Also the various ocean technologies are going to run into the same environmental complaints as the idea of seeding otherwise barren areas of the ocean with missing metals, causing algae blooms that sink to the bottom. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocea... for a discussion of some of those. (And see https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/28/iron-fer... for a more laudatory article about this in the general press.) If you can deal with the regulatory concerns, the existing low-tech solution is one of the cheaper ways of removing CO2 that is known.
Speaking personally, I understand the qualms of environmentalists but consider the possibility of local toxic algae blooms to be a less serious environmental disaster than the otherwise certain ocean acidification that will wipe out all shellfish species worldwide. Yeah, nobody wants to accept a bad outcome, but in this case I think it is better than the alternative.
By the end of 2019 we hope to have our first olivine on the beach. The project will be funded by donations, but we will also be selling olivine/peridot jewelry that's price equates to actual tons of olivine we will dump on the beach. Raw olivine is currently ~$20-$25/ton and the average us person puts out 15-20 tons of CO2/year. The next closest technology for sequestering carbon is well over $150/per ton.
For more info and access to the full text studies, visit https://Climitigation.org and Project Vesta https://ProjectVesta.org
For $400 I want a t-shirt that says "I'm carbon neutral. Do you have the rocks to become carbon neutral too?" with a pic of olivine rocks and your website url.
Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively. Would mining operations be able to scale appropriately without prices going through the roof?
Aside from the traditional engineering and commercial constraints of the idea, observations should focus on gathering data and modelling the complex ecological effects of the releases. They are the greatest factor of the plans success or failure so they should be a priority for prospective eco-engineering projects to observe, even where regulations and incentives may currently be limited.
1. What can the average person do to help you with your mission? 2. Where is the kickstarter? 3. Do you have someone working on marketing already? 4. Is there a way to volunteer without being physically present? Marketing, design, just brainstorming etc... I realize you have a "contact us" button on your website, but could you list more specifically what you are after? 5. Where can we keep track of what you are doing now and what the next step is? 6. What is standing in your way now to get your test project going. Specifically referring to "wiggle tank" and first olivine by 2019. 7. Have you factored in all of the economics of this? Extraction, delivery, dispersion?
Thank you.
But what's the total CO2 cost of the olivine (extraction, processing and transport to the sea) ?
How does adding it to the ocean differ from the stuff on the ocean floor?
So when can I buy it and/or register my interest?
First a thought experiment: consider 2 identical hermetically sealed containers (representing gravitationally sealed atmosphere), each containing an open bottle of water (representing oceans).
In container 1 we introduce CO2 in the container, some of which will be absorbed by the water both in dissolved gaseous form and in carbonate form.
In container 2 we introduce the same amount of CO2 by adding carbonate into the closed bottle and then open the bottle.
After letting both containers seperately settle, they will both have the same equilibrium end state, where the same fraction of CO2 is in the container's air, as dissolved gas in the bottle's water and also in the form of carbonate in the bottle's water.
H2O (liquid) + CO2 (gas) <=> H2CO3(solution)
I don't contest the chemical facts that these rocks can form carbonates by reacting with CO2.
I contest the idea that a new sink is identified. The sink is the same sink that has been known for a long time: the oceans, which are currently absorbing a large part of the emissions.
So how is this any different? It's just emissions foisted off as capture?!?
Do the investors know this? Who are the investors? I assume some of the investors are perfectly aware and simply big CO2 emitters trying to externalize any taxation back on the public by reclaiming money, and the other investors genuinely intend well but were simply tricked into supporting this scheme...
As one of those environmentalists, my qualm isn't so much that this may be dangerous but that carbon capture tech (and associated "carbon capture and storage") is often championed by people looking to delay implementation of technology and laws that limit carbon emissions. It is far more energy-efficient to curtail carbon emissions than try to capture it once emitted. The most efficient use of money is to do things like close coal power plants in favor of solar/wind. Once all the coal plants are gone, then is the time to focus on capture.
We need to find ways of getting this carbon out of the air.
Best would be if we could create actual products out of it, such as aggregates using advanced weathering like Blue Planet ( http://www.blueplanet-ltd.com/ ) or creating carbon based building materials like stones, insulation or others. If we combine this with bio-energy we might find systems that are already profitable without carbon credits.
The future of the world is presently in the hands of pasty white men on Capitol Hill. Why not sequester their carbon (hot air) first?
I don't like this reasoning because when it comes to environmental effects we've always had individual firm expectations but we haven't known, we didn't know and we still don't know.
But I do believe the growing crisis demands urgent research and gradual early implementation of a range of projects like ocean seeding, and others which may be opposed by a most skeptical portion of the environmental movement. But when there are doubts about the details of potentially massive eco-engineering projects, please dont write them up as 'qualms of environmentalists' The movement has broadcast for decades the crisis we face today, helped in many situations and hindered very few - it was never truly characterized by sentimentality.
Personally, I think a good compromise lies in resorting to algal blooms in a controlled setting.
Algal blooms have another advantage: there is already hypertrophication around farming regions where water bodies are polluted with fertilizers.
So the ideia is to build artificial reservoirs as buffers for algal blooms that not only pollute the water, jam irrigation systems and decrease biodiversity, but also as a means for carbon fixation. The algae would then have to be harvested, processed and buried. A fraction of it could be used to produce biofuels, thus reducing the need for fossil fuels, and for fertilization, which would reduce the usage of artificial, carbon-releasing fertilizers.
My only doubt is whether the scalability is interesting enough.
This to me smells like it could have potential unforeseen consequences like the Deepwater Horizon cleanup.
The argument that the action may be dangerous is not as compelling when the prognosis for inaction is bleak.
Look you raise good points but this is nonsense. The Earth has had far higher CO2 concentrations for geological periods and there’s no fossil record suggesting shellfish all died. This kind of Trumpian rhetoric just hands ammo to the skeptics.
Acidification is not caused by how much CO2 there is in the water. It is caused by a rapid increase in CO2 levels. We are dumping CO2 in very quickly, and so are acidifying the water.
But given time, oceans will mix down the to bottom. At the bottom it will encounter very large stores of calcium carbonate. As that dissolves, it renders the water no longer acidic. As that mixes back to the top the rest of the ocean becomes less acidic. This mixing process is estimated to take on the order of 1000 years. Therefore the long term the oceans can handle all of the CO2 we're dumping into them and much more. Increasing the long-term average CO2 of the atmosphere will not make the oceans acidic.
The problem is that this mixing process is too slow to help shellfish living near the surface today. Sure, the ocean winds up at a good ph. But it will be acidic for several centuries. And that is unprecedented. In fact there is no record of any event since the Permian-Triassic extinction over 200 million years ago that featured such rapid acidification as the oceans face today. And perhaps not even that one. We estimate that several times as much CO2 was dumped into the atmosphere as what we're releasing now, but it probably was not dumped in such a short time period. And that event wiped out an estimated 90% of all marine species.
Higher acid levels should mean most of the average stock will die, and the mutants which survive will eventually adapt.
Think of the George Carlin skit - the planet will be fine, just we humans and everything we know will be gone.
EDIT: The Great Lakes are not land-locked either. They flow out to the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence River.
We're going to need them.
[Edit] I’m not being facetious. 40% of emissions are as a result of poor land management. We’ll need all the technological help we can get, but if we can’t manage land as carbon stores - not sources, we’re not going to win this race.
Planting tree is actually a great carbon removal technology. Unfortunately most forest owners in the world don't know or don't have incentive to care the about the carbon impact the forest have on the climate. Biggest reason forests are taken down is to grow cattle for beef. If you are working on a startup to reverse this we'd like to fund it too
Joel Salatin has done some great work related to this and collected decades worth of data.
So the irony is that we could grow more beef and pull carbon out of the air at the same time, only if we cared. But we don't, it's easier to slash and burn then to also take the environment into consideration...
If anyone is interested in keeping in the loop on progress: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/pledge-balance
I'm in Australia and the geology of the Tasmania/South Victoria region is the best in the world for carbon capture using trees. Specifically it's the native habitat of the Tasmanian blue gum, the worlds fastest growing tree, and here it grows between 20-100% faster than anywhere else.
Is there any option for having non-US startups funded given that ego-engineering can't be done out of the Bay Area alone? I and the other co-founders have no interest in moving since we are already in the best place for what we are doing.
