80 - 180 US$ for the removal of a ton of CO2 is far more than the cost of adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere (in Germany, currently around 10€/ton, I believe).
In principle, removing a ton of CO2 needs to be cheaper than the cost of adding a ton of CO2.
Then let's raise the cost of adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere.
We have been encouraging pollution since it's cheaper to just dump it than to reduce their production significantly or invest in capturing it.
If the cost to remove it is $80-$100 USD, then that should be the cost of adding it. We should start demanding they either pay the costs associated with someone else having to deal with it, or reduce how much they dump into the air in the first place.
>Then let's raise the cost of adding a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere.
>If the cost to remove it is $80-$100 USD, then that should be the cost of adding it. We should start demanding they either pay the costs associated with someone else having to deal with it, or reduce how much they dump into the air in the first place.
This works until all the people who have enough trouble achieving a decent standard of living vote you out of office or revolt (depending on the system of government of the country in-question). Few things universally piss people off quite as well as standards of living going backwards.
The cost of removing CO2 needs to be cheaper. The cost of emitting less CO2 for a given standard of living needs to be cheaper. Carbon taxes that reflect the current price of removing carbon from the atmosphere are socially and politically unsustainable.
Correctly pricing in the negative externalities of burning fossil fuels is what will help us shift away from fossil fuels.
And if people are gonna be upset about a decrease in standard of living because they can't buy gas guzzling cars anymore or air travel is more expensive, they're really not going to like the drop in standard of living from climate change. Coastal flooding and storm surge is already destroying billions of dollars in real estate value. Houston has seen three 500-year floods in less than 5 years. We've seen the devastation from large scale wildfires in Australia and California. Subsistence fishermen in some parts of the world are already seeing their fisheries collapse.
If we don't get climate change under control we're not going to be talking about temporary pain while we shift to cleaner technology. We'll be looking at large scale climate refugee crises, collapses of industries, collapses of governments, and wide scale human misery.
The fact that we are headed toward refugee crisis and Miami being underwater doesn't change the incentives and game theory aspect of it. If emissions are expensive to remove and there is no way to globally ensure that nearly everybody pays for their emissions then nobody is going to pay for any of their emissions and will just invest in mitigating the problems locally even if that's not the globally optimal solution. Any country that tries to make its people pay the actual cost of their emissions without the rest of the world doing the same will quickly see regime change because people aren't gonna waste a bunch of resources pissing in the wind like that.
If emission are cheap to remove then it's going to be easier to get everyone to pay and the fact that some "emissions havens" won't pay will be a non issue because picking up the slack will be cheap enough. In order to tax emissions at what it costs to dispose of them the cost of disposing of them needs to be cheaper.
(Of course both of us are making the assumption that taxing emissions at the cost of disposing of them will solve the problem which isn't guaranteed because nations will be tempted to use that money on other things but I think we can continue using that assumption for the time being.)
> Any country that tries to make its people pay the actual cost of their emissions without the rest of the world doing the same will quickly see regime change because people aren't gonna waste a bunch of resources pissing in the wind like that.
Yes it is the classic tragedy of the commons scenario, and frequently that is the argument brought up whenever countries talk about climate change action. "Why should I reduce my emissions if China/India/United States doesn't". That is certainly a hurdle to correctly pricing CO2 emissions but I don't know that the hurdle is insurmountable or that that the hurdle won't get lower with time. We've seen a lot more popular support behind climate change action in just the last 2 or 3 years. Even then, in order for us to meet the challenge we have to start making the argument to people that we can either experience temporary discomfort now, or massive misery in the future. I think the average person really doesn't grasp the severity of the threat, so it makes it very difficult for them to make that value judgement.
> If emission are cheap to remove then it's going to be easier to get everyone to pay and the fact that some "emissions havens" won't pay will be a non issue because picking up the slack will be cheap enough. In order to tax emissions at what it costs to dispose of them the cost of disposing of them needs to be cheaper.
Clearly we should be pursuing carbon sequestration technology and trying to find ways to make it cheaper.
Maybe right now, today, pricing in the full cost of carbon removal in a fossil fuels tax wouldn't be economically viable. But at the very least, we should be pricing in some significant portion of it if possible. That is a political question that will have to be played out in countries across the globe.
The answer to the "Why should I, if someone else isn't doing as good a job?" : It is our collective planet. It is on each of us to own the entire problem and lead.
