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Carbon Removal Technologies

carbon.ycombinator.com

1,187 pointssama660 comments

I would strongly suggest investigating the claims of http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli... that after mining, milling, and then being spread in the ocean, olivine rocks weather quickly and take out CO2. The estimated costs of large scale CO2 sequestration this way are surprisingly reasonable, and the technology is already available.

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.

>> I understand the qualms of environmentalists

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.

How about investing in lobbying? If $10B were sent to politicians, perhaps they’d implement a carbon tax?

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?

Washington State is voting this week on a carbon tax. That future is now, should voters choose it.

How this is not on top of HN for the past month?

It's not the first time I see a comment like "actually, a $critical-legislation is under vote this/next week somewhere". It feels that the important cases lack marketing.

Politics are generally decremented on the front page. It's not just N, but rather HN, after all.

It is news, though. It is the second time that a carbon tax has been on the Washington ballot. It may pass this time around.

It may, but the last one lost by a pretty decisive margin. I have received a half dozen large glossy mailers funded by oil companies urging me to vote no on 1631, and have seen zero mail advertising for "yes." Which gets back to the fact that there's little lobbying/advertising money for curbing emissions and a lot of money spent against curbing emissions.

Agreed. I think the highest leverage at this point is actually in political realms, when it comes to climate change.

It's just infuriating that a $100/ton tax could fix the problem in a perfectly reasonable manner and government has their head in the sand.

I thought the recent UN report was saying that we'd need more like a $5,000/ton tax at this late stage.

Here's a right wing source: https://www.heritage.org/energy-economics/commentary/un-clim...

> To accomplish such a feat, the new IPCC report proposes an energy tax of epic proportions. It claims that, to keep warming in check, by 2030 we’ll need to impose a tax of between $135 and $5,500 on every ton of carbon emitted. And that’s just for starters. By the end of the century, the authors say, we’ll have to jack the tax up to as much as $27,000 per ton.

The denialists have stalled for so long that it's too late for anything except drastic emergency actions, and then they complain that the drastic actions are too extreme. Personally, I think we're doomed but we owe it to future generations to at least try.

Those numbers are definitely inflated, even at current stage Direct Air Capture Technology is already at well below 1000 Dollar per metric tonne with an outlook to end up below 100 Dollar per tonne in ~20 years. [0] Not saying that DAC is the ideal approach but I find those numbers you mentioned to be very inplausible.

[0] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/cost-plunges-capturi...

I think the idea is that the tax would dis-incentivize emissions, so the cost of capture is irrelevant.

Capture technology becomes automatically profitable if the cost to capture is less than the tax. If my business pays $100/t to emit carbon vs $90/t to capture it, I’ll emit and capture and make a $10/t profit.

At $100/t, capture technology would become widespread very very quickly as an arbitrage against the carbon tax. And yes, some emitters might find a more profitable way via reduction in emissions, but since capture is equivalent to reduction, the most profitable option will win out every time.

This is the magic of carbon taxes.

Carbon Engineering already captures CO2 for $100/tonne. They published a paper on it https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3

http://carbonengineering.com/

“Individual DAC plants can be placed in any country and in multiple climates, and can be built to capture one million tons of CO2 per year. At this large scale, our technology will be able to achieve costs of $100-150 USD per ton of CO₂ captured, purified, and compressed to 150 bar.”

I should add: BC’s carbon tax will reach $50/t by 2021, which is half way to viability for Carbon Engineering.

Lol, from this morning's news:

https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tasker-carbon-tax-plan-trud...

Some of the future is in the hand on "hands of pasty white men on Capitol Hill". Other parts of the future are in the hands of more enlightened leaders.

Eh, don't worry. This is partly in response to some of the pasty white men in provincial parliaments at present. (Looking at you, Ontario and Manitoba). Thank god the PM & Fed is trying to get on top of it.

In fact Trudeau will win re-election this way. The carbon tax will be combined with a massive taxpayer credit. People will experience a modest increase in gas prices, but receive a cheque from “Government of Canada” for hundreds of dollars at just the right time in the election cycle. It’s a shrewd, shrewd move.

Reminder to be civil during dialogue.

Doesn't that further a bidding war where the chief winners are sell-out politicians?

I don't see any reason not to focus on reduction AND capture now – in fact, I think it would be irresponsible not to. The atmosphere is a reservoir that's already holding way too much carbon; let's reduce what we're putting in AND increase what we're taking out – NOW, at the same time.

We're going to need carbon removal tech AND a decrease in emissions. From year 1750 to 2007, we've added around 820 000 million tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. We've already got way too much CO2 in the air, and we're still adding around 35 Gt per year extra.

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.

I'll take it a step further and say I don't think sequestration will work if economically productive materials or systems can't be made out of the resulting carbon. Humanity is too shortsighted to fix it without gain. It's worth investing not only in the technologies that can halt climate change, but also the technologies that will enable us to survive as we endure increasingly volatile climate change.

Why not both? Scientists have said we're already screwed if we can't capture CO2 so it needs to be done at some point.

I mean, do we know that local toxic algae blooms are the only effect this will have?

This to me smells like it could have potential unforeseen consequences like the Deepwater Horizon cleanup.

The point is perhaps that we know we're driving off a cliff. Is this going to slow us down or not? If you look at the proposals, what does setting up half the land mass of the Sahara as algae lagoons do? How does that affect local weather patterns, wildlife, Etc.

The argument that the action may be dangerous is not as compelling when the prognosis for inaction is bleak.

But that's missing the point. You're saying that we have to then sell these two messages - one of which is being supported by actors that are not acting in good faith.

Message 1: yes, this could have unpredictable and devastating consequences in new and exciting ways, and you are directly responsible for it.

Message 2: (current message) we shouldn't do that and you're already doing enough because you have a more fuel efficient truck than you had in the 90's, and you use LED lights.

For most people, that's what's in the back of their head, I would argue. (note that I'm not agreeing with either).

How do you sell that?

Fair enough, it wouldn't be the first time I missed the point. But lets talk about how we talk about it (which is kind of meta but hopefully it will help)

The message in that CFS was pretty clear to me, it was "We aren't doing enough, and not doing anything will doom us to yet another mass extinction event." (they aren't as explicit as that but nearly all of the literature on "Phase 3" of this stuff has nearly everything dying off.

So the first thing to check is this, is that the message you heard in the linked CFS? Or did you hear a different message than what I heard?

Assuming you heard the same message, we can talk about the next place in the conversation where things may go off the rails, a comment of the form "We already know how enhance algae blooms by fertilizing the ocean." Which related to previous work on dumping ferrous material into the ocean to create an algae bloom that would capture carbon and sequester it.

And the response to that comment, the message I heard/read was (paraphrased) "How do we know what that will do in the long term? We should not make such a move without knowing the consequences of making it."

In my reading, that has been a common response to large consequential ideas such as the fertilize the ocean. So is that something you've heard as well or is the first you have heard it?

So the messages in that exchange that I've heard are

1) We understand the mechanism of phytoplankton blooms and we know how to create them, we should try that.

2) We should not try that because we don't know if creating such a bloom would generate a net positive result, and we don't know what intermediate results it might generate as well.

I combine the RFS message of "We're doomed, none of the current things people are doing to ameliorate CO2 gain in the atmosphere are working." with "We shouldn't try things if we can't predict the outcome." and come up with, "Inaction is worse than not fully understood action if inaction is leading to destruction of the world."

Now I often lose the climate deniers on that last bit. In their belief system as I understand it, it is not something we are doing that affects climate so there is no compelling call for action on human's part.

So, what part of the point did I miss?

As for "selling it" I am not sure who is being sold here.

In my response, I was making the argument against inaction, against the environmental argument of 'do no harm.' I recognize that doctor's admit that you have to poison your patient (which does great harm) using chemotherapy when they are suffering from cancer because the alternative is just watching them die. What the doctor knows is that once the risk of cancer is gone the normal processes of the body will recover the patient to a better state of health. The argument for iron fertilization is similar, which is that while it may do short term damage, by pulling the CO2 out of the air the Earth will be in a better place after its own restoration mechanisms have undone the damage.

Sadly, unlike cancer patients we can't do clinical trials on planets, we've just got the one.

I think your parent wasn't complaining so much that your reasoning is wrong or argument is weak, but instead that many people hear the denialist messages and think that the problem is not urgent or that they're already doing reasonable things. The "missing the point", as I read it, is that you weren't proposing a strategy or argument to counter that denialist message.

In my mind, there are two responses to this: (a) regardless of the current state of public opinion, it's worth developing technologies that give us options, and (b) making the media environment healthier and more honest would be a big win, and strategies to make that happen are far more valuable but probably much harder to implement.

There is not only one kind of "action" available to take.

What about doing it in landlocked major bodies of water? I'd sacrifice the Great Lakes for the climate.

You would sacrifice the largest source of freshwater on earth for the climate?

EDIT: The Great Lakes are not land-locked either. They flow out to the Atlantic Ocean via the St. Lawrence River.

Isn't Baikal much larger?

It depends on how you measure. By surface area, no. By volume, yes.

Those are the largest [above ground] freshwater bodies on the planet. That is not a good idea.

We're going to need them.

Millions of people depend on the Great Lakes for their supply of fresh water. Water scarcity is already a problem, that would make it worse.

I thought that the biggest problem with the "seeding the ocean with iron" method of sequestration was not the "qualms of environmentalists" but that it turned out to sequester a lot less carbon than initially thought?

Its sequestration efficacy is not well-established yet. I think that more experiments should be run to better quantify the effects. Some environmentalists oppose even additional research-scale trials. Some proponents of iron fertilization have internalized "some environmentalists oppose this, and efficacy still has large error bars" as "it probably works great but technophobic environmentalists want us to suffer deprivation instead."

From the appearances, it has a lot of potential. Iron is extremely plentiful and has a very large impact on the small systems it was tried.

It is possible that inefficiencies take such a toil that it stops being viable, but it's not the opposition that make people think it can have a large impact.

There are reasons to think it may be effective. But I try to live by "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself – and you are the easiest person to fool." I want additional experiments to make findings robust. In particular, even if small fertilization inputs reliably lead to large biomass increases, we need to know how much of that added biomass sinks to the deep ocean before we know how effective it is at sequestration. That can mean trying to track carbon movement over complicated food webs.

Last I ran the numbers for that chapter, I determined that there simply isn’t enough ocean surface area to achieve the carbon absorption necessary, even if we used every underfertilized patch of seawater on the planet.

It was close, but it still came up short.

Do note that "not enough by itself" doesn't preclude "important part of the puzzle for how to do it".

More than that, articles like https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizing-ocean... indicate that the sequestration efficacy varies widely based on a variety of parameters that we do not yet know enough to control. In particular the type of diatom that blooms matters. A lot. And it isn't obvious how to get the one that you want.

Furthermore there is a question of what happens when deep ocean currents turn over the ocean. Does that CO2 come back out? We don't know. And that is the difference between solving the problem versus kicking it down the road for a few centuries.

But still environmentalists have moved to get all research into the topic shut down. Which I think is shortsighted at best. We have a big enough problem and few enough plausible options that I don't believe we should shut this one down.

I've lost track of the literature since the early 1990's, but from what I recall of the early IRONEX experiments the problem was that net sequestration was disappointing: despite significant increases in fixation, much of this new carbon is remineralized by heterotrophs prior to burial. However, I don't know what some of the more recent data have shown—

> nobody wants to accept a bad outcome, but in this case I think it is better than the alternative.

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.

I am working on a non-profit that is utilizing Schuiling's research and is actually getting this project done. We are scouting beaches right now for a "wiggle" tank, which is a sort of see-saw like device where we can gather data to affirm the real world dissolution rate. The chemistry, however, is sound that each 1 ton of olivine will sequester 1.25 tons of carbon.

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

Hi Matz, this is super awesome. I'm looking for some resources to offset my carbon footprint to live carbon neutral. I was thinking about tree offsetting but I'd love to donate this to advanced weathering $20 per ton for offsetting is peanuts and I'd be more then happy to pay this. Do you have some info on the rate of sequestration of olivine? Are you also taking for account that you need to transport the olivine and crush it to increase the surface area?

Hi, thanks just working to apply the hard work of Schuiling and others. Glad to hear that the pricing makes sense to you as well. I love trees and suggest we plant as many of them as possible, but the problem with using them as a means of carbon sequestration is that you have to protect them for 50+ years from pests, fire etc.

If the trees were to burn, all of that carbon you worked so hard to sequester would be released, so it is not foolproof and decades of sequestration can be rolled back in hours. Whereas once the olivine grains are on the beach, it is going into the seafloor in a pretty much irreversible chemical reaction.

As for the rate of olivine weathering, it is the fastest of any major rock-forming silicate mineral and is further accelerated by the abrasions of rock, and by microbes. The rate of sequestration depends on the size of the particles, and how much is spread per each beach. Many of the calculations affirming the data have been measured from static piles of olivine tailings (pilings of rock that sit as "waste" in mines sites.) Those rates alone are impressive, but we are looking to utilize the beaches to further increase the rate of weathering to at least 20 microns per year. At that rate, a grain of olivine with a diameter of 100 microns will dissolve in around 5 years.

"Our experiments show that olivine grains when kept in motion weather fast because continuous mutual impacts remove reaction-inhibiting silica from the surface and tiny µm-size slivers are produced allowing a fast chemical reaction. The application of olivine and other (ultra)mafic minerals like serpentine in high-energy shallow marine environments can make a significant contribution in the fight against climate change. The counteracting effect on ocean acidification is immediate."

Here is the basic reaction:

Mg2SiO4 + 4 CO2 + 4 H2O −→ 2 Mg^2+ + 4HCO3^- + H4SiO4

CO2 is consumed, and Mg2+, Fe2+, H4SiO4 and HCO3^- are produced.

This paper has the best calculations and a lab experiment demonstrating the rate. https://climitigation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Rolling...

This one is good as well and discusses the tailing pilings and importance of microbes alone in possibly accelerating the rate up to 4,000x https://climitigation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Olivine...

How elastic is the price of that olivine?

> Raw olivine is currently ~$20-$25/ton and the average us person puts out 15-20 tons of CO2/year.

Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively. Would mining operations be able to scale appropriately without prices going through the roof?

More importantly, how much carbon does olivine mining burn per ton? Is this scheme still carbon-negative if we account for that (and transportation)?

Great question, the total CO2 expenditure of the whole olivine mining, milling, and transport process has been calculated to be 4% of the amount of CO2 that is captured.

In general, the cost of mining, milling and grinding 1 ton of rock in large-scale mining, has been calculated to be about $7/ton. Applied to olivine, it proposed that it would be about $12/ton.

The good news is that for the initial olivine, we will attempt to utilize "tailing" piles, which are the removed rock from existing mines. It turns out that diamonds, nickel, chromite, and other commodities are found in olivine-rich rocks. And to get to them, they have to dig up massive amounts of olivine that just sits on the site in piles as "waste."

Those tailings piles are also where some of the real-world calculations for olivine dissolution rates come from. They even determined that some mines hosted in olivine-rich rocks actually more than offset their own CO2 emissions in this unintentional way.

The ideal set up for a beach project would be right on the coast (in a tropical area as temperature affects the speed of weathering), near the end of a railway that runs from an abandoned mine with tons of tailings piles.

Geologist here. Can't speak to the economics, but there's no shortage of mineable olivine, mostly in areas where mantle lithosphere that was formerly below oceanic or island arc crust has been "obducted" on the continental crust and thrust up to the surface (the mantle is mostly olivine). These are called ophiolites, and they're not uncommon in places where you used to have a destructive plate boundary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiolite

Google says there’s 2.996×10^12 tons of carbon in the atmosphere. I’m guestimating we have about 1/3 of that which needs to be pulled out to correct for emissions to this point. Do we have access to that amount of olivine?

Thank you so much for your comment!

Edit-As to pricing, if olivine is a common byproduct of other activities and generally common in that sense then obtaining 1 ton of olivine is the cost to move it. Then they need to process and disburse it. That seems like a cheap process.

Edit2-the non-cheap part of this seems the dispersal. How long will it take to disperse all that olivine?

> I’m guestimating we have about 1/3 of that which needs to be pulled out to correct for emissions to this point.

For the moment, that’s a slight overestimate; we’re a little over 400ppm, and pre-Industrial levels were about 300ppm, so we “only” need to remove 1/4 (and we don’t really need to go back all the way to preindustrial levels, it was about 325ppm in 1970)

With 20/ton of olivine it’s still around a 20 trillion dollar industry (just that cost alone)!

Yes! Just to pick one famous ophiolite, the peridotites of the Semail ophiolite in Oman are perhaps 300km * 50km * 5km from a quick look at some maps and cross sections [1], so 75000 km3 at 3300 kg/m3 comes out to about 2.5E17 kg or 2.5 E14 metric tons. So that's just one ophiolite and we've got a few orders of magnitude to spare.

If for any reason ophiolites weren't enough, there's places at slow-spreading ridges where it's peridotite all the way from the ocean floor to the outer core, albeit expensive to mine.

In short, we would run out of CO2 before we run out of olivine.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1144/gsjgs.151.3.0555

Hi! You are correct in how common it is. We will be utilizing forsterite (MgSi4O2), the magnesium-rich form of olivine. We are looking to mine large dunite massifs as they are more than 90% olivine and close to the surface. And you are also correct in that these type of deposits are usually found at the base of the ophiolite sequences. :)

If you are interested in getting involved, feel free to msg me!

Happy to help if my expertise becomes relevant

> Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively. Would mining operations be able to scale appropriately without prices going through the roof?

Prices wouldn't go through the roof, because the demand isn't there at higher prices. A significantly higher price would make other methods of sequestration attractive instead.

Hi, yes it does appear possible to not only increase the mining capacity, but that doing so will actually bring the price down to around $10-$12/ton. To do the total sequestration of anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2 release per year with olivine, it would require approx ~7km^3 of rock (23 gigatons or billion tons). This is compared to the ~10km^3 of oil equivalents we retrieve from the earth each year. And the ~20 gt of construction minerals mined each year. There are individual mines (for other types of materials) that have excavated volumes of greater than ~25 km^3.

To bring the planets atmospheric CO2 concentrations back to pre-industrial levels would likely require around 30-50 new olivine mines globally. The good news though is that olivine is extremely common, making up 80% of the mantle. Almost every country has olivine/dunite deposits, and so countries with cheap labor and lack of other viable export commodities would be ideal places to open mines, which would also help create jobs for them (and ones that actually help the planet).

> data to affirm the real world dissolution rate

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.

Hi, yes the ecological considerations should be made carefully. Let's look at some examples though, if we were to offset 100% of the next 100 years of anthropogenic CO2 emissions with olivine, it would only change the Mg-concentration of the ocean from something like 1296 to 1296.8 ppm and the bicarbonate content from 42 to 45 ppm. These changes are considered within the normal range of ocean water.

Most of the ocean though is experiencing catastrophic increases in ph and need some sort of anti-acid, which is what is amazing about the reaction from olivine. It almost sounds too good to be true, but the resulting solution from the reaction is alkaline. Its addition to the water actually deacidifies the ocean in the local area.

Further, one of the breakdown products in the reaction is silicate, which is a limiting factor for diatoms. Diatoms are particularly hit hard by climate change and are important in the base of the food chain. Diatoms provide food for the entire ecosystem from fish and birds. Diatoms themselves may also actually be responsible for moving significant amounts of biomass to the deep ocean as they sink (further reducing CO2). They also compete with dinoflagellates, which are the cause of red tides and could be useful in stemming their increased occurrence by counterbalancing their rapidly increasing populations.

That said, you are right that the addition of olivine should be carefully considered, especially for specific areas. We know already to avoid areas that are adapted to acid conditions, such as peatlands, because increased alkalinity could accelerate the breakdown of peat and speedup methane release.

Excellent and interesting reply, to my rather reflexive comment on your phrase in isolation.

I am heartened by the existence of this technology and news that it is proceeding, even with the lack of political help and funding at this stage of need.

A popular theme at this time is how people just have too much total impact - yet humanity as a whole might have enough comprehension and agency, to not only reduce and survive the worst outcomes, but achieve a positive and stabilizing impact on this diverse and precious world.

Thanks and Good winds !

That's awesome - I would be one of the people who would pay $400 to be carbon neutral each year. You should think big and do a Kickstarter with $25 gifts up to $5k gifts...

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.

You can already compensate your Co2 online and it's not that expensive. Generally the companies are replacing very inefficient processes in developing countries.

Part of it is I want to support promising geoengineering solutions because I don't think reducing emissions will be enough in the future. In particular spreading olivine on beaches also reduces ocean acidity and gives nutrients to the base of the ocean food chain.

Donating money so that polluting industries can pollute less seems like a bailout to those industries. They should be fined/regulated by their governments in those countries. If they get a bailout which gives them a competitive advantage (free money) what's stopping them from opening another low-tech, inefficient plant with the extra money, then expecting another bailout? It seems like rewarding bad behavior.

> Part of it is I want to support promising geoengineering solutions because I don't think reducing emissions will be enough in the future. In particular spreading olivine on beaches also reduces ocean acidity and gives nutrients to the base of the ocean food chain.

We can do both! No need to make a choice. The carbon offsetting schemes in the developing world are currently very cheap because we have all the low hanging fruits available at the moment. When all the very inefficient and easy to replace processes will be replaced, the offsetting schemes will be much more expensive than geoengineering solutions.

