All over the world, countries and corporations have committed to becoming carbon neutral by 2050. Sing their steel doors as carbon neutral but when we do our carbon accounting we find that the door is actually not carbon neutral at all the furnaces are more efficient but they still require coal and the steel doors are made with iron ore that was smelted with coal and the car company that bought the door uses fossil fuels to ship the car to the dealership and the dealership uses electricity from fossil fuels to power their lights and computers and the consumer uses fossil fuels to drive the car around and all of these steps release carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases so when you add up the total emissions from making and using the car door it’s not zero at all it’s a lot higher than zero and that’s why carbon accounting is so important it helps us understand the full picture of a product’s emissions
Up to 70% of companies in major industries like road vehicles, cement, and electricity, have announced Net Zero targets, but what does that even mean? I, for one, hear “Net Zero” every time I try to play basketball, but that’s neither here nor there. Let me explain: being carbon neutral means reaching no net carbon emissions. To do this, we’d need to both reduce emissions and offset the ones we can’t avoid by extracting carbon from the atmosphere. Just like my basketball training, it’s going to take a lot of work. We’ll need some crafty solutions, plus a good way of measuring decarbonization, because the solutions marketed as green or eco-friendly don’t always tell the whole story.
Biofuels are a potential solution to decarbonizing heating and transportation. Biofuels are liquid fuel substitutes often made from plants, and in theory, they’re carbon neutral by nature. That’s because these plants have only recently removed carbon dioxide from the atmosphere via photosynthesis, so when the biofuels are burned, it returns the carbon the plants recently removed from the system. Burning biofuels is like returning a friend’s shirt that you borrowed a week ago - you’re not adding to their wardrobe when you return it, you’re just putting it back.
On the other hand, when we burn traditional fossil fuels, we’re releasing carbon that’s been locked up for millions of years, and that’s enough to seriously change the balance of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That’s not like returning a shirt you borrowed last week - it’s like returning a pile of clothes you borrowed in preschool, and now your friend’s closet is overflowing.
Because biofuels seem so much better than fossil fuels by comparison, they’re already a big part of our lives. If you live in the U.S., at least 10% of the gas you pump into your car is probably not gasoline at all - it’s likely corn ethanol biofuel. Corn ethanol is an alcohol made by fermenting the starch in corn, and it’s been added to gas for several decades to help minimize the emissions from transportation.
But growing corn and turning it into biofuel takes a lot of energy. You have to clear huge areas of land, douse it with fertilizer, harvest and transport your corn with heavy machinery, and then process it in specially made facilities - all of these steps involve fossil fuels. It’s such an energy-intensive process that you barely get the same energy out that you put in - kind of like making a really complicated celery dish. It takes a long time and you’re still hungry at the end.
And because each step releases greenhouse gases, the emissions for making this carbon-neutral biofuel can be higher than the emissions from burning gasoline. When you add up the carbon emissions of everything involved in a product like this, it’s called carbon accounting. Just like regular accounting helps you subtract losses from profits to understand the total picture, carbon accounting helps us figure out the total emissions involved in making and using something. Once you’ve captured the carbon with methods like these, researchers are exploring various storage solutions, many of which are quite literal. One option is to inject gases into the sediments at the bottom of the ocean, where they’ll be held in place by the crushing pressure of thousands of kilograms of seawater. Alternatively, the carbon could be stored in actual rocks, ironically, in the holes left behind after miners extracted fossil fuels, the same fuels that started this problem in the first place.
Right now, there’s no single storage solution that’s watertight or airtight. Even so, another possibility is to not let the carbon go to waste, and use what’s captured to make things like fuel and chemicals. This may only be a short-term solution if the carbon ends up back in the atmosphere eventually, but it is much cheaper than locking up the gases for eternity.
If we look at this issue through carbon accounting goggles, carbon capture promises great things. It could even lead us down a path to negative carbon emissions. However, the current status of carbon capture technology would only help us reduce our annual carbon emissions by about 3.5 billion tons by 2050. That’s a huge amount, but it’s no match to the 51 billion tons of emissions we release each year.
Therefore, there’s a lot of room for scientists, engineers, investors, economists, communication professionals, and perhaps you, to get involved in this part of the problem and its possible solutions. In the end, climate change will require a whole host of solutions, avoiding greenhouse gas emissions where possible, but also where that’s not possible, alternatives like biofuels and carbon capture can take us a long way towards carbon neutrality by 2050. Plus, with accurate carbon accounting, companies can make sure their emission goals are really on the right track, which will become more important than ever as the effects of climate change are being felt around the world.
Special thanks to India Quesiro Wardna, our basketball coach for this episode. Thanks to you, I can now score a three-pointer, don’t make me prove it—we’ll get there eventually. Thanks for supporting us on Patreon.
Crash Course Climate and Energy is produced by Complexly, with support provided by Breakthrough Energy and Gates Ventures. This episode was filmed at Castle Garrity Studio and was made with the help of all these nice people. If you want to help keep Crash Course free for everyone forever, you can join our community on Patreon.