Hacker News Reader

Comment by zetalyrae | Hacker News Reader

Complete absurdity. By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise.

Predictions about what conditions look like in the year 2100 (let alone 2500!) are meaningless because they assume little to no improvement in technology or energy availability.

This is like those articles about how "in 30,000 years humans will evolve to look like goblins because smartphone". It's status quo bias with James Burnham/Ray Kurzweil levels of unprincipled extrapolation.

View on HN

Unflinching confidence in the smashing success of an unproven speculative technology to be a silver bullet savior in some currently unspecified Hail Mary pass at the global scale is equally problematic.

For instance, this pathogen is currently whipping us pretty good for such a master of the universe civilization. It would have been far worse before modern science but we aren't exactly living in a Gene Roddenberry fever dream.

Our grasp and control of things is tenuous, fragile, narrow, and sometimes, completely imagined. These times, like all others, call for both a pessimism of the intellect And an optimism of the will.

Not to mention, carbon capture these days is mostly about capturing emissions at source, not about distilling CO2 out of the atmosphere at large. It doesn't work very well, either.

Extracting CO2 from the atmosphere will be energy-intensive and inefficient. Where are we going to get all this spare energy to scrape back the disastrous consequences of releasing a well-mixing destructive greenhouse gas? Uh, solar panels? Nuclear? A trillion trees? Spending energy on such CO2 extraction will literally have no economic value. And we're going to fund that how?

We don't do anything now because it is easier to put it off till later. In the future, the humans should be wealthier on average, and have access to better technology.

But even then, it will always be easier to put it off till later. What generation is going to take a significant, and eventually massive, charge in order to help their grandchildren? It seems not unlikely that no generation does, the problem gets worse and worse, wealth stagnates and then starts to decline, and eventually the problem is unsolvable. This could happen even without any climate tipping points.

The Moderna vaccine was designed on January ~12 2020. All problems since have been social rather than technical. And if Balaji Srinivasan was head of the FDA we'd all have been vaccinated by December last year.

The technology that enabled mRNA vaccines took more than a few decades to get to this point.

That was a rhetorical device to emphasize our buildings still crumble from earthquakes, our villages still get consumed by fire and our cities are still evacuated by flood.

The damoclean sword of nuclear apocalypse still hangs by a thread despite our best efforts and 25 years of international meetings on climate has produced only platitudes and promises.

Coal plants are still being constructed and oil pipelines are still being built, intended to last decades past the dates we promise to dismantle them all, and the world goes on.

Now is not the time to be lulled into confidence by a perceived competence and strength lest we cheerlead ourselves into an abyss. Civilization persistence and failure are both fair bets to make.

We can not rely on the greatness of people yet born to save humanity from the burdens caused by our current lack of will. There will be no future of superheros. We must address the problem at a scale that matches the insanity of the circumstances because they will only become increasingly insane without our immediate and swift remediations. Intentions are fatal where actions are required.

> That was intended as a rhetorical device to emphasize our buildings still crumble from earthquakes

When did a building in Tokio crumble from an earthquake last time? Long-long-long time ago for a place where earthquakes are almost daily experience.

The fact that US infrastracture is poorly designed and mantained does not say anything about our technology and capabilities, it only tells us that our social and political systems suck. In some places of that planet.

Technology isn't gifted to us by the God Prometheus descending from Mount Olympus. It is always a product of social and political systems; long chains of teams trying to dance together. Every shiny marvel you interact with has countless human institutions, passions and pains hidden behind it. Ultimately it's people all the way down.

Fetishizing an imagined perfection is ultimately of benefit to no one.

And to answer your question, Fukushima Daiichi did not respond with perfect grace and aplomb as an uninterrupted unflappable marvel of technological perfection effortlessly absorbing the tectonic sways

Can I move the goal post to that other place in Japan, the one with a nuclear plant, or are we cherry picking facts to ignore reality and the larger picture, pretending everything's okay ?

> When did a building in Tokio crumble from an earthquake last time?

Not exactly Tokyo, but nearby Touhoku region suffered devastatingly with entire cities being levelled a mere ten years or so ago.

> By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture (and atmospheric carbon targeting more generally) a trivial exercise.

Source?

My own intuition and knowledge.

In 1895 Lord Kelvin stated that “heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible”

1900's gave us first flight on a plane made of wood, by 1960's we had spaceflight and nuclear power.

'Intuition and knowledge' would suggest that today, as another 60 years passed, we should have fusion power and cities on Mars, but the world is still powered by coal and instead we got the iPhone.

Kelvin also said other things that turned out to be unbreakable rules. You can't do anything you can imagine just because Kelvin was wrong once. That's magical thinking.

What are the things he predicted to be unbreakable that withstood the test of time? Genuinely curious. thanks in advance.

The point is about not about him, it's about increadible progreas that was made in 60 years past has definately slowed down, nothing 'impossible' was accomplished since. Skyscrapers, farming, construction, they are all the same as 60 years ago. 'exponential progress' is a myth

"Liquid metal proven to be cheap and efficient CO2 converter"

In their paper, the research team show a 92 percent efficiency in converting a ton of CO2 as described, using just 230kWh of energy. They estimate this equates to a cost of around $100 per ton of CO2.