> Donating money so that polluting industries can pollute less seems like a bailout to those industries

It's not really how it works (at least not the companies I've looked at). The way it works is you have a more expensive and equivalent way to do things which at the end does release less carbon. It still works in a free market way. For example they engineered cooking stove which are much more efficient but slightly more expensive, they are subsidised by the Co2 offset donations.

Do you have any carbon offset schemes you recommend? I feel like there are a lot of BS offsets out there.

>Not OP, not my personal recommendation.

Giving What We Can has published an analysis on the topic. You can read it here when the site is up again (it is down for me right now): https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/research/causes/climate-chan...

Tl;dr: Cool Earth is their recommendation.

Just FYI, CO2 credits may not be removing CO2 from the atmosphere in the way you expect.

For example, since methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than CO2, one can generate CO2 credits by finding a natural methane leak and igniting it.

While yes, it needs to be done to reduce the greenhouse effect, this is just addressing one of the runaway effects. Removal and reduction technologies are needed to move our individual footprints towards zero.

You'll pay $400 to be carbon neutral!?

Why don't you just stop eating meat, stop driving, stop whatever else that you do and have a smaller carbon footprint naturally, instead of living a carbon lavish life and paying some money to be called carbon neutral.

Its like bribing your way out of jail after you have done the crime.

[EDIT]: removed expletives

While I don't agree with the tone, $400 implies the average CO2 emission in the US (16 tons/capita/year) which is fairly high. I wonder how much an individual can lower their own contribution.

It takes a lot of mental bandwidth to think about lowering your own CO² emission. Still useful in terms of awareness though! Less driving and flying, less meat, low cost/high reward home energy efficiency improvements, ... are quite obvious ways.

It's important though not to overlook the effect of investing in other people's carbon efficiency instead. A piece of anecdotal evidence. I willingly spent ~25000€ extra on my Belgium home's energy efficiency. One year later, I end up living in Latvia, where many places don't even have simple radiators valves. When their appartments with city heating get too hot in winter, they just open the window at -30°C! Imagine spending just 5000€ on my home, and the rest offering free radiator valves installations in Latvia -- or other even more efficient schemes of course!

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

It is useful to be aware and as such it is good to know the effectiveness of each action.

Going car-less for a year is similar to going vegan for three years or doing 3 crossing of the Atlantic by plane. Switching over to buy exclusively "green energy" is almost twice as effective in reducing CO² emission compared to a vegan diet per year. All those are high impact changes, while home energy efficiency improvements are medium to low impact changes, with wall insulation estimated to be about 50% compared to eating less meat and up to 10th compared to a vegan diet.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

Price signals are one way to do this. This will hit people unequally though, so probably needs some other things at the same time.

Ie if energy price is raised a lot, it will make poor people's lives a lot harder suddenly.

But currently the price of things is very much disconnected from the climate impacts

I actually live in a city a few blocks from work, don't own a car, and only eat poultry/eggs which have a lower carbon footprint than red meat. On the other hand I do order a lot of crap from Amazon.

It's not so much about offsetting my personal carbon emissions - it's more about supporting projects that could potentially slow down runaway global warming. There are a lot of feedback loops in the pipeline in the next 20 years that will accelerate climate change (arctic ice melts, more heat gets absorbed etc). Those feedback loops are going to kick in even if we stopped all human emissions today. So when that happens and drastic environmental changes start occurring, I'm hoping we'll have some demonstrated solutions like advanced weathering we could scale up.

You can make the same point in a less aggressive manner.

After all, being carbon neutral is about punishing you for your self-indulgence, not anything to do with actually being neutral in terms of carbon emissions.

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why not both? Why not more?

We don't know if the OP already has a fairly low carbon footprint, or has done all they can to reduce it.

Cumulative effort and reducing carbon footprints on many fronts is what we need.

Things like:

- Walk / Cycle where you can. Use public transport where you cant.

- Have your heating / AC lower.

- Stop using single use plastics.

- Eat less meat.

- Swap all your bulbs to low power equivalents.

- Take shorter showers.

- Turn off your work monitors / PC when you leave the office. (Assuming tech population here)

- Switch to a power provider that only uses 100% renewable power. (Like bulb in the UK)

- Support a charity that is planting trees or is fighting to save the rain forest.

- Donate/pay to have some charity/company do some carbon removal for you.

- Change your browsers default search engine to Ecosia (Bing results and they plant trees with the profits)

Lots of tiny things can be done now, with relatively little effort. In parallel with companies and researchers work on better carbon capture techniques.

> Lots of tiny things can be done now, with relatively little effort.

Those little things of "low effort" have just as little impact. Those things that are significant (transportation, meat consumption, heating) would also represent significant changes to my level of comfort. I like meat. I like being warm. I like not walking everywhere. I dislike public transport. I like long hot showers. I like to keep my PC running.

On the other hand, I can budget some money for the "luxury" of being carbon neutral. I can also not do that and keep on living the way do. The money is on the table, those changes to my lifestyle aren't.

> Why don't you just stop eating meat, stop driving, stop whatever else that you do and have a smaller carbon footprint naturally, instead of living a carbon lavish life and paying some money to be called carbon neutral.

Why? Because I want to keep my standard of living, just like almost everyone else. What a silly question to even ask. Any solution that asks people to practice austerity is obviously doomed to fail. Any solution that leverages a human's self-interested (even if it's just vanity) at least has a chance.

> Its like bribing your way out of jail after you have done the crime.

It's more like when faced between the choice of paying a fine or going to jail, you pay the fine. That money can be put to work and that time can be put to use, but if you just sit in jail nobody benefits, it just costs the public money to keep you there.

Except of course in reality there is no crime here that anybody could get prosecuted for, and the real victims haven't even been born yet.

“Be the change that you wish to see in the world.” ― Mahatma Gandhi

These things you classify as comfort may not be that essential and good for you and the others. Someone that eats animal products everyday and claims that it's their comfort, while it's affecting their health, the lives of 56 billion animals per year and the environment, is, to me, problematic.

I always, in my head, compare it to slavery. While it's not the same thing, of course, the pattern is the same. Something that's not ethical at all, but we, for a long time, did not care because of the comfort it brings us. Can we still live without it? Of course. And well.

I'm sorry, I'm having a hard time getting my point accross in these topics, but what I mean is that what you call "comfort" may not that critical to your well-being at all. You don't need to change eveything from day 1, but doing it a bit more everyday will make feel like a better human being, as you know you're living by respecting others and your environment, while giving money is kind of too easy and doesn't influence what's surrounding you. If you want things to change, you have to be this change. By being it you expose others to the issue you're fighting and make think about it in another way, up to a point they might understand it and join the fight, or at least acknowledge it. It's a very slow process but this is how sustainable change goes since the dawn of time. Actions matter, but ideas win. And ideas don't get seeded with money (well, in the long-term... because propaganda and stuff, but I hope you get the gist).

In another comment you mention you don't like walking. These likings are not by any means frozen in you. Maybe you never tried enjoying walking alone, with your thoughts drifting away in your mind and just living the present moment. Comfort is really subjective, I really think what we should all yearn for is the greater good, which, suprisingly doesn't cost that much in the end and gives you a real sentiment of fulfillment. It's just a matter of /being/ that change.

>Why don't you just stop eating meat

I saw a recent study that said everyone going veggie in the developed world would only have a couple of percentage points effects on emissions. Surprisingly ineffective.

Errr, citation?

Not quite what you were after, but I saw this Twitter thread that claims (with evidence) that the greenhouse gas contributions of meat and agriculture are overstated: https://twitter.com/fleroy1974/status/1053398265817894914

I was under the impression that guy was paid by like the Belgium meat board or something. I can't find the reference to that right now so might be wrong. (I came across him in another thread where it was discussed)

Nuclear Diamonds[0], sounds cool. Pretty sure this will the most viable as the 1% will surely want to get their hands on this because of Conspicuous consumption [1].

[0] https://climitigation.org/nuclear-diamonds/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspicuous_consumption

@matznerd

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.

how do you control carbon emmssions of those who produce olivine ?

Do you know much CO2 we release to mine and move 1 tonne of olivine?

That's the question I was wondering. Paying a few hundred dollars to be carbon neutral seems good (at least if it's not just to a way to allow guilt-free consumption) but but:

- we need to be sure we are paying for the carbon we trap minus the one we released

- we need to be sure releasing that much olivine in the complex and living system that is the ocean is not going to have a terrible impact on it

- we need to be able to adjust according to profile. I use planes a lot and I buy bitcoins, yet I'm veggie and don't own a car. I'm probably not at the middle of the Gausse line but I don't have a clear picture of where I am.

See the post from cbkeller above. He/she said the mantle is mostly olivine and outcroppings at the surface exist.

This litterally answers none of my questions.

Good now via my response to your parent?

Thanks a lot for taking the time to give a detailed answer.

Kind I subscribe to some kind a newsletter about your project ?

Hi, please check if my response to the parent (and other responses in the thread) answer your questions.

As for your individual carbon profile, there are many calculators out there that can help you decide how much to offset. I am sure we will work in this area to help you determine your level, but for an intense calculation that you'll need to pull out your electricity bills of check the Resurgence one: https://www.resurgence.org/resources/carbon-calculator.html This one is good as well https://www.carbonfootprint.com/calculator.aspx For your crypto: http://www.cleancoins.io

Once that is added up you would be able to purchase your CO2 equivlanet output in olivine with this fomrula (CO2 output in tons)/1.25 (quantity of carbon sequestered per ton of olivine)

Our plan is to fund the fixed costs of the beach and operations through larger scale donations and sponsorships so that 100% of your money goes directly to tons of olivine on the beach and not administrative BS.

Net carbon sequestration:

The CO2 expenditure of the whole operation, including mining, milling, and transport, has been calculated to be about 4% of the amount of CO2 that is captured by the olivine.

Environmental concerns:

"The ecological considerations should be made carefully. Let's look at some examples though, if we were to offset 100% of the next 100 years of anthropogenic CO2 emissions with olivine, it would only change the Mg-concentration of the ocean from something like 1296 to 1296.8 ppm and the bicarbonate content from 42 to 45 ppm. These changes are considered within the normal range of ocean water. Most of the ocean though is experiencing catastrophic increases in ph and need some sort of anti-acid, which is what is amazing about the reaction from olivine. It almost sounds too good to be true, but the resulting solution from the reaction is alkaline. Its addition to the water actually deacidifies the ocean in the local area.

Hi, the CO2 expenditure of the whole operation, including mining, milling, and transport, has been calculated to be about 4% of the amount of CO2 that is captured by the olivine.

We are not planning to do any new mining for the first allotments of olivine, as there are literally "tons" of piles of olivine-rich rock sitting as "tailings" on the property of old mines.

This already excavated rock was mined in the pursuit of the mineral deposits below it and are considered "waste" by these mines. Kind of like buying a used car instead of having a new one created, that rock's CO2 is already accounted for. So, in this case, we do not have to mine it, only transport (ideally in an efficient manner like a train) and then mill it and spread it on the beach.

Check this paper for more details on the calculations: https://climitigation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Olivine...

I wish their website had a form so I can give my email to get an update on their mission.

Surely there is already a lot of Olivine on the ocean floor?

How does adding it to the ocean differ from the stuff on the ocean floor?

That's awesome! Olivine as a mineral actually looks very nice, I would totally buy a piece of Olivine jewellery for my SO. Especially if it saves the planet (and my SO would love it even more thanks to that).

So when can I buy it and/or register my interest?

it's hard for me to stay stoic in explaining what I see in this proposal, I wish so hard this were a real solution, but I fail to see more than A) a white wash, B) lip service to environmentalists or C) a way to circumvent current or future carbon emission taxes (unclear to me if dumping emissions as carbonates in the ocean is currently considered emissions or not according to carbon credit legalese)

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...

What they are discussing is simply an acceleration of a natural process: the carbonate-silicate cycle[1]. Silicate rocks are transformed into carbonate rocks through weathering. This captures CO2 from the atmosphere.

When carbonate rocks are transformed back into silicates through metamorphosis or magmatism the CO2 is released back into the atmosphere.

This definitely has the potentially for the long-term capture of CO2. For example in about 600 million years increased solar output will disrupt the carbonate-silicate cycle, resulting in the increased weathering of rocks and the capture of enough CO2 that C3 plants, which make up 99% of existing plant species, will no longer be able to live on earth. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate%E2%80%93silicate_cyc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

The Carbonate Silicate cycle you linked also states:

>These dissolved minerals are eventually carried by water to the ocean, where they are used by living organisms such as foraminifera, radiolarians, coccolithopores, and diatoms to create shells of CaCO3 (calcite) or SiO2 (opal) through the reactions Ca2+ (aq) + 2HCO3− (aq) → CaCO3(s) + CO2(g) + H2O(l) (for calcite precipitation) and SiO2(aq) → SiO2(s) (for opal precipitation).

Observe how half of the carbon is transformed back into CO2, and of the remaining half most will simply return carbonate after death and it's just a small portion of the latter half that falls to the sea floor to end up buried...

That makes sense, thanks

Why would the CaCO3 return to carbonate after death ? In the past skeletons of diatoms dropped down to the ocean floors in huge layers which are now limestone rock.

You are certainly correct that there is limestone rock and that it derives from skeletons of diatoms etc..

Consider this (caricaturized) argument: suppose most artificial mummies are mummified humans, that does not mean most humans end up mummified!

please check out the sibling comment by philipkglass, the referenced text has a section on calcite compensation, and the previous section detailing the saturation horizon. At high enough pressure calcite prefers being dissolved again.

Consider a calcite diatom cap, close to the beach, since it is above the saturation horizon, it won't dissolve soon, now consider a diatom dropping dead over the mariana trench, so the calcite starts sinking, until it passes the saturation horizon, now the pressure is clearly high enough to prefer being dissolved...

As btilly has mentioned a few times, ocean acidification is a major problem because atmospheric CO2 has risen so quickly. It takes a few thousand years for the atmosphere, the upper portion of the ocean, and the deep ocean to reach equilibrium. There is an especially elevated CO2 concentration and corresponding lowered pH in the upper layers because there hasn't been time to reach equilibrium with the larger volumes of water in the deep ocean. These upper layers of the ocean, sadly, are also where the vast majority of ocean life and photosynthetic activity exist.

Adding alkalinity to the oceans via accelerated silicate weathering can protect sea life against acidification. More alkalinity in the ocean also increases its absorption capacity for CO2, which reduces warming feedback effects caused by radiative forcing from CO2 in the atmosphere. The ocean contains ~60x as much inorganic carbon as the pre-industrial atmosphere; to draw down the content of the present atmosphere to pre-industrial levels, it would require increasing the dissolved inorganic carbon content of the oceans by less than 1%. Converting some of it to solid carbonate minerals is a nice-to-have but not especially critical, because average residence time of dissolved inorganic carbon is about 200,000 years, which will take us well beyond the age of fossil fuels.

https://www.soest.hawaii.edu/oceanography/faculty/zeebe_file...

I am really grateful for the text you mentioned, but it did not change my opinion on this technology as a carbon removal technology, it only confirmed what I understood. However, it is very well written and I will probably reference others to it whenever I can. The only minor mistake I could detect was a "boron" when clearly carbon was intended. If you have a similar quality text detailing the relevant parameters of adding carbonated rocks to counter the acidification I would be interested.

I was discussing the claimed carbon removal aspect, so I now disregard the acidification aspect...

In my analogy I stand corrected and should have stated that the bottle of water represented the surface seawater, since there is no free fast oceanic mixer. The surface water is equilibrating much faster with atmosphere than the whole water column of the ocean.

You defend the technology by mentioning that the average residence time is about 200.000 years, but that is for all inorganic carbon across the whole depth of the ocean, not just the surface layer! As you say there is not enough mixing, so dissolved inorganic carbon in surface seawater has a much shorter residence time. The long residence time is dominated by the slow movement of deep sea water...

So unless the proposal is augmented with either a huge oceanic mixer, or with dumping the carbonate over the mariana trench (if it dissolves there, it will take a long time before it reaches atmosphere again), lacking these augmentations we are dissolving carbonates in surface seawater, and the carbonate ions can equilibrate back to CO2 so it really is just emissions foisted of as capture...

If it stays in the solid say calcite CaCO3 state as opposed to being dissolved, then it does not affect the alkalinity of the surface water...

The pH shift from adding more alkalinity via silicate weathering shifts the equilibrium to favor more CO2 dissolved as carbonate in the oceans. That is why I do not worry about captured CO2 going back to the atmosphere in less than geological time: the shifted chemical equilibrium will favor more dissolved carbonate.

As a small scale example, consider a beaker of distilled water freely exposed to the atmosphere. It dissolves a small amount of CO2 and becomes slightly acidic from carbonic acid. Now add sodium hydroxide -- it becomes strongly alkaline. Wait again and the pH falls again (though not to its original level), due to dissolving more carbon dioxide, which is deprotonated to form carbonate anions. You can keep adding hydroxide and absorbing more atmospheric CO2 for quite some time, until solubility limits come into play. Even though it is just a solution at equilibrium with the atmosphere, and not a precipitated solid, the sodium carbonate solution will not spontaneously separate back to sodium hydroxide solution in the beaker and CO2 in the surrounding atmosphere. It takes thermodynamic work to reverse the carbonate-heavy equilibrium.

Sure but in your example you are adding sodiumhydroxide.

I agree that after adding say CaCO3 to distilled water containing inorganic carbon (CO2, carbonate ions, ...) the carbon content will have increased after equilibrating with the atmosphere, but not with the claim that the eventual carbon content of the water will be the sum of the original carbon content plus added CaCO3 carbon content... some undisclosed part of the added carbon content will be released as CO2 to atmosphere...

The pH will change only very slightly if you add CaCO3 to distilled water, because CaCO3 is very poorly soluble. I also agree that adding CaCO3 to seawater would not sequester carbon dioxide. But releasing basic metal cations via weathering silicates like olivine will sequester carbon dioxide. The difference is that the starting olivine does not contain carbonate, whereas in your example there is already carbonate in the starting CaCO3.

Schematically:

A) H2O + CO2 <=> H2CO3

Equilibrium favors left hand side, but water exposed to atmosphere becomes slightly acidic from right hand side.

B) Mg2SiO4 + 2 H2CO3 => 2 MgCO3 + SiO2 + 2H2O

Equilibrium strongly favors the right hand side. But the reaction is strongly kinetically hindered with naturally occurring large lumps of rock. This is why it will take a very long time for natural silicate weathering processes to absorb the extra CO2 that humans have recently added to the atmosphere.

C) CaCO3 + H2CO3 <=> 2 CaHCO3

Equilibrium favors left hand side, but limestone can be solubilized from right hand side reaction at a low rate (or faster in presence of high CO2/water concentration).

Note that the metal in the silicate of the left hand side of B can be various alkali and alkaline earth metals, but magnesium dominates in olivine.

EDIT: "CO2 Mineral Sequestration Studies in US" by Golberg et al appears to be the best reference to the thermodynamic and kinetic aspects of magnesium silicate weathering that I can easily find outside of a paywall.

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1208898

This paper is focusing on a different way to accelerate weathering: apply wet, concentrated, hot CO2 to crushed silicates. The olivine-crushing proposal discussed here on HN takes a different approach to accelerated weathering: crush and disperse larger quantities of silicates, but do not try to heat or pre-concentrate the CO2. Just let the ambient conditions of the atmosphere and oceans work on crushed rock (this is still far faster than natural weathering).

The key takeaway from this paper is on pages 3 and 4: magnesium silicate carbonation is exothermic (thermodynamically favored). Once magnesium silicate reacts with CO2, it would take more energy to undo the reaction and put that CO2 back in the atmosphere.

Following back on your comments from the Mars colony thread...

Olivine weathering is so energetically favorable from that paper that, if you put enough of it into a sphere, and feed it enough pure CO2, it's actually a usable thermal energy source.

You can "burn" it like coal, except that it "burns" CO2 instead of oxygen.

To relate back to Mars, you can probably do similarly absurd things with the perchlorates in the soil there. You can "burn" perchlorates in a reducing atmosphere of e.g. methane from the sabatier process, and end up with salt and an explosion.

You can "burn" it like coal, except that it "burns" CO2 instead of oxygen.

That is a bit optimistic :-)

The potential energy per gram of mass is much lower than for coal burning in Earth's atmosphere -- worse, the kinetics are so sluggish that you would need a very large vessel with good insulation to build up a useful temperature differential.

You'd also need to concentrate perchlorates from the Martian soil before they would sustain combustion with methane. Assuming that was done, though, perchlorates plus hydrocarbons will combust with vigor.

I think the analysis I saw was that it's energetic enough that the entire mining + grinding + "burning" process is energetically favorable. Which I found pretty astounding, but I think that points more to the incredible efficiency of mining and industrial processes than anything.

I think that was also at elevated temperature in a carbonic acid solution, so basically the fastest possible "weathering".

Do you know where I can find reaction rate constants? I tried the NIST reaction kinetics database, but H2O + CO2 -> H2CO3 is not even listed... I have implemented chemical reaction simulations before (gillespie and normal differential equations), the hard part is not the theory of simulating reactions but knowing how to determine the needed reaction rates for small inorganic reactions...