Happy to talk about it any time: ben at droneseed.com
Spending that money on intensive lobbying and forest advocacy in rapidly-deforesting countries could have an impact, too.
The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.
Our company is working on these issues by trying to reduce demand for meat and seafood by creating alternatives to it, but I think the problem is so large it needs to be tackled from multiple angles. As you term it both Phase I and Phase II type solutions.
What worries me is that the Phase II type solutions are going to be mostly a political problem at least much more than they are technical problems, and political problems are much harder to fix than technical problems where the solutions can be market driven rather than based on international consensus. I think with enough creativity most Phase I type solutions can be market driven and be accomplished without achieving consensus.
The other thing with trees is that they aren't permanent carbon sinks in the way that coal underground is.
Wood will eventually rot or burn and release it's carbon.
Human beings have taken carbon in the form of hydrocarbons underground and released is into the C02 - O2 cycle in the air. The main way to solve this would seem to be putting it back into the ground. So, reverse coal-mining? Turning wood into charcoal and burying? These seem like necessary counter-parts to simply growing trees.
Are there issues with raising cattle on land with a trees spaced maybe every 10 feet or so? Does it have to do with herding the cattle? Feeding the cattle? Those I feel can be solved with technology, specifically IoT/Drones/Autonomous Bots.
It seems to me, if every livestock pasture in the world has trees every 10 feet, maybe less, it could have a pretty big impact. Combine the Apple orchard with the cattle grazing land. Use technology to efficiently operate both.
Edit: And speaking of cattle. I wonder if we can literally strap something onto the back of a cow that would be able to capture methane, burn the bio-mass, and collect everything to be retrieved later on and used/buried.
I really really wish YC would bring on a polymer, nuclear, petroleum, or materials engineer to help wrangle on these thesis-es on all things related to energy. [I'm more on the textiles side of polymers, but I'm here if you need me.]
Trees are not a great carbon removal technology, grasslands are much better as they aren't impacted by fires and droughts.
Grasslands sequester carbon underground whereas woody trees store it in leaves and woody biomass.
What you're saying is actually questionable in a non-stable climate which is what humanity has today.
I think it's really foolish to allow carbon pollution credits to be backed by trees instead of grasslands.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2016/dec/01/trees-ma...
Also, bark beetles aside from droughts and fires are pretty onerous to tree populations.
https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/soil-carbo...
So why limit yourself to existing forests?
Instead of flooding deserts (using energy-intensive/land-intensive/wealth concentrating desalinization), we can re-green those same deserts[1], which restarts the "atmospheric river" that brings water to the interiors of continents. Isotopic analysis has revealed that trees powers the water cycle (by recycling rainfall that would otherwise flow off into the ocean) and causes 80% of Earth's terrestrial rainfall.[2] Compared to desalination this is far less costly (downside being, it's harder for Nestle et al. to profit off it).
Yes Virginia, rain literally comes from trees! This partly explains why deforestation leads to desertification.
There's a nugget of a story in the Carboniferous being the result of a civilisation trying, but failing, to sequester carbon by burying trees and plankton.
Someone want to engineer a tree with enormous, deep roots? Basically make the trees self-burying.
The tree already buries almost half of its biomass in the ground for you. And a lot of material goes through the food chain when the tree rots in situ. There's a big difference between regrown forest and converting prairie to forest and a lot of that has to do with quantity and quality of decaying matter on the forest floor. Dead trees are better than no trees.
Not all at once, though, and new trees spring up pretty quick. If you're replacing unforested land with forested land, you're still storing substantial carbon. Cutting down / burning an existing forest to plant trees doesn't work, sure.
This video makes me pretty proud to have graduated from UBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHtdnY_gnmE
An extra reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2DPp2NcnTb0
Sure, the individual trees will eventually die and release a lot, though far from all, carbon back again. But by then, new trees will grow and act as the storage buffer.
Regenerative agriculture is about harvesting sunlight (free resource), utilizing plants photosynthesizing abilities. Plants are a part of a larger ecosystem including producers, consumers and decomposers.
Plants exudate sugars feeding the soil microbial life, sugars from the photosynthesis where atmospheric carbon dioxide is converted into sugars. Large herbivores eat the grass, holistic grazing keeps the animals moving mimicking predators and the defensive herding mechanisms for efficient animal impact. The timed regrowth will let the plant photosynthesize more carbon dioxide, while the walking sun powered compost machine (cow) decomposes the organic matter and leaves it for further decomposition and utilization.
We have huge areas where desertification is happening [1] because of wrong management. Holistic Grazing is a easy implemented, low tech, approach with great benefits for capital, social and ecological level.
Regenerative agriculture is also covering land management in less brittle environments, field production, notill, utilizing plants, the soil community and the only truly free available resource sunlight.
Any carbon-based stuff you put in a landfill generally degrades to methane, which is 25-86 times worse than CO2 when it comes to global warming.
So recycle your paper :)
Fine, but by the same token, the absence of progress on climate change is because there is no political will, not because it is hard. With enough adults in the room, we could have solved this problem 20 or 30 years ago at comparatively little cost.
The prairies are amazing ecosystem pumping carbon into the ground when properly managed.
The knowledge is available, but this ted talk only has 2 million views. https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI
As global warming devastates more of the biosphere, there will be perhaps less opposition to GMO plants engineered for maximum sequestration capacity. Also useful for Mars.
Maybe there is a good business in finding a good way to truly move old trees, so that we aren't forced to cut them down?
So, there is a ton of value to growing fruit and nut trees, not to mention hedge rows, vineyards, and other farmable plants, and then figuring a way to keep that carbon sequestered in the soil.
Something on the order of 10,000 of these industrial plants could get us carbon neutral rather quickly.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-company-...
I wonder if they have considered using concentrated solar as the heat source instead? The temps are pretty high and obviously there is no carbon capture needed so it might be a cheaper way of doing it. Also you already build those plants out in the desert so you probably have a lot of cheap land available to put the units nearby.
Cheap energy seems like the key ingredient. The compressor equipment to do the task seems within reach.
One could reverse the process and feed the air (de)compressor gas to make energy on low wind days. I'd be interested to know what the round trip efficiency could be. You could optionally use the compressed products as feed stock in some other industry. Perhaps use blocks of CO2 to make methane or a room temperature liquid gas.
I think another way we could look at things is finding "cheap" forms of carbon that would have otherwise been burned/left to rot and reprocess those into building materials.
Seriously?! If this is actually true, sign me up. I will absolutely pay a 25% fuel tax to make the world a better place and also not have to give oil companies more money
Air-To-fuel is not and will never be their moneymaker. The synthesized fuel is not in demand and probably was thought of by a board member who heard of the word "value add" for the first time.
The ONLY in-demand product of CCapture is the CO2 itself - whether it's the gov. who pays for it to be sequestered or an O&G company who pays for it to be used in enhanced recovery. Even the O&G demand is insignificant compared to the amount of money they'll get in sequestration contracts from the government, or by proxy, the FF producers who'll be required to implement them on site.
It's important to note CCS is required to meet emissions targets - so I hope CE doesn't get distracted with less important/profitable goals.
It's not carbon-neutral — just better than gasoline:
> Because the plant currently uses some natural gas, by the time the fuel it produces has been burned it has released a half-tonne of carbon dioxide for every tonne removed from the air. That gives it a carbon footprint 70 per cent lower than a fossil fuel, he said.
So where exactly is the energy coming from? I don't see any mention of renewable sources in that article. Is it somehow combining methane and CO2 to get larger hydrocarbons?
But this is just about the least politically palatable policy imaginable. Democrats don't like it because it's a very regressive tax—the working poor across much of the country drive to work in older, less efficient cars. And besides being opposed to any "new taxes," the rural Republican base would be hit especially hard by this as well.
Also, the demand for gasoline is very inelastic. Very little driving done today is for pleasure, so the cost would have to be raised so much that people are reducing driving out of necessity/looking for alternatives.
Finally, consumption taxes on necessities act regressively (ie the poor are taxed proportionally more than the rich).
[1] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...
A form of cap-and-trade in which the carbon credits are auctioned off to emitters (and retail fuel sellers) and the profits are distributed equally to all residents would likely be progressive, since wealthy people are likely to have a higher carbon footprint.