I disagree and feel that it is you who are missing the point. While I agree removal of CO2 needs to be less expensive, we simply don't have an option right now. We do have an option to make it more expensive to pollute until we figure that out. Why do you directly relate carbon taxes to a reduction in living standards??
If you're a suburban citizen/voter who relies on a car to get to work/stores/school and on hydrocarbons for home-heating in the winter, the immediate impact of a carbon tax (without mitigatory measures) is to increase your expenses. That generally leads to reduced living standards.
I agree that properly pricing carbon emissions is essential, but one should not overlook the short-term impact. I remember the original Kyoto agreement, which seemed impossible at the time; in hindsight, the negotiators could have done us greater good by adopting a quantitative pathway that even the developing countries agreed was possible. Beginning to price carbon emissions, even a little, will have real impact.
The most thermodynamically-efficient way to deal with carbon in the atmosphere is to keep it in the ground. Furthermore, when we burn hydrocarbons and sequester CO_2, we remove oxygen from our atmosphere.
>We do have an option to make it more expensive to pollute until we figure that out
I'm saying that option only exists on paper because invoking it in any capacity that actually imposes enough cost to make people reduce polluting by a meaningful amount is going to met with too big a backlash to be sustainable.
>Why do you directly relate carbon taxes to a reduction in living standards??
Because anything that raises cost across all goods and at every step of every supply chain reduces living standards because people will simply be able to afford less goods and services at their new prices. That people will have to do things like turn down the A/C and eat out less in order to make ends meet. Individually those aren't big deals but they have follow on effects, the HVAC guy and the restaurant get less business. Those apply through the entire economy compounding the problem. There are also a lot of people who are going to be pushed over standard of living "cliffs" so to speak. The increased cost will be the difference between living in an air conditioned apartment or not. You apply the former type of changes across the entire economy you'll piss everyone off. You sprinkle in the latter and you've got a regime change on your hands. The only way an across the board standard of living decrease like that is tolerated is when it is overwhelmingly consensual (see WW2 mobilization).
I agree we need to do something but what? It's a real shit situation. Doing nothing is bad. Doing a token "something" doesn't help. Doing something that actually helps is not sustainable. Either climate change has to get worse or solving it has to get cheaper before we as a society can (uncontroversial) justify the level of resource allocation that will be required to make a meaningful difference.
Agree with you completely. A simplistic way of pointing this out is that EVERY tax and every cost regressively effects the poor more. If you are close to break-even, or you have negative surplus already, then additional cost is always worse for those who are worse off.
The alternative is to levy large taxes on corporations who pollute, that come only after payroll expense. Then, you could create a progressive deduction where pollution taxes were zero for low income earners, while after some threshold everyone was taxed for polluting.
It's unsatisfactory because the government hates earmarking specific income for specific outcomes and they much prefer the slush fund approach (for not entirely bad reasons). But, if pollution taxes specifically were spent on buying CO2 sequestration products which were deemed effective by the NSF or some other group, we might be able to create a non-regressive pollution tax to increase the net cost of polluting.
Because a certain type uses it as a code-phrase for "smaller cars, condos and fake cheeseburgers". They feel a deep sense of revolt at the affront of that personally, but are smart enough to realize they'll come off like the disgustingly amoral (imho evil) person they are if they complain about it personally. So they project it as a vague "standard of living" across poor/global-south people as a way of concern trolling libs into not taking their truck.
Making emitting CO2 more expensive leads directly to releasing less CO2 for a given standard of living. If you 10x the cost of coal, that's not going to 10x the cost of electricity, people are just going to switch over to a different energy source. Likewise for large scale industrial processes and transportation.
Further, most technologies that reduce CO2 emmissions do so by being more efficient, which reduces long term costs and leads to better productivity. The creation and installation of these replacements creates high paying jobs and stimulates the economy. Incentivising the adoption of these technologies allows them to be produced at larger scales which in turn drops their price, leading to wider scale adoption. Preventing catastrophic climate change of course has its own immense benefits to standards of living.
Indeed, a high tax due to a high cost of removing CO2 from the atmosphere creates an enormous incentive for those who can not abandon their polluting methods to invest in the developments of better sequestering technologies. Waiting for the technology to just magically appear as a prerequisite for incentivizing its deployment is dumb.