I read the paper you referenced, but it does not really add much? The key takeaway you refer to is probably the exothermic reaction enthalpy... we were discussing equilibria before this, so while a profound one, it is still a plattitude to point just at the exothermic nature as if at equilibrium all matter will be in the lowest energy state. It's still ~300K out there...

Somewhat less of a plattitude is to look at such a reaction and pretend we have a 2 level system (i.e. no other reactions occuring, no substep reactions). Let's take reaction number 2 on page 4 you mention:

1 / 3 Mg3Si2O5(OH)4 + CO2 → MgCO3 + 2 / 3 SiO2 + 2 / 3 H2O + 64 kJ/mole.

So lets call the energy of the "excited" LHS(left-hand-side)-state E1 and the RHS-state E0 the ground state.

Now to make a physical calculation we need integral numbers of molecules so I multiply both sides with 3:

Mg3Si2O5(OH)4 + 3CO2 → 3MgCO3 + 2SiO2 + 2H2O + 192 kJ/mole.

(The enthalphy per mole of reactions tripled because a single new reaction now converts 3 times the reagents as the original reaction)

So the LHS is 192kJ / N_avogadro higher in energy than the RHS for the specified number of molecules.

So for a simple 2 level System the partition function is Z = exp(-beta E_lhs)+exp(-beta E_rhs), from here on I will write B for beta...

The probability of finding the molecules in the LHS-state is P(LHS)=exp(-B E_lhs) / Z and similar for RHS...

The ratio LHS:RHS at equilibrium is P(LHS)/P(RHS) = exp(-B E_lhs) / exp(-B E_rhs) = exp(-B DeltaE) = exp(-B 192kJ / N_a)

= exp(-192kJ / mole / (N_a k_B T))

since B = 1 / ( k_B T ),

= exp(-192kJ / mole / (R T))

since ideal gas constat R = N_a * k_B = 8.314 J / mole / K

= exp(-192kJ / mole / (8.314 J / mole / K * 300K) )

= 3.7E-34

So the right hand side does indeed look very much preferred

But this calculation assumes not dissolving in water.

This paper does not propose dissolving the resulting mineral carbonate in water, they propose burying it in the same mine the igneous rock was found!

I am still worried that simply dissolving it in surface water of the oceans means the CO2 can be released, or at the very least the CO2 in one of the dissolved species CO2, HCO3- or CO3(2-) are too bio-available... this may sound good, but if it is captured back into the biosphere it will be exhaled again by the organism (or its predator) pretty soon... grass clippings can be considered carbon sequestration, until you feed it to the organisms in your composting heap!

I would love to see numerical simulations of the chemical reactions, it would help sway those of us who understand how to simulate a set of reactions but have insufficient domain knowledge to know which reactions should be kept in mind.

The different competing entities that wish to get sponsored for such activities have a common interest to produce such a model or at least a list of relevant chemical reactions in the ocean and their kinetic rate constants. They could pool their resources to build this model.

I see that I could have skipped some of my previous explaining :-)

If you are interested in modeling rate constants and mechanisms, the most interesting work I have come across is the Reaction Mechanism Generator developed at MIT and Northeastern University:

https://github.com/ReactionMechanismGenerator

https://greengroup.mit.edu/reaction-mechanism-generator

https://rmg.mit.edu/

https://web.northeastern.edu/comocheng/

As you may be aware, determining rate constants from calculations is quite difficult even for gas-phase reactions. It's much harder for condensed-phase reactions. I do not have any hope of applying these techniques to olivine weathering at present. There have been quite a few small scale laboratory experiments on olivine weathering. There will be more factors at work in a real near-shore environment: abrasion by sand and wave action, biological activity, varying temperatures depending on the locale. I think that questions of rates need to be answered by field trials now; theory is inadequate and small lab experiments have already been done. But I still contend that this is not "simply dissolving" CO2 in ocean surface waters -- it is an acid-base reaction, with magnesium providing alkalinity.

> The chemistry, however, is sound that each 1 ton of olivine will sequester 1.25 tons of carbon.

But what's the total CO2 cost of the olivine (extraction, processing and transport to the sea) ?

The CO2 expenditure of the whole operation, including mining, milling, and transport, has been calculated to be about 4% of the amount of CO2 that is captured by the olivine. The financial cost of mining, milling, and transporting rock is about $7/ton.

We are not planning to do any new mining for the first allotments of olivine though, as there are literally "tons" of piles of olivine-rich rock sitting as "tailings" on the property of old mines.

> wipe out all shellfish species worldwide

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.

Right, the ones that exist today should be evolved for today’s environment.

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.

I agree with your main point, but I'm pretty sure that evolution and adaptation work for humans too and there are an awful lot of human beings.

None of this is to discount the potentially severe (unknown, scary) risks, but I don't think human extinction is really in play due to a warming climate. The most serious risk I'm aware of is that high CO2 content in the atmosphere will interfere with human respiration. Evolution will handle this, just like it handled human beings living in the Himalayas.

How is this not fear-mongering? Most people will be fine with a 5deg C global increase.

Maybe people, yes, in the short term. But everything that people depend on.... not so much. I mean, yeah we'd live but you an kiss coral reefs goodbye, glaciers, etc... It would be a rather shitty place to live.

Why though? Honestly, do you and 99% of the global population depend on glaciers and coral reefs?

See my sibling answer next to yours for an explanation of why the oceans were not then acidic despite the higher atmospheric CO2 levels. If you wait a few thousand years, ours won't be either. But shellfish who depend on their calcium bicarbonate shells not dissolving can't afford to wait a few thousand years while bathed in a mild acid...

It only seems like nonsense because you're missing an important piece of the science.

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.

To piggyback onto this comment, it really is a matter of rates, of chemical kinetics. The current increase in CO2 from fossil fuel burning and related human activities has occurred at a rate that is geologically instantaneous. There is no real precedent for this. CO2 has indeed been higher in the geologic past (e.g., Cretaceous maximum, early Paleozoic prior to vascular plant systems), but these increases are likely tied to very leisurely evolving cycles of plate tectonics and enhanced volcanic CO2 fluxes. Higher pCO2 during these periods produced warmer, wetter climates that drive enhanced rates of silicate weathering. The result? High pCO2, somewhat lower pH, yes, but also higher carbonate alkalinity in seawater as well, which gave rise to higher, not lower, saturation states for marine carbonate minerals, and are associated with higher rates of biomineralization (e.g. Steven Stanley's periods of 'hypercalcification'). So it's really a matter of the balance of rates. "Natural" rates of C oxidation via the slow uplift of buried organic carbon are far slower than what we have produced via fossil fuel burning of coal, hydrocarbons. In this process, silicate weathering acts as an essential thermostat through the feedback to chemical weathering of crustal silicates. This has been understood for quite awhile.

As fairly experienced aquarium hobbyist I'm a bit worried about the side-effects of this approach. If you add amounts of olivine that are sufficient to create a globally significant effect on CO2 how do you avoid altering the local environment parameters too quickly? Marine animals are not as adapted to quickly changing environment like freshwater or terrestrial animals, and sudden swings in CO2, pH and hardness (which are all interconnected) could just wipe out the whole local ecosystems. Cyanobacteria and algae blooms are just the tip of the iceberg here. This is something that needs to be implemented really carefully and step by step to avoid causing even worse catastrophe.

That's a reasonable concern; I'd expect anyone doing this large-scale would first investigate local environmental impact.

Presumably one could add olivine in areas of the ocean that are far from coastlines, and spread it around in a wide area so local effects are less extreme. I don't know if dumping it in the deep ocean where there's less life to disrupt is viable, but if so maybe that would mitigate negative impact.

Unfortunately ocean fertilization efforts are limited by phosphorus. And even in simulations where the entire phosphorus content of the ocean was "magically" replenished every year for the max amount of biomass possible it only slightly delayed air CO2 levels by about a decade and didn't significantly impact ocean CO2 levels.

Large-scale geoengineering has the potential for unexpected consequences that could seriously damage the environment. This applies to olivine mining and desert flooding.

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.

We already have carbon removal technology. They’re called trees.

[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.

I guess trees could be planted more creatively. There is one particular situation where I think they should cut down / or move trees, and that is when trees are near power lines: it's basically a matter of time of when the tree falls down and the local power company has to fix the power line and the local population has to deal with the disruption in power.

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?

Or you could just have the power lines under the ground. If they are low enough to be endangered by falling trees, they could perhaps go underground instead. No need to cut down trees or maintain buffer zones along power lines. No annual periods of days/weeks without power for affected areas.

Underground power can solve tree fall issues. But it is much more expensive, both initially, and when any repairs or new connections are needed. The number of repairs likely goes down, but time to repair goes way up. In some areas, soil conditions make it pretty much impossible.

Trenching for the install may require more plant disturbance than would be needed to maintain nearby trees on a regular basis.

Distributed generation and redudnant distribution can help reduce the impact as well. Everything costs money though.

Trees hardly make anyone any money (absent a carbon credits/tax system).

Wood is 50-100 billion dollar business globally, it's not nothin. Plus, a bunch of trees are food sources.

Isn't that tearing them down, not putting them up?

Lots of it, yeah, but tree farms are a thing too. That's a matter of cost in modern times though. Currently faster/cheaper to convince a government to let you chop down rainforests, but that won't always be true.

Definitely curious how hard it would be to have drones plant trees in arid regions. Feels like I've seen some related projects before

Isn't that ok, though?

If I build a building out of wood, or print a book in a library, that carbon is sequestered at least as long as the building or book exists.

That's true, but you've netted zero on carbon. You need to put up more trees if you want to remove carbon. I mean, by all means tear em down, but you gotta keep putting them up.

I think that's the point.. Grow more trees and use the wood and the tables and books that are created are carbon that used to be in the air.

I didn't address all the possible nuances, but for the purposes of being precise: "reforestation at the scale necessary to act as an effective carbon sink is uneconomical".

As you must know, trees accelerate their carbon sequestration as they get larger. Also, fruit and nut agricultural species are frequently not robust enough, fast growing enough, or zone hardy enough to be good candidates for this either.

Yes, trees have economical value. Trees an a AGW-countering scale carbon sink are not. I'm in favor of a carbon tax/credit system in part for this reason.

Neither would any of the other proposals in the link for extracting carbon.

Any and all plants sequester carbon, and plants for all intents and purposes create all the wealth in the world. Everything else is just reusing existing wealth.

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.

This is covered in the "Where We Are Now" section at the bottom that explains BECCS. The issue is really cost - to remove carbon semi-permanently with trees you have to grow a lot of them, and then bury them deep enough that natural decay processes don't just put the carbon back into the environment. Basically you have to do the exact opposite of what we've been doing with coal and oil for over a century.

> Basically you have to do the exact opposite of what we've been doing with coal and oil for over a century

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.

Why not build houses from trees that will take carbon out 100-200 years from cycle.

Not just houses but any kind of building. There is an architectural movement called Mass Timber where the buildings are not just framed in wood but are virtually solid wood. It actually solves a lot of problems around building cavity thermodynamics, by eliminating the cavities. A large scale mass timber building sequesters a huge amount of carbon.

Carbon sequestration is a nice side benefit, but wood-into-durable-products can absorb only a small fraction of present anthropogenic CO2 emissions. We're emitting about 37 billion tonnes of CO2 per year at present (10 billion tonnes of carbon) and wood is about 50% carbon. To offset a quarter of human CO2 emissions, we'd need to turn about 5 billion tonnes of wood per year into long-lasting buildings and other manufactured objects. As of 2014, the world was producing about 0.8 billion tonnes of wood products that could be used in long lasting applications (sawnwood and wood paneling).

https://www.co2.earth/global-co2-emissions

https://blog.forest2market.com/fao-report-highlights-resurge...

I see what you're saying, but that doesn't actually strike me as too crazy of a goal. 0.8 is 16% of 5, and 6x-ing an industry seems within reach, given sufficient incentives.

Also concrete industry produces huge amounts co2 so chancing concrete to less co2 intense options helps lot.

There is enough landmass in Northern Canada / Russia to do this on a mass scale. Could you coat the trees in something to greatly reduce their likelihood of burning? Therefore not having to use biochar or some other form of carbon storage.

You would also have to coat them in something to prevent decomposition. Assuming that worked, over time you would take a ton of nutrients out of the system and the primary forest would eventually become grassland.

Maybe if you were growing trees specifically for this purpose on degraded land it could work.

Could we sink the trees in the ocean? The water would prevent them both from rotting and burning.

This doesn't make sense, the trees themselves are valuable. Why flood the market with cheep tree's and make useful stuff out of them. As suggested earlier, we can use way more trees in our building materials ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18286855 )

Trees ultimately burn or rot, releasing a large portion of that carbon back into the atmosphere. Cutting them down and burying them to grow more would be ideal, but takes additional work.

Someone want to engineer a tree with enormous, deep roots? Basically make the trees self-burying.

> Trees ultimately burn or rot

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.

We're essentially doing just that when we use the wood for housing and other products and then eventually landfill, then you can plant more trees on that land.

Too narrow a view.

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.

It's a buffer as long as there is a forest. Once you establish a forest where there previously was none, you have tied up a certain amount of carbon in all those tree trunk/root/branches.

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.

Not if they're treated with preservatives and built into houses. Every wood-frame house and piece of wooden furniture is carbon sequestration.

As long as those houses don't burn down...

What percentage of houses burn down out of all houses ever built? I think not that many. Most probably stand for a hundred years and then are torn down and their component parts recycled.

https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_green_why_we_should_build_...

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

Wood buildings using Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), which doesn’t significantly burn. Cool!

Make more stuff from wood. Replace lots of throwaway plastic goods with wood that lasts. Slow the rate at which it rots. Engineer landfills to retain the carbon.

This is mentioned on the website under "Bio-energy with carbon capture and storage".

Trees will only absorb 1 watt of hydrocarbon emissions per square meter, on average, even before considering the cost of burying the woods so the carbon isn't released when it rots.

Nuts. Literally. Breed oaks with acorns so dense they are like rocks.

At the timescale and costs needed to combat climate change, trees will be prohibitively expensive(land, fresh water) and slow. If reducing global carbon with plants was easy, governments wouldn't probably be complaining about protocols, solutions for almost 3 decades starting with Kyoto discussions. Can we stop mentioning planting trees as ultimate solution everytime carbon capture research comes up?

> Can we stop mentioning planting trees as ultimate solution everytime carbon capture research comes up?

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.

We can manage grassland and savanah. Grasses exudate a lot of their sugars (carbon) into the ground feeding the microbes. Holistically managed grassing is all about timing the regrowth and recycling the nutrients and fibers through the cow.

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

This is Gustaf from YC. I wrote the first Carbon Removal RFS.

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

If you'd like to fund trees, one could start buying land and start protecting trees.

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.

we need a black mirror-esque social credit score system where based on the individuals revenue, and what corporation they work for they have a 'tree quota' they need to fulfill. this could be hours volunteered at a global tree planting foundation, $$ donated to public works companies who plant the trees. I suppose if someone only made a small amount of $ and hid the rest behind their corporation , corporations would also have to be responsible in the system and donate $ to plant trees. website would be something like tree.global ... we need some way to tie all the world (or atleast continents) together under one government, a .global domain name or something.

EDIT: after reading other comments on how trees arent the greatest solution, replace trees with the best option and tie it to a continent wide / global wide black mirror credit score system.

So does anyone know why this isn't happening more? Surely there are plenty of super wealthy tech titans, Hollywood stars, etc. that care about climate change. They could buy up rural land that is suitable for forestry and start planting trees, or prevent deforestation. Even small time donors could make an impact. Land in the US is cheap, right? What am I missing?

Land isn't that cheap compared to the (not that large) effect, especially if we want that effect to be meaningful in the short term.

Buying land and planting trees there will cost something like $2000 per acre and retain something like one ton of CO2 per acre per year (an order of magnitude estimate - depending on details both the cost and CO2 effect can be very different).

Industrial carbon capture at power plants can do that for something like 70$ per ton. That's much cheaper than forestry, but that's still not good enough. ycombinator is obviously looking for technologies that scale better than these existing approaches, something that might achieve large scale carbon removal at maybe $10/ton or less, at which stage the option "just pay a lot of money to reverse the effect of our emissions" might be plausibly considered affordable to our society.

Why do you want to buy the land? Raise the money for seedling, get volunteers/robots to plant them. Pay people to maintain trees on land (which should require 0 effort). You can come up with some clever designs to make it a tourist attraction and make some extra cash. Plenty of room for improvements.

Let say you can have 100 000 trees per square km. If 40 trees gives you 1 ton of carbon per year then spending $25 000 gives you $10/ton.

Well, because to the first approximation pretty much all land is used - any land thats suitable to be a forest but is not already a forest is only that way because it's used for grazing or farming, otherwise it would overgrow naturally (though not as efficiently as with planting). If you want to increase the amount of woodland, you have to decrease the amount of pastures or farmland, so you have to either buy that land from the previous owner (because they won't be able to graze or plant there anymore) or take it from them by force.

I pretty sure that are that 10 mln km^2 around the word that is not use (Canada, Alaska, Syberia and patches of land around the world)

As I said, I'm talking about "any land thats suitable to be a forest but is not already a forest". These large uninhabited areas in Canada, Alaska and Siberia don't have such land - if any spot there is suitable for trees, then trees already have filled that area for hundreds of years (I mean, these areas already have massive forests), and in the areas where trees aren't growing naturally, it's for a reason, planting won't make a difference.

If you want to convert not-woodland into woodland, then that limits you to farmland or pastures - because there's no such thing as "unused natural potential woodland", any potential woodland that's not used and left alone becomes actual woodland; any potential woodland that's not woodland only became that way when we cut down the trees and cleared the land because we wanted to use it otherwise.

I agree that my estimate could be too big, but I do think there is a potential to increase the forestation in the north. Because of the warmer climate, Iceland can grow aspen. The government is planning to grow tree in a large part of the island, but the have a problem with free roaming sheeps. The land the can only sustain shrubs and moss could grow trees now.

Some countries are increasing the forestation as well https://www.citylab.com/environment/2018/01/northern-forest-...

>Industrial carbon capture at power plants can do that for something like 70$ per ton.

And then you have a lot of captured carbon dioxide on your hands - next big cost is the storage/conversion.

IPCC summary on cost of forest sequestration :

> Estimates of the private costs of sequestration range from about US$0.10-US$100/tC, which are modest compared with many of the energy alternatives (see Table 3.9 and Figure 4.9). Additionally, it should be noted that most forest projects have positive non-market benefits, thus increasing their social worth

http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/tar/wg3/index.php?idp=171#fig...

It is happening.

The founders of Patagonia and The North Face brands did start conservacion patagonia together. [1]

It is one amazing project. [2]

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservaci%C3%B3n_Patag%C3%B3n... 2. http://www.conservacionpatagonica.org/aboutus_oh.htm

Also is this a suggestion that a company that did just this would be accepted and funded?

That's an interesting option, but I wonder how a company might sustain itself doing this.

Lease land to eco-friendly activities like zipline adventures or something?

Also sounds like a good reason for expansion of National Parks services.

Right. And that charity is https://www.coolearth.org/. They don't buy land but they protect trees.

Actually, my idea would be the following:

1. Automate tree/crop planting

2. Reform regulations stipulating that planting of trees/crops/plants should be required on any and all uninhabited lands, as a matter of "imminent domain" regardless of the land owner. Perhaps even as a tax incentive to land owners.

3. The development of a maintenance and management policy and system around all that is planted

4. In conjunction with the RFS for flooding deserts, develop a multi-stage water transfer to desert desalinization ponds, then to be used in irrigation of the tree planting efforts.

We already have autonomous farming combines with excellent ability to harvest crops and plant seed. They should be put to use at scale in panting trees.

Further, we could make an effort to employ the vast amounts of humans with little opportunity to be productive to build, plant and deploy a massive effort such as this.

We dont need to try to do everything with robots, when we have millions and millions of humans.

If we are so progressive and smart, maybe learning how to manage a labor force in the millions to accomplish a great work such as terraforming a desert is someting we should attempt again.

RE: 1. Automate tree/crop planting:

https://www.biocarbonengineering.com/ These guys use drones to shoot tree seeds in the ground.

Also regarding terraforming a dessert, I think one of the biggest problems with is the number of water needed in the area, but I do think that this will be a really interesting part of the solution. Maybe the increase of land prices due to the decrease of arable land might make such ventures more profitable. There's a great ted talk about reversing desertification: https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...

Around here, tree farms replant by hiring people who plant hundreds to thousands trees per day per person and are paid for piece-work, a fraction of a dollar (~$0.20?) per treelet planted.

Given that you need to do this once every 25-40 years (maturity cycle of the tree), is doing it with drones really that big a win?

I'm also not sure how much of a big win the drones are. Proper forest management is probably way more important. So protecting against illegal logging and making sure that whenever trees are almost dying to take them out so that they don't rot and replant a new one.

Do you feel that #2 is a plausible goal that can be realistically achieved within a decade? I'm not really seeing any political will to do something like this, and without buy-in and cooperation from those who actually can make such regulations (and, effectively, authorize massive expenditures to make this happen) the other points don't really matter.

You are right that there is no political will right now. We need to make it happen.

Historically non violent direct action has been successful in changing politics (see womens suffrage, civil rights movement). This is the primary goal of the Extinction Rebellion http://extinctionrebellion.org

>The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.

"Doesn't concentrate wealth exponentially; BZZT rejected!"

