Comment by GreedClarifies | Hacker News Reader

Comment by GreedClarifies | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

We created this problem by using energy and energy is the way back out of the problem.

Energy released by burning one barrel of oil: ~6 GJ. Total number of barrels consumed per year: ~100M

Total energy per year: 6 * 10^17 J

Solar flux on 10^17 J/s or 3 * 10^24

if we had a machine that could convert CO2 -> Carbon in some stable form, we would need to use 10^-7 of the earth's solar flux.

At a very high level such a machine would have two principle "knobs" (1) the efficiency and (2) percent of earth that would need to be covered. The product of the 2 must equal (or be less than) 10^7.

Some example parameters:

Efficiency : 10^-2 Area: 10^-5

This seems wildly plausible for some microbe that we design in the near future that lives in the ocean. This efficiency parameter is lower than current plants.

For those wild eyed technologists that think we can beat nature by a good amount:

Efficiency : 10^-1 Area: 10^-6

That's a couple of hundred square miles. That seems paltry for an "existential threat". Even a couple of orders of magnitude more area seem like they would be fine to sequester for this purpose.

This type of technology seems well within our grasp (or within the next 20 years). I never understand the hysteria over this topic.

I have read this analysis several times, and near as I can tell you’re basically saying “if blowing up a stick of dynamite provides x energy, we can just use that same x energy to find all the original bits of that stick and put it back together”.

We're not talking about some kind of very complex macro object.

We're talking about converting hydrocarbons -> CO2 + water (or whatever if you care) and reversing that reaction (or similar, since we may want something more stable than hydrocarbons).

There are already machines which do this (anything that does photosynthesis). We're just going to play around the edges of making the reaction more efficient and/or the results more stable.

Oil before burning is an incredibly concentrated source of carbon. After burning, it’s less than 0.05% of the makeup of the atmosphere.

If it were so simple, we’d be doing it. Over here in reality, carbon capture remains a difficult and unsolved problem in practice, requiring enormous amounts of energy that is—at present—generally far better put to use replacing carbon-based forms of energy than trying to put the carbon genie back into the oil barrel.

That's an interesting way to move the goalposts.

You started with a complex macro object and said it's difficult to reassemble. I noted that the reaction is actually simple, this isn't an information problem.

This is a technology problem, and one we are actively working on. And with the correct technology it is a not a large problem.

Yes, not a large problem at all. We just have to bioengineer a new organism that has to be wildly successful in its biome while simultaneously not becoming food for other aquatic life nor subject to decomposition after death.

Trivial, really.

We might have the technology in 20 years, but only if people are hysterica about it being needed. If everyone thinks everything is okay and it will solve it self, nothing will happen! It's a prior to the preparedness paradox.

I don't think so. The technology to enable this is being worked on anyway since it is economically very valuable. Its probably the 2nd most valuable technology being worked on today.

Soil converts it to carbon.

> I never understand the hysteria over this topic.

It seems to be a gross mix of a few things:

-Most people are simply incapable of doing this type of analysis. They hear that "the sky is falling, and the only way out is to perpetually give up our comforts and live shittier lives", and they believe it.

-People get really hung up on forcing their personal "correct" way of doing things on everyone else. Whatever their personally acceptable use of energy miraculously happens to be "acceptable", and anyone else who uses more is a "bad selfish person".

-A lot of people seem to just enjoy the "us-vs-them" mentality, and shitting on others for their differing energy use seems to be a way to scratch that itch.

Our entire civilization is fundamentally based on energy use, and we have so much energy available to us in the form of sunlight. We can unwind all our carbon issues, and enable everyone to consume as much energy as a typical American, and more. But people seem to be more interested in shaming and shrieking at each other over bullshit.

The typical American buys unnecessarily large cars, lives nowhere near mixed zoning and uses AC in inefficient housing. It amounts to huge amounts of wasted energy. That's not someone to emulate.

There are correct ways that are correct because they're effective and incorrect ways that aren't. Those ways should be imposed on people in tragedy of the commons type market failures. It follows from the social contract.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com