Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by credit_guy | Hacker News Reader

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A lot of people are dismissive, and to be honest, I'm a bit skeptical too.

But this is fundamentally an absolutely great idea. If anyone is able to crack this nut, then this could be a more momentous invention than the Haber-Bosch process.

Here's why: at this point all food produced on Earth starts from the point where photosynthesis produces a molecule of sugar. That reaction is terribly inefficient at 1-3% efficiency. At least in principle it should be possible to synthetically produce glucose and other sugars at a higher efficiency. This paper [1] goes into more details.

Once you get synthetic sugars or starch, you can use them as feedstock for other things. Aquaculture, poultry, mushrooms, etc.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fsufs.2020.0009...

I am somewhat dismissive, not of the process but of the end outcome itself.

Industrial scale carbon capture only makes sense, if we are going sequester it and remove the carbon from the ecosystem. If we are just going to make fuel/food out of it, it would make no difference to our Climate woes, other than perhaps buy us some time.

I guess, that's still better than what we have, but I can't help think of these as half measures.

The largest industrial carbon capture facility we have built will mitigate ~3 seconds of global warming in a year. It won't get us anywhere without net zero emissions, even if we assume improvements of multiple orders of magnitude. Even a magic material that perfectly binds to atmospheric CO2 would require rounding up molecules in numbers I don't know the English for. This does open up the possibility of using the 1/3rd of arable land (26% of the terrestrial surface) being tied up growing feed as forests again, though. According to Current Affairs, re-foresting 70% of our terrestrial surface (not possible without drastic food production and consumption changes) would mitigate 1/10th of our global emissions. It's a lot of CO2 we're talking about, your car (if you have one) on average releases a metric ton of the stuff every 2000 miles.

3 seconds of global emissions*

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