At some point, we apparently forgot that wealth/power inequality itself massively contributes to environmental problems.

* If you have no political power, you can't defend yourself and your land from pollution.

* If a large portion of the society has no political power, a large portion of the society cannot defend themselves and their land from pollution.

* In a society with extreme wealth, the price mechanism can't "kick in" to protect increasingly-scarce renewable resources (ie saving a species from extinction). Donella Meadows gives a much better explanation than I can, using fisheries as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg&t=18m48s

Better timecode link (the relevant comments are here in Part 2, but the whole thing is worth watching): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc&t=10m30s

I'm seriously considering doing this myself. I've got some money set aside, and a smallish group (~20) people who are interested in contributing time, smaller amounts, etc. I'm no tech billionaire, but there's definitely areas where I could buy a few dozen acres of land.

I've been researching what's involved in reforesting, and it looks like a ton of work and a non-trivial cost. And maybe not the most efficient dollar / CO2 ratio, but also something that has the nice side effect of having a living forest around. (And also the side effect of providing exercise, access to the outdoors, etc.)

Is that really the biggest reason for forest being removed?

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 don't think you need fart bags, cows fed seaweed emit significantly less methane -https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-help-c....

Cattle is one main reason, second one is clearing forest for industrial agriculture like soybean and palm oil plantations. Third one is logging for wood products.

Essentially they are all because of overpopulation and massively increased demand for these products.

Don't forget that the main use for the soybeans is cattle feed.

It's the feed for the cattle that takes up the most space, and that is directly replacing rainforests.

Combining trees and livestock has been done for centuries and is called Silvopasture:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture

Another major issue is the removal of mangrove ecosystems which are great at long term deposition of carbon (mostly driven by shrimp farming).

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.

Have a look at “Mossy Earth”. I can connect you with the founder if needed.

Well,

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.

That's called bio-char, and is referenced in the submitted link here.

I think you're overstating the problem with carbon released from decaying wood.

Trees newly planted now will net-absorb carbon for the next 50-100 years, exactly the time period when we need to bring the carbon balance under control until we have our energy used cleaned up and other technologies developed. When the newly planted forest matures, trees fall and rot, but new growth takes their place. So it doesn't release a large amount of carbon, but enters a steady state roughly carbon-neutral.

Gustaf, without being too facetious, I think a startup to incentivize landowners to use forest land for carbon removal instead of beef would be called "donating to a politician's election campaign." : ). The reason I make the joke is to ask, is looking at technical/business solutions without directly addressing the social and political reasons why global warming has gone on basically unchecked like missing the forest for the trees?

I agree that political action is incredibly important. Carbon tax, carbon incentives etc. I don't believe we need to change our political system in order to stop climate change. And if we had to that would make it far more difficult to do.

Even if countries implemented carbon tax and carbon incentives like many have it doesn't change that we innovation. Modern cheap verification systems, Marketplace's like Nori.com

Grassland, if properly managed, can sequester more carbon than a forest. This is related to the (unintuitive) fact that grasses are more efficient producers of organic matter than trees.

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...

> 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.

I want this desperately to be true as someone who loves meat but everything I've read tells me it's not. There is definitely a nice symbiotic relationship that exists between cows grazing and grasslands but it is significantly more expensive to raise animals this way, and you can raise significantly fewer of them per sq ft.

The main issue with cows is methane, not carbon (edit: carbon dioxide*), anyway.

I might be pedantic, but methane is a carbon atom and 4 hydrogen atoms. I assume you meant carbon dioxide.

This is HN, the one place you don't need to apologize for pedantry. Right: I meant carbon dioxide. Made the edit :)

Salatin’s mob grazing creates soil.

It is cheaper to raise them this way because you don’t need to buy corn feed.

The cows digest grass well. They do not digest corn well, which means corn fed cows produce methane and get sick, and don’t build the soil (sequestering carbon).

Definitely worth watching some YouTube videos and reading about it, it’s pretty fun and interesting.

The problem with mob grazing (and really any kind of similar system) is that you cannot support nearly as many animals per sq ft. in comparison to more industrialized farming.

Salatin's solution is to shift a major portion of the work force/economy into making sustainable food. It sounds amazing from a utopian standpoint but is a total fantasy.

Won't the rise of automation result in a lot of people without jobs ? They could start working on sustainable food.

Sounds like a win / win.

Mob grazing does not need more work, and it reportedly needs no fertilizer and less land, and it was noticed years ago - this is how it is clearly fantasy at this stage. The strategy would have transformed existing beef and dairy economics within years of discovery.

no the main issue with cows is land-use (the thread topic here), methane is just another way they're really terrible. its a hell of a one-two punch.

> The main issue with cows is methane, not carbon

Although objectively it makes the most sense if we all eat less meat or even go vegan (in terms of bang-for-the-buck), from what I understand the methane problem is mostly a result of them not being fed a healthy diet.

Cows are ruminants, so their production of methane is a necessary component of the fermentation that takes place in their digestive track.

Also, somewhat surprisingly, "free range grass fed diets" lead to more methane production then cows fed grain diets (factory farmed cows).

See https://www.fcrn.org.uk/sites/default/files/project-files/fc...

Grassfed does not necessarily lead to more methane production, it depends on the mix of grass and secondary vegetation, on the grain mix being compared to, and on potential supplements.

https://prairiesoilsandcrops.ca/articles/volume-1-3-print.pd...

Just reading the article you provided and "Feeding high grain diets to cattle unequivocally lowers the formation of CH4 in the rumen." seems to disagree with what you're saying?

That isolated statement only loosely connects to the over reaching statement which I responded to: the performance of the high grain diet depends on the type of grain. In addition, there are complications.

From same section of the article it was picked from :

"While increased use of grains in ruminant diets reduces enteric CH4 emissions, there is concern that increased grain production may increase the use of fossil fuels for fertilizer, machinery, and transport, resulting in more greenhouse gas emissions. Grain feeding ignores the importance of ruminants in converting fibrous feeds, unsuitable for human consumption, to high-quality protein sources (i.e. milk and meat). Furthermore, high grain diets can negatively affect cow health due to acidosis. With escalating grain prices, the scope of further increasing the grain content of ruminant diets in Canada is limited"

Even ignoring CO2 cost, nutrition, grain availability and all other complications, what is required to show that grass fed diets necessarily lead to more methane output than alternatives - is a comprehensive study of the performance of all dietary options and supplements. I dont think that is setting too high a bar, to avoid arguing on sweeping generalization and loss of context.

Ah, you're right, it is a nuanced question. Perhaps more importantly: as mentioned in the (admittedly large) publication I cited, the rearing time for grassfed cattle is about 3x longer than factory farmed cattle, so the net methane output is considerably larger.

I should acknowledge it was more of a caveat than a correction to be honest. Concentrated livestock farming has on the face of things significant efficiency advantages which can make compelling points, yet the infrastructure and resources to maintain more intense systems is easily ignored.

Taste can often be regarded as ephemeral, while fast fattened livestock can be discerned to taste different and are considered inferior in most food celebrating cultures.

There is a possible health factor involved with grass fed (or mixed prairie for better) beef and dairy accumulating a markedly different spectrum of omega oils, which are debated inconclusively, but also formally studied and theorized to be superior for human consumption.

A focus on the strength of methane emissions seems increasingly common in discussions and magazine articles, while the long developed advice from the IPCC is that CO2 demands priority because methane clears naturally in a decade or so, and requires less action to avoid than CO2 output which takes much longer to clear.

My understanding of IPCCs focus on CO2, is that while methane reduction presents an opportunity to buy a few years time, the priority is to convince action on the hardest problem which has been created, is worsening rapidly and much harder to clear.

Grassland does not tend to develop soil, so if employed in feeding cattle, the cattle is where the carbon is "sequestered" to - into and through them, out the rear end. If the grass is cut and harvested (at some expense) instead of fed to cattle, then we get a lot of carbon negative hay to do something with. Bury it maybe (to sequester) or biofuels (to release again).

With traditional timber plantations we get the carbon in a load of timber mostly. Build with some of it, pulp and burn the rest. Timber plantations tend not to build soil either.

With relatively unheard of silviculture - the detailed management of mixed forest, the optimum efficiency of carbon absorption can be arranged with select and native symbiotic species, while producing wood and foods and building soil mass. In addition to economic (and atmospheric) services advanced management of mixed forestry and groves can tolerate and support ancient plant and animal species - for future generations - which have been critically devastated by the persistent strategy of individuating production goals.

We don't need to get any smarter at all, we need to get wiser. There is plenty enough grassland now, its time to grow trees.

From everything I've researched the opposite is true. Properly managing grasslands (which used to happen naturally with large herds) makes for health grasses which develop root systems, create soil and sequester carbon.

Poorly managed grasslands that are under grazed leads to soil degradation. The answer seems to be intensive grazing followed by rest periods to allow grasses to use nutrients and grow.

More links in my post here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18287434

I made a reply to your post on that subject of potentially transformational management of grasslands.

On this ungainly subject of grassland vs mixed forest here, I'll just remind - two hundred years ago about 60% of the earth surface was covered in mature and native forest. The figure is less than 30% today. Most of the worlds fertile crops are grown on deforested land, on the soil which native forests developed due to ecological diversity and lack of erosion. Most of the grasslands which are used for grazing, don't have soil to support demanding crops.

https://www.britannica.com/science/deforestation

I'm working on a way to bring dollars to carbon removal, whether as simple as planting trees or investing in these more advanced upcoming technologies. It is an app with a personal pledge to balance the negative impact of your own driving and flying with a small payment. Cheap at just a couple dollars a week, with the potential to reach a significant scale through companies. In fact, I look forward to hearing back from YC later today!

If anyone is interested in keeping in the loop on progress: https://www.producthunt.com/upcoming/pledge-balance

This is great. We need a verified system where know exactly where each dollar is spend and how many CO2 tons are saved per dollar spent

For now money will be passed along to the best-in-class organizations doing hands-on carbon removal projects - I believe there are several excellent non-profits with the right efficiency and transparency. Yet even though these great organizations exist and plenty of people care about the environment, hardly any money ends up on their hands. I think there is great grass-roots potential to change this and it is equally as important as marginally improving the efficiency of carbon removal tech.

Sounds a bit like what Nori plans to do.

http://rameznaam.com/2018/09/10/yes-blockchain-can-help-us-s...

I'll have to check them out, thanks for sharing. I did hear of another blockchain carbon project, but this one seems more promising at first glance.

Does https://www.goldstandard.org/ not do that already?

Is your app eventually meant to turn a profit, and if so how? Or, are you doing this on a nonprofit basis and planning to keep it as such?

I believe a business model helps align incentives and increases potential scale. Certainly things can evolve, but the plan is no cut from users and charge businesses a markup to balance employee commute and flights. Hopefully can make it in the businesses self-interest where they see a return on their small investment in terms of employee satisfaction and retention.

I certainly agree a business model can do those things, and sometimes does.

I could see companies such as Patagonia, who have a strong reputation for prioritizing sustainability, potentially being interested in a service like that.

It seems tricky though to align the interests of your users, your customers (businesses, the ones who will actually be paying you) and the environment.

Which is not to doubt your intent, but is why I am skeptical of market-based approaches to solve a problem which is of the type (a problem of the commons) that governments can be good at (if they choose to be) and businesses struggle with.

It does seem tricky. A worthy adversary even.

Look 10 years out in the future though and I think it is easy to imagine 1) many more people care about this 2) the urgency they feel is increased. Can we start with the Patagonias of the world (there are many others) and build some traction? Can we make it something that young employees want and bring transparency to which companies participate? If it can give a slight edge to McKinsey over Bain for example, the cost is trivial.

[Update regarding above: no YC interview, which is understandable based on where things currently stand]

We at DroneSeed are using swarms of unmanned aircraft for mass forest/rangeland restoration projects - monitoring, planting, invasive species mitigation, etc. The mission of the company is to help combat climate change by substantially reducing the cost of afforestation/reforestation.

Happy to talk about it any time: ben at droneseed.com

I pictured DJI drones dropping seed bombs, but taking a look it seems a lot more impressive than that. Very cool--hope this takes off!

This is Kumar from YCS2012.

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.

What do you think about perennial grains that sequester carbon underground, like Kernza?

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/could-perennial-grains-be-n...

From what I understand, it can sequester carbon because its roots run pretty deep. But then what? Won't the soil become saturated with carbon? Or isn't that an issue?

That's right, and you won't have the carbon emissions that happen right now with annual grains from tillage/erosion/too much fertiliser.

Soil has a carbon budget but I'm not sure saturation is an issue - that's basically how grasslands work today

I've read through the prospectus and seems like it's only for US based companies.

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.

I'm in New Zealand and trees grow here like weeds. A hectare of pine trees reaches maturity in 25 years and holds 200 odd tons of carbon. Once mature, those trees can be harvested and the carbon locked away in furniture, buildings, etc. As far as I know, it doesn't matter where on the planet the carbon is being sequestered, so a global view will likely be more effective.

In many ways it’s the soil itself:

https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/soil-carbo...

>most forest owners in the world don't know or don't have incentive to care

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.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xcZS7arcgk

[2] https://www.nature.com/articles/nature11983

Stopping our reliance on animal products is the next big change for humanity. People will look back on these times like we look back on times of slavery and tyranny. Either that or we die.

Trees don’t make money for Venture Capitalists.

This. We need USDA money going to tree genetics for carbon sequestration. Pat Schnabble at ISU would be amazing at this. He has already isolated genes to thicken cell walls. He also has a novel technique of using time-lapse video to isolate lines that maximize solar uptake by cooperating with neighbors on how they grow. Almost all grain productivity in the past 20 years has been on cooperative solar coverage, not per plant yield. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXiV1dTlRSU

I once started thinking through what we would want out of some kind of ideal carbon sequestering device. I thought that for the scale of the problem, they would need to self-replicate, and run on some natural energy source, like solar power. Then, I realized I had just invented the tree.

Haha, I had that same chain of thought. I’m sure we aren’t alone.

And animals, ecosystems!

A set of forests that stays the same size, i.e. some trees fall down and rot or get cut down and burned while new trees sprout or get planted, so that the total amount of biomass in these forests is more or less stable long-term is not a carbon removal technology but simply a carbon store. To remove carbon, the amount of biomass needs to increase... so we essentially need to cut down trees and somehow store their carbon instead of releasing it back into air through decay or burning.

So this might be a dumb question, but if I landfill paper instead of recycling it, does it degrade? If not, is that a poor man's form of carbon sequestration? A cursory glance suggests this is correct [1], though you'd need to know a lot more to say that it was more carbon efficient than recycling.

[1] http://www.allaboutbags.ca/degradeinlandfill.html

Was the carbon not already sequestered when it was in the form of a tree?

I assume any serious paper production company replants the tree, so you start with a tree and end with a tree and landfilled paper.

Given strommen's statement about landfilled paper turning into methane, doesn't that mean paper manufacturing is basically a carbon dioxide->methane conversion operation?

Yes, the possibility I described was for if they did not biodegrade significantly. More reading makes it sound like they degrade in weeks, with a few exceptions.

No, it wasn’t.

Trees (esp. those suitable for paper) either burn or fall over and rot, both of which release most of the carbon they used to store.

Fossil fuels used to be trees, and they were well sequestered. Paper would eventually become something similar when buried.

Yes, paper degrades in a landfill.

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 :)

Important to add that plants are the only carbon removal technology with a successful track record.

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.

We already have carbon removal development. It's called regenerative agriculture.

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.

[1] https://youtu.be/vpTHi7O66pI?t=157

I recently heard about Carbon Engineering, a B.C. Canada based firm that is extracting carbon from the atmosphere and making liquid fuel -- they call it "recycled fuel." Apparently it can be used in existing combustion engines. And it is already up and running.

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-...

That is awesome.

Carbon Engineering and Climeworks are two incredible companies working on Direct Air capture and Air-to-Fuel and we'd like to fund more companies like them. There are less than 5 companies worldwide that are serious about getting Direct Air Capture to scale. The world need more bets that that on such a promising technology

Hi Gustaf, I read earlier that you are more interested in Direct Air Capture technologies than others. Do you have any specific reasons?

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.

Also other greenhouse gasses, like methane capture from landfills.

I'm not Gustaf, but I'll try to answer this.

The return on investment for a lot of Carbon capture/sequestering is not lucrative (or at least the business models are not yet apparent). The long term VC angle for air to fuel seems straight forward.

- Mars alone will be a huge market for such technology. Driving a lot of demand 100-200 years out (if not a big market in 20-40 years).

- Shanghai, et-al, need air filters. Now imagine a filter which also generates a sellable resource; fuel. I imagine that machine would sell quite well in those markets.

- With the right level of efficiency, a new era of "sail" boats could be powered by reclaimed fuel from air. Imagine the market for a cargo/cruise ship leaving port with an empty fuel tank, and days later reaching the destination port with a full tank and its goods delivered.

- With the right level of efficiency, this only improves the efficiency of coal plants. Burning coal for electricity but also reclaiming the CO2 for fuel.

I don't see how you could make a "sail" boat powered by reclaimed fuel from air, as there is no fuel in the air. You will need a source of energy to convert the CO2 to fuel. In nature the most common (to my knowledge) CO2 -> fuel process is called photosynthesis, and is powered by the sun.

CO2 -> fuel consumes energy (that is stored in the fuel). Fuel -> CO2 releases it.

Sorry, in the case of "sail" boats, I worded it poorly before. Wind turbine-like "sails" could act as a propulsion source when the wind direction is correct, and generate energy and funnel the air into the CO2 -> fuel machine when the direction of wind is non-optimal for propulsion.

I agree in all of the cases I mentioned there would always need to be some energy source.

The reason I'm so interested in Direct Air Capture is:

- It's primarily a tech solution which allows for scale. If you build one Machine you can build a million. It won't actually require very much space, it need access to cheap energy and abilities to store/sequester the CO2 captured.

- Technology have the benefit that can be optimized and optimized and optimized to the point where the cost is not very high. The less tech the less changes for optimization

- There is a big risk many countries won't meet their responsibility. Getting wealthy democracies onboard is hard enough. We need a scalable way to solve this that doesn't require everyone to help because they prob won't after all

- Any negative emission solution that requires a large land-mass will create other problems (dealing with land-owners etc).

If Carbon Engineering can really scale (and they can reduce costs to below $100 / tonne of CO2) - why not just pour money into them?

People are. But that's just one bet. There are lots of components in the ecosystem needed to make everything succeed

You could put compressors next to windmills so that on days there is too much wind, you could start up the compressors and make dry ice, liquid nitrogen or some liquid air feed stock.

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.

Yes, you are correct. Cheap energy is the main input to Direct-Air-Capture. Overflow energy from Solar and Wind is a great source of that.

Yes, solar seems like it will continue to drop in price and you'd probably want to leverage that savings too.

A mass produced portable compressor unit could also be neat. Something for around the home. A 1kw to 3kw unit could be nice to make dry ice. You practically need to have AC if you want to work in Florida or other tropical climate. There is a big market for AC combined with solar in the U.S. since folks want AC and a good chunk probably also want to use solar. Given that you want cooling at night, a solar powered dry ice maker might be able to compete with solar + battery + AC. The panels can feed directly into the compressor to make the night's dry ice rather than storing the energy in a battery and running the compressor at night.

The bonus is that any efficiency gains in the dry ice maker could be applied to processes further down stream that make methane or heavier hydrocarbons. You get a solar cooling solution and something that could be helpful when bootstrapping synth gas production.

Here are some small high pressure projects / products:

Liquid nitrogen https://makezine.com/2010/06/07/diy-liquid-nitrogen-generato...

Shoebox compressor https://www.shoeboxcompressor.com/

Not sure how you'd separate the CO2 out of the liquid air though.

One of the things I find interesting about Carbon Engineerings process is that it requires a lot of heat to separate the captured carbon from the fluid (I forget what the fluid is called). Last I heard they were using natural gas for this (with more carbon capture tech attached).

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.

But doesn't the carbon just go back into the atmosphere when the fuel is used?

Yes. It reduces emissions but does not sequester carbon (unless you bury it and don't burn it).

You could just "bury it and don't burn it". The US already has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Assuming that you can recycle something close enough to the original petroleum, you could even process the recycled fuel into durable petroleum products instead of consumable ones (lubricants, plastics, etc.)

Or you could sell it to SpaceX and have them ship it all to Mars, so someone can use it to fuel their Mars rovers and terraform Mars.

Yes, ignoring economic incentives, they could just bury it. (Due to similar incentives, Chevron and BP aren't leaving oil sequestered in the ground.)

Shipping petroleum from Earth's surface to Mars is almost certainly prohibitively expensive.

You could get environmentalists or governments to pay you to bury it. Carbon offsets already exist anyway. You can't avoid public policy when it comes to solving climate change, but if you can bury reserves of atmospherically-extracted hydrocarbons in the ground, that's an easy budget line item and not a massive fight that requires coordination among literally every industrialized nation.

I'm only being half-facetious about shipping the stuff to Mars; eventually, we're going to want to terraform Mars, and creating a greenhouse effect is going to be part of that.

Or you could make lubricants, plastics, vaseline...

> You could get environmentalists or governments to pay you to bury it.

It isn't sufficient to punt the cost onto a small group with shared political bent (environmentalists). There simply aren't enough of them to bear the costs, and it creates perverse incentives for carbon consumption for everyone else.