That's the real problem with any policies that would actually significantly fight climate change: our unequal society has people who would be disproportionately impacted by increased prices and laws against carbon emissions.
Demanding an increase in the cost of adding CO2 would be effective for the organizations and people in that jurisdiction as long as that rule lasts. It's a great stop-gap mechanism. But a technical solution to lower the cost of removing a ton of CO2 is superior to a political solution to raise the cost of adding a ton of CO2. It's better because it's a permanent step forwards, not one that has to be held on to, and it's better because it better aligns with everyone's incentives.
The political solution is vulnerable to changing societal and cultural winds. It takes constant expenditure of political fervor to maintain as a law, and is always vulnerable to a political competitor suggesting "...don't want to pay that $100USD/ton fee? Help me gain power and I'll help you gain money."
Once the technology exists to take the cost to remove it down by an order of magnitude, this effort no longer needs to be expended and the incentive to remove it no longer exists. Modern fuel-injected and turbocharged engines do not only have lower emissions, they are more powerful and require lower maintenance than carbureted big-block engines. And if you've driven a Tesla you know that a battery electric vehicle can be both better for the environment and a better car (for everything but extremely long-range journeys) than an internal-combustion vehicle. Similarly, Lets Encrypt making HTTPS as easy and as cheap as non-encrypted sites did far more to increase the number of secure websites than years of advocacy begging website owners to get certificates and browser vendors to increase the equivalent of fees.
The price for a CO2 certificate is around 25€ per ton. The biggest problem is that lots of emission sources are still excluded from the CO2 trade and that businesses receive a certain amount of CO2 certificates for free.
The problem with CO2 certificates is that they aren't backed by anything. We had no priceable scalable means of removing CO2 from the atmosphere so those prices are arbitrary.
If people were serious about using markets solve this problem the price of CO2 credits would reflect what it actually takes to remove that much CO2 from the atmosphere and they would be much more expensive. There would be companies forming just to get those credits and trying to undercut one another looking for more efficient ways to sequester CO2 permanently.
But we can't because it would drive up the price of gas and with it everything else in the economy. People would blame other countries for cheating and the Illumiati for taking their jobs. Then politicians would lose their seats and the work they did would be reversed.
In principle, removing a ton of CO2 needs to be cheaper than the cost of adding a ton of CO2.
And it will be, at some point in the future; it’s not intended to compete with preventing CO2 emissions today. We need to start work on the technology now though, even if it’s not immediately scaleable.
The technology to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere at scale will be required over the 21st Century to return the CO2 levels to pre-industrial levels, which our forecasts have priced in.
I agree with you. But I wish we could get our shit together, decide that maybe this is a problem out of scope of the economy and we should solve it with the tools we have regardless of cost. Print some money to pay for it, push the cost downstream through inflation, doesn't matter the mechanism. The work needs to be done either way, but we should start now.
So. US $150 per ton, so $150B per gigaton. We must ultimately remove 1,000 gigatons of CO2, but we need to start with 10/year. Using this method will cost the world $1.5 trillion per year. That seems completely within our resources. What's stopping us?
The same thing that has slowed efforts to curb emissions before they need removal: the free rider problem, or collective action problem. Every country benefits a little from one country's efforts to remove atmospheric CO2, and the non-participating countries don't pay anything. There's an incentive for every country to wait for some other country to take up the burden first.
That said, I think that the cost of accelerated silicate weathering could drop significantly with further advances in automation. At some point individual governments or well funded NGOs may be able to make a dent in the global problem without waiting for everyone else to cooperate.
I really wonder the same thing. I know I’m at a tail of the distribution, but I could see committing 150/mo of my own funds to sequestering co2.
I’ve heard it posited that for one or another reason climate change could create a dictatorial regime one or another way. I hope humanity figures out a way to pull our collective heads out of the sand and start doing stuff before anything like a dictator kicks up...
You're correct, but let's say the target is 1/10th of it, or $15/month, therefore affordable by many. Still, there's something that prevents us, as a society, from doing it.
There are sequestration projects out there already, as well as reforestation efforts. If you want to put your $150/mo to work today, you can!
One might also consider putting that $150 toward eliminating inefficiencies somewhere in the world -- subsidizing renewable power or improving fuel efficiency in some way.
An issue with this is release of nickel. The most easily weathered silicate, olivine, typically has several tenths of a percent nickel. I would want to make sure the croplands are not being progressively poisoned.