[edit]
The biggest problem with any sort of carbon tax is that at some point it incentivizes evasion more than conservation. e.g. importing finished goods and electricity rather than raw materials and fuel just moves the emissions to another country.
However, if EVs become the norm, that relationship breaks down and it becomes trickier to fund roads with taxes that link very directly to usage--assuming you believe privacy is a good thing and worth protecting.
It seems we are past the luxury of looking for incentives to reduce CO2 emissions. It's about reducing CO2 emissions right now, no proxy allowed, no IFTTT schemes.
There might be a bare minimum amount of CO2 allowed, it's fixed. We could monetize that but it doesn't matter. We can't go beyond that amount.
I'm not sure I understand, are you suggesting an individual "carbon-quota" as a more radical way of slashing emissions than the "incentives" of a carbon tax? Depending on the tax rate, a carbon tax could produce reasonably expeditious results.
So the YC question is: What can be done outside of American politics?
In the absence of a world governing body with teeth (e.g. space aliens with a death ray), you can't enforce a carbon tax.
Also, generally, what about increasing cloud cover in general? Wouldn't this reap a huge reward for cooling the planet? I know it doesn't remove gasses and prevent ocean acidification, however it may help with heat-related issues.
I don't think people realize how a lot of these problems are solvable for only a few billion dollars... It's an engineering problem, mainly. Someone just spends the money and goes and fixes the problem.
You've shown a proposal, not a reality. (and the proposal didn't even mention a "shield" that I saw, but I may have skimmed past it). I didn't see a price tag, nor a timeline. Money can boost research speed, but not remove the need entirely.
Second, If the cross section of the earth is 1.2x10^14 m^2, one of these would...well, we don't know, because the link mentioned volumes and length (the 10k km is a potential "span length" and wasn't tied to being "one" of anything). I failed to find the cargo volume for a Falcon 9 or other rocket (everything is in mass) but I think it's safe to say that you're talking a lot of launches which clearly aren't trivial to do.
Third, and most importantly, you've just decreased the amount of energy coming to earth. You've not solved the problem, you've changed it.
I love tech, but I think it's worth noticing the ratio of times someone says "It's [just] an engineering problem" versus the number of issues that have been actually been solved in this way (seeing the problem, spending a boatload of money, seeing problem solved). Most of our industries are based on the fact that we KNOW they can grow into more, but figuring out how and the complications thereof are literally the work of countless lifetimes.
Really? This isn't just a matter of putting a big ball of tin foil out there letting it go. What about the station keeping? How is this big piece of tinfoil going to stay in place? At these sizes, solar pressure and the buildup of static charges become huge issues. It is going to drift. It will need engines, power and fuel. Ion thrust would seem an obvious answer, but electrical/static issues may make a web of ion drives difficult. It will need either new tech or, at least, extensive testing of current tech before any attempt. = a great many billions of dollars. I'd rather see that money spent on solar panels.
That said, I think the usual objection to the space mirror approach is that you can get the same result much cheaper by spreading a cloud of tiny reflective particles into the upper atmosphere. (I've heard of proposals that would just mandate some additive to the fuel used by large passenger aircraft.)
Making the sky 1% hazier is kind of uninspiring (especially when compared to giant orbital mirrors, which could also act as death-rays if aligned and focused properly), but if it's cheap and is likely to work, then maybe it's worth a try.
(Unfortunately none of these options is that they don't do anything about ocean acidification.)
Objects in space are generally also subject to less weather, and as such they don't materially degrade. You could make a shield out of opaque film that would tear to shreds at the slightest breeze (see JWST sun shield)
"MYHRVOLD: So, climate change is a 1-percent effect. Now all we have to do is make the sun 1 percent dimmer. Now I don’t literally mean changing the sun. But there are a variety of things that bounce sunlight back into space. Clouds are one of those things: white clouds bounce white light back up into space. It turns out that volcanoes throw ash and particles, if it’s a big volcano, very high in the atmosphere. That reflects some of that light. And in fact this happened in 1991 when Mount Pinatubo went off. It cooled worldwide temperatures by a degree, degree-and-a-half-Fahrenheit for 12 to 18 months. Well, my company has come up with some very practical and cost-effective ways of deliberately putting particles into the upper atmosphere. And on paper, it works out that you could nullify all of global warming that way." [2]
[1] http://www.nathanmyhrvold.com/ [2] http://freakonomics.com/podcast/save-the-planet/
PS: Unfortunately, as a side effect you reduce the energy of all plant life by ~2% solar panels would also be effected. While this is probably no where near as bad as global warming it is something to look into.
A better choice is something akin to a semi-sun-synchronous Molniya-style-orbit. That is, orbit that is somewhat highly elliptical (so a satellite on it spends most of it's time near apogee, and zips through the perigee relatively quickly), and which precesses so that the apogee is always between the earth and the sun.
A satellite on such an orbit can easily spend >70% of it's time between the earth and the sun, and you could send many satellites there for a similar cost to putting just one to Earth-Sun L1.
Personally, I like the idea of Marine Cloud Brightening. Getting 1 or 2 thousand ships spraying seawater into the air seems tractable, if not trivial.
I suppose you could have a bunch of shades in a geosynchronous polar orbit, but I suspect they'd still be more effective over the equator, just because it gets more sunlight.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/mysterious-masses-se...
So looks like this is Sargassum (brown seaweed). I feel like any large-scale geoengineering to combat carbon will probably involve growing something like this over large areas in the middle of the ocean and then burying it.
This would only be feasible if it scales by the square or cube. I'm thinking a genetically modified plant designed to grow in single stalks or sheets hundreds of miles long so that it can be wound up by some kind of continuous process. It could use a traditional coal power plant modified to burn some small portion (say 1%) of the plant itself.
Sure there are side effects and unintended consequences from this but cut me some slack, it's only my first idea!
I had a recent crackpot idea that falls into the "unlikely to work" category since my background is not chemistry.
Given that a modern automobile's tailpipe emissions are mostly C02 + H20, those molecules can be converted into ethylene (C2H2) using known efficient electro-catalytic processes. The conversion of ethylene gas to a polyethylene (plastic) is well known and has the added benefit of being exothermic.
The end goal is for my car to output a lump of plastic I can drop into the recycling bin instead of CO2.
But my gut tells me that:
1) There is no way to speed up the reactions to keep up with the 80 liters per second of tailpipe exhaust (~40rps * 2.0 liter engine) without this system being impractically large and/or requiring energy intensive compressors.
2) No one, including me, wants to drive around with a tank of hydrogen and a tank of ethylene gas.
But still, it might be fun to hack on something like this assuming I can do it safely. If anyone has any feedback, or has experience making polyethylene, I would be grateful for feedback even if it is negative. Thanks.
Basically you'd need a second car worth of engine to generate the electricity to convert 1/3ish of the co2 from the first engine to ethylene (the rest winds up as methane, ethane, and CO.). Plus storage, maintenance and misc.
There are a few reviews by Hori that are more or less the gold standard on the chemistry if you want to read more. Unfortunately the literature is full of fud though.
3) The energy content of the hydrogen tank needs to be greater than the energy content of the fuel tank.
And if you were going to add such a huge hydrogen tank to the car, and keep it filled, it would be simpler to use the hydrogen itself as fuel. Many people have indeed proposed hydrogen powered cars. Hydrogen powered cars in turn don't look like they have a very bright future because battery electric vehicles are reaching mass production first, and because batteries are more energetically efficient than storing/transforming energy via hydrogen.
Is this article a PR piece? I am a bit annoyed by the lack of reflection in this naive approach to develop xeno-biology and let it loose in our (only) planetary habitat.
If it were the only statement of the kind in the sub-articles, it would be fine. There is, however, a strong disregard for second/third systems effects. Radical approaches alone do not cut it, they have to 'fit'.
Not that it is easy to do in the first place, but please think about the ecosystem as a whole. It is hard to take these type of statements seriously - but this is YC here, an outlet with a lot of media impact. Please communicate a responsible call for action.
Not much info online, but we have a weekly climate newsletter [2], or you can ask me (cofounder)
[1] https://www.charmindustrial.com/about/
[2] https://charmindustrial.us18.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=aaf...
I think Kyoto is a good example. Take (liberal and environmentally enlightened) Canada -- their Kyoto target was 6% reduction (compared to 1990 levels) in emissions by 2012. Did they come close to meeting it? No, instead they were on track to be 25% over their 1990 emissions and dropped out in 2011 in order to avoid paying billions in fines.