Yes, I think environmentalists have been trying to encourage governments to pay for carbon sequestration etc for quite some time. Mandated emissions reductions and increased fuel efficiency, carbon offset taxes, and funding carbon sequestration (burying) are all sides of the same coin.

> You can't avoid public policy when it comes to solving climate change, but if you can bury reserves of atmospherically-extracted hydrocarbons in the ground, that's an easy budget line item and not a massive fight that requires coordination among literally every industrialized nation.

Potato, potato. It's still additional funding, and good luck getting a conservative-majority senate to pass funding for anything other than the military and social security.

Yes, there is some use for carbon products, assuming people dispose of them by recycling or burying rather than burning. But I don't think it comes close to the volume needed to really restore pre-20th century atmospheric carbon levels.

That helps with reducing emissions (modulo inefficiency) but since we're already past the point where that was sufficient, we still need to sequester additional carbon without burning it.

Carbon Engineering should be focusing on capture and sequestration, not this synthesized fuel BS.

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.

> Carbon Engineering's fuel costs about 25 per cent more than gasoline made from oil

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

Yeah, if that's the case - if we can make petroleum products from CO2 and power for only a 25% premium (hell, a 100% premium) over current prices, that's incredible. That's not (just) an environmental breakthrough, it's a MASSIVE geopolitical change. All of a sudden, the pricing power of oil exporting countries disappears - there's an infinitely scalable replacement waiting in the wings. Hell, can you imagine how much the US Navy would pay to produce jet fuel on board carriers (nuclear power!) and eliminate a need for underway replenishment?

And for that reason I really have to assume that it's standard science reporting, and some wires have been crossed along the way.

> can you imagine how much the US Navy would pay to produce jet fuel on board carriers (nuclear power!) and eliminate a need for underway replenishment?

They're already working on that too.

Reading the article:

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?

Wood gassification does that already.

An obvious step towards reducing CO2 emissions in the US would be raising taxes on gasoline. Americans are driving ever larger and less fuel-efficient cars in part because gas prices have remained steady or fallen in real terms since the 70s. In fact, Ford announced a few months ago that they will stop selling passenger cars in the US (except the Mustang), to focus on more popular trucks and SUVs.

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.

> An obvious step towards reducing CO2 emissions in the US would be raising taxes on gasoline.

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.

> There might be a bare minimum amount of CO2 allowed, it's fixed.

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.

Yes, I was unclear, sorry. What I mean is: "There might physically be an amount of CO2 that can be released without compromising our ecosystem. That amount is fixed. We can't borrow on it and repay it later."

More importantly, while the grandparent poster is right about carbon taxes (and I support them), they require coordinated political action that is not happening right now in the United States. Again: let me reiterate that I agree they should happen, but the current dominant political party does not support them.

So the YC question is: What can be done outside of American politics?

If the article posted last week is to be believed [1], which I do, then transportation makes up a relatively small portion of emissions (14%).

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...

All carbon taxes can be made non-regressive by giving each citizen (or resident, or taxpayer or whatever) a credit.

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.

Perhaps using fees from all combustion products (gas, diesel, natural gas, heating oil, coal, etc), to directly fund prairie, forests, gardens, etc will immediately begin reducing CO2 and help increase biodiversity which we are also highly dependent on.

The problem with carbon taxes are the incentives to cheat. The US is probably being the 'most honest' by simply saying we won't implement them. In China and India they would simply misreport their emissions and not pay the tax. And of course, you can't hit the carbon targets w/out getting India & China on board.

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.

> The US is probably being the 'most honest' by simply saying we won't implement them. In China and India they would simply misreport their emissions and not pay the tax.

Uhm, is there some data backing up your claim that we are honest and that China and India are dishonest. I mean, we really should think twice about accusing other countries of dishonesty after our whole weapons of mass destruction invasion debacle, various wars, regime changes, our "intelligence" services, rendition, Vietnam...

This wasn't really an accusation that China / India are less moral, only that they will game the system differently than the US will. I mean... I put 'most honest' in quotes to imply the US is not really honest. No state actor is honest or moral, they all act in their own national interests.f

For all the instances you reference, you think India or China don't have an equivalent moral failing? Cultural revolution? Great leap forward? Tienanmen square? Great firewall?

As for India, go look up "most polluted city in the world." The top 5 are located in India and 9 of the top 10 are in India. Do you expect them to implement carbon taxes when they can't even clean up their own air?

The whole point of this thread is that we need a technology solution with the underlying reasoning that political solutions have been and will remain untenable.

Raising gas taxes are a good idea for other reasons too, primarily being the funding of infrastructure maintenance. Gas taxes are an almost perfect tax, where the more you're using the underlying public good (the road) the more you'll pay to support it.

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.

Can we discuss space sunshades? Assuming the cost of getting freight to orbit goes down substantially as companies like SpaceX ramp up launches, what's the limiting parameter on some sort of sunshade over the north and/or south pole? Is it indeed the cost of launching the sunshade, or are there other factors at play which make the space sunshade unrealistic? What materials would be reflective and resilient and cost-effective to block the sun? Would polar blockers be enough to cool the planet as a whole and stop warming, or would multiple sunshades spread around the globe be better?

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.

My personal preference is an inflatable sun shield method like these 10,000 kilometer-wide objects: "Self-deployed, extremely large low mass space structures" http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/space/Self-deployed%20extrem...

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.

That's one great thing about sunshades- they can be implemented by just convincing a spacefaring billionaire or two instead of having to change policy / steer nation-states.

Unfortunately, you still need to convince the billionaire that the project will make him into a 10-billionaire, otherwise he’ll just keep it in the bank, or bathe in it or whatever rich people do with all the vast piles of money they are sitting on.

Perhaps there's the chance that they're interested in their legacy being saving the human race. There will probably be statues of them, schools named after them, and who knows what else if the plan succeeded.

How would this affect plant life and agriculture?

Since this would be over the poles, agriculture would not be impacted. There would likely be a substantial impact to ecology of these regions, depending on size of the shade of course.

I'm skeptical -

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.

> 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.

Probably the most important advantage sunshades have over other kinds of geoengineering megaprojects is that they can be trivially (compared to their construction costs, that is...) turned off. If they turn out to be very harmful in some previously unforeseen way, we can choose to not have them anymore.

That is not so for, for example, seeding lots of nutrients for algae over the continental shelf.

As others have noted, solar radiation management doesn't do anything to counteract ocean acidification. I still think that SRM of some sort may be necessary to stop runaway feedback loops like loss of soil carbon from thawing permafrost.

The sunshade approach to SRM looks like it may have been devised like other big speculative space projects: "start by assuming that big projects in space are the solution, then find a problem to motivate that solution." (See also: mining helium 3 from the Moon.)

Solar radiation management with reflective aerosols instead of space sunshades looks simpler and easier to me. Most importantly, SRM based on aerosols is incrementally scalable from small low initial investment/scope. The sunshade approach, like many envisioned large space projects, appears to require large "lumpy" investments before delivering any detectable benefit.

On the other hand, we've got a pretty bad track history with adding gases to the atmosphere.

And, as mentioned, it's pretty easy to 'turn off' (fold or destroy) a sunshade. Not so easy to remove a bunch of aerosol in the stratosphere. I'd prefer more expensive but reversible action, personally.

On the other hand, a slow approach may negate that aspect, and just about anything is better than the nothing we've got now.

Depending on how high in the atmosphere the aerosols are added, they remain aloft for a few weeks to a few years. It's not a long-term commitment to altering the atmosphere's composition like burning fossils has been. This is in fact one of the arguments raised against solar radiation management: that the temperature rebound could be terrifyingly rapid if SRM is stopped. But that danger applies to space sunshades too.

>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.

There's a lot of EM that neither chlorophyll nor existing PV can use. Hopefully a sunshade would be chosen that selectively works on those less-useful bands. I hope that someone is looking into aerogels for this purpose; they can cover a lot of area per unit mass and have tunable optical properties.

>> for only a few billion dollars.

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.

Anything you can do in space would be cheaper on earth. So rather than shading the pole by spreading ~100,000 sq. km of material in orbit, instead ask why we wouldn't spread the same shade cloth / reflective mylar etc. on the surface of the earth. Then you realize how much of a colossal project it is and how completely impractical is is.

Earth is a closed system, so the shade cloth on Earth would simply warm up and reradiate the absorbed energy as infrared. Reflective mylar would see a portion of the reflected sunlight (which would have warmed the atmosphere upon entry) trapped by the greenhouse effect.

This is not necessarily true as demonstrated by Steven Chu's 'Paint the Earth White' campaign.

Earth is is not even close to a closed system. There's a giant thermonuclear explosion factory in space that pumps insane amounts of energy into our system. If earth was a closed system it could not harbor life as entropy increased.

That's why you set up orbital infrastructure so that you don't have to bring up everything from Earth and can just mine stuff in space.

It's way too late for that. Recent UN report basically says we're hosed by 2040.

We do not have decades to develop a mature space-mining and construction industry.

Anything you build on earth is inside the atmosphere. Keeping heat away from greenhouse gasses is the whole point.

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)

The easiest surfaces to make more reflecting should be the oceans. Some proposed carbon capture methods involve algae. Maybe algae could be synthesized that are white/reflective as well as capture carbon? Patches of algae can be huge without the need for any construction.

I don't know about that; land is expensive and inhabited by plants and animals, and you have to deal with wind. In space, there are other problems but at least you're probably not getting in anyone's way. You might also be able to use a much smaller shade, as it can be parked in L1 where it's always shading the Earth, and you don't have to deal with some of the reflected light diffusing through the atmosphere and not actually making it back out into space.

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.)

Sunshades don't address other attendant issues stemming from increased CO2, such as ocean acidification. The ocean biosphere wholesale is threatened by acidification. (Among other things, bio-carbonate generation and stability are undermined. And thus, the entire food chain above organisms that depend upon this.)

Because the earth is effectively a black body it cools down at T in kelvin^4. This means you need to block a huge amount of energy ~2% of the sun to get around global warming. Sticking something at L1 looks elegant, but you cant just toss junk there it needs serious station keeping making it far more expensive than many assume.

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.

The launch volume looks infeasibly large in the foreseeable future, but I don't think the station keeping problem is that bad. Any sun shade is basically going to be a solar sail already and steering via LCD panels like IKAROS did should be sufficient.

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

The problem is you now need some actual structure rather than just some thin sheets / inflatable structure or whatever. Further applying even small amounts of force across huge sheets adds up while as you say it's acting like a solar sail.

That is to say it's clearly still possible, just not as cheap as people are assuming.

IKAROS handled that by spinning very slowly to remain rigid with centrifugal force. To be practical you really can't have one single structure but a swarm of medium sized shades would work much better.

If by medium size your thinking ~1km^2 then sure. But, much smaller than that you you start talking about billions of these things. Keeping them properly aligned and not shading each other would be a non trivial challenge.

My proposal is to send up a robot, capture a smallish asteroid, and have it use the material to weave/spin out a shield. The robot sits at the edge and spins and weaves away. More robots would be employed as the shield grows. Honestly, I've not worked out all the details. I'd love to hear what others think. Is this just pie(sheet) in the sky? Or is this the salvation of humankind.

Earth-Sol L1 is probably a bad place for a solar shade. That's where a solar shade of any given size is the most efficient, but the cost of getting it there is much more than the cost of having more, less efficient ones.

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.

LEO to L1 is not that bad using solar sails or ionic propulsion.

There are going to be real trade-offs to any orbit, but I think the minimum cost is going to be above X mass in L1 means X mass into LEO as you can't use less mass than that in any other orbit.

But then you have to put solar sails or ionic propulsion into the shade.

BFR could deploy a completely passive sail directly into such a sun-synchronous elliptical orbit, return to land, and launch again after a few hours.

Anything that blocks that much light is going to be a huge solar sail and need a lot of station keeping.

The only reason ionic propulsion might be considered is the they are already going to be solar panels. If you make a large chunk of them from solar panels you then have crazy energy for space based industry and plenty of energy for ionic propulsion.

Also, with that much mass in orbit you are going to want some way do move dammaged segments.

Supposing you can re-orient parts of the "huge solar sail" then wouldn't it become rather like the sail of a ship or the wing of a plane, and be usable as a control surface for maneuvering?

I'd imagine that in the neighborhood of L1 you would try to find some equilibrium point a little closer in to the sun so that the force of the solar wind matches gravitational pull to the sun. If you start drifting in to the sun, you expose more surface area, and if you're drifting towards the Earth, you re-orient the sail to absorb less solar wind.

That's the idea I was going with. You let the sun counteract most of the force from your solar sail, but that requires you to constantly to make minor adjustments because unlike a normal orbit it's not even close to stable over time.

But, while not necessarily difficult it does prevent a lot of the more simple designs as you can't just toss out a bunch of reflective beach balls with very low pressure or other 'simple' means of blocking sunlight.

How are you going to use a solar sail to go towards L1 from LEO?

You don't have a keel, but you can use the suns gravity with a similar goal. The sun's gravity is much stronger than a sail's thrust so you can't hover, but you do end up in a higher orbit by aiming it at the sun. However, this averages over an orbit so you don't gain energy over time.

But, aim the sail off-center say 45 degrees from the sun and you can pick if that's adding or subtracting angular momentum from your orbit over time. Reduce angular momentum and gravity pulls you into a lower orbit and thus more orbits/year. Reverse that and your gain angular momentum and get fewer orbits per year. L1 is a special case as it's balanced between the sun and earth so you have the same number of orbits per year.

Now, rather than just orbiting the sun your also orbiting the earth. But, similar manovers work just fine.

PS: It's even more complected as you end up in elliptical orbits if you don't keep things balanced etc, but that's the basic idea.

Is L1 the most efficient for a fixed size? The difference is ~6000 km for LEO versus 1.5 million km for L1 to the Earth's center and the r^2 law means you need to put a lot more area in L1 than in LEO, even after discounting for the fact that in LEO it'll be on the wrong side of the Earth half the time. Filling up appreciable fractions of LEO might have it's own problems.

r^2 is not that relevant. The moon is 384,400 km from the earth and can cause a total solar eclipse despite only being 3,474 km wide where the earth is 12,742 km wide.

The geometry works out more or less linearly with distance. So 1.5 / 0.384 = 1.065. Which means and object 1.065x as wide as the earth would also provide a total solar eclipse. Making sunshades more than 2x effective L1 vs LEO.

PS: Only 1/2 the time they are on the sun facing side, but they are not perpendicular with sunlight for that entire half. At a 45 degree angle a sunshade blocks ~70% as much sunlight vs a 0 degree angle.

How would you keep a sunshade over one pole? Keeping anything over a single spot requires a geostationary orbit, which by definition is only possible on the equator.

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.

Seconded. It would just fall down.

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

Interesting; I'd seen this before but forgotten about it.

Don't think it works here though - if the pressure of reflected sunlight is counteracting gravity, then I don't see how the statite can be acting as a sunshade. If it were in position for that, the sunlight would be pushing it toward the Earth, no?

If anything this sounds more like the reflectors often proposed for Martian terraforming, which are designed to heat the planet rather than cool it.

A very different mode of Statite system operation is possible that would allow the Statite to be placed at any point around the Earth, at all times of the year, even over the sunlit side, at the expense of slightly greater operating distance. Instead of the Statite being balanced by sunlight in the gravitational field of the Earth, the Statite would be placed in orbit around the Sun, at such a distance from the earth that the gravitational field of the Earth plus the moon is only a perturbation on the gravitational field of the Sun. [1]

But in practice, I think you're right. Forward wrote a short story about such a "pole sitter" ("Race to the Pole"), and had one of the characters say this:

The control problem of keeping the [statite] balanced over the pole is very tricky, especially during the summer season of that hemisphere when the polar axis is over on the sunlit side of the Earth. That’s why ‘pole-sitters’ have to be placed so far away from the Earth. If they get any closer than 250 Earth radii, they become unstable during the summer. [2]

[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US5183225A/en

[2] https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2010/07/29/statites-hovering...

That falls under a number of strategies for Solar Radiation Management [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation_management], which, as you say, doesn't address the core CO2 concentration problem, but it might buy us time.

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.

...Mr. Burns?

Wouldn't sun shades blocking any amount of sunlight have a negative effect on agriculture and endanger the food supply?

What impact would sun-shades have on agriculture?

I think Nathan Myhrvold [1] proposed something like this. There's a summary of it on one of the Freakonomics podcasts, but the summary is basically that it acts like an erupting volcano to cool the earth slightly.

"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/

"My company" referring to Intellectual Ventures, which has such an illustrious reputation with patents?

I think geo-engineering will open Pandora's box. On one hand, we need to invest in geo-engineering as a last resort, on the other hand, if people see this as the last resort the problem of CO2 will seem less urgent. Very dangerous stuff.

People already don’t care about carbon emissions. Those on the right think it’s a hoax or humans aren’t causing climate change, those on the left largely pay lip service, but still do very little.

I was just talking with my uncle a few days ago who has sailed around the Caribbean. He said there are meters-thick piles of what he thought was algae piling up on beaches. From a search:

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!

"It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions to this problem - including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to work".

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.

That is interesting. Perhaps more applicable to large industrial CO2 emitters like fossil fuel power plants.

There's an even worse third constraint:

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.

The short answer is that while that reaction works in a beaker, it is too slow, inefficient and fragile. Plus there's also the thermodynamic perpetual motion machine in using the energy from a combustion reaction to reverse that combustion reaction.

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.

> The question then becomes, whether we can create new genetic chemistries that are not based on DNA, but some new genetic polymer?

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.

Charm Industrial [1] was recently mentioned on HN, with a novel approach to BECCS using grass to produce carbon-negative hydrogen. Grasses are the highest-yielding biomass per acre and thus the cheapest CO2 removal option. It also helps if you can make a profitable product from that biomass, like Charm is doing with hydrogen.

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...

Good. More and more, reducing GHG gas emissions politically or through any sort of international agreement looks like a pipe dream.

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.

The issue with the Kyoto Protocols (and most multilateral agreements) is that there is no recourse from the international community for leaving the agreement. The only enforcement is for members, and there is no penalty against not being a member or real economic benefits for being a member.

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.

Would you also suggest to give up all kinds of nuclear weapons non-proliferation agreements because the NPT isn't 100% successful?

Whatever the solution is to global warming and the looming ecological crisis, I don't believe it lies in more technology.

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.

I think we cannot stop now. Current CO2 levels plus the momentum in world economy is such that we need to actively digg out in order to survive. Becoming progress averse now would be disastrous since even with the highest affordable tech we live far from sustainable.

Redefine progress then.

Taking care of your environment is not being progress averse, especially if your survival depends on the health of your ecosystem.

If world will end next week, we should just stop global growth, stop all the unnecessary human events, stop all the unnecessary producing, go home with families, only do the most necessary things. For earth, for human beings, for ourself, it will be enough and worth.

That's a fundamental debate that is worth having!

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.

Wow, this is really skewed towards the 1%, even if you meant it the other way.

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.

> 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.

I see the old "[technological] man's burden" is as magnanimous as ever. ;)

Why is the rest of the world desperately poor? It's absurd to imagine that it's because the free enterprise West wants to help that 90%, but is held back by... anti-growth activists. Nothing could be further from the truth. In reality colonialism (aka stealing from that 90%) never ended, it just got better PR and privatization.

> Redistribution only comes through bloodshed.

Agreed, and most of the wealth redistribution in the world today is upward (as 'the rich getting richer' implies). Since we're having the consequent bloodshed anyway, why not redistribute wealth in the other direction to maximize hedonic good?

Warren Buffett put it best: "There's class warfare all right, but it's my class — the rich class — that's making war, and we're winning."

> At least with technology you can build it through hard work, effort, and ingenuity.

...implying[1] technology doesn't cause bloodshed. Talk about a skewed perspective!

Just to arbitrarily pick a (hardly unique) example, what do Amazonian tribespeople think of technology? What have their experiences been? https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/12/uncontacted-trib...

Why was that gold suddenly economical to prospect/mine? Technology.

How were these people massacred so efficiently? Technology.

Why was there such an enormous power imbalance between these two populations? Technology.

"Technology" may look fine-and-dandy to the person behind the keyboard (especially for those who personify it by unconsciously imagining that 'technology' pays their salary), but never forget that all our technological artifacts were ripped out of the ground at some point, typically after using third-world government corruption to steal the land from its former inhabitants. We're merely rich enough that we can push that devastation "far, far away."

[1] or perhaps I'm misinterpreting, and you're just saying that technology brings hard work in addition to bloodshed?

My core argument is that using technology to help curb CO2 emissions is a way to solve the problem that is something we can do, and that ideological solutions - let's rework our society or kill half the population - aren't as easy. To say that we should turn from a growth-based economy to a sustainable economy is much more difficult to create a plan of action for than to create a technological solution.

Ideological solutions have their own stains on history as well, compared to technical solutions - Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all have something to say about that.

There's no need to attack technical solutions as an epidemic on society. If you argued that society is an epidemic on society, that's a different story, but I would counter and say that there exist bad and good rich people, as well as bad and good technological outcomes, and bad and good ideological outcomes. To cherry pick the bad aspects is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

...assuming there is a technological solution.

My core argument is that "endless growth = good" is an ideological problem, and it requires an ideological solution. Without changing the goal of the system, any tech solution will inevitable be used simply to enable more growth (see: Jevon's Paradox).