Source: https://phys.org/news/2021-10-liquid-metal-proven-cheap-effi...

(To put this price into perspective, according to the EPA, a single passenger vehicle emits 4.6 metric tons of CO2 per year. Source: https://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/greenhouse-gas-emissions-t...)

And if that's not your jam, check out Prometheus Fuels, which produces synthetic fuels from captured carbon: https://www.prometheusfuels.com

How much time for that? How big can that scale?

To give an idea of the current trend, every single day, near 100 million barrels of oil are produced. Each of those barrels make between 500 and 750kg of CO2 equivalent (source https://carnegieendowment.org/2016/02/09/breaking-down-barre...)

And that only counts as fossil carbon from oil (gas and coal should be added), that has been going for decades (at a slower rate, in 1998 it was 73 million of barrels/day, still a big number). And positive feedback loops are adding new carbon to the party as coming from permafrost thawing and other sources in increasing volumes, as the planet warms up.

So for making the trick carbon capture should not only offset what is being produced in that moment, but capture everything ever emitted till reaching an amount below the one we had in preindustrial times. And keep it that way for enough time to undo the warming and try to shutdown the bad feedback loops.

Creating synthetic fuel from captured carbon doesn't lower the amount of carbon in the system (once it is burned as fuel, at least), but if it is used instead of pumping out fossil fuels, at least will accelerate less the amount of carbon we still add to the atmosphere.

Having a small scale demo doesn't mean that it will be ever feasible a production of the size and the speed that will be needed.

Carbon capture aint easy, and scaling it isn’t as easy as “solar freakin roadways” makes it seem.

This would give us a lot of bang for the buck but for some reason it’s been years and it’s not taking off — why?

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2021/10/12/seaweed-could-help-cow-f...

typical reply of a guy who live in SF

> Predictions about what conditions look like in the year 2100 (let alone 2500!) are meaningless because they assume little to no improvement in technology or energy availability.

As meaningless as assuming there will be improvement in technology or energy availability

It's not profitable, therefore it is not the priority, at all

We have the tech to build super cheap housing for everyone, yet poverty and homelessness skyrocket

So to think we'll solve the issue we have with Earth's climate cycling through its natural cycles is mind blogging

>typical reply of a guy who live in SF

I am Uruguayan and have never even visited the Bay Area. But just cry "tech bro" and move on.

>We have the tech to build super cheap housing for everyone, yet poverty and homelessness skyrocket

This is a great example of a regulatory (rather than technical) issue. Global cities should simply be built up into the stratosphere by decriminalizing construction, anything else is a policy failure.

Similarly, climate is solved by decriminalizing nuclear power.

I think you are attributing too much power to policy alone.

I think human behaviour are much better explained via incentives.

We are putting ridiculous amount of CO2 in the air because roughly every human is incentivized to do so. Basically the things that scale only scale because everyone has an incentives for it.

I don't see any personal level incentives for carbon capture so I doubt it will scale.

> Global cities should simply be built up into the stratosphere by decriminalizing construction, anything else is a policy failure.

Physics, anyone?

It was strange, but the paper [0] concludes:

> Our projections and associated approaches to adaptation governance represent an initial attempt and have considerable uncertainty given their extended time horizon. These efforts are meant to highlight the need for more sophisticated climate and Earth system modelling beyond 2100, including a focus on aspects of ecosystem goods and services not considered here. Our work thus provides a framework and baseline for the assessment of longer-term anthropogenic effects on climate and Earth systems, and highlights the critical need for further work in this area.

[0]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/gcb.15871

I think I agree. In the early 1900s New Yorkers were freaking out at the calculations that showed that their streets would be buried in 10 feet of horse shit within a hundred years. Obviously that didn't happen. Technological progress has a way of completely invalidating your old problems and replacing them with something totally different.

As a thought experiment, look back on humanity for the last 500 years and imagine what would happen if you asked them to solve the problems of the next century. It would be ludicrous. Steam powered air travel, pneumatic computers, advances in blood-letting, etc.

If we can crack fusion in the next 100 years, carbon capture becomes essentially free. And that's just ONE of the solutions we know about now. Imagine how many solutions we can't even conceive of...

"By the end of this century we'll have the technology to make carbon capture"

We have this technology already. It's called "trees". Whether we choose to use it is a different matter.

Environmental sustainability - like most hard problems in the world today - is not so much a technological challenge as a political one. I do believe technological progress in the future is a certainty, and will bring many good things with it, but it will not do the hard work of encouraging humans to do the right thing. That is something we have to do for ourselves.

That's the bad news. The good news is that this work is something we can do immediately, right now, without waiting for the hope of our utopian Star Trek future to become reality.

The politics of carbon capture are all but guaranteed to be a much bigger headache than the politics of cutting emissions. There's a 5 trillion ton surplus of CO2 in the atmosphere and it keeps getting bigger. We might be able to turn some CO2 into useful materials, but five trillion tons? For scale, that's 50000 times the weight of all the buildings in Manhattan:

https://www.thrillist.com/culture/how-much-does-manhattan-we...

> in 30,000 years humans will evolve to look like goblins because smartphone

I'm really hoping we evolve into something with more than 1d4 hit points.

Let's keep burning as much coal as possible then, to ensure we get to this point even faster.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com