldn’t predict the specific risks of the future, they had a general sense of what it might look like — and what opportunities they might avail themselves of as it materialized. According to the World Bank, by 2050 some 140 million people may be displaced by sea-level rise and extreme weather, driving escalations in crime, political unrest and resource conflict. Even if the most conservative predictions about our climate future prove overstated, a 1.5-degree Celsius rise in temperature during the next century will almost certainly provoke chaos, in what experts call climate change’s “threat multiplier”: Displacement begets desperation begets disorder. Reading these projections from the relative comforts of the C-suite, it wasn’t difficult to see why a company might consider enhancing its security protocols.

For Pinkerton, the bet is twofold: first, that there’s no real material difference between climate change and any other conflict — as the world grows more predictably dangerous, tactical know-how will simply be more in demand than ever. And second, that by adding data analytics, Pinkerton stands to compete more directly with traditional consulting firms like Deloitte, which offer pre- and postdisaster services (supply-chain monitoring, damage documentation, etc.), but which cannot, say, dispatch a helicopter full of armed guards to Guatemala in an afternoon. In theory, Pinkerton can do both — a fully militarized managerial class at corporate disposal.

Later, after Paz Larach took his turn on the range — during which he emptied a Galil ACE assault rifle into a human-shaped cardboard cutout, then quickly drew his nine-millimeter, grouping four shots in the chest-cavity bull’s-eye — he offered the example of Hurricane Maria. On the day the Category 4 hurricane made landfall in Puerto Rico in 2017, he received more than 30 calls from American businesses and multinationals. He wouldn’t go into detail but explained that many chief executives felt blind to the situation and effectively tendered a blank check if Pinkerton could provide security. Over the next few days, as the company deployed hundreds of agents to the island, some of them, Paz Larach claimed, reported seeing firearms brandished at gas stations. “We had to escort the cargo with real agents, have cars chase the main truck,” he said. “Those who did not have protection were having their cargo hijacked.”

Aware that he might end up sounding vampiric, Paz Larach hesitated, then eventually confessed what he’d wanted to say in the first place: The future looked pretty good for Pinkerton.

There are a few more articles on the eventual impact of climate change in the NYT Magazine this week. I enjoyed this one.

As a young professor on a sabbatical in Vienna in the mid-1970s, Nordhaus happened to share an office with an environmental researcher, who helped spark his interest in the emerging issue. While there, Nordhaus came up with the target, now famous, of holding global warming to two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. He chose the target, as he recently explained to me, because he believed that the earth has experienced similar fluctuations before and that humans had tolerated them.

The Nobel was a tribute to the originality and influence of his work developing economic models that help people think about how to slow climate change. It also seemed to be a cri de coeur from the Swedish academics who choose the economics laureates: Climate change is a threat like no other. Fatal heat waves, droughts, wildfires and severe hurricanes are all becoming more common, and they are almost certain to accelerate. Avoiding horrific damage, as a United Nations panel of scientists recently concluded, will require changes in human behavior that have “no documented historic precedent.”

In his speech, Nordhaus explained that people use too much dirty energy because they don’t have to pay the true costs it imposes on the world: pollution-related health problems in the short term and climate change in the long term. Economists refer to these costs as externalities, because they are not naturally part of the market system. “We have a climate problem,” Nordhaus said, “because markets fail, and fail badly, in the energy sector.” The only solution, he argued, was for governments to raise the price of emissions.

Economists and other policy experts have long focused on this idea of carbon pricing. It can take the form of a carbon tax, as Nordhaus prefers. Or the pricing can be embedded in a system of permits known as cap-and-trade, as President Barack Obama and other Democrats proposed in their 2009 bill to address climate change. Either way, the underlying concept is simple. When a product becomes more expensive, people use less of it. Carbon pricing is an elegant mechanism by which market economics can work on behalf of the climate rather than against it.

But if the idea’s straightforwardness is its great economic advantage, it has also proved to be its political flaw. Energy, for utilities and transportation, is a major cost of living. And across the industrialized world, the middle class and the poor have been struggling with slow income growth. As Nordhaus acknowledged in his speech, curbing dirty energy by raising its price “may be good for nature, but it’s not actually all that attractive to voters to reduce their income.”

The timing of Nordhaus’s Nobel Prize highlighted this political problem. While he was onstage, demonstrators in France were marching against gas-tax increases in raucous protests — the so-called yellow-vest movement — that shut down the Louvre and the Eiffel Tower. This is “the ultimate challenge” that Nordhaus was describing. Climate change may be an existential crisis, but in their day-to-day lives, many people are more worried about the problems created by the most obvious solution than by climate change itself.

