Elon Musk’s $100M Gigaton Scale Carbon Removal Prize
xprize.org
xprize.org
Carbon removal: taking carbon out of the ambient air rather than decarbonizing the system
Gigaton scale removal by 2030: 5 orders of magnitude beyond current capacities. That's only one order of magnitude less than Earth's yearly emissions (40 GT) and 3 orders of magnitude less than Earth's excess emissions (1,000 GT).
Solution agnostic: Whether you call it "natural" or "technological" what matters is it can remove carbon and scale without harming the rest of the system
If you prefer a video summary, here's my take:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XNq8Hb7nSVY&feature=youtu.be
B. For those of you who want to work on this prize:
1. AirMiners - the premier community of 800+ scientists, entrepreneurs, engineers, artists, hackers, and business peeps working on solutions to pull carbon from the air
2. Air Mining 101 - Guide to getting started in carbon removal, including links to the Carbon Removal Academy and other resources
My understanding is that there is basically a fixed amount of energy being used (fluctuating mostly due to mining profitability) for the ~fixed block rate. How does adding transactions increase the energy use?
Revenues are based on the block coinbase reward and transaction fees from transactions (txns) included in the block. The coinbase reward is currently a large majority of mining revenue, but this will decrease over time according to the coinbase halving schedule every ~4 years.
Since block capacity is arbitrarily limited to 1MB, txn throughput is limited. Therefore, all txns contribute to txn fee competition. There is a transaction fee market where users must outbid each other to ensure their txns are incorporated into the blockchain in a timely manner.
The net effect is that txn demand does contribute to mining rewards and ultimately the energy used for mining. But it is a very small effect at present:
* Txn fee competition only rarely kicks in. The network operates most of the time without substantial mempool backlog. https://jochen-hoenicke.de/queue/#0,6m This does change with market activity, and we are certainly looking at more txn fees overall in the future.
* Coinbase rewards dominate mining revenues, so the effect is proportionally small. As these rewards decrease in the future, txn effects will have bigger effects.
The upshot of all of this is a shift into a 'mature' paradigm of blockchain security funding. It's a pretty big shift and easily the biggest unknown in the future of Bitcoin. More and more, the focus will be on scaling and whether the opposing goals of affordable transactions and miner revenue (and therefore network security) can be balanced. There are also interesting technical issues such as whether txn-fee dominated revenue will present new malicious actions. Namely, whether miners can withhold blocks to gain advantage, plaguing the network with reorgs and further centralizing mining.
Your take is 100% correct, but we still opted to use Ethereum Gas units as our "emissions factor" because it represents useage of and relative benefit from the Ethereum network.
We are interested in raising money for carbon offsets, so if we ask the question of "who pays?" it wouldn't be fair to place the burden on miners when all users benefit from the security and stability that comes from mining.
I'd eventually like to develop a model that allocates emissions based on "unit of time held" which is a more accurate allegory for 'benefit' for speculative assets like Bitcoin (if we are honest about Bitcoin's purpose), and because of the macroeconomic reasons you mentioned.
It's an interesting problem and discussion because unlike driving a car or eating meat, simply reducing consumption won't fix the problem, and yet we would all agree heavy users or benefactors of the network should bear more of the burden.
(As opposed to something like planting trees that's inherently 2D and takes many years to reach maturity.)
Hmm, some quick Googling shows lots of results for algae carbon capture, e.g. this company: https://newatlas.com/environment/algae-fueled-bioreactor-car...
You can also check out the AirMiners Index to scan through the other folks working on solutions:
There was a time when I was convinced Algae was the way forward but the rate limiting step for them just don't make sense.
Unless things have changed since I last researched this
Use your clout to persuade governments to donate to and support the cause.
It would be the best use of that money.
Eventually those trees die and rot and rejoin the natural carbon cycle. That's what's so fucked up about the CO2 emissions problem: the carbon we've emitted to the atmosphere (and has been absorbed into the oceans) was previously locked out of the natural carbon cycle as coal, limestone, etc... But burning/creating concrete/ etc has put it back into the active loop.
Any solution has to take the carbon out of that loop permanently if we want to address the greenhouse gas problem, reduce the total amount of carbon in the cycle.
Trees can be the perfect buffer foe our societys transition to a carbon neutral economy.
There are 3 different states of carbon on earth: a solid/liquid from underground (oil, coal, bitumen, etc); in organic matter (trees, animals, plants, etc); and in the atmosphere (CO2, methane, and others).
If we assume that the earth is a closed system and no carbon can leave or enter earth, it means that when carbon gets transformed from its coal/oil state it must either become organic matter or atmospheric gasses — the two other states of carbon.
Conversely, to reduce the amount of atmospheric carbon we must either transform it to organic matter (trees, animals, etc.) or put it back into the ground.
The issue with transforming atmospheric carbon to organic carbon is that we have already reached and passed the global maxima for organic matter during the prehistoric times before human deforestation. At best we could plow down all the cities and civilizations and plant forests in their place and we would reobtain the global maxima of organic carbon again. But even at this point of global maxima of organic matter, we would still have all the carbon which came from coal/oil present in the atmosphere.
Finally there is the natural process of transforming organic carbon to ground carbon, but that takes millions of years — which is a few orders of magnitude too long for us to address the crisis.
This is why artificially sequestering carbon back into to ground is a vital part of addressing climate change.
Forests are really the simple solution. it’s a matter of time frames not net carbon in and out.