It's even more depressing when you consider that even if Kyoto HAD been fully implemented (by every country), it wouldn't have done enough actually stop global warming.
IMO, basically any political/collective effort is doomed to fail, even if the alternative is disaster. It's going to take something like this -- carbon/albedo reduction/capture technologies that can be implemented by smaller groups of people (not nation states) and probably will be if things get really bad.
There is a place for international agreements, but only if structured properly and flexible enough to change with the timescale they are meant to mature in.
The only viable solution in my opinion is for people to realise that our planet's resources are finite and that we need to accept this fact. AS others here have stated, moving from a growth-based economy to a sustainable one is the only way forward. Sustainability and technological startups are diametrically opposed.
You do know that the global middle class yearly income is 1-3k a year, right? That's probably less than a typical American food budget.
It's fine if you want the US to stop growing. But the rest of the world would desperately like to grow more. And that's 90% of the world's population.
It's also naive to think it's easier to redistribute wealth globally than it is to create technology. Redistribution only comes through bloodshed. At least with technology you can build it through hard work, effort, and ingenuity.
On the other side of the argument: US economic growth has decoupled from CO2 output in the last few years — industrial output & productivity has risen steadily while CO2 emissions have remained basically flat.
Scenarios I can see:
1. Reduce our economy by a factor of 10-100 — probably our population as well. Only way that can happen quickly is a catastrophe unparalleled in history.
2. Improve our technology to be carbon-neutral, retain the same population, maybe even improve our standard of living in the process.
The question is: is 2. possible? If it is, I prefer it. If it isn't, that really sucks, and there's merit to the anti-natalist strategy. I happen to think it is possible though — technology and policy and effort can get us to a sustainable energy economy.
The guys who run the podcast are not long on CCS as a savior for 1.5 degrees C, but they are incredibly knowledgable about the space and dive into a lot of technical, policy, and economic minutiae that you wouldn't think would exist.
I never exactly knew how much mitigating something like peaker plant composition and more sophisticated demand response can affect existing CO2 emissions. Even things like the opinions of energy executives in the (very silo'd) regional utilities (Dominion Energy, Green Mountain Power, etc) can have a wide-reaching effect on the timeline of policy.
I've listened to the whole run of each of the podcast and it's definitely got me more excited about the space. I'm glad YC is getting more aggressive.
They are right that we have all the technologies we need to reach 1.5 degrees C. However we need massive acceleration of implementation of those technologies. Like a 10x improvement. We're not on track right now.
The reason we need Carbon removal is because most IPCC forecast still assume a large % carbon removal. And it's going to be important for us to get back to 300ppm in atmosphere. The consequences to society of 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees are so massive and costly that we should anything that have a shot at avoiding it.
Taking a wider lens, my honest opinion is I think it's going to have to be a combination of a "Cuban Missile Crisis" moment for our society, and some sort of Moore's law effect on PV or battery storage.
Taking the analogy that Climate Change is the "Nuclear Arms Race" crisis of our generation, we haven't really had an event that has resonated with the populous to take an aggressive stance that blunts economics. It's shocking but true that the events of Super Storm Sandy (285 deaths), Katerina (1,833 deaths), and Puerto Rico/Maria (2,975 deaths) haven't been enough to really move the needle in the collective consciousness. It may a true disaster, on the order of Miami being rendered uninhabitable, in order for some entity above the state level to really instantiate something like a Carbon Tax.
But once we get there, I think the bottom falling out of solar pricing between now and 2025 has enough of an economic incentive to get us to 10% renewables, whereas it gets de-risked enough for the "big money" (think: Fed-backed Capital Markets ala infrastructure spending) to come in and take over. It is true that PV manufacturing doesn't exactly map onto chip manufacturing (it's not about nano scape per se, it's more about layering absorbing levels in a way that allows full capture), but ultimately I am hopeful we can get there.
Lastly ... solar is ultimately a empowering technology, in that anyone with land can use it. It's a perfect fit for a country where the laws were originally meant for a farming population (which is essentially what solar is). I think once a tipping point gets hit where gas prices stay between where they are now (maximum shale extraction cost) and ~$30 (when the Saudis start pumping), and solar goes below that, the discussion will be more around how many DC lines do we need to get electricity from the southwest to the rust belt, than whether renewables are what will save us from our energy troubles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/07/double-sided-solar-cell... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/29/us/puerto-rico-growing-death-...
But pls don't use the word "space"
Just US $250 billion per year to offset ALL of humanity's carbon emissions. Yes I said ALL. It would cost less than the ongoing 'war on terror.' If I was rich I would be building autonomous mining robots so I could do it myself because I'm not confident governments will take action until it's too late.
This isn't a smart-arse answer given every additional gallon of oil dug or gas fracked makes the problem worse, the oil industry hasn't yet accepted defeat, and politics still promotes and subsidises fossil.
How then to take that problem out of the realm of political corruption (lobbying) even faster?
We know what to do. Slightly facetiously, simply copy Orkney, we know how, and the cost. Save a little oil for chemicals and plastics that cannot be replaced. Yet we don't. Lobbying and politics is the problem.
The article discusses this point in the second paragraph.
> We're now in "Phase 2" and stopping climate change requires both emission reduction and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. "Phase 2" is occurring faster and hotter than we thought. If we don't act soon, we'll end up in "Phase 3" and be too late for both of these strategies to work.
Do you think the political part of the problem will magically go away if there is a viable phase 3 technology that does not contribute more carbon than it captures?
Do you think the politicians will permit it to be used at scale when they have done all possible to slow renewables?
Massive, self-replicating system of genetically engineered bacteria? I'm certainly no marine biologist, but I'm pretty sure phytoplankton are a super important part of the world's ecosystem. Suddenly massively increasing the number of them that exist in the open ocean seems like it would wreak havoc on the world's ecological balance.
I'm super concerned about externalities for any sort of geo-engineering, but we are going to get some externalities of the present course anyway.
Charles Eisenstein, a prescient thinker on this topic (and others), has advocated for our reconnection and renewed stewardship to/of the earth. That might sound a bit new-agey to some, but after reading his recent book, he made some compelling points:
- mainstream environmentalism has taken a reductionist approach by almost solely dedicating itself to emissions reduction (it has also made the movement vulnerable to climate-change deniers, who are (at least partially) correct in that emissions cannot account for ALL of our environmental issues... e.g. bees dying off has likely nothing to do with carbon emissions, yet the culprit is often vaguely referred to by many activists as "climate change" which has become synonymous with "carbon emissions")
- while reducing our emissions is unquestionably critical, we need to widen our focus to include the following, which are equally if not more important: restoring water cycles, considerate reforestation/halting deforestation, ending pesticide use (which is likely a primary driver of insect die-off, causing catastrophic disruptions in global food chains and biodiversity, both of which are critical to nature's ability to heal itself), and last but not least:
- regenerative, no-till agriculture (versus till-intensive, soil-eroding industrialized agriculture) is an effective tool for restoring these systems, and it also acts a stunningly powerful carbon-sink (by some estimates, if my memory serves me correctly, we could reduce current emissions enormously by converting only 10% of our global industrialized, mono-crop farmland to regenerative, no-till farmland, which IMO is a small endeavor when compared to the tech-intensive and potentially world-altering prospects of massive carbon-sucking machines or injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to induce artificial cooling)
For anyone interested, his recent book is "Climate: A new story." It was the most meditative and thought-provoking collection of ideas that I've read on the state of the environment and climate. It's also incredibly hopeful without being blindly optimistic. In fact, it's rooted in a deep sense of awareness, not just of the many existential ecological crises we face, but of the new mindset we must adopt if we are to truly heal our planet.
1 kg of iron can fix 83000 kg of carbon dioxide and turn it into biomass.
The idea is that you give algae the one ingredient to growth which is very sparse in the oceans yet over-abundant on land.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization
"Give me a half a tanker of iron and I will give you another ice age"
What I took away most was that carbon removal is now firmly a part of mitigating climate change. It's part of "Plan A" but also there is so much from the previous "Plan A" that will still need to work on. There are a number of carbon-capture technologies on current emissions that need to be deployed from power plants to cement factories.