Which helps explain why climate activists have recently begun to change their political strategy. The cherished idea of economists, carbon pricing, is losing favor and being supplanted by ideas that seek to invert the political logic. Rather than broadcast the necessary sacrifices, as taxes and cap-and-trade schemes do, the alternatives try to play them down and instead emphasize the benefits of less pollution. These alternatives — like clean-energy mandates and subsidies — are less efficient than carbon pricing, as skeptics like Nordhaus point out. They don’t harness market forces to the same degree, and they don’t necessarily affect the entire economy. But they still have the potential to make a real difference, and in some places, like California, they already have. The question is whether any policy is both big enough to matter and popular enough to happen.

If you want to watch a Midwest progressive turn hardline conservative, ask them how willing they are to ship all the water from the Great Lakes to the southwest.

Edit: full disclosure: I live ten miles from Lake Michigan and rely on it for my livelihood. If trump had pushed for a border wall between me and Texas, I would have supported it, and part of my reasoning is my fear of water refugees. the next wars will be over water and the Great Lakes region could soon be under siege.

This Is How Human Extinction Could Play Out

could, in other words, do my best to scare you silly. I’m not opposed on principle — changing something as fundamental as the composition of the atmosphere, and hence the heat balance of the planet, is certain to trigger all manner of horror, and we shouldn’t shy away from it. The dramatic uncertainty that lies ahead may be the most frightening development of all; the physical world is going from backdrop to foreground. (It’s like the contrast between politics in the old days, when you could forget about Washington for weeks at a time, and politics in the Trump era, when the president is always jumping out from behind a tree to yell at you.)

But let’s try to occupy ourselves with the most likely scenarios, because they are more than disturbing enough. Long before we get to tidal waves or smallpox, long before we choke to death or stop thinking clearly, we will need to concentrate on the most mundane and basic facts: everyone needs to eat every day, and an awful lot of us live near the ocean.

Some thoughts on that article.

1) the author hasn't reckoned with the fact that capitalism caused this disaster and capitalism can not fix it. Talking about the monetary costs of climate change is as brutish and backwards as a starving king trying to eat his golden crown.

2) it’s interesting that the animals we refer to as pests are thriving in the new climate. Humans themselves are a pest, and we supplanted our hominid competitors in some part due to the advantages the current climate gave us. It’s theoretically why we beat out the Neanderthals, denisovans, and other archaic humans for world dominance. We are the aphids of 70,000 years ago - and there is some evidence to support the idea that we very nearly lost our chance back then, too.

So much of human history has been stored digitally: I wonder how many humans are needed to preserving our collective knowledge. If you buy into the human extinction event I mentioned above, the entire planet could be wiped of humanity except for, say, Norilsk, Siberia (population 100,000) - and in less time than what elapsed between Brandon the Builder and his namesake Bran Stark, we may recover.

Or maybe we’re the Titans/Old Gods in this story, and once we give birth to our digital children, they will remake the world with our flesh, like Odin did to Ymir.

As a sidenote, RE: today's news....

....as beloved as it is, Notre Dame's been in disrepair for, like, 30 years now, and I've seen several articles and things from years past about how desperately it needed rehabilitation. Now that it's caught on fire, people are actually getting around to pouring in the money to renovate and rebuild it.

This does not bode well for our response to climate change.

Lackner's carbon-capture technology moves to commericalization

SKH plans to deploy clusters of column-shaped devices, or mechanical trees. A cluster comprises 12 columns and can remove 1 metric ton of CO2 per day. SKH will deploy the technology in a pilot CO2 farm targeting 100 metric tons per day of CO2. The technology will then be deployed to full-scale CO2 farms in multiple locations, each capable of removing 3.8 million metric tons of CO2 annually.

Just a press release and it's still in the very early stages, but I'll take it.

Chairman_Mao wrote:

Lackner's carbon-capture technology moves to commericalization

SKH plans to deploy clusters of column-shaped devices, or mechanical trees. A cluster comprises 12 columns and can remove 1 metric ton of CO2 per day. SKH will deploy the technology in a pilot CO2 farm targeting 100 metric tons per day of CO2. The technology will then be deployed to full-scale CO2 farms in multiple locations, each capable of removing 3.8 million metric tons of CO2 annually.

Just a press release and it's still in the very early stages, but I'll take it.

I'm not up on the math - how many of those CO2 farms are we talking to have a measurable effect on slowing climate change? And what kind of footprint does that have (expressed in Texas's)?