I wonder if it might be possible to actively strip methane and nitrous oxide from the atmosphere, as these are powerful greenhouse gases. I have some ideas how this might be done.
That's first point is true, but the second point doesn't necessarily follow. Methane is a quite powerful greenhouse gas, and it could be removed by in situ destruction (as it naturally is) rather than capture.
Yes, but that's kinda my point. Trying to remove methane from the atmosphere probably isn't a good use of resources. Methane capture at the source like what is being done at some waste processing plants makes sense though. And changing livestock feeds to reduce methane emissions seems like a no brainer.
Most methane emission is natural, so if it could be removed from the atmosphere, the potential reduction in forcing could be quite nice, above and beyond just reducing our own methane emission.
This document from EASAC (European Academies' Science Advisory Council) is a pretty nice and well sourced overview of many (not all) different negative emission technologies/methods.
Maybe not as hard-science heavy as you are looking for, but I found this article to be an approachable overview of potential methods https://www.orbuch.com/carbon-removal/
preliminary calculations suggest this has the potential to capture about 5% of current CO2 emissions if applied to 50% of worldwide farmland.
(citation needed)
Is there any research on what the ideal co2 level is? I’m on the climate change team of course but is there a risk we overshoot and bring co2 too low? I’d just say we should know what we’re aiming for.
I guess plants like some amount of extra co2 so we’d think about that. Should we also have some kind of buffer between a future ice age?
Don’t get me wrong, I think bring the co2 level close to zero is a viable argument too.
It's not really a mystery, we could just bring co2 levels back in line what they were at the beginning of the 20th century. Hell, even the 1950's levels of CO2 would be great.
But right now the carbon capture discussions are simply trying to avert disaster. None of the potential carbon capture solutions can remove so much carbon that we'll have to worry about removing too much co2.
The only way I see us overshooting is if CO2 suddenly becomes a valuable resource. The atmospheric CO2 concentration changes really slowly, at the rate of several ppm per year right now, just because there is so much of it. If/when we start bringing it down we will have plenty of time to stop.
There is of course such a thing as too little, plants need some to survive. Something on the order of 150 to 300 ppm is the range it existed in for the last 800,000 years and probably a reasonable target.
Just going back to the CO2 level of 15 years ago " would be equivalent to the stone in 165,000 Empire State buildings or 66,000 Great Pyramids of Giza...a cost of $28 trillion for the United States, about $90,000 per individual" so there's no chance we'll accidentally remove too much! Source: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
fwiw, this assumes a $500 price per ton to remove the carbon. Currently it sounds like several different technologies think they might be able to get it below $100/ton, which would significantly improve the cost outlook.
Though, you are completely right, even then it's still far too expensive to accidentally remove way too much.
There is no such thing as an ideal CO2 level. Life in general, and humans in particular, can exist in a world of far more or far less CO2.
The problem is our modern, industrial civilization is built on the assumptions that future world is very much like the current world. Everything from houses to cities to nations are built around these long-term assumptions. The danger of climate change is that we erode the very foundations we've built our civilization on. The danger is not some arbitrary level, it is the rapid change to that level.
I can't imagine what should happen for us to overshoot the co2 level and make it too low. We can't even slow down the increase of the global emissions, let alone freeze them at the current level, let alone reduce them to zero - which is the goal (I am talking about the emissions, not the concentration in the atmosphere). After the emissions are down to net zero, we need to start removing excess co2 from the atmosphere.
So what is the risk of overshooting and bringing co2 level down too much? I think there is a higher risk of the universe spontaneously disintegrating before that happens.
Not really a silver bullet. We are at the point where this is something we have to do in addition to reducing carbon emissions. This is more like an extra household duty.
I don't like those kind of projects because they sort of try to bank on the global warming problem with inventions and new things, except this doesn't work, because CO2 is just too hard to eliminate.
It's the penultimate problem of industrialized capitalism: "we have a problem and we need to MAKE something new to solve this". But the problem was always the excess of industry in the first place. The solution is simple: slow down consumption everywhere and optimize the use of carbon, but it's completely against the spirit of industrial capitalism. That's why global warming can only be solved with political solutions.
