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Comment by thechao | Hacker News Reader

I don't know why the Democrats, in particular, don't turn this into political hay: it's literally the perfect counter to the coal issue.

1. Olivine is plentiful, everywhere, including as the tailings from huge defunct coal mines;

2. All of the mining & transportation infrastructure is already in mining country;

3. Mining country is desperate for solid, dependable blue collar work; and,

4. Mining country already has expertise in ... mining.

Instead of rolling in and telling mine workers that "their livelihood is destroying the world, please go find something else to do", the Fed could roll in and say: "now it's your turn to ~save the world~; go dig!"

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It's not enough to change people's beliefs about climate change and political choices.

>> Olivine is plentiful, everywhere,

That means olivine will be mined everywhere. not necessarily in coal country.

Computers are plentiful everywhere, yet more bits are mined in SV than anywhere else. Maybe the fact that bit mining expertise is concentrated there is useful to produce more zeroes and ones. I suppose the same might be true of olivine.

> yet more bits are mined in SV than anywhere else

Are they?

Yeah, this is almost certainly not the case any way you want to frame the question and define a 'bit being mined'.

You'd really have to twist some strange language to attribute distributed global computation to SV because they may own or have invented certain technologies to even begin to argue that.

Just think of how expensive SV is in general. It doesn't make sense.

Coal country has a comparative advantage due to the already existing infrastructure and expertise that others would need to acquire from scratch.

Just a side note, as I don’t know a thing about olivine, but wouldn’t they be able to pull the material from the waste piles instead of mining new material? I remember this popping up in a discussion about thorium (super abundant in coal mining waste) and that was one of the points brought up

Yep; straight from the tailings. It's all the transport & digging parts of mining, without any of the dangerous "going into a hole" parts of mining. Obviously, this is just a form of strip-mining so there's definite downsides.

1. The tech isn't ready to deploy.

2. There are hardly any Democrat leaders left who care about or can talk to blue collar workers.

> 2. There are hardly any Democrat leaders left who care about or can talk to blue collar workers.

The problem is voters, not workers. US voters are significantly older and to the right of employees - either past or near retirement. Improving employment certainly does work on the margins, but in absolute terms there's a lot of people who don't care and just want to be entertained.

Problem number 3 though is the US doesn't emit that much carbon. To be part of a worldwide solution we need to sell carbon capture tech to China and India.

> The tech isn't ready to deploy

What makes you say this? All they have to do is grind up olivine and dump it in parts of the ocean with high vorticity like unused shores.

Coal has other externalities besides CO2.

Coal power plants have some of the worst air pollution around on all counts and are terrible for the health of everyone around them.

Or if you need a less relevant but scarier message, they emit more radiation than a nuclear plant.

I think part of this is because there is a group of people that doesn’t want there to be an easy technical solution to climate change. They would rather use the massive threat of climate change as the catalyst for social, economic, and behavioral change. They view climate change mitigation tech that does not require changes in behavior much as religious conservatives viewed birth control and condoms - a technical hack to get around immoral behavior.

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