Some scenerios rely more on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, while others rely more on afforestation, which are the two carbon-removal methods most often included in the IPCC reports. Trade-offs with other sustainability objectives occur mostly through increased land, energy, water and investment demand.
There is another scenario were we might not need a lot of bioenergy with carbon capture storage and that would be if we would decorbonise at an incredible fast rate (starting now) and planted a lot of trees. I'm not seeing that happening anytime soon though.
"If we don't act soon, we'll end up in "Phase 3" and be too late for both of these strategies to work." In fact, let's at least start brainstorming about plans to deal with Phase 3, too.
The topic of desert flooding has been thought about quite a bit, e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project.
20 years ago: "I'm sure technology will figure out how to reduce emissions. Sequestering tech is neat, but will only take off if the end product is itself useful in bulk"
10 years ago: "Sequestering tech will take too long and has too many potential complications to rely on, we need to get serious about reduction."
Now: "We're screwed and it's only a matter of how much people end up suffering. I'm very skeptical of sequestering tech, but we need anything that works"
It was not long before the Colorado River began to wreak havoc with its erratic flows. In autumn, the river would drop below the level of the canal inlet, and temporary brush diversion dams had to be constructed. In early 1905, heavy floods destroyed the headworks of the canal, and water began to flow uncontrolled down the canal towards the Salton Sink. On August 9, the entire flow of the Colorado swerved into the canal and began to flood the bottom of the Imperial Valley. In a desperate gamble to close the breach, crews of the Southern Pacific Railroad, whose tracks ran through the valley, attempted to dam the Colorado above the canal, only to see their work demolished by a flash flood.[197] It took seven attempts, more than $3 million, and two years for the railroad, the CDC, and the federal government to permanently block the breach and send the Colorado on its natural course to the gulf – but not before part of the Imperial Valley was flooded under a 45-mile-long (72 km) lake, today's Salton Sea.
Edit: Never mind, missed the YC dessert flooding article:
>> This system of oases would be used to grow phytoplankton. With additional desalinated water, it could irrigate the surrounding area to propagate vegetation as well as provide fresh water to nearby communities. These oases would operate similarly to the ocean phytoplankton cultivation concept but executed in a relatively controlled and, thereby, safer environment than in the ocean. Unlike BECCS, the oases would absorb CO2 via phytoplankton growth - phytoplankton produce biomass faster than agriculture, reducing the necessary surface area by almost 4x - which would be periodically harvested to extend the length of sequestration and set up downstream use as fertilizer or other higher value products. This would be the largest infrastructure project undertaken, making its scale the main challenge.
For the curious: http://www.scp-wiki.net/object-classes
What Would Dr Bright Do?
With how well that's been going, I'm wondering why they even need a plan b...
But surely it makes sense to stop digging up coal in the first place.
> The notion of ever-expanding economic growth has been promoted so relentlessly that “growth” is now entrenched as the natural objective of collective human effort. The public has been convinced that growth is the natural solution to virtually all social problems—poverty, debt, unemployment, and even the environmental degradation caused by the determined pursuit of growth. Meanwhile, warnings by scientists that we live on a finite planet that cannot sustain infinite economic expansion are ignored or even scorned. In Collision Course, Kerryn Higgs examines how society's commitment to growth has marginalized scientific findings on the limits of growth, casting them as bogus predictions of imminent doom.
> Higgs explores the resistance to ideas about limits, tracing the propagandizing of “free enterprise,” the elevation of growth as the central objective of policy makers, the celebration of “the magic of the market,” and the ever-widening influence of corporate-funded think tanks—a parallel academic universe dedicated to the dissemination of neoliberal principles and to the denial of health and environmental dangers from the effects of tobacco to global warming.
This of course balanced by the interests of those protecting their current cash flows in established carbon releasing industries.
A 500 MW renewable energy power plant dedicated to negative-emissions H2 could therefore consume and store nearly 8 million tonnes of CO2 per day while generating a little more than 2 million kWh in the form of H2
As both the math and later text makes clear, such a plant would store ~21,600 tonnes of CO₂ per day - or 8 million tonnes per year. The 2 million kWh generated looks more like a daily figure but doesn't match up with the daily figure elsewhere in the article (it has 6 million kWh / day equivalent of H₂ generated for a similar sized plant) - it was probably supposed to be 2 billion kWh / year?
I've always been thinking - someone should give these guys money, and lots of it.
An acre of lawn grass can sequester several tons of CO2 each year. I bet properly managed, you could achieve 10x that by optimizing growth cycle. If we could harvest and store it without releasing it, might turn into a useful agricultural product: bokashi.
My napkin math puts it as needing within orders of magnitude of acres used for US corn production for the 40 Gt/yr target, but does not account for energy use.
Also, more wood construction? Wood is 50% carbon, but because CO2 is only ~1/3 carbon by weight, every pound of wood represents ~1.5 pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere. If can grow, harvest and use ~13 billion tons of wood a year, that wood satisfy yearly 40gt target. Seems like forests can grow roughly a ton of wood per acre.
If we can redirect wood waste (sawdust/chips) to livestock operations efficiently, the material could be used as bedding to absorb waste and then be buried/composted for agricultural use. Less CO2 release and counteract soil depletion, so subsequent generations of plants will grow yet more vigorously.
Mixture of factors is likely best solution. I think Joel Salatin could probably save the planet if we let him.
Under centrifugal force fluids separate into bands based on mass. The same principle as oil and water separating under gravity. Use giant centrifuges to spin compressed air until it separates into bands, then extract the bands corresponding to greenhouse gasses.
I don’t know the energy requirements for this or if there is a better way of doing it. But if you’re looking for blue sky thinking, that’s what I’ve got.
Could you math it out from there and compare it to the Sabbatier reaction or to just plain old trees? I doubt you'll extract CO2 cost effectively that way.
Also taking a quick look at the natural separation of gasses in Earth’s atmosphere, it seems that the uppermost layer consists mostly of hydrogen, helium and CO2, and that’s just under gravity.
I’m not a chemical engineer, but I’ll have a stab at what the energy for the process might be. No promises that I can reach an answer.
However, I get the impression that gas centrifuges are really high-maintenance. Is that right? Or does that only apply to the Uranium enrichment case?
The most relevant published literature I’ve found is this:
http://www.mate.tue.nl/mate/pdfs/5250.pdf
Which is exactly about the separation of CO2, but for natural gas production. The throughput was uneconomical in their case, however it does establish that the principle is sound, it may just need a (possibly very considerable) amount of development.
I haven’t exactly done an exhaustive search though, so there’s probably more out there.
CO2 concentrations are higher indoors, and they're affecting our cognitive ability. Atmospheric concentrations are going to be high for human cognition, especially in dense urban areas.
Better indoor ventilation will help, but if outdoor air already has higher than optimal CO2 concentrations, scrubbing that air is the only option left. Given the number of air changes needed (assuming 10X), a home unit would need to scrub CO2 from around 100,000 liters of air a day per person.
Small-scale removal is likely much more expensive than industrial BECCS or other carbon capture technology - but the value proposition would be fresher air for healthier, smarter workplaces and homes. Sell me cartridges of enzymes, and take spent ones with bicarbonate for reconditioning, and I can feel like I'm helping the planet a bit while making my life nicer.
https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...
I minuter the co2 in my office and vent when required.
And do we know for sure that 500-1000 is fine for cognition?
My thoughts are that people may be more willing to invest in carbon removal as it allows them to continue to live their same life. They see it as "I can continue to pollute since we can just remove the CO2." Similar to how some people may view eating and dieting... "I can eat bad now, I'll just go on a diet later."
So to answer your question, the popularity of carbon removal will probably be about the same as the popularity of a carbon tax.
Equally exciting are the biomass gasifiers that utilize Stirling engines, such as those made by Microgen (http://www.microgen-engine.com/) as they are external combustion engines which are quieter and have better runtimes and maintenance cycles.
Basic idea is a nanoscale metal-organic "hack" of common bacteria systems to develop efficient pathways for the conversion of sunlight and CO2 into useful fuels. Massive search and simulation required to find ideal candidates. Which could then be incorporated directly into carbon emission sources such as factories and power plants.
One recent example is hybridizing M. thermoacetica with "magic" Au22 nanoclusters
https://chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/harvesting-solar-fuels-t...