Here's part of a talk by seminal systems theorist Donella Meadows, who explains it better than I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc&t=13m55s

>There's no need to attack technical solutions as an epidemic on society.

We do need to be realistic about technology, including its downsides. I'm countering the one-sided perspective of technology as bloodless hard work & ingenuity. Perhaps true for the colonizer, but not the colonized.

So in the end, we need both.

We need technological solutions to undo the damage we've done to the climate. Trees won't sequeseter CO₂ fast enough by themselves. We need ideological solutions, so that people don't cancel the gains of technological solutions with increased growth and waste. And then we need political/economic solutions like carbon tax to redirect money towards technological solutions, and minds towards ideological and lifestyle ones.

Really, we shouldn't be fighting over which kind of solution we need, because neither is sufficient in isolation. We need them all. Let's focus instead on fighting opposition to any and all effective solutions for saving people.

Thank you, well said.

For anyone who is interested in the Energy Industry in general, including Carbon Capture (CCS), I would recommend "The Energy Gang" podcast as well as "The Interchange".

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.

I love those podcasts. You should all listen to them.

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.

Right, and thank you for calling out that CCS is only going to be part of the solution.

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-...

Agreed. We still need a massive holy shit moment (millions displaced?) vs. bigger CA fires or more heatwaves (which Europe mostly enjoyed this summer) or a few strong hurricanes.

Thanks for the recommendation.

But pls don't use the word "space"

I'm glad someone mentioned it above, because my favorite solution is still "advanced weathering" of rocks: http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli...

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.

Don't you think that there's perhaps something wrong with a perfect solution presented with no drawbacks? Something like that screams, "incomplete knowledge of implementation or externalities"

I just think it's the best out of all the options. Since it's a natural process I think it has less chance of unintended consequences compared to something like putting aerosols in the sky to block sunlight. Just like Elon Musk's plan to put humans on Mars there's going to be tons of problems, but it makes sense to start working on it now so we can come up with solutions.

It doesn't look like that math accounts for the energy/cost of crushing all of the olivine to the specified granularity? It might be 250 billion to get the raw material, but its going to cost a lot more to process and distribute it all...

The only viable carbon removal technology yet identified is leaving it in the ground.

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 only viable carbon removal technology yet identified is leaving it in the ground.

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.

That is far from discussing.

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?

This. 100 companies are responsible for 70% of the worlds emissions. Yes, carbon capture tech is needed, but you're missing the point if you think its the _only_ thing thats needed.

The ocean phytoplankton technology sounds like it has the potential to screw the planet up worse than the climate change issues it's trying to solve.

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.

Yes, thank you for pointing this out. Biological systems are huge

Yes, thank you for pointing this out. Biological systems are huge & interconnected, and changing one component will invariably affect the others — probably in unforeseen ways.

You're correct in that assumption. Plankton blooms are already damaging the climate in many ways.

I'm quite impressed by this presentation. There is a tremendous amount of content here to excite some different audiences about opportunities for planet scale changes.

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.

I'm encouraged by the full-scope approach this report takes, though I get very worried about technological fundamentalism, the idea that we might possibly engineer our way out of the worst effects of climate change. Don't get me wrong, we might, but do we really want the reality it gives us on the other side?

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.

Iron fertilization!

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"

It is also great tool to turn oceans into oxygen-free death zones.

I wrote a series on carbon capture technologies: https://qz.com/re/the-race-to-zero-emissions/

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.

Yes according to the latest IPCC report ( http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/ ) in the 1.5 degree scenario we need to deploy bio-energy combined with carbon capture storage on large scale. Carbon removal tech will become indispensable and is definitely part of "Plan A".

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.

This is awesome! Some people don't like having a Plan B along these lines because they think it distracts with the standard approach of emission reduction. In reality, for something this important (i.e. Keter level destruction event) we should pursue all threads simultaneously.

"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.

It's been interesting to watch my own thinking evolve:

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"

>standard approach of emission reduction

With how well that's been going, I'm wondering why they even need a plan b...

> Keter level

For the curious: http://www.scp-wiki.net/object-classes

What Would Dr Bright Do?

Desert flooding even happened before by mistake in the US:

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.

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

Curious, how does desert flooding fit into this? It's basically energy creation using hydro or am I missing the point here?

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.

I really think CO2 should be scrubbed from the air, however how would you store them then? Ideally something like solid carbon - a black solid which you could then bury. Its a lot like using energy to make coal out of air and putting it back in the mine.

But surely it makes sense to stop digging up coal in the first place.

An elephant in the room not being discussed here are the propaganda networks that are persuading voters and preventing any kind of government action on climate. Disrupting these propaganda businesses is another necessary angle of attack for preventing climate change catastrophe.

Unfortunately there's no profit motive for this.

Of course there is, for companies with technology to reduce or reverse the carbon in our atmosphere there's a giant profit potential.

This of course balanced by the interests of those protecting their current cash flows in established carbon releasing industries.

There's no innate profit potential for this technology. If the governments decide to pay lots and lots and lots of money to sequester carbon, then there's a giant profit potential for anyone who can do it. But note the "if" - as of now, there's no indication that they're going to do so; and if/when it comes to such an emergency that they will, they might as well nationalize (or 'globalize') that tech and implement the solutions at-cost without any meaningful profit for the owners of these technologies; if push comes to shove enough so that the major powers of the world will be willing to invest a nontrivial share of their GDP in fighting climate change, honoring international intelectual property agreements will be the least of their concerns.

> There's no innate profit potential for this technology.

I don't know if that's true or not in the long term - not even first order. Wind turbines weren't innately profitable until at one point they became a low cost leader in power generation by some measures. Humanity may find a fairly low-power input catalyst that give us cheaper fuels than digging it up from miles underground, shipping it thousands more miles, refining it and shipping it hundreds of more miles. Right now, in this instant of technology, I'd agree on first order profitability.

Second order systemically it's almost certainly a profit vs needing to rebuild so much civil infrastructure for hurricane resistance, new and expanding flood plains, fire resistance, farm droughts, etc.. or incurring all sorts of other health costs for fossil fuels infrastructure. The cost of acting to curb climate change is still cheaper than letting it all go chaotic.

Where's the profit in global eco-suicide?

I recommend the book "Collision Course" by Kerryn Higgs for anyone interested in reading the history of this kind of propaganda. It won't immediately provide a path forward, but it will help explain how we've arrived at where we are today in terms of inaction regarding global warming.

> 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.

https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/collision-course

Do you have a reference for a single climate model prediction that's come true? In most other areas dealing with science, if the theory does not predict the reality, then the validity of the theory is questioned.

The public believes in and supports climate change prevention. The problem is not so much that propaganda convinces public opinion that the people in power do not have an incentive to make any changes.

On the Electro-Geo-Chemistry page, there is an error here:

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?

Regarding the wonderfully sci-fi idea of flooding deserts, I raise you the seawater greenhouse company: https://seawatergreenhouse.com/ - which have been at this game for a couple of years now.

I've always been thinking - someone should give these guys money, and lots of it.

I wonder why we can’t just extract CO2 and H2O from the atmosphere and recombine them back into hydrocarbons. Not only would this give us a closed-loop supply of hydrocarbons (meaning you could have things like airplanes) but you could just sequester the carbon by storing the hydrocarbons. The only problem is that it takes a lot of energy (more energy than we got from burning those hydrocarbons in the first place) but it would be great to solve the energy storage and carbon sequestration problems at once.

I'm curious about pickled compost of fast-growing grass to avoid CO2 release by keeping it anarobic so it produces lactic acid instead during fermentation.

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.

Here’s my crazy idea: nuclear powered high pressure differential centrifugation.

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.

What do you do with the CO2 once you've isolated it?

Put it through a process to solidify it. You may be able to extract other useful gasses from the air to help with this. If the end result were stable, either put it in landfill or use it as fuel, so it becomes an energy reservoir. Then it’s closed loop, the energy is generated by nuclear and expressed via the expenditure of the manufactured fuel and subsequent recapture.

Feed it into a massive underground greenhouse?

Huh ... this is kind of a fun idea. Kicking this around a bit, it's similar to how you separate U235 from U238 for enriching Uranium. I wonder if you could back into the energy requirements from that process (assuming it isn't classified).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zippe-type_centrifuge

Liquids have differential densities which allows them to spread into layers. If you have "compressed air" that separates into bands, you're just talking about compressing the air into a liquid phase so it can then be extracted as above. The triple point of carbon dioxide is -57 C and 5.1 atm, so in other words you'd have to get colder and higher pressure than that to even produce the liquid. Then you'd have to spin it down while it's pressurized and cooled.

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.

I’m not sure that compressing to a liquid would be necessary. https://energyeducation.ca/encyclopedia/Gas_centrifuge , which is describing the uranium enrichment process mentioned by Ichengify, states that the separation occurs while the uranium is still a gas, with the heavier fraction just being scooped out.

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.

I really like the idea.

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?

Thanks! Honestly I don’t know. However, since basically all the search results I’m getting are for uranium enrichment, I’m guessing gas centrifuges are not in common industrial use for any other purpose. That probably means they aren’t well optimised.

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.

I'd like to propose a different scale removal, for anyone that may have the means to do it: home and office CO2 scrubbers.

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...

C02 in the atmosphere is going to need to increase by 2x-4x before cognition becomes a problem. Meanwhile indoors co2 jumps to these levels within hours of poor ventalation.

I minuter the co2 in my office and vent when required.

We're passed 400 ppm globally, and urban areas are much higher. Indoor air is often 1000 ppm - how many air changes do you need to get that down to a reasonable amount if your intake is around 450? 500?

And do we know for sure that 500-1000 is fine for cognition?

Is anyone aware of measures of public acceptance of carbon removal vs carbon reduction (emit less)?

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."

I think all the carbon removal solutions assume some sort of carbon tax for them to be viable. Otherwise carbon removal is a process with some cost and zero benefit for the individual.

So to answer your question, the popularity of carbon removal will probably be about the same as the popularity of a carbon tax.

All Power Labs, a company that makes biomass gasifiers, has estimates for the amount of carbon their technology can sequester (http://www.allpowerlabs.com/carbon). This appears to be the most viable process forward, as not only can one create a ton of electricity, hot water and air, but also biochar which sequesters carbon in the soil in a beneficial way for an estimated 10k years. (full disclosure, I'm an ex employee).

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.

Isn't the challenge that biomass gasification systems require fairly pure feedstock (ie cubes of hardwood)? Has anyone succeeded in developing a feedstock-agnostic gasification system?

Yes I think this is one of the bigger problems of these systems. So for example, let's say you've created a device that only accepts rice husk and your device pays itself off in 10 years. Now suddenly your neighboring country is subsidizing the gasification of rice husk. This means that the prices of rice husk increase and you're expected ROI is suddenly changed. This makes investing in these types of devices difficult and unattractive.

There are more agnostic systems, like fluidized bed gasifiers, but they generally create tar rich gas, which can gum up an internal combustion engine. That's why external combustion engines (Stirling or Steam) are so desirable as the pistons and internal moving parts don't come in contact with the flame front.

That was an amazing read. The fun thing, is that I started the draft of a quite similar post a couple of weeks ago. That's a great example of definite optimism. The fact that the post mentions but doesn't expand on outer-space solutions it's a bummer.

Artificial photosynthesis.

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's reading this. I'm really passionate about this crossing of tech and environmental issues & awareness. I have a tiny carbon footprint myself, I am super conscious about everything: no car/no emissions/ tiny electricity and water bills compared to everyone else in the city/food&waste minimization etc

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!

Goddamit no

>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?

For an overview of 80+ startups working in carbon removal, check out AirMiners: http://www.airminers.org/explore

I'd second this. Great list. There's also this map with lots of carbon capture projects: https://www.thirdway.org/graphic/carbon-capture-projects-map

Energy is needed to separate CO2 into carbon and oxygen. At the individual molecular scale, this can't be much. How many can I separate at once with my hands?

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...

Fun idea - very back of the envelope math is if you could convert energy into strictly breaking CO2 bonds, the amount of energy it takes is 805 kJ/mol (from Google). WolframAlpha says this is roughly the caloric content of a biscuit, or 30 min of sports [1]. This would then separate 22.4 L or one mole of pure CO2.

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...

A biscuit! Breakfast 4 carbon credits...

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...

What if we would make such an advanced filter, and then make it mandatory in cars. That way cars would 'clean' the air. You'd need to find a process that scales though, so that the 'dirty' filters are processed in a way to get out the carbon and use it somewhere.

Make sugar with the pure carbon, a la photosynthesis?

Use electrolysis to split water, get the Hydrogen and Oxygen, insert Carbon, excrete glucose...

Or make direct fuels out of it :P /s (that would not work, otherwise you've created a perpetuum mobile). Would be interesting if you could use your car's surface as a kind of anode.

I feel like this would make a really interesting sim video game. Start with a certain amount of capital, research and build, and try to save the world from carbon :)

What about changing our diets?

> 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?

[1] http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/

Or to lower emissions instead of building stuff that causes emissions? There are soo many possibilities to do it.

It seems global warming politic's main focus is to implement a global carbon tax in one form or another. Proceeds from the tax are administered by a supra-national government. That's how the Paris accord worked and very credible global warming authorities said was the only solution to global warming. Does this company have a business model of being the recipients of the global carbon tax?

> that's how the Paris accord worked

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.

Nationally defined contribution is a nice way of saying global carbon tax [1]. I mean sure the UN doesn't have a way to enforce the tax, but it's still a tax. Presumably this tax would wind up somewhere and someone, not the person who contributed it would spend it. This money spent would go to someone based on somebody's decision. Perhaps this company would be the recipient? There is so much pussyfooting around the whole issue of what the paris agreement was about due to politics. It's freaking underwear gnomes from South Park levels of hiding what's actually going on.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#Nationally_det...

For a great in depth but still understandable look at the race to zero emissions, including carbon capture technologies, I highly recommend this series from Quartz: https://qz.com/on/race-to-zero-emissions/

Some of my notes on why carbon sequestration is a no-go for civilization to achieve lithospheric homeostasis.....:

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.

I don't think anyone in their right minds believes that fighting CC is going to be a profitable venture at all. The point is it will take co-operation and investment by governments worldwide.

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.

I recommend reading Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think, by the late Hans Rosling and his kids. In particular, Chapter Five, "The Size Instinct" can help you reframe the way you look at this fear. When looking at CO2 emissions for China and India, you have to look at their emissions on a per-capita basis.

People in cities in China routinely wear face masks because of the pollution there -- they're very acutely aware of the problem.

It would sadden me if "oh but China won't stop polluting" strawman arguments stop us from putting an effort into trying to find a solution.

> China/India in particular

What data are you basing that on? We and our Arab client states are the biggest polluters by far, on a per capita basis.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di... CO2 emissions by country name (only fossil fuels and cement manufacture, metric tons per capita

China 7.6 India 1.6 United States 16.4 Qatar 40.5 Saudi Arabia 19.2

Because most CO2 emissions are from industry, not humans, per capita statistics mean very little (especially since these industries ship their products globally). Per capita statistics are championed by industry because they shift blame to citizens and paint the false picture that citizens are entirely responsible for the nation's output.

This means it is more effective to use a metric like CO2 emitted per $1000 GDP because it reflects how polluting industry is in each country. See link attached and sort. It is also important to remember China and India (especially) are far from industrializing, and Western nations' emissions are dropping (they peaked 10-15 yrs ago).

In reality, some combination of CO2/capita and CO2/$1000GDP is the most effective for determining how polluting a country is.

Environmental policy is dictated at a national level. And this is why I put pressure on the Chinese state (again, NOT the people). A bigger portion of their emissions are caused by industry than in most countries). The Chinese state and only the Chinese state has the ability to reduce industrial emissions in their country.

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

> The reality is that something like this will require spinning up an entire Trillion dollar market.

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.

Hi, there's a lot of interest comments in this thread, we have found, in our own experience, is that now we have a much create of push at all levels than we used to from individuals to governments even though the latest is still being to slow. We believe that the future looks much better in brighten, that we are still on time to move from phase 2 back to (the improbable) phase 0 and we are working to make this happen and will continue until the job is done. :D

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/

I appreciate the focus here and applaud all progress and work related to any kind of carbon capture/sequestration technologies. These approaches are necessary and important.

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.

Each proposed idea has a section related to energy requirements.

I do understand the direction of travel here (and notwithstanding the idea that most geo-engineering and other "solutions" seem to carry James Bond Villan levels of unintended consequences) what I feel is missing is tackling the elephant in the room.

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.

Just because you like them, should that trump significant threats to the environment or or civilisation?

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.

The most impactful technology would be some sort of financial instrument to fund known and future carbon reduction techniques which could be implemented independently (or with the help) of governments.

Besides CO2, Caron removal should also target other greenhouse gas with much higher potency like Methane/CH4 [1], which is the central point of why livestock is a big cause of global warming in Gate's Note about Climate Change Quiz.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane

[2]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Climate-change-quiz

Any plan to massively capture CO2 should take into account that removing too much CO2 from the atmosphere would cause a mass extinction of land-based plant life if CO2 levels fall below 150 ppm.

Anyone thinking about or considering working on these technologies owes it to themselves to read Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet. Whatever you may think of the author's various statements on Peak Oil etc., the book is a worthwhile meditation on two very different approaches to our current crises.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-...

Thanks for the recommendation. Could you explain a bit more in detail why you recommend reading it? I've read a lot of online resources (IPCC, wikipedia, different lectures on advanced weathering, pyrolysis/biochar etc) and have been looking to read a book related to the carbon dioxide problem.

It's not about CO2. It explains where two major environmentalism schools of thought came from and how they approach the same problems differently.

Would like to see YC address the economic incentive problem with carbon sequestering. How do you incentivize companies and individuals to capture C02? What lessons from the failed cap and trade systems can be adapted to a new "sequester and trade system"?

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.

According to the World Bank[0], the US produces 75% more CO² per $1000 of economic output than the EU.

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%.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KD.GD

I'm worried that it's too late for carbon removal to prevent some of the worst effects (since no large scale carbon removal plan can be implemented overnight) and we need to look into more short-term ways of reducing warming such as albedo modification.

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.

I think the IPCC does have some scenerio's where there is an overshoot but that can be 'recovered' using carbon removal tech. You can find some graphs on these projections here: https://chemconnections.org/Global%20Warming/After%20Paris-S... (second page)

According to 1st Geochange report (2010), anthropogenic factors don't play significant role in climate change

http://geochange-report.org/index.php?option=com_content&vie...

The post mentions the significant logistical challenges associated with moving large quantities of biomass and biochar. What about a mobile biochar production system? ie a device that could be delivered to a farm and towed through the field to convert waste biomass in-situ into biochar and till it directly into soil?

Tilling the soil actually releases quite a bit of CO2, some of the best practices are "no till" methods. But to your point, biochar retorts can and should be used at the source of the biomass, instead of burning fossil fuels to transport the biomass to a dedicated facility.

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.

How can you get biochar into the soil without tilling?

Layering biochar mixed with compost on top of existing soil, and/or putting other biomass on top of that (Lasagne gardening, or no-till farming). The bugs and worms in the soil will move it around.

You can also drop it in when you plant (digging or double digging).

Getting really good at carbon capture (specifically direct air capture) could also have the side benefit of proving technologies that drive in-situ propellant production within the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars.

Similarly, this could drive a net carbon-neutral source of natural gas on Earth.

Cheap energy is the enabler for several of the solutions proposed among the comments.

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.

I am a structural engineer of moderate capability. I have developed an engineering platform as a startup. If anyone is serous about doing one of these projects, I would love to speak with you about helping and about using my platform to design anything you need.

I work at a startup that is using AI to reduce emissions in industrial and data center contexts. I like the big sky approach of this post but so much savings / reduction is an execution question.

We are hiring so DM me if you would like to learn more!

Anyone else find it weird when people talk about "carbon removal" instead of "CO2 removal?" Maybe it's just me but "carbon removal" evokes "eradication of life" in a sci-fi way

The significant atmospheric carbon is in the form of CO₂ and CH₄, which are both greenhouse gases. If we "just" removed the carbon, we'd be left with O₂ and H₂, which are mostly harmless.

For anyone who still clings to the weird, blinkered, narcissistic technofix superstition: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity...

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.

For flooding of the deserts, id like to determine the size and power requirements for a renewably powered valve-pumping section that will work in series to pump water along the required route.

I'm very happy to see this new interest in saving our planet among the tech elites (this includes the recent post from Bill Gates). Maybe we are not all too stupid to save our planet...

We need a video game where all global planetary effects are simulated. Like civilization or alpha centauri but with plot twist regarding global warming. Our children will finally get it.

Do carbon offset projects like Terrapass have any merit? I know it's not as good as selling my car and decking my life to planting trees, but is there any benefit at all?

I think discard/reduce most of the non life-essential technology is more important than inventing new technologies, than opening countless startups.

Like any sane person, I totally accept the global warming is real and most likely mostly man made. But rather than fighting that change which is already underway, can we not adapt to the higher temperatures and entropy? I appreciate that there's lots of side effects that we see as disastrous, but generally warmer = better for life in many parts of the earth. Most likely the positive outcomes of global warming do not outweight the negatives, but it looks like relatively very little attention is paid to what is most natural course of action - adaptation.

We will have to adapt, even if we mobilize to remake the entire energy economy. It is too late to prevent a lot of warming from occurring.