I believe that in the future, violence will occur to stop co2 emissions by force, while the wealthy will be able to shelter themselves away from hot places. Global warming is EXACTLY the problem of libertarian ideology. It completely dismisses the commons. Global warming is the perfect example of what happens when we accept "survival of the fittest" and social darwinism. I'm worried that rich people are okay with global warming because they are able to justify it with Malthusian arguments.
Well, "ultimate" means last. So it's really a way of saying "second most important", which I think could easily have been what they were going for there.
That's some moral arguments you are using here, it's all nice and well in a debate but it's not moral arguments which will help in any way the humanity to fight global warming. Yes we do need technology and we need it quickly before the problem worsen even further.
Even global agreements like the Paris one are built upon having such technology, no amount of shaming and moral argument will help in achieving anything.
I disagree. We've had all necessary technology all along. It's exactly the lack of moral responsibility that's holding us back. Fighting climate change is more akin to the civil rights movement than to the Manhattan project.
I don’t disagree that we have the technology to emit less pollution simply by doing less (the moral decisions in this hypothetical), but the issue is that most (perhaps nearly all) people in the world don’t agree with your morality.
This makes technologies which bypass this problem far more feasible, even if they’re further out from actually solving the problem. They might have the potential to get there, whereas morality probably doesn’t.
Agriculture is a major source of pollution for example, but it’s how everyone eats. The fact that most people in the world are poor makes this problem extremely hard to solve... How do you argue morality with someone who is just trying to feed themselves? If you want them to use less fertilizer, irrigate less, ship their product shorter distances, etc for the sake of climate change, well... Good luck. Now try telling them to stop driving, or use less electricity, or...
> How do you argue morality with someone who is just trying to feed themselves?
Don't change the subject. I am not arguing morality with someone who's trying to feed themselves. I am arguing morality with someone who flies to tech conferences several times a year, drives around in a huge SUV, and screams bloody murder when someone else proposes maybe a carbon tax or something. And then blames it all on poor people.
Poor people are not the problem. Rich people are the problem.
You’re right, that is a glaring issue and to me it’s indisputable. It cuts all ways though. Targeting the rich alone just isn’t sufficient. I didn’t mean to imply poor people are the only problem at all - just that pleading for moral decisions with the bulk of the earth’s population would be futile.
One of my greatest fears is that I’m right, so I genuinely hope I’m not.
I totally share your fears. I am afraid we are already too late. Though, pleading for moral decisions seems to have worked in the past. Again, see civil rights movement, women's suffrage etc. Let's just hope it will work again, and that it won't be too late.
Those are very good points, you're right. Here's hoping.
I guess the best thing we can do is normalize these behaviours by making the moral decisions ourselves and encouraging the same within our family and peer groups. Just like those movements before us. Stop flying, stop buying things wrapped in plastic upon plastic upon plastic, cycle more places, eat more plants and less meat, etc – the 'drip in the ocean' strategy might be all we have, but you're right... It has helped before. There's no sense in discouraging that.
Beef is the problem. Beef is not a necessary food. It can also cause health issues. The fact that it emits a lot of carbon makes meat a thing to work on.
There's just been a months-long Europe-wide experiment re reducing emissions which should yield some interesting data, and the early reports do seem to support what you're saying.
Your argument is a different one already, yes we're definitely not doing much against climate change, and yes some moral responsibility to fight this global issue is badly needed.
But that does not validate the pseudo-moral arguments blaming technology & industry like the one above, this is guaranteed to fail.
Even if we completely stop all manmade CO2 emissions right now, there still is too much CO2 in the atmosphere already. Actually removing the CO2 from the air in some way will be necessary if we want to stop global warming from getting even worse.
Stopping all human CO2 emissions stops global warming (on average, bad valvano you years will make it worse that year), and reverses it. Plants convert more CO2 than gets converted back by a small amount every year.
You just want something that doesn't need a million years to get back to normal.
You get downvoted because you provide no arguments for why it is too hard of a problem for eliminate.
You also didn't provide any arguments as to why this specific approach won't work.
It's similar to people closing their eyes when there's fire and screaming "we'll all die". It's your choice to believe that, but don't stand in the doors trying to prevent people from searching for a survival route.
With nuclear umbrellas? Even with eco-fascist fundamentalists at the helm it is a hell no, absolutely no nuclear power even pretends to be that crazy.
It might have been a viable geopolitical picture before WW2 and a useful pretense for causus beli against other industrialized powers or a sick justification for lebensraum - effectively used like eugenics as an intellectual justification for why these current travesties are moral imperatives.