If anyone needs a developer and/or marketing engineer with a passion for automation (think very advanced Zapier) hit me up because I'd rather work with you than working for the next "Crypto currency company". Look at my profile for how to contact me!
>About 10% of the world's surface is desert, which is cheap, uninhabited, unproductive land that is drenched in some of the most powerful solar radiation on the planet.
Land doesn’t have to be productive to be protected. Deserts are ecosystems, and this kind of “changing the wild forest frontier to mans will!” thinking is how we landed up without forests in the first place!
From desert hare, to toads that come out once a year when it rains, to cactii, snakes, insects, and many other creatures - deserts are filled with living creatures.
Is this stewardship of the planet or just ensuring habitability for humans?
If we invent a device that helps us to physically separate oxygen from carbon, humans and farm animals could do it. It would be like milling grain, or washing clothes.
Idea: create filters which are big enough for carbon to pass through, but not oxygen. Then "squeeze" a bunch of air through, and wipe away the carbon on one side. Like a cheesecloth made of carbon nanotubes...
There are approximately 1E20 moles of CO2 in the atmosphere (very rough math)[2,3]. This could take a while, especially considering efficiency would probably be 10% of this idealized system. However, this filtering idea isn't bad, I don't know of any filter like this for splitting CO2, but something is almost certainly being worked on for just general sequestration of CO2 from other atmospheric gasses.
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=805+kJ
[2] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(5.148E18+kg)%2Fmolar+m...
[3] https://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/math-how-much-co...
I saw a nanofilter that could remove salt from water.
If you can puncture a material with ultra-violet lasers, the holes might be the right size to filter carbon; that is my guess, based on these results https://phys.org/news/2014-10-oxygen-molecules-carbon-dioxid...
Use electrolysis to split water, get the Hydrogen and Oxygen, insert Carbon, excrete glucose...
> Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the combined exhaust from all transportation [1]
Are you will to fund any product ideas that will be willing to encourage a paradigm shift/or smooth shift with regards to a more eco and animal fríendly lifestyle?
No, it isn't. The Paris accord was a non-binding document that tried to put in place a framework for coming up with solutions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#Nationally_det...
5 Billion Cubic Meters of Oil are produced Annually by humanity.
30Bn Tons of CO2 generated.
60% is un-sequesterable because it is small and/or mobile.
40% is sequestrable and large scale/stationary.
12 Billion Cubic Meters of CO2 are thus sequestrable.
You must liquefy CO2 before putting it into the ground.
50% -70% efficiency in converting it to a liquid that we can shove into the ground.
6 to 8.4 Billion Cubic Meters of Liquefied CO2 are thus Sequestrable.
Shoving 6 to 8.4 billion cubic meters of liquefied CO2 into ground is no small matter.
Think about it this way, humanity built an entire industry focused on an annual extraction of 5Bn Cubic Meters of Oil over a time span of 100+ years with refineries and complex processes spanning multiple countries, geographies, regulations, wars, and land rights.
Also, who’s going to buy sequestered carbon?
The reality is that something like this will require spinning up an entire Trillion dollar market.
It's also important to note that the geological formations necessary for sequestering CO2 are a lot more common than those required to _potentially_ be stores of crude.
In addition to all this, countries around the world will have to be willing to take an economic hit, something I'm worried the biggest polluters won't do (China/India in particular). This makes me wonder if it is futile for developed nations to be stifling their own economies with carbon taxes because China, India, and Africa don't keep up. In any case, we probably will be far off the IPCC recommendations and will have to resort to geoengineering.
You’re right. This is unlikely, but if you think there’s even a remote chance, the scale will be so huge that betting on startups working on this tech could still pay off.
We believe though there is still a lot to be done, and not just in CO2 capture, but in air pollution in general.
Here's the website: http://http://www.pureairindustries.com/
BUT
I think it is too often overlooked that a fundamental prerequisite for making any meaningful progress in this area predicates on cheap, affordable, abundant "clean" energy. Anytime you talk about hydrolysis, desalination, or increasing concentrations of CO2 in a gas or a solution - each of those processes require non-trivial amounts of energy to do at scale and the limitations are often in the realm of physics. Ultimately, energy from somewhere is needed to break the bonds of the CO2 so it can bond to new inert compounds and that requires lots of energy.
The article says it clearly "It's a collective action problem the world has been unable to solve"
Well, can we place a call out for investment in innovative solutions to collective action.
Can we fix democracy - both where it lives but could do better and where it does not live at all?
I don't accept that "Social Media" already does this. We need more
In short - Let's have investment and innovation in the democracy and freedom space (as well as) in the carbon sequestration space.
I rather like spending money, but I know I only have a certain budget. Consequently I only spend what money is available rather than only depending on how much I want things.
I feel we should look at the environment in the same way; decide our carbon budget, and work within what's possible according to that, rather than start with what is palatable to the individual and working backwards.
Keeping our environment habitable seems like something we have to do rather than a nice-to-have.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-...
Solving this problem would open up resources to this field. Right now we suffer from global bystander/freeloader syndrome. The cost of global warming is spread to thin/gradual across the global population.
The US should be able to reduce that inefficiency delta to just over 5% by cutting CO² emissions by 40% without any impact on luxury whatsoever. This alone would cut worldwide CO² emissions by about 5.73%.
Or in the terms on this page, we need a Plan C.
[edit]
They actually do list this, I didn't notice at first since it's not a carbon removal technology.
http://geochange-report.org/index.php?option=com_content&vie...
Many small scale gasifier generators are designed to do just that. The problem with all solid fuels is that material handling is difficult (you need to chip wood to the correct size and shape to have it feed through a machine effectively, this gets more complicated when you're trying to process corn cobs, sugar cane bagasse, and fruit pits also), not to mention that the fuel needs to be the proper dryness to burn without producing excessive tar.
Then there is the problem with the PAH (Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons) that are produced, and their carcinogenic on any of your workers...not to mention any other toxic chemicals that may be produced out of your smoke stack when using mixed fuels.
All this boils down to details that have to be worked out in a mobile unit.
Similarly, this could drive a net carbon-neutral source of natural gas on Earth.
I really see nuclear energy as the solution. The nuclear reactions are emission free, and the emissions in the supply chain to drive the reactions have very low emissions compared to other sources of energy.
We are hiring so DM me if you would like to learn more!
Climate breakdown is not a problem worth tackling in isolation, because it is merely one prominent symptom of a general catastrophe. Capitalism will not allow evolved complex systems to continue to exist, because they can either be extracted directly for short-term profit, or destroyed in side-effects (appearing costless to the brutish actuarial mind) of other profit-making activities. Our home (the so-called 'environment', a term we really should abandon) cannot survive our way of life. We have no other home (Mars fantasies aside). Ergo, our way of life must change.
If we do nothing however, we are headed for things we cannot adapt to. The worst case is not rising seas and famine, the worst case is the Permian-Triassic Extinction.
It’s an ecosystem in its own right with specialised creatures that live there. Plus it’s not like the people in the Sahara are going to be happy that a bunch of people decide that their nation should be flooded.
Remember we can’t convince Brazillians to stop ranchers from decimating the rainforest.
Also that added water, if it is stable, will result in ,ore growth and human presence, adding to the heat engine. (Assuming people in the region don’t drain it for irrigation almost immediately )
There is in fact no market for CO2 separated using DAC because it costs an order of magnitude more to separate CO2 (>$100/T) than its value on the market (max $15/T). So, the real question is, who is going to pay for it?
The companies currently operating in this space (e.g. Climeworks, Carbon Engineering) are doing so at a massive loss. In the case of Climeworks, they are pumping the CO2 to a greenhouse.[0]
I don’t think DAC alone can ever make sense, there has to be a second step in the process where the CO2 is converted into a marketable product, so that product displaces emissions. This means something like converting CO2 to plastic or fuel that would otherwise be produced using petrochemicals. Carbon Engineering recently announced that they are pursuing this. Of course, in addition to two technical breakthroughs that need to occur (cheap CO2 separation from air and cheap CO2 conversion to fuel), they will somehow have to get those fuels to be cost-competitive with current fossil fuels.
The thing to keep in mind is that CO2 emissions from man-made sources total 60 GT per year (pa). And eventually all 60 GT must be removed every year. To put this into perspective, the amount of oil produced globally by weight is about 5 GT p.a. The amount of CO2 produced is truly enormous.