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.

We can't adapt to an ecological collapse. It's not the few degrees of extra warmth we worry about, it's how major extinction events will threaten nearly everything.

I think one of the bigger problems of global warming will be mass migrations and less arable land and probably a ton of other big problems. How would you deal with those problems? Do you have any ideas on that (serious question)? And what do you think the biggest problems would be and how would we adapt to those?

The problem with +2° is, that we will be at +5° soon after. Phase III is an irreversible chain reaction.

Desert flooding is out - long time back an article on solar energy in the desert pointed out that the desert isn’t dead.

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 )

Note that phytoplankton accounts for 50% of photosynthesis on the planet, already capturing 50 GtC/year.

Finally! I want to invest in YC batches just for this. Didn’t care to invest before.

Are there any crowd funding efforts out there for carbon removal?

I'm surprised by the hype around for-profit direct-air capture (DAC) companies because, unlike afforestation or biochar, which produce useful products, there is a very small market for CO2. Somewhat ironically, the biggest market for CO2 is for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which is exactly what it sounds like: it allows for more oil to be extracted from oil wells.

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...

I've been watching waay too many youtube videos about reforestation, agriculture and land management recently and I think I've learned a little from it (links at the end).

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

I came across those videos before and noticed the main speaker has been giving talks for many years claiming he has transformed the fertility and productivity of multiple cattle farms in the course of research, by simply increasing cattle density and intensity. Alas if there were truth to the idea, Allan Savory would not need to promote it - he could own or have franchised thousands of farms by now.

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...

https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/silvopasture

The doubts about the technique seems warranted. On the other hand there is a simple reason why it might be true : if large herds destroyed the herbs on which these herds depend on, they would die off. So from an evolutionary point of view, it makes a lot of sense for large herds to fertilize soil. They NEED grass to thrive.

There are few simple rules to count on. The stability of grasslands depends on circumstances, usually including a range of herbivores to prevent forestation. Mega-fauna, like mammoths used to contribute to grove and prairie creation by eating trees, before humans dominated.

I wrote this to dereke in another comment, I think it is relevant to understanding the present situation: > Two hundred years ago about 60% of the earth surface was covered in mature and native forest. The figure is less than 30% today. Most of the worlds fertile crops are grown on deforested land, on the soil which native forests developed through ecological diversity and lack of erosion. Most of the grasslands which are used for grazing, don't have the soil quality to support demanding crops.

https://www.britannica.com/science/deforestation

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I absolutely agree with you regarding regenerative agriculture and moving towards a plant based diet. We have to do that so we can stop destroying the soil and can actually produce food with adequate nutrition.

With regards to intensive grazing it appears that some farms do do it and there have been some studies that suggest it does work. For instance this study (of which I've only read the abstract) seems to support the technique - http://www.publish.csiro.au/sr/SR07220

There are quite a few more studies and supporting material on this site http://www.regenerateland.com I won't pretend to have read them all but from the few abstracts that I have read it seems to be based in science.

As a vegan I don't want to see more animals being killed and eaten, however if farmers are going to keep farming then they should do it this way (and using silvopasture we need multiple approaches!). However if ensuring the survival of the planet involves using animals to do some work then I'm definitely open to it.

Something which may be of additional interest to you are Forest Gardens which seem to be pretty good at optimising a whole system https://www.agroforestry.co.uk/about-agroforestry/forest-gar.... The book "Creating a Forest Garden" by Martin Crawford is definitely worth checking out if only for the wealth of information regarding types of plants and their use.

At the rate we're setting up for a future where the entire ocean blooms, dies, and we're left with nothing.

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.

To stay below 2 degrees of warming via CO2 curtailment alone, serious curtailment would have had to start a generation ago. I wish that we had acted with urgency then, but we didn't. Now we need curtailment and active interventions.

Agreed. Many environmentalists like to argue that curtailment is the “proper” way to handle global warming. If the situation is half as dire as they are claiming it is, then that is simply not good enough.

The problem is the existence of these techniques will be used to justify inaction elsewhere. They also do nothing to tackle acidification.

And it’s not as if the world has been standing still over the last decades, huge progress has been made and many technologies are at the borderline of being economical or cheaper than the alternatives, and are continually falling in price. Once we push the boulder over the crest of the hill it will roll down unaided. The economy can change much quicker than we think.

Some of the active countermeasures contemplated, like ocean fertilization and accelerated olivine weathering, also tackle acidification if they work at scale. Solar radiation management does nothing to fix acidification though it can possibly interrupt feedback loops that would make acidification even worse.

I agree that many technologies for replacing fossil usage have now achieved or are close to economic superiority, and that change can come very rapidly with economic superiority. But I also think that reaching this point has taken too long and now we will need active measures as well as emissions cuts.

The problem is that while solar energy may have already achieved superiority over the net cost of finding, drilling-off and extracting hydrocarbons, solar energy is not going achieve superiority over hydrocarbons people already have. The cost of already found oil is just the cost of pumping it out of the ground and with easy fields, no energy source is going to beat that (the cheapest Saudi cost less $10/barrel to pump and that's light, easy to refine oil).

So, due to these different marginal costs, there's no way even completely practical, economical solar can stop fossil fuel usage quickly without active regulator intervention.

Yes, it's harder to out-compete fossil projects that have already been built, already paid off their capital costs, and incur just operational costs going forward. Some of those fossil projects (like Saudi oil fields that cost only $10/barrel) are not going to be economically forced into early retirement by any foreseeable lower-emissions energy source.

Note that there is also quite a bit of already-built fossil capacity that can be retired early by economic pressures. Not every big fossil project has operational costs as low as Saudi oil.

For example, the Navajo Generating Station is the largest American coal plant west of the Mississippi River. It was built in the 1970s. It has a stable, low cost for coal since it is supplied by the nearby dedicated Kayenta Mine. Just a few years ago it was planned to run until 2044. But the falling costs of gas and renewables have made it economically uncompetitive. It's now going to close at the end of 2019, 25 years early:

https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/energy/2017/0...

I agree on the broader point that fossil fuel emissions won't be curbed quickly without active regulator intervention. Since that intervention may arrive late-or-never in different nations, it's one of the reasons that I believe active carbon dioxide removal measures will be necessary in addition to emissions reduction efforts.

Since that intervention may arrive late-or-never in different nations, it's one of the reasons that I believe active carbon dioxide removal measures will be necessary in addition to emissions reduction efforts.

Both regulating carbon emissions and active carbon dioxide removal measures will, in the end, come down to some state or world body acting in a coordinated way to push money at this problem. It seems like people are imagining active removal would be easier in this fashion than basic regulation. Why?

If most countries decide to use basic regulation but, say, Russia, does not, then the other countries could use active removal to offset the Russian emissions. Not likely a world body is forcing Russia to do anything (although if Europe stopped using their gas, they would have a lot less power).

Find a way to build georedundant electricity links from stable solar fields in e.g. the Sahara or so, up to Europe, with a reliable capacity of ~ 1 TW or maybe even closer to 5 TW, along the feeding solar arrays, and we can use existing ways to store energy for nightly use to wean Europe of natural gas in about a decade.

The largest one build seems to be 10 GW between Xinjiang and Anhui. It's still quite a bit from the scale we'd need to wean of natural gas however.

My hope is that newly-built or soon-to-be-built O&G production sites will be converted to have CO2 capture and just export electricity or hydrogen. We have all the tech, it's just that someone needs to force O&G operators to do it.

Operators, by the way, love this concept. It means they can continue production basically forever, if they want. But there's a big economic disadvantage in being the first mover, which is why we need government regulations forcing it.

Here's the thing. Environmentalists have been warning about climate change for generations now. Calling for replacements for fossil fuel and for drastic cuts in emmissions and consumption. Basically nobody acted. And now the situation is becoming dire. Suddenly curtailmennt is off the table because it's no longer enough? It's never even been tried or seriously considered. Pretty much no developed country is on track for reducing CO2 emmissions by a large enough fraction. And yet, somehow, we're now expecting those self same countries to become proficient at geo engineering on a scale massive enough to revert climate change? It's a farce.

OK, so here's the thing from a politician's point of view:

If you do something fairly extreme for curtailment, like a tax on fuel that motorists really notice, the other party will get voted in and they'll undo it. Now you've got kicked out of office, with no environmental benefit to show for it.

And if you go further with something like a ban on pet dogs or ban on meat-eating? Same thing but faster and with more certainty.

Indeed,

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...

Coal consumption has already peaked in the USA, France, UK, Canada, (probably) China, and a number of other countries. Emissions intensity and absolute emissions from the electricity sector has already peaked in multiple countries. The cost of electrifying automobiles and generating low-emissions renewable electricity is much lower than a generation ago.

On the other hand, global fossil fuel use has not peaked yet. Global population has not peaked yet. Many countries have worse cost-and-schedule problems with attempted deployments of nuclear reactors than they did 40 years ago. We are barely reaching "maybe starting to flatten out emissions" -- actually trending down toward zero is just a mirage in the distance at present. The opportunity to stabilize the climate just by cutting emissions is now in the past.

I feel like humanity is moving toward making the changes it needs, and has a better toolset for those changes than before, but is changing much slower and later than it should have. We're out of completely safe options and have to try to navigate between various risky options. I can understand the perspective of people who feel like we're acting too late and there is no chance of industrial civilization surviving into the 22nd century, even though I don't share that perspective.

On the other hand, global fossil fuel use has not peaked yet. Global population has not peaked yet.

Indeed, but if solar power is now the preferred energy source, solar power could be being used for all new energy need as well as help us cut back on fossil fuel's original usage.

But it's not. That's a world-killing problem.

What we're out of is laize faire options. Neither sequestering nor dramatic winding down of fossil fuel consumption is going to happen without a world level authority dictating things. Sadly, that seems unlikely.

Solar power is not the preferred energy source before we figured out storage. Just because the marginal cost of adding a watt of solar is currently lower than adding a watt of coal that doesn't mean that we can switch off coal plants and replace them with solar.

> Sadly, that seems unlikely.

Although it seems unlikely today, a military coalition to enforce stricter emissions standards may be something that comes together in the future.

Unfortunately the only parties interested in winding down fossil fuel use are Europe and China. If Europe is further disrupted by the infusion of right-wing politics, that might leave China going it alone.

At some point this will tip from "wouldn't it be nice" to "this is a battle for survival". A tactical strike on coal plants or other sources of egregious carbon emission seems ridiculous today, but it might be no different than striking a nuclear weapons lab is, something that's got the potential to cause immense harm that needs to be eliminated.

That's not a bright future at all.

When you say that coal consumption has already peaked in the USA, how do you know that? What is to say that next year we won't be using more coal per day than we are now?

Coal consumption for power in 2017 was 36% lower than in 2008:

https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=36812

Coal consumption in 2018 is on track for a 4% decline below 2017:

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php

That same short-term outlook predicts a further 5% drop in 2019 over 2018.

It is at least physically possible that the US could consume more coal in 2019 than in 2018, though only a sucker would take that bet. But it's not even in the realm of possibility for the US to consume an all-time-high amount of coal in 2019, greater than 2008. Too many coal plants have already been shut down and scrapped since 2008. It takes years to build a new plant. There would be years of advance warning if the US were going to reach a new peak of coal consumption, because there would have to be a large wave of new coal plant construction first.

Renewable energy saw a ~30% growth from 2008 to 2017, but in percentage points of the total energy consumption, that's only a 5%-point increase. The remaining 30%-point reduction in coal consumption was covered primarily by increased natural gas usage.

We're out of completely safe options and have to try to navigate between various risky options.

Another way to put this - we're not out of safe options if we're not doing the safe options. We may need to do risky options once we are fully engaged in doing the safe option but today, now, we have not yet acquired the ability to even do the safe options consistently.

Sure, maybe the risky options will be necessary but if efforts to do the safe get pissed away with corrupt deceptions, how are we expecting efforts to do the risky efforts won't suffer the safe fate?

That some amount of CO2 production is being reduced almost at random isn't much of an argument that human society has the ability to choose a path and follow it effectively. How many fake versions of sequestering do you think scammers will come up with if the money ever appears?

A regulatory body capable of doing CO2 reduction might have the competence to then regulate sequestering. Random activity by supposedly concerned citizens or something just invites abuse.

If we assume that global emissions will continue to grow at the current rate, or increase exponentially, the situation appears more dire than it really is. Renewable energy is getting cheaper every year, and fossil fuels are getting more expensive. Some sources of c02 fixation are more efficient when the c02 levels in the air are higher. Also as energy gets to be cheaper overall, the cost of sequestering goes down.

Think about it, a generation ago the ozone layer was the most we did. The rest was impossibly deep in humanity subconscious. And to add the club of rome report came out before most of us were even born...

I still can't believe that ozone depleting CFCs and putting toxic lead in gasoline were the the inventions of the same guy.

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

Given more time I'm sure he would have come up with other world destroying chemicals.

Oh yeah, THAT "most impacting" guy in human history..

One active intervention would be a permanent individual gasoline-rationing program. No sells, no trades, decreasing allotments year-by-year. Thus encouraging -planned- driving, -smaller- vehicles.

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.

Sure we could curtail CO2 emissions, but that means lowering people's quality of life which is a hard sell.

For first world countries? Sure. For developing countries, we are talking mass starvation and death.

I guess that could be considered "lowering people's quality of life" though.

The global rate of extreme poverty has dropped from 29% 20 years ago to less than 9% today. You need a solid argument for how these actions would reverse the incredible drop in poverty and start us in the other direction, not just the usual factually wrong conventional wisdom.

Extrme poverty is a razors edge from just poverty, and that growth has been driven by magic substances like plastic.

A classic example of economic growth innovation in price sensitive India is the single use detergent sachet- each of those represents an improvement in cleanliness and hygiene for people who couldn’t afford it before.

Now increase the cost of plastic, even marginally and that change reverberates down the product chain.

Everything from medicine packaging, to Saran Wrap to those single use sachets change in price.

However, the correct point is that if we don’t do anything, what will happen to that number? Is it truly conceivable that climate change will not send more people into poverty eventually?

Why do you think the plastic production has much to do with CO2 emissions? While it takes energy to produce the oil and transform it into plastic, if that energy is CO2 free, producing plastic won't put CO2 into the atmosphere. Unless there is some trick to plastic manufacturing that requires blasts CO2 into the air like steel production does that I am not aware of.

> A classic example of economic growth innovation in price sensitive India is the single use detergent sachet- each of those represents an improvement in cleanliness and hygiene for people who couldn’t afford it before.

Maybe I'm not western enough, but I can't understand that thing. How is a single-use detergent sachet an improvement over good ol' powder? Do you have any articles discussing it?

The thing is, it's not just "a razor's edge from just poverty". If you use Hans Rosling's four-part income definition, "just poverty" represents a 4x increase in income from "extreme poverty". For Americans who might make hundreds of dollars a day, the difference between a dollar a day and four dollars a day may not seem like much. But imagine instead what it would be like to change from $100k/year to $400k/year. That's the ratio, but the effects are even greater than that.

It's access to some rudimentary health care. It's maybe a bicycle for transportation. It's a gas stove so you no longer have to use firewood to cook (speaking of deforestation...). It's maybe getting a cash-paying job so you can quadruple your income again.

Well, we've had a massive increase in annual co2 emissions since 20 years ago. I would posit that the decrease in poverty is a direct result in our burning more energy for short term production.

It's not only that, but I think it's a major factor. I'm only extremely slow internet so I can't look up the table, but I think our annual rate of emissions are 30-50% higher than in 1998. Could be wrong there though.

Studies on happiness--as hard as that is to objectively study--show it is more closely related to social status than absolute and total consumption.

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.

You can cut emissions even more by eliminating the need for cars, but as that would put a huge dent in the automotive-central industrial complex that is the United State, nothing short of apocalyptic conditions are going to make that happen.

> Studies on happiness--as hard as that is to objectively study--show it is more closely related to social status than absolute and total consumption.

> 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.

The first statement doesn't imply the second. Low social status can make someone unhappy, but that doesn't imply that consuming more doesn't make them happy.

In fact, I'm not even sure how much "materialism" is to blame for global warming. I know plenty of people who care more about "experiences" than "material goods" -- and in turn massively contribute to global warming by flying a lot. Equally, I don't view someone as wanting to live in a reasonably sized home in suburbia as necessarily materialistic, even though living there can introduce huge CO2 emissions from driving a lot.

For talking about links between wealth and happiness, it matters greatly what absolute level of wealth you are talking about. Within first world countries, the link between between wealth and happiness is weak. But when comparing between countries that are rich versus on the brink of starvation, the correlation is one of the strongest known.

This may seem contradictory makes sense if you think of it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you are at the base level of meeting your physiological needs for food and shelter, wealth directly helps you meet those needs and makes them happier. If you can take care of that, the law and order that brings you safety is again correlated with being in a wealthier society. But beyond that, the correlation vanishes because wealth doesn't give you love, esteem or self-actualization.

I think that's correct afaik, and it reinforces what I was trying to say: most ghg emmissions come from the absolute wealthiest individuals on the planet who do not allocate these resources efficiently with respect to human welfare/pursuit of happiness.

A 4°C increase in temperature will lower people's quality of life a whole lot more than any minor inconvenience you'll have to endure in the short term.

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.

The government of the people, by the people, for the people.

We get what we vote for, for need to vote for backbones.

That's not exactly how it works, of course. The people did not lower their quality of life to support the cause, per se, they did it to vanquish Those People. An actual enemy to focus on. And a pretty short timeline. Now you'd ask people to declare war on their own quality of life to fight a consequence which is necessarily vague over a timeline that likely exceeds the remaining lifespan of half of everyone alive today.

Good luck.

In the meantime I sure would like to try some mitigation techniques.

This is true, but I fear the time horizons are too long for mass human psychology. WWII was a short term emergency. That seems to be what springs people to action.

Incentives are another way. I still think a global carbon tax agreement would be a good idea: companies work together to implement carbon taxes and cut income taxes or a local equivalent. That helps eliminat the problem of production offshoring to cheaper carbon areas, and gived incentives to alternatives.

Actually making carbon economically unviable with our psychology works, obviously. I really, really hope we can figure out something else cheaper.

Finally, if we had a carbon sequestering method with no major side effects and clear costs, it would be psychologically easier to charge fossil burning industries and activities the cost of the CO2 emitted. Eg a fee of $30 per ton if that's the cost of sequestering. Of course, you'd need a way to measure the carbon impact of the sequestering, to make sure that process wasn't indirectly emitting carbon.

Reducing would also be highly useful, and I hope we will, but enpirically we don't seem to be built for it without some mechanism like what I described above. It's terrifying and dispiriting and I hope we figure out a way to work around our broken mass psychology.

Can't edit, but should have been "countries work together to implement carbon taxes", not companies.

Do all methods of curtailing CO2 emissions lower people's quality of life?

Yes or they don’t work.

I’ve spent way to much time as lay man trying to penetrate Econ speak to get the issue, but the crux seems to be this:

Currently markets and goods don’t price the cost of economic damage into products.

So plastics are cheap as hell because they don’t reflect clean up costs.

This means we have plastic straws which are so cheap on a per unit basis, that you can sell 100s in a single bundle.

Saran Wrap, packaging plastic, tooth brushes, phones, pens, toothpicks, mugs, wires, buttons, and billions of other items are extremely cheap.

Now imagine if ALL of them went up by a small amount.

Then recall, that for the developing world the difference between a 0.01 cent plastic cost and 0.05, is an increase in packaging cost for cheap goods like single use detergent sachets, or single use shampoo packets.

Of course, this will directly reduce usage of those goods, which is the intended purpose, but the fact is that those goods being cheap means people can grow faster without worrying about the issues which arise.

Carbon curtailment is fundamentally energy consumptive. We will spend more energy to capture carbon. We would have to create a system which is carbon negative in itself (after power and maintenance costs are calculated), and then pay for the whole thing,

Taxing goods to price externalities is probably the most efficient way to achieve it.

So if I buy a car that has much better gas mileage, my quality of life is lowered?

If I buy a product that has less packaging, so there's less waste, my quality of life is lowered?

If I take up bicycling, and as a result drive less, is my quality of life lowered?

If the hotel I stay at starts using containers of soap instead of single-use packets, is my quality of life lowered?

1) a car that truly gets fantastic gas mileage is small and aerodynamic to the point it loses many practical features of a traditional car

2) If the packaging results in greater spoilage, reduces stimulated demand, or is more expensive to produce than cheap plastic

3) more time to do things, less ability to transport equipment and goods

4) you're being moronic at this point

Those are all options and choices for a small fraction of humans at what is effectively the top of the pyramid.

In each case, those are choices made out of ZERO economic pressure. You can do that TODAY, without the need of us discussing carbon capture costs.

However, most people DOMT exercise that choice, either through necessity or preference.

For all of those people, an increase in oil prices mean that they have to choose between working and living in an affordable place. It means more Money out of the monthly budget which is not available for other things.

This is economically defined as a reduction in their quality of life.

Do consider that, For most of humanity, food, water, medicine, clothes are decisions separated by razor sharp margins. Owning a car is a distant dream.

Simply - If the cost of everything went up, and you thus has less disposable income to use, then your quality of life by definition has dropped.

Only based on the idea of QoL that comes from economics, where it's measured by money exchanged. That's the less important definition, IMO, just a poor approximation of real QoL.