They have a perpetual self-sustaining cycle of growing new trees and turning the old ones into soil and burying them under more soil.
I mean it's fine trying to save the planet and stop emitting co2, but so far, unless you do it by force, it's quite unlikely that anyone will really manage to convince people to do it, or find some miracle solution, or to organize something so that people make the efforts to avoid emissions.
We should just prepare to migrate north, grow food elsewhere, move away from hot regions, and more important: find more and more techs that allow every humans to protect themselves from heat.
People will have to change their behavior to survive collectively. Technology is part of the solution (renewable energy, zoom calls instead of business travel...) but the idea that everyone needs a car that just sits around idly 95% of the time is ludicrous. If humanity is to survive, this sort of widespread ludicrous and unsustainable behavior needs to stop...
I'm sorry if I come across a bit harsh but your comment sounds quite defeatist. If you need an argument mir grounded in economics, have a look at the relative price of coal power: even ignoring the health and climate effects, it's getting too expensive compared to renewables (lots of asterisks on that one but the gist is true).
I've never understood this argument. People don't trash their cars like broken appliances. Most cars get driven until they crumble to dust at the 300k mile mark. Whether a car is idle is completely irrelevant.
There are problems with cars and dependent city planning but utilization rates of cars is not one of them. Far from it.
How exactly? Voluntarily? Or by force?
What is that truth:
We cannot fix atmospheric CO2 concentration. The amount of energy and resources necessary to accomplish such a feat is far more likely to kill all life on this planet than reduce CO2 by even 10 PPM.
I know people don't like to hear this but I still haven't found anyone who is able to refute the most basic of arguments proving this reality. I have challenged many. What usually happens is a range between ignoring the question and insults (or both).
This is about pulling our heads out of the sand to take a look at the data in order to understand what it is screaming at us very loudly. It goes something like this:
If humanity --all of us-- left the planet tomorrow and we took all of our technology, cars, planes, buildings --everything-- with us...it would take somewhere in the range of 50K to 100K years for atmospheric CO2 to come down by 100 ppm (which is roughly what we need).
This isn't me saying it. We have very accurate data on this. We know, with a very high degree of certainty, what the atmosphere looked like and how long it took for CO2 to increase and decrease when humanity was but a bunch of apes on trees.
This data is provided to us by the 800,000 years of ice core atmospheric data we already have. Ice core atmospheric composition sampling is a highly accurate way to learn about what the atmosphere looked like in the past. And, again, to be redundant, we have data going back 800,000 years.
This means we KNOW how the atmosphere behaved when we were not here.
This also means we KNOW how it will behave is we all left.
If it takes the planet 50,000 to 100,000 years for a 100 ppm reduction --without humanity around-- there's NOTHING we can do at a small scale (solar panels world-wide, stop using cars, stop using planes, ban all fossil fuels, etc.) that will accelerate the slope at all. If we stay on the planet the rate of change is GREATER than 50K to 100K for 100 ppm, because we are contributing more CO2 to the equation.
Please don't take my word for it. Look at the data and you should have the same revelation about this issue I had many years ago. This does not mean we should not make an effort to clean-up our act, there are many reasons for which this is a good idea and none of them anything to do with climate change. I does mean we need to not lie to ourselves and start having real conversations about this stuff rather than, on the one hand, denying it, and, on the other, thinking we can actually affect planetary scale problems with truly insignificant measures. Hint: Everything is insignificant when compared to humanity leaving the planet. Both extreme positions are unreasonable and delusional.
Finally, a problem: Scientists, researchers, don't want to talk about this reality because their careers would be over if they did. At the very least their grants would evaporate. This is a terrible side-effect of the religion climate change has become. We need to free our researchers so that they can be honest about what we know and we can put them to work on how to deal with reality.
Here's were you will find the 800,000 years of ice core data:
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical...
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/trends/co2/ice_core_co2.html
Here's a paper that explains why it is that atmospheric CO2 will continue to rise exponentially even if we switch the the most optimal forms of renewable energy world-wide:
https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...
I have looked into this issue in depth and I have yet to find any argument or proposed solution that can do better than all of humanity leaving the planet, which is to say we can't fix it. We better start talking about how to live with it soon rather than propose ridiculous "solutions" that are far more likely to kill us all than fix anything.
Here's the problem with any carbon sequestration proposal: You have to prove how you are going to violate the law of conservation of energy. Seriously. Any sequestration approach has to, by definition, consume more energy than what it took to create the problem in the first place. Not to mention resources.
We have the hubris to think we can do millions of years of work in 30 years. This is delusional.
You need space, you need to plant/nurture them, and assure they survive long enough/remain healthy.
The total area of forest land in US is 501 million acres, with 2.5 trillion trees of all types.
So you'd need to just find 207 million acres of viable land, 1 trillion saplings and enough people to plant them.
In my point of view, that's a bit challenging - but I'm no expert in such matters.
Otherwise the Co2 will be returned to the atmosphere once the tree rots or is burned for fuel.
Individual trees die and decay, but their place is taken by their offspring and the total biomass of the forest does not decrease over time.
The amount of carbon stored in the forest is approximately proportional to that mass.
Forests that we don't cut down is called reservations.
In Sweden there is a law that states that any forest cut down must be replanted unless used for farming or new buildings. I also recall Norawy having the similar law. If we counted that as carbon removal, we would have a massive carbon net negative from this pretty old law.
The law is not a carbon removal strategy. It simply maintain current biomass over time.