The market for CO2 for EOR is about 80 Mtpa (around 1000x less than CO2 emissions)[1]. EOR actually makes some sense as we will be using oil for some time, the carbon footprint of EOR-extracted oil is lower than conventional oil.
At the end of the day, CO2 capture, especially DAC, seems more like something that is run at a loss for public benefit, like public transit, not as a for-profit enterprise.
[0] On the face of it, this seems great because the CO2 is being used, but the problem is that the plants would remove the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere whether they were grown with captured CO2 or not (they might just grow a bit faster in the greenhouse). In fact, the energy required for the carbon capture process means that the carbon footprint of the plants grown in the greenhouse using captured CO2 is likely higher than if they were grown outdoors!
[1] https://hub.globalccsinstitute.com/publications/global-statu...
We no longer have the number of massive herds of animals that used to roam the plains/savannahs grazing, pooing and to a lesser extent escaping from predators.
This has meant that the grasslands are no longer trampled on and "fertilised". This has caused the grasses to die back, the soil to degrade, to not hold water and to turn to desert. (see the sahara, the outback, parts of china and the usa).
Subsequently we've tried to be really careful with the land and not over graze it etc. which tends to have the opposite effect than what is desired.
Now I also looked into reforestation because I thought trees were the answer. Grow trees sequester carbon etc. But it turns out the cost of doing this £/$ and water (desalination) would actually be outweighed by both the albido effect (green trees absorb more sunlight than deserts that reflect it back) and that trees don't really grow fast enough to have the impact required.
Getting back to the grasslands, it turns out that when you intensively drive a herd over grasslands the grass initially dies back but the root system expands, the plant grows quickly and sequesters carbon into the ground. It actually builds soil and traps carbon and it does it faster than previously thought. The ground is also more permeable to water so when big storms come it actually soaks up the water for later use rather than it running off and causing floods, erosion etc. Also grass is lighter (colour) than trees so the albido effect is not so bad.
This is just my understanding of one part of the problem. This is what I think may be a solution to that:
We need to change the way we manage livestock. Probably change legislation so they can't be kept indoors or feed grains (I think that is a big methane contributor as well). We should have grazing plans for entire countries that manage existing land well and restore broken land. We should stop eating them because we need a big herd to restore the land and we probably need to employ a lot of people to drive the herds (yeeha).
Grazing plans are simple, illiterate people seem to cope fine with them. We've got the technology to scale this and in the west we probably have the maps/surveys etc. to make this relative straight forward.
Whatever ends up being the solution to these problems we need to make government act. Historically the best way to do that has been non violent direct action. As we are at crisis point now (5yrs until the arctic has melted based on current melt) it is really our final option. You may be interested in joining the Extinction Rebellion to make this happen.
My interest grew from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI But this video has a lot more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7pI7IYaJLI Why growing trees in the sahara won't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfo8XHGFAIQ And this is long but has a lot of detail about holistically managing livestock and the effect on soil structure etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HmoAIykljk Finally the Extinction Rebellion - https://extinctionrebellion.org
The purported enhanced stocking strategy would catch like wildfire if it were real and could at least be well documented after years of research, but there are no studies of any substance for it. There is no difficulty in implementing it - just keep more cattle than before, allow it to herd, move the herd around and presto your output increases and costs reduce - climate and environment get fixed and we all eat steak. This is not an exaggeration of the case made in the videos.
I think the theme detracts from the image of practical sustainable farming techniques, which are very real, continue to develop and have to compete in the current economy.
https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/plant-rich-diet
https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/regenerative-agricul...
https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/conservation-agricul...
Already jellyfish are taking over. We're killing off so many life forms we're essentially going back in time to the precambrian era.
Instead of looking for "quick fixes" like iron seeding, which has just as much a chance of going awry as Australia importing cane toads to deal with their crop insects, let's just curtail CO2 emissions.
The problem is that, given we're failing the straightforward task of curtailment even now, what are the chances that we can successfully achieve curtailment and sequestering in the required time-frame?
Curtailment is a large task but we know what to do. Sequestering would also be a large task but what to do is uncertain. Curtailment so far has been a corrupt circus with "pledges" and other indirect inducements ("carbon credits") being most of what was done. These indirect inducements primarily served as speculative vehicles and advertising gloss.
And here, I just google'd up what you'd expect: A bitcoin-based platform for trading carbon credit. Now you can use the certainty of damaging the environment to make a promise to repair it.
https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/ibm-and-veridium-transf...
The world needs to declare a WAR ON CO2 and put it on a war-time footing. Further considerations of tinkering around with an environment we've already de-stabilized only shows we haven't learned our lesson. We don't know enough to know what's safe... except the way things were.
We are though. Most people I talk to don't know that the US peaked CO2 emissions ten years ago and it's been falling every since - in per capita, per GDP, and absolute terms.
The problem is that the US can export it's carbon-intensive industries and even consume new carbon intensive entities produced by other countries. For example, US investors certainly consume a modest fraction of bitcoins mined in China and bitcoins wind-up consuming not just a lot of energy but also form a new source sort of carbon-intensive production.
Solar and wind power are becoming competitive with oil in general but this can never by itself halt hydrocarbon-energy production 'cause as it's relative price drops, there's always a practical use for hydrocarbon-energy close to the source, where pumping it out of the ground is nearly free.
The reason it was falling was because of strict emissions standards and a strong EPA, both of which are basically gone.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/un-says-climate-genoc...
https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...
I've yet to see a plan for a transition to a carbon-neutral economy, even on a 30-year timeline.
The iron particles aren't going to breed and make more iron particles.
> let's just curtail CO2 emissions
So we shouldn't aim for zero (or even less)? Because 'curtail' will never reach zero.
Iron particles won't replicate, but the chemistry of the ocean could change dramatically. We don't know what happens at scale, and we probably don't want to find out.
Find another solution.
If the government had any backbone at all they'd rally people around the idea of committing to it and getting it done. In World War II people lowered their "quality of life" to support the cause. It can be done.
In other words, the SUV or sports car apparently has more to do with making people happy by making them look to be of higher social status than the actual utility of those goods.
This is also demonstrated in the South Park episode Smug, which criticizes hybrids. From a public policy perspective, the greatest reduction in CO2 comes from getting people into economical cars (like a 42+mpg --or higher in EU models--Civic) rather than in necessarily Hybrids or electrics which not everyone can afford. The greatest co2/$ reduced is actually going from average to a civic-like car.
Perhaps cultural changes away from materialism, as well as effective public policy may be important in reducing global warming.
But what we get is more "War on Poverty" style bureaucracies and activism which has become a self-perpetuating and wasteful industry of its own.
I guess that could be considered "lowering people's quality of life" though.
The first crucial question is whether catastrophic damage to Earth's ecosystems is biologically inevitable given human cognitive capacities. Given a satisfactory answer to that (which I think unlikely), the next question is: how can we displace the cancerous ideology of limitless growth? These are obviously more challenging issues, requiring the recruitment of a far broader range of human capacities and knowledge than dangerous & blinkered technological capitalists can offer.
The general consensus seems to be that gasses like carbon dioxide and methane heat cause an increase in global warming. I don't dispute that, but out of fun a few years ago on earth day I started crunching some numbers regarding our direct thermal pollution.
In the US our current consumption of gasoline alone is as 142.98 billion gallons per year[0]. At an average of 120,429 BTUs per gallon [1] that puts the US at ~17.219 quadrillion BTUs a year (in gasoline consumption alone)
Does this matter? Well at that scale we're talking about a Hiroshima Nuclear Bomb level event (15 Kilotons of TNT or ~60 Billion BTUs) every 0.54 minutes all day every day in this country when just considering American consumption of gasoline alone. If volcanoes are your thing, Mt. Saint Helens produced 24 megatons of thermal energy in its 6 years of eruptive activity. The US on the other hand produces the thermal equivalent of that every ~2.1 days... and again, that's just gasoline.
Most of our heat comes from gas which is converted directly to thermal energy. And then we have coal power...
Regardless of how "clean" you make it. We're talking about burning things to create energy so the basic law of the conservation of energy comes into play. And as hot air rises, it doesn't just magically become cooler... it dissipates that energy until it reaches an equilibrium. Thereby transferring energy into the geosphere.
