I completely understand. On a personal level I worked for years on lobbying to get a carbon fee and dividend system passed at state and federal levels because I felt that taxing companies for their carbon emissions was a smart and tangible way of dealing with the problem. As I’ve grown cynical with CF&D never catching on politically, I sniffed out different technocratic solutions. I agree the companies researching and implementing CCS are the same oil companies that got us into this mess so how much can we take from their advocacy with CCS as being a good thing? As a professional geologist I have a love-hate relationship with O&G industry but they are so powerful I don’t know how to work against them but instead with them (I don’t work for an oil company, I work in publicly funded CCS research)

Not exactly dry ice, it is supercritically pressured carbon dioxide so it has the density of a liquid but defuses like a gas. CO2 plumes are stable at depths where injection occurs because they are maintained in a pressure and temperature environment where the CO2 stays in a liquid stage, so it will never rise to the surface like a conventional lighter-than-air gas. In-situ mineral carbonation can also occur where the CO2 is injected into silicate rock formations to promote carbonate mineral formation, locking the CO2 for thousands (millions maybe) years.

This is just simply not true . There is robust science that shows the technology can work, it is not a comprehensive solution, but one of many that can reduce atmospheric CO2 emissions. You can read my post where I cite some literature if you’re interested.

Planting more trees and making more solar panels won’t fix the issue of rapidly increasing CO2 emissions around the world. Making solar panels is not a green industry and the ability to build them locally is not really an option for a lot of countries, which will need petroleum fuel to ship panels and mine the materials. CCS is the only technology we have available that can actually prevent CO2 emissions from entering the atmosphere from sites that are CO2-heavy, with direct air capture showing we can remove carbon from the air (though it is not inefficient). Yes, that CO2 is instead going into the deep subsurface (mineralized or as a supercritical plume) but it can be managed with robust regulations and scientific monitoring. Petroleum based combustion is not going away and especially in an incoming Trump administration I see any option on the table as a good one when it comes to carbon wrangling. I’m happy to debate this because as a society we need to have dialogue about how to mitigate climate change.

Regarding this Illinois project, this project began 10 years ago as a proof of concept, of course target sequestration rates will be lower than desired. DOE regularly invests huge sums of money to develop technology for industry using research scale pilots. This plant was never meant to be a proof of what large-scale CCS can do.

I was a youngling when this happened but rereading about this event 20 years later… we’ve seen nothing like it. I think the most interesting fact from this earthquake/tsunami is that the Indian Ocean’s volume permanently decreased as a result of sea floor movement, producing a rise in the global sea level by an estimated 0.1 mm.

This event also improved tsunami warning systems throughout the Indian Ocean and Indonesia, hopefully if an event like this happens there will be a lot more notice given.

So tsunamis are definitely a threat generally from earthquakes and an earthquake of this size can make it deadly. Unlike the San Andres faults that cause most California earthquakes ( which wouldn’t produce significant tsunamis) this earthquake occurred in a discordant part of the pacific oceanic crust called the Mendocino triple junction - the intersection of the San Andres fault, Cascadian subduction zone (where the Pacific crust is plunging under the North American continent, feeding features like Mt. St Helens), and the Gorda plate (the last remnant of the precursor to the pacific plate, the Panthalassic Ocean that surrounded Pangea).

Because there’s a Wikipedia article for everything, if anyone else is morbidly curious about the history of dying on stage

A good point. From the get-go humans have been intensely tribal and fearful of outsiders. 10,000 years of history shows we kinda bumbled our way through it with a lot of causalities but also a lot of beautiful culture, art, feats, and athletic talent sprinkled in for people who had the time. Now every part of the earth is so interconnected it is unprecedented. How we bumble through this stage is unfolding into a sad story but I can’t get too beat up about it for my own sanity.

A nuclear winter isn’t a scientific guarantee, many post-cold war models have suggested it might not happen.

That said, shit would get fucked up but for how long and what affects they have on the atmosphere is still debated.

This is so profoundly sad for a country that once had so much. My Cuban ex-pat family decry the communist government role here but I can never forgive the US for their inhumanity in tacitly letting this disaster unfold and others in the Caribbean, but what else is new.