> let's just curtail CO2 emissions

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.

It's not even nearly enough. According to the recent UN report, we need cut global net emissions by 50% in the next 12 years, and get to zero net CO2 by 2050. This is a slow-motion catastrophe and people aren't nearly worried enough to take the steps necessary to avert it.

http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/un-says-climate-genoc...

https://www.vox.com/2016/10/4/13118594/2-degrees-no-more-fos...

It seems obvious to me that this is unrealistic - that we're not going to do the cuts that we "need"; People will not get worried enough to take the steps necessary to avert it, it's simply not going to happen, and it's wishful thinking to expect that people will change their behaviour so much before they have immediate first-hand horrible effects (and those effects won't happen before it's too late). If that is our plan, then why not just wish for rainbow-farting unicorns to fix our ecosystem, it's just as likely to happen but more effective? Everything we know about people's psychology, social structures and politics seems to indicate that if the global population will be given a choice between those reductions and a slow-motion catastrophe, they'll pick policies that result in this catastrophe. Such reductions won't be made unilaterally or willingly, they might happen only if enforced with extreme violence (i.e. short-term threats instead of long-term horrible expectations) but no one sufficiently powerful seems willing to fight internal unrest or threaten international wars to enforce drastic measures for the sake of preventing climate change.

So we have to start with an assumption that emission cuts of the required scale are not going to happen (or, at least, are not going to happen soon enough), and look for more realistic alternatives than convincing 7 billion people to voluntarily downshift their lifestyle by 2050. Large scale carbon sequestration is one such alternative option.

But that UN report is based on predictions we know with 100% certainty to be incorrect. That's politics, not science. Science says "learn to do math before telling everyone the world is ending".

[citation needed]

All models are wrong. Some are useful.

Basically every organization that has looked at the issue and built a serious model has reached the same conclusion. From early studies done by engineers at oil and gas companies, to research undertaken by skeptics, the message is the same: we're not in Kansas anymore, and we're running out of time to turn around.

https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/30/opinion/the-conversion-of...

Which organizations are those? Ones that are funded based on how much hysteria they whip up to justify stealing from people? I don't care about organizations opinions or statements, I care about the math. When the math is clearly incorrect, and we keep being told the world is ending because the incorrect math says so, there's a problem. Climate hysterians hate Monckton, and rage about how evil and wrong he is because "his opinions do not match the scientific consensus", but none of them refute the simple, factual errors he brought up. Mathematical errors that have been confirmed by mathematicians: https://mythesmanciesetmathematiques.wordpress.com/2016/09/1...

All of the models you mention use the completely incorrect math for feedbacks that will worsen warming caused by CO2. They literally all use the 3K per doubling figure. Despite it being proven wrong mathematically, and proven wrong historically as these models have all been wrong for the last 20 years of observed data.

reference on monckton for others: https://www.skepticalscience.com/Monckton_Myths_arg.htm

Yes, precisely like that. He makes a simple, objective claim that a specific formula used in the models is used incorrectly, and the self proclaimed "skeptics" who see themselves as the arbiters of science can make no objective response. Instead the compile a list of strawmen and ignore that the very references they are using to "debunk" those strawmen are the ones proven wrong by the corrected math in question.

I'm sure you're aware that one of the "engineers from oil and gas companies" that I mentioned is Dr. Flannery, an author of the literal bible of computational numerical methods [1]. I'm sure you're aware that Monckton has no formal mathematical training and that his complaints against terrestrial climate models include the "fact" that they didn't predict warming on Pluto.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Recipes

>I'm sure you're aware that one of the "engineers from oil and gas companies" that I mentioned is Dr. Flannery, an author of the literal bible of computational numerical methods

As soon as you get him to address the error, let me know.

>I'm sure you're aware that Monckton has no formal mathematical training

Good thing it has been confirmed by mathematicians like I pointed out then huh?

>that his complaints against terrestrial climate models include the "fact" that they didn't predict warming on Pluto.

I am not interested in strawmen, I am interested in the simple, verifiable, objective claim being made. Every single climate model used to promote climate change hysteria uses the same feedback equation. They all make the same error, using the temperature difference rather than the temperature as they should. Using the correct data to calculate the feedback, those climate models produce only 2 degrees warming by 1200ppm CO2 rather than the 6 the IPCC is promoting. And they match with the last 20 years of data, while using the wrong figures as the IPCC promoted predictions do gave us hugely overestimated warming for the past 20 years. No amount of "I don't like things I pretend that guy said before" changes this. Math does not care about what anyone says or how anyone feels. The entire warming hysteria relies on the feedbacks, the IPCC and CIMP both agree that direct warming is only 1k, and claim feedbacks make it 3k. Without the incorrectly calculated feedback, there's simply no justifying the hysteria.

But the decline hasn’t been monotonic. There have been several years of the past ten where absolute and per-capita CO2 emissions in the US have increased year-over-year.

Just because you've taken the foot off the accelerator, doesn't mean that we're going to stop before we drive off a cliff.

I've yet to see a plan for a transition to a carbon-neutral economy, even on a 30-year timeline.

There isn’t. There won’t be. Fair warning, this is a cynical, but honest comment, and it’s not defeatist, but acceptance of our collective nature.

I’ve roughly gauged most of our species moves on climate accurately so far.

I bet that We are going to go full bore on geo engineering. It’s the perfect eco-poli-socio fix, and is a perfect storm to fill a lot of our mental blind spots.

Geo engineering is jobs, and economic spending. It’s great PR, and it’s a BIG moonshot style project, so the optics are stupendous. Which politician wouldn’t like to say “we secured billions in funding for jobs protecting our environment, by creating factories that absorb carbon from the air”

It doesn’t even have to work, for people to sell it.

Create a military industrial complex style system with geo engineering at its root, and soon humanity will be performing biospheric surgery.

There’s a specific vein of cynical realism, that acknowledges both humanities ingenuity and it’s emtrapment to its darker natures.

We will stick to a carbon positive economy, because no one can turn around and tell the world “its over, the good days are gone, and now when we price environmental costs to everything, the markets will tank.”

Too many goods are cheap because externalities aren’t priced in. A price rise in plastic costs will end product lines and packaging.

This will push people to alternatives which are worse (paper takes more water than plastic, and decays causing eventual spoilage and replacement.)

Plastic releases little CO2 into the air and its environment negatives are minimal if deposed of in a landfill. If CO2 and other external pollution sources were highly taxed, plastic prices could even go down as burning oil for energy is phased out and non-taxed oil used for plastics drops in price.

Sure, local commodity price changes are not predictable. But the point I am making still stands.

If only there weren't other countries that we import goods from. If I drive a car made in Canada, Mexico, China, and the US what do I contribute as a consumer to CO2 production?

But this achievement is less even impressive than a "OK, we've done the US, now let's look at other countries"

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 United States fully intends to reverse course on that and fire up coal plants in order to something something jobs.

The reason it was falling was because of strict emissions standards and a strong EPA, both of which are basically gone.

That's just angsting about short term partisan politics. The trends remain positive for the longer term. Don't let whatever Trump says this week blind you to the long term.

Trends are whatever people make them and many people don't appreciate both the fragility and reversibility of "progress".

Things don't just work out, they get worked out. Telling people to stop worrying, relax and become lazy and complacent is extremely counterproductive.

I'm not saying to "relax and become lazy and complacent". I'm saying that attitude that nothing can be done, because we happen to have a crap president at the moment, is far more counterproductive.

Yes, the EPA is taking a beating. But within my lifetime, the EPA didn't even exist. We did something about it. The EPA can and will be rebuilt. The benefits of solar/wind power are real market benefits, and will triumph, despite the desperate resistance of the coal industry. Etc.

Do you think the United States is capable of reliably thinking about the long term and electing a President that does the same? As long as the planet can be impacted in such a large way by myopic leaders, I don't see what can be done.

We don't need all of them to be sober, responsible thinkers. Just a majority of them.

I was afraid that the new administration would follow through on its promise to increase American coal use and extraction. Fortunately, it has not.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/westmoreland-chapter-11-mar...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mission-coal-bankruptcy-marks-5...

Wait, are you saying Trump lied to them?

It's not a lie if you believe your own bluster.

Pro-coal government action in other countries has managed to delay and diminish coal retirements there, so I wouldn't consider it impossible that it could happen in the USA too. I'm grateful that the economics are so steeply tilted against coal in the USA and that few politicians appear to have the stomach for large direct subsidies to keep coal plants profitable here.

I was under the impression that we've "done well" because natural gas generation has come online like crazy and proves more economical than coal and INCIDENTALLY cleaner to burn.

I'm not sure how long (absent intelligent policy) til we hit peak natural gas and the balance naturally shifts back towards dirty energy sources.

I.e. policy helps, but economics had as much to do with it

Solar power and large scale battery storage are still dropping in price though - I would assume that by the time we hit peak natural gas, the more dirty energy sources will not be economically attractive as solar will be simply cheaper even without any incentives.

Fracked gas is about as bad as or dirtier than coal.

Source? That sound very unlikely, unless we are talking about CO2 only. But then keep in mind the total CO2 emissions. Coal needs more workers, more machines and more transportation.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13053040

Yeah - no.

Coal CO2 emissions are almost double natgas' [1]. While it is true that natgas is mainly CH4, a highly potent GG, its atmospheric lifetime is about 8 yrs. Further, the only way the methane would be getting into the air is via leaks in upstream/midstream processes. Today, hardly any of this leaks (EPA estimates leak rate of 1.4%).

Now addressing fracking, the drilling and fracturing process are the cause of little to no environmental impact/damage. The culprit is wastewater injection. This is the unknown, and while the EPA found no evidence of widespread or systemic pollution of water resources due to the fracking process (which includes WWI before the well is capped), it did highlight the potential in several stages of production for contamination to occur.

Now that said, the damage natgas causes, from E&P (especially) to burn, pales in comparison to coal's at any stage.

I think it would be beneficial for HN users to spend some time in the energy industry before making baseless claims.

[1] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11

Baseless? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13053040

That study starts with the ridiculous assumption of a 3.6 -7.9% leak rate in fracked gas. By their own admission, the data they used was spotty for leak rates during drill completion, and transport. Study is also outdated (2011) with regards to technological improvements of frack wells.

A leak rate confirmed by NOAA and Lawrence Berkeley: https://cleantechnica.com/2013/12/01/natural-gas-production-...

There's also a defence of the original study https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-012-0401-0#...

Even with a lot of political will to increase coal, the economics won't permit it. Natural gas, and now renewables in many circumstances, are the clear economic winners.

And the reason it was falling is natural gas / hydraulic fracking, which emits far less carbon for the energy produced.

The EPA can lay claim to many environmental successes, but this isn't one of them.

The main reason it is falling is because of natural gas substituting for coal in the power sector and that will continue to happen due to the low prices for natural gas.

Not exactly. The sharpest drop happened "thanks to" the financial crisis, and after that, it has been bouncing up and down depending on the year. The overall trend is downwards though. But not enough, by far.

> "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

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.

Fucking around with the ocean on a scale that's going to move the needle on CO2 in the atmosphere has a very high probability of serious unintended consequences.

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.

> Iron particles [...] Find another solution.

Technically, seeding the ocean with iron particles is a suspension, not a solution. Luckily, the common technique is to use Iron(II) sulfate, which mixed with water does create a solution!

Not doing anything has a certainty of turning the ocean to a mild acid, with disastrous effects that are already becoming visible in coral bleaching and shellfish die offs. And carbon that is already in the atmosphere and not yet dissolved is only going to make it worse.

We are at the point of choosing between what disasters we will suffer, rather than figuring out how to not have a disaster.

Why are we so concerned about ocean acidification from CO2, when past CO2 levels were far higher than now and all of the shellfish species that currently exist lived back then too? Wouldn't it be a good idea to consider the massive quantities of known toxins we pump into the oceans rather than fixating on a red herring?

another [citation needed] for @deialtrous. existing research, such as here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2951451/

says:

> Bivalves grown under near preindustrial CO2 levels displayed thicker, more robust shells than individuals grown at present CO2 concentrations, whereas bivalves exposed to CO2 levels expected later this century had shells that were malformed and eroded. These results suggest that the ocean acidification that has occurred during the past two centuries may be inhibiting the development and survival of larval shellfish and contributing to global declines of some bivalve populations.

i'm not sure where the claim "all of the shellfish species that currently exist lived back then too" is coming from, although it is correct that CO2 was higher in the past (https://www.skepticalscience.com/co2-higher-in-past.htm)

Look at the study, not just the summary. What does "preindustrial levels" mean? Preindustrial includes over 4 billion years, including years with no life on earth. It includes the absolute highest and absolute lowest levels of atmospheric CO2 ever in the history of the planet. They chose a very low level that would give them the biggest results, and compared it to a hypothetical future level which isn't actually possible to achieve because there's not enough carbon stored in all the fossil fuels on the planet to get close to it if we burned every drop. Yes, record low atmospheric CO2 means shellfish have slightly thicker shells. Does that have an actual benefit for shellfish, much less entire global ecology? Those low CO2 levels are unquestionably bad for other things, like plants, and humans. Shellfish survived previous high CO2 levels just fine, we have the fossils, they existed. They can go ahead and have slightly thinner shells, while we have more plants and more food.

Also, we're talking about coral bleaching and it being blamed on CO2 despite absolutely no evidence, and despite the fact that some coral reefs are seeing normal growth, while others which are in major pollution streams from Asian rivers are seeing bleaching events. But it has to be CO2 because Al Gore says so! Ignore the billions of tons of toxic waste being pumped into the Ocean by China and India and Africa! Europeans and North Americans are the problem with their evil CO2! They need to become poor like everyone else to save the planet!

Your question assumes that the oceans had to have been acidic because CO2 was high. This assumption is wrong.

You don't get acidification as long as CO2 levels change slowly enough that it mixes down to the bottom of the ocean and then gets buffered by calcium bicarbonate being dissolved there and mixing back to the top. But this mixing takes place on the scale of a thousand years. This is no big deal for CO2 level changes taking place over geological time. But it doesn't help shellfish with sudden increases of CO2 taking place on a scale of decades or centuries.

Another geo-engineering idea is to speed up this mixing by pumping air deep down into the oceans. Personally (as a PhD geoscientist), I think that taking CO2 out of the air, compressing it to a liquid, and re-injecting it back into the geologic formations that the oil came from in the first place, is the procedure for getting rid of CO2 that is least likely to screw things up even more. It would just go back where it came from (many caveats, but basically can work).

Start raising a tax on CO2 emissions and at the same time start paying people to put it in the ground. Raise the price on both each year and you could reach equilibrium pretty fast. Should have started 20 years ago, but now is better than never. Maybe start at increasing it at $10 dollars a ton/year. $10/ton is about $4 per barrel of oil. If people saw that sequestering CO2 would pay $100 a ton in a decade the research and excitement around the ideas would be huge and likely encourage many breakthroughs. Isolated solar and wind farms extracting CO2 from the air and pumping it underground could be a huge business.

Edit: $10/ton CO2 is more like $4 a barrel than the $2 I originally wrote. Source: https://pyrolysium.org/how-much-co2-produced-by-burning-one-...

You can say that if you like, but I tend to err on the side of scientific evidence. Even the hysterians most scary claims merely suggest that we "are headed for" ocean PH levels that are "unheard of in 25 million years". And yet the shellfish people are trying to tell us will die from slightly thinner shells have been around for a couple of hundred million years.

Getting worldwide collaboration on c02 emission should be actively worked on, but we can't expect it to succeed. We need other technological strategies to augment diplomatic strategies.

Why should we sacrifice the welfare of human beings to prevent jellyfish from taking over the ocean?

This is just symptom-chasing. Growth ideology in general, and capitalism in particular, are incompatible with the continued existence of a living planet. The problem space of replacing complex living systems with crude technological ones will be explored fully by these crazed systems in all possible directions even if/when this one symptom (climate breakdown) is countered with a narrow technofix.

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.

So I would love to get some feedback from this group on my takeaway from what I've learned of global warming.

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...

I highly doubt capitalism is going to save us from climate change considering it has largely driven the problem.

Or we could just plant trees. Lots of them. Give people a small tax deduction per acre of forest on their property.

Stop polluting entirely and plant trees? All of these useless ideas above could be solved by getting rid of the endless growth required by capitalism, but nobody wants to give up their Alexa to save the entire population.

...are stupid even to contemplate while we're still increasing carbon emissions. If you actually cared about the impact — and weren't just cynically cashing in on environmentalism's recapitulated caché — you'd be shorting big markets. The biggest threat to the world is unbridled capitalism, which VC's like you are incapable of abandoning. May as well ask a fish to bicycle.

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.

"... stupid to contemplate while we're still increasing carbon emissions."

Ok, let us know your plan for reducing carbon emissions and when and how we can expect it to happen.

Easy. Stop subsidizing fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and movement (ie. pipelines). Make carbon emissions expensive, and you'll see them go down.

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.

Transportation is only 14% [0] of greenhouse gas emission, and passenger cars are about half of that. While driving less can help, even reducing it to zero won't prevent serious climate change. So we need other solutions as well.

[0] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...

14% is big enough to include in a reduction scheme, no? I don't understand wanting to exclude it.

First two points (subsidy removal and carbon tax) would apply to all uses of fossil fuels, not just transportation.

I happen to agree with all of these, on some level they're even obvious, to the extent that 99%+ of all environmental economists would support it.

However, it's naive to think anything close to resembling this could happen politically IMO. That's why we aren't at all close to doing it, even though it's "obvious".

> 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.

More like people who are doing actual work to capitalize on the problem.

If someone can figure out how to make money to reverse climate change, that will be the end of climate change. The whole problem is that it's hugely expensive and only impacts each of us a tiny tiny bit _today_

The only way we're going to turn this ship around is by telling people that there's money to be made somewhere else. If you ask a world full of the rich and those who want to be that they have to turn away from money you're not going to have an audience. Telling us to read 5+ books to appropriately educate ourselves on why the system is doomed and how to fix it isn't going to reach the masses, and certainly not those with power, especially when the basic assumption is that they have to lose all their power in order for the scheme to work.

I didn't realize you were a masses. If you don't have time to read two books, how did you get a job in the technology industry?

I'm sick of you lazy techies. Grow up and read a damn book.

Telling people to read books to understand your argument is a form of gate-keeping that isn't going to convince anyone of your argument. If you can't express it yourself after having read 5+ books, why would I want to go through the same exercise?

I just did you a huge favor listing those books because, of the hundreds I've read, these few are particularly telling, relevant, and accessible.

You now want me to synthesize a co-review of them all? That's actually a fantastic idea, which I am now more seriously considering, but I won't do it out of charity to those privileged enough to frequent this website.

This doesn't sound relevant to carbon fixation:

"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."

Forgive my penchant for lateral thinking; English & Ehrenreich's book makes strong points about the development of "professionalism" and industry, two pillars of the pathological substrate making our survival, as another commenter put it, "politically impossible."

YC should be investing in Deep Isolation.

http://deepisolation.com

You're being down voted because this is off topic. One, the threat from nuclear waste pales in comparison to that from climate change. Two, making nuclear energy more attractive reduces emissions. This article is about removing carbon from the atmosphere.

This scientism approach to what is a problem of crumbling connections to our selves will get us nowhere. Instead of having the best minds of our generation flailing away at marginal gains within a flawed hypothesis, maybe we should embrace the Earth as the whole biological system that it is. These approaches are fixing the bruised elbow while the heart is laid bare and shooting spurts of blood onto the floor.

Ah, the irrelevance of YC has begun.

YC should instead focus on solving real problems, like how to democratize sharing pictures of dog-sitters over a blockchain.

Could this endeavour be detrimental to the environment? (Please read my whole reasoning before calling me a Climate Change Denier or something like that)

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.

Just came here to say:

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.

Given that every global warming/climate change prediction has been wrong so far, why would it make sense to believe the same political entity making predictions now? If you plug in the data from 10 years ago into any climate model, the prediction for now is wildly wrong.

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.

Hey, let me play the devil's advocate here and say that these are nothing but knee jerk reactions.

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.

What a lovely message. Thanks for that.

You are most welcome

> Genetically engineered phytoplankton might be used to photosynthetically convert CO2 into an ultra-stable carbon sequestration medium

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.

I hope they will never succeed, but the mere idea that it is technologically possible for a relatively small group of people to create something uncontrollable, able to destroy the whole our biome is scary.

I know this is going to get downvoted but I have to say it: the problem is not CO2, the problem is CO2 alarmism. The models on which the IPCC predictions of doom are based do not match the data. Even the IPCC admits that in the AR5. The actual data says that CO2-driven warming is not enough to worry about. (Not to mention that the prediction of doom also depends on economic models which are even worse at matching data than the climate ones are.)

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.

Sources?

For a start, see the first graph here:

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...

For the curious, here's a website that thoroughly debunks Judith Curry's "science" : https://www.skepticalscience.com/Judith_Curry_arg.htm

For the IPCC AR5, the Summary for Policymakers of the WG1 report is linked here:

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?

I don't know enough about the data to contribute any thoughts on it. Could be valid, could be incomplete/inaccurate. However, I don't think this is an either/or situation, and wouldn't it be great if we contributed some time and focus on making sure that there is a world left in which the impoverished can be helped?

> I don't think this is an either/or situation

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?)

You are correct

read the report. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5_SPM_...

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.

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