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Comment by ollybee | Hacker News Reader

These kinds of ideas just don't seem to make sense given the scale of the problem. It's as if some people imagine you could set up a few plants of for each power station and we'd be all square. When in fact: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/life-unbounded/the-craz...

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Exactly. I think we need to find a biologic solution. Maybe genetically modified trees / plants that spread quickly and capture carbon efficiently, terraform sahara, that kind of thing.

in $current_year? there will be "save the desert" groups springing everywhere, fighting for the rights of the horned vipers or smth

One of these machines could sequester about 10 tons of Co2 per annum. (1) According to the linked article we have roughly 25 billion tons of Co2 emissions yearly. If we take 5k cities in the world (2), and each had just one machine you could cut emissions down to about 500k tons per year, that is a 1e6 factor magnitude difference. If each city had a single "farm" of 20 of these (they are 3x3x7 after all for roughly 400 m^3 of space) you'd be down to 25k tons of Co2 per year.

1. https://projects.ncsu.edu/project/treesofstrength/treefact.h... 2. https://www.quora.com/How-many-towns-and-cities-are-there-in...

Hang on, if they sequester 10 tons and you build 5000 of them you would sequester 50,000 tons per year, not nearly 25 billion.

10 tons is in the region of what the global per capita emissions are so you're looking then at about 3+ billion needed.

good catch. I divided where I should of subtracted.

I wonder how much CO² you could sequester from the atmosphere per year by removing just one cargo ship.

None. You'd reduce emissions if it was not replaced by anything else and you don't look at the impact of what was being transported, but you'd not sequester any carbon.

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