Now it would be even less effective than screwing for virginity. I mean screwing is capable of producing more virgins at least.
Comparing the nitrogen problem with the problem of CO2 emissions is apples to oranges IMO:
- Nitrogen is very abundant in the atmosphere and bound nitrogen (i.e. fertilizer) has an inherent short-time value that is higher than the cost of nitrogen fixation (i.e. fertilizer production). So this is something that the market readily solves via technological progress.
- On the other hand CO2 emissions result from extracting energy stored in fossil carbon. Currently a significant part of the energy needs of the whole planet are satisfied by extracting energy from fossil carbon (e.g. burning coal). Removing CO2 from the atmosphere does not have any short-time value to whomever does that. No market force working towards that. Also, removing the CO2 probably needs (depending on technoligy much) more energy than was extracted from the carbon in the first place. Humanity does not currently seem to have any energy sources available to "return" the energy havested from fossil carbon. Good luck waiting for a magical technology that can easily satisfy the energy needs of a whole planet-wide civilization with less negative side-effects than combustion of fossil carbon. Also the deadline for undoing CO2 related damage may be quite close [1] so that any such technologies would need to be available for global deployment within a few decades.
- Climate engineering [2] may be a way to compensate CO2 related damage without having to remove CO2 at all. But again, no short-time benefit to whomever does that and all available technologies would also incur immense cost and do not evenly undo greenhouse-gas induced temperature changes over the whole planet (plus all the other possible side-effects)
CO2 is an oxide. I barely remember my chemistry classes, but i think than without solvent, oxides need energy to be broken. And even with 70% of our planet covered with a solvent (the sea that absorb CO2), our emissions are still going through the roof.
If fusion happens in less than 20 years, we may be able to absorb CO2. I'm not high on this, but with supraconductors, you never know when the next breakthrough is.
However, if we manage to hit +3°C average (we are already at ~+.9°C average), the living conditions will become hotter than the Sahara for 1/2 to 2 billion people. And that's without counting wetbulb temperature that will be reached in Florida more than a dozen day a year. I know that +3° average is hard to understand but consider this. Between the last ice age, where France was basically Siberia, Scandinavia was under 3km of ice and you could make Calais/London by foot, and 1850, there was a 5°C average temperature difference. The change was over 20 000 years.
Also CO2 emissions today will have an impact in 20 year (CO2 in low atmosphere does not seems to have more than marginal greenhouse effect, its high-altitude CO2 that cause our troubles).
That's the political challenge:
- Are the predictions for +3° around 2070 right? And i'm not talking about RPC 8.5, i'm talking about the one with constant CO2 emission btw. If they are at least right on magnitude order, will we be able capture CO2 before 2050?
- Will technology be able to grab CO2 out of low atmosphere? It seems we need incredible amount of energy for that (compared to our production). So fusion it is then. Is fusion before 2080 possible? At least China is advancing faster than France so maybe? I'm not high on this, and i'm a supraconductor optimist since 2009.
- Will we be able to capture increasing amount of CO2 out of our electric centrals, cars and trucks? This is what i think is the more likely. But this technology still don't exist, and we need it right now.
- Are we hoping that either fusion or CO2 captation will come soon enough to limit the CO2 emissions, and... That's all? Or are we vastly investing in research? Or investing in energy/consumption economies? Do people understand what does it mean for a country to reduce its CO2 emission by 4% a year? Do politicians and economist understand, or are we still stuck with "green growth" for another decade?
I will order my research once i quit my job, try to order my sources (or find more precise ones), clean my code and write a long, long post on what it really means to stop using fossile fuel, even "only" -4% a year (what we need to do to respect the 2°C Paris agreement). From what i've read in the last GIEC report, if we don't find a new technological ace right now (ten years ago even), the win solution might be hard to swallow for the western world, and even harder for those living in tropical areas.
The only thing i'm really sure is that if we don't take care of the problem, the problem will take care of us.
It's a problem of fossil fuel combustion [1], not capitalism. The per-capita CO2 emissions of the USSR were also above the presently sustainable level for Earth's 7.8 billion people.
[1] And land use changes, larger herds of ruminant food animals, high altitude airplane contrails... But mostly fossil fuel combustion.
In principle, removing a ton of CO2 needs to be cheaper than the cost of adding a ton of CO2.