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Comment by wcerfgba | Hacker News Reader

Fellow techies interested in helping solve the climate crisis may be interested in https://climateaction.tech/ :)

I am a tech guy, but I am not very optimistic about finding a technological solution for this. The problem is energy, how much energy do we need to change to move to a greener infrastructure? There is also the paradox of jevrons [1]. I need to slow down the economy and, at the same time, ensure that everyone lives a decent life. This would be real progress. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

There is a whole lot that we can do. A plant caused the last ice age[1]. If we could genetically engineer that plant to grow on the ocean, it would sequester an incredible amount of CO2.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

Most of the discussion of combatting climate change focuses on reducing atmospheric CO2, but there's an entire second category of approaches: Solar Radiation Management, some of which could be much faster and cheaper than reducing CO2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_radiation_management

While reducing CO2 emissions via investment in renewables is still an important long term goal, if we're already heading towards a potentially catastrophic situation, it seems we should be investigating other forms of climate engineering more seriously?

I find some challenges in geo engineering: - Problem shifting. Gaia is a very complex system, and geoengineering solutions can have unexpected effects - We don't just have the problem of climate change to solve. Loss of biodiversity, acidification of the oceans, soil loss have to be taken into account. - We have the jevons paradox. By finding a technical solution to the problem we can think that it is justifiable to continue polluting.

If we could slow down human activity, nature would begin to regenerate. I think it is possible to slow down our development without any major problems for humanity, after all we have never lived in a period of such prosperity. It would be a matter of maintaining our level of wealth (or even lowering it a little) instead of aspiring to more.

Solutions created by us are usually fragile compared to natural systems that are anti-fragile.

Is it not possible that we find a way to scrub carbon straight out of the atmosphere and trap it underground? I don't know, and would be happy to pointed towards research on this, but it doesn't strike me as a simple energy-in-energy-out situation. There seems to be the potential for a brilliant technological solution.

They’re called trees.

Not really - By converting pasture back to woodland you could potentially restore some of the released carbon from agriculture-driven destruction of old forest land. But it won't make up for the vast reserves of carbon that have been dredged up from deep underground and released to the atmosphere. If it's necessary to re-balance that withdrawal we're going to need to put something back down there, or come up with something novel.

AFAIK, every other method requires massive electricity input; and we’re still not getting enough energy from renewables for that not to mean spewing more additional carbon than we sequester for each unit sequestered.

(Of course, trees also require massive energy input. The difference is that we don’t have to supply that energy.)

Which leads back to my question: is it not possible that we may find a technological alternative to trees which scales better and does not require us to supply so much energy.

I suspect the chemistry of it requires as much energy put into sequestering as is captured by releasing it. But... I could be wrong.

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