Hacker News Reader

Comment by oxide | Hacker News Reader

is carbon capture actually viable? a completely carbon-free capturing method sounds like perpetual motion or free energy.

View on HN

Ignoring costs, it's "trivial" to do with nuclear energy providing the carbon capturing power. But doing so requires a tremendous amount of power (proportional to how much hydrocarbon-based power we're using now, as noted elsewhere in the comments) and a tremendous amount of resource investment (building the power plants, building the carbon capture mechanisms, etc.). So: doable, but insanely expensive.

That said, if the alternative is the death of most ocean life, the depletion of most of the planet's food resources, and therefore the death of a large chunk of the planet, we may end up reevaluating our willingness to spend that kind of change.

Like trees?

trees sound plenty viable. maybe it should be called tree planting instead.

I don't know why this is not on the agenda.

People are instead wasting money on crazy stuff like compressing CO2 into projectile like cans and dumping them into the ocean. Or my favourite, stopping the sheep from NZ from farting!!

The terrestrial biosphere makes a terrible place to store carbon, as you really can't store that much of it, and eventually it has a tendency to burn and release it all back. If you wanted to grow a bunch of forests/crops, and then bury them and grow new stuff I guess that might work. But not as well as pumping new CO₂ underground or into the deep ocean (below the carbon compensation depth, where it will dissolve existing carbonates and buffer the ocean).

Also forests make the Earth's surface darker, thus decreasing albedo and potentially increasing global warming.

"Also forests make the Earth's surface darker, thus decreasing albedo and potentially increasing global warming."

Obligatory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albino_redwood

Or just use the wood to build things! Has the added benefit of reducing the use of carbon intensive materials like concrete and steel.

Good idea. Now tell me how you plan to offset the carbon emissions from land use change... You weren't planning on building dense housing with wood, were you?

There's a group doing that.

They can make some pretty impressive engineered beams these days. The fire intensity required to destroy them, they claim, also structurally damages concrete, so it's not the issue most of us take it to be.

The presumotion is that the land would have changed anyway, just in a more carbon intesnive way. Of course "burying it" would seem to require some carbon outputs, and a temporary land use change. What do you think that would be sustainable?

Any carbon you can put below the surface tends to stay put. So it's not 'grow trees' it's 're-establish healthy forest ecosystems'.

A bunch of Doug firs growing on compacted clay isn't going to sequester much of anything.

I'm not saying that healthy forest ecosystems don't have a lot of benefits, it's just that "grow moar trees" as a carbon sink is a trigger for me. Planting trees is the perfect feel-good solution that solves, at most, 0.1% of the problem. It's a "send food to Africa" or "build the wall" analogue solution that doesn't address any of the root causes.

Things one can actually do to help solve this: Plant trees as part of restoring ecoystems; recycle metals (esp. Al); join the diplomatic corps and negotiate climate and trade agreements; buy locally grown food and locally obtained materials; start a massive battery/solar/car company to obsolete the fossil fuel industry; research atmospheric alchemy; eat less meat. Not necessarily in that order.

Only the solar powered ones.

There is carbon cogeneration though. Diverting point-source CO2, scrubbing it and using it in industrial applications that require carbon dioxide.

no reason why it should sound like that.

why shouldn't it? the phrase itself, in my mind, conjures up images of impossible patents and theoretical technology.

maybe I just have a good imagination, but when someone says "carbon capture" I imagine some sort of artillery sized vacuum we can point at the sky and turn on to start sucking carbon out of the atmosphere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com