And then when you explode things like natural gas or coal use, it's sometimes being used to heat, but even when it's being used to cool, we're not getting 1-to-1 efficiency. Air conditioners output more heat than they dissipate.
And if people use ACs more as atmospheric heat increases, we're talking about a positive feedback loop without even taking into account the thermal pollution of creating the energy by burning stuff in the first place. (Even nuclear plants tend to use ocean water for cooling - thereby directly heating the oceans)
I'm not saying carbon dioxide and methane aren't potentially catastrophic, but I don't think it makes sense to discount our direct thermal pollution as a potential cause. I only based figures in my argument on US gasoline consumption. That's a minor piece of the global energy pie.
Either way, reducing personal wattage through efficiency and reduced use seem to be pretty productive in terms of reducing my personal thermal impact so it seems like a step in the right direction whether thermal pollution is directly related to global warming or not.
[0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10 [1]https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=about_ene...
This post is a pitiable joke, whose highest purpose is to stand in a museum, one day, as a testament to how blindly we charged into the apocalypse. I only hope that museum's curated by our children, and not whatever species finds our remains.
For a good, hard look at why I believe this, read Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything," and Peter Frase's "Four Futures."
If you're daring enough, you can follow those with Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash," and Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets" and "Witches, Midwives, & Nurses" for a deep look at how and how long we've been going wrong.
If that all doesn't make you straight up suicidal (let alone quit maintaining your startup pyramid scheme), I have more reading suggestions for how to turn this ship around.
Meanwhile your post is putting down people who are doing actual work to fix the problem. I for one am delighted to see people committing resources to solving real problems instead of developing worthless mobile phone apps. That gives me hope our species will get through global warming.
Ok, let us know your plan for reducing carbon emissions and when and how we can expect it to happen.
Levy a revenue neutral carbon tax which anually redistributes to consumers the "average" tax per person.
Stop subsidizing suburban sprawl. Build more high density housing near mass transit. Walkable neighborhoods and such.
These are all obvious things we should have started decades ago.
"Witches, Midwives, & Nurses, first published by the Feminist Press in 1973, is an essential book about the corruption of the medical establishment and its historic roots in witch hunters. In this new edition, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have written an entirely new chapter that delves into the current fascination with and controversies about witches, exposing our fears and fantasies. They build on their classic exposé on the demonization of women healers and the political and economic monopolization of medicine. This quick history brings us up-to-date, exploring today's changing attitudes toward childbirth, alternative medicine, and modern-day witches."
I'm sick of you lazy techies. Grow up and read a damn book.
I understand that humans are changing the Earth's environment, but with this we need to acknowledge that other organisms are doing it too. In particular plants have been taking CO2 from the atmosphere for ages and continue to do so. If you look at CO2 concentrations for long periods of time, you'll find that the levels of today are not very different from what has happened cyclically for hundreds of thousands of years.
The difference may be on the fact that now we are adding an extra influx of CO2 to the atmosphere, but in doing so we may be balancing greater concentrations of water vapour, which is a much more efficient greenhouse gas. If doubling the concentration of CO2 increases the temperature of the atmosphere, in say one degree, to gain another degree you'll need to double the concentration of CO2 again, so the effect of concentration of CO2 on temperature is logarithmic. Water vapour is much more efficient and by decreasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere we may increase the amount of water.
This is because of how photosynthesis (and agriculture) works. A plant breathes air in through small pores on their leaves called stomata. Doing so allows water to evaporate through those same pores. If the concentration of CO2 in the air is low, the plant will need to evaporate more water to absorb the same amount of CO2. On the other hand, if the plant doesn't have enough water to evaporate, it will close its stomata and the result will be lower growth and poor yield, simply because of the lack of carbon. Since nowadays many agricultural plots are using water from aquifers and other underground sources, we are actually putting into the environment much more water than would have been without agriculture. If we decrease the amount of CO2 we may push even further the plant's need for water and produce more water vapour, pushing even further the warming, since water is much more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
We may be fighting against the wrong enemy. And in doing so punishing unfairly the poorest of the world, who rely on fossil fuel for energy and those who will be the most affected when crop yields start falling and the water available becomes insufficient.
I haven't been able to find a global warming model that incorporates this effect, but if someone made it this far into this comment and knows of any model that does, I'll be very grateful to hear from it. If someone related to this project reads this, please discuss it. It may be a mute point because some reason that I don't know, but it may very well be an important one.
1) Thank you for doing this
2) You should have been doing this 10 years ago because it was exactly as obvious then that this kind of acceleration of investment was necessary, and YC sank millions of dollars into social media bullshit in the intervening period instead.
A more prudent approach, in terms of believing that a prediction for the future may happen, would be to plug the data from a decade or more ago into a model and see if it accurately predicts now. If not, reject that model, try to do a root source analysis to find out what's actually happening, and try again.
Call me cynical or pessimistic, but the time has already passed. Maybe we should focus on saving as much as we can.
Funding a few companies may be the right thing to do, but shouldn't it have been ten years ago. Or were the smartest people on the planet were hoping that it would all just go away.
It's already too late. Sorry, but you have to invest in saving as many people as possible.
Unfortunately, the politicians would never understand that.
Its actually funny. After decades of dystopian future being manifested in the literature and movies, we have come to believe that's it's all just another science fiction movie or a conspiracy theory.
We are heading towards a earth altering event, and we can't stop it.
Save yourself.
If you downvote this please leave a note with what is wrong with my logic.
This is so wildly irresponsible. Every time I hear of these mega projects to remove CO2 I get scared. Let's try to think about this coolly and logically for a minute.
Our planet is used to change. Our ecosystem is ready to deal with change, and CO2, and heat. It takes a lot of hyperventilating to even imagine a way in which global warming destroys life on Earth. Worst case scenario is stronger weather, higher oceans, and change of ecosystems. Maybe we get forests in Antarctica again. Maybe North America becomes one big desert. Or a jungle. Life adapts.
The biggest existential climate threat is a permanent ice age. Our planet has been slowly sequestering carbon for eons. The ice ages last longer than the warm periods. All of human history has been in a warm period. You want to genetically engineer little organisms that we can in no way control, to remove carbon from our atmosphere? Sounds like a great way to kill everything on the face of the earth and turn our giant spinning miracle into just a big ice ball. Just one team needs to do it one time, take that decision into their own hands.
Think of hurricanes becoming routine in some parts of the world. Then think of literal miles of ice, flexing the tectonic plates as they crush everything beneath them, creeping towards the equator.
I'm not going to even address the other ideas right now. We have a small fraction of the understanding and intelligence to be making these kinds of decisions. Just my opinion, but the best thing we can do for now is stop adding carbon to the air, and learn more about this world we live in.
We should not be spending the valuable resource of startup founders on this problem. We should be spending it on creating enough wealth to bring everyone in the world out of poverty and giving them the tools to adapt to whatever happens in the future, including changes in climate.
It is if the alarmists have their way and we commit trillions of dollars in resources to CO2 mitigation. That's trillions of dollars that can't be spent to create wealth and bring people out of poverty. That's a lot of opportunity cost.
To be clear, YCombinator's money is theirs and they can invest it however they choose. I don't know what fraction of their total investment will end up being committed to this. My objection is to the "existential threat" language, which makes it seem as though they would be willing to drop everything else and commit all of their resources to this effort. (After all, if it really were an existential threat, why wouldn't they? How could they justify funding any other startups?)
the data does not say we will be cooked to death. the data says our planet's ecospheres will continue to be increasingly violent and unstable if the warming continues. the warming is caused by atmospheric cO2.
http://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar5/wg1/
The key items are on p. 16: first, that the "likely" range of equilibrium climate sensitivity is 1.5 - 4.5 C (which is the same as the first report in 1990--we have learned nothing in 28 years), and second, the footnote at the bottom of the page: "No best estimate for equilibrium climate sensitivity can now be given because of a lack of agreement on values across assessed lines of evidence and studies".
First, this raises the question: if there is lack of agreement, how did they even come up with the "likely" range? How can they say anything at all? And second, since the climate sensitivity is a key input to the models, how can the models possibly be valid?
https://judithcurry.com/2016/04/05/comparing-models-with-obs...
Some other relevant posts from the same blog:
https://judithcurry.com/2017/09/26/are-climate-models-overst...
https://judithcurry.com/2018/09/17/a-test-of-the-tropical-20...
