Experimenting with olivine crystals in the ocean to increase CO2 absorption

To me the numbers don't make any sense. Maybe you can help here.

We put in the atmosphere roughly 50 billion tons of CO2-equivalent per year. About half is removed by forests and the ocean, but we are still talking tens of gigatons.

Humankind produces very few things in gigatons per year numbers. Obviously (and sadly) CO2 is one of them. Coal, petroleum and natural gas are part of this family too, multiple gigatons each.

There are 4 agricultural crops that we produce in gigatons per year: sugar cane, corn, rice and wheat.

And then there's cement and iron. About 4 gigatons and 2 gigatons per year each. Cement is mixed with sand, gravel and crushed stone to produce concrete. We make about 30 gigatons of concrete per year.

Everything else we make is in numbers less than 1 GT/year. The next 2 things are fertilizers and plastics, maybe about 0.5 GT/year.

I'm saying all these things to set the scene for the proposed olivine use.

What is the idea here? That we will create an entirely new industry that will produce a new material (olivine) in quantities larger than anything any other industry produces, with the few exceptions mentioned above? All the industries I mentioned did not spring overnight, they had been around for hundreds of years.

Is the idea to create a new industry that grows at triple digits every year for a few decades? Because if this is not the idea, then I don't think this whole thing would make a dent.

I apologize for sounding a bit brusque, but I don't see how this thing makes any sense from the numbers point of view. These guys in the article are talking about 500 m3. How do you get from 500 m3 to billions of m3? Billions per year.

Of all mammalian biomass on Earth, 34% is human and 61% is livestock. Only 5% of mammalian biomass is wild animals.

Admittedly we are vastly outweighed by sea life, plants and bacteria - but our sheer mass dominates Mammalia.

While I think the anthropocene is a stupid concept[0] I read an interesting article yesterday that human pumping of groundwater may have shifted the axis of the earth's spin due to the mass displaced: https://nationalpost.com/news/humans-have-used-enough-ground...

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/08/arroganc...

I really agree with your sentiment, although maybe not the details. All those efforts are gargantuan YC-scale world-changing efforts that can compensate… a small fraction of people not driving 50 miles to work daily. Or, at least, drive an EV. Or even, have people eat pasta rather than beef once a week. It’s very sad that it’s so hard to ask people to make such a small effort.

I suspect that if we electrify transport, there will be more electricity, and we could have more travel overall with night trains, etc. So I’m not sure it has to be less consumption overall. Eating like a pig (which I wouldn’t recommend), but vegan food has less carbon footprint, for example. So “less electricity, less meat, less travel and fewer people” makes sense, but I’m hoping it won’t be necessary.

That and much more will be soon if we don’t change many things fast, but so many of those things are as simple as teaching people to cook dahl (it’s so simple, even I can do it).

Those are miracles that good advertisers pull off every week, but so far, they are focused on getting more giant trucks on the road and pretending hybrid engines are good enough. They are fighting for milk and beef and airlines, while alternatives use amateurs who keep making blatant mistakes.

Halving the emissions of the wealthiest 1% would have the same effect as eliminating the emissions from the poorest 50% of the population[1].

It's not a population problem. It's a consumption problem. The number of people consuming is only one variable of the equation, and it is neither the easiest, fastest, most attainable nor the most ethical one to adjust.

There are a lot of low hanging fruit we could tackle with willing policymakers, before depopulation has to be even considered.

[1] https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/carbon-emissions-ric...

Plenty of people speak it out loud. But getting billions of people across numerous cultures to collectively give up what they consider basic comforts is not going to happen. It goes against basic human nature. You can try to fight that, but you will lose. The planet will die off first.

In light of that, it seems wise to me to try and get other plans in place to remove carbon from the atmosphere.

There was a good Ask Reddit question recently that really drove home how the "use less electricity, travel less, eat less meat" solution is completely unrealistic when it comes to what is needed to arrest climate change. The question asked why, during 2020, when there were huge lockdowns around the world, with gargantuan portions of traffic completely eliminated, that overall CO2 emissions only fell 6%

Think about that. To arrest climate change we really need to bring CO2 emissions down nearly 100%, and the greatest worldwide economic pause in living memory only brought it down 6%.

The only thing that can possibly solve this problem is improved technology.

Interesting that it is already not about fossil fuels but about electricity as if it can only be generated with CO2 emissions.

> There's one sure strategy for beating climate change and no one dares speak it out loud.

You also did not dare but I can do it for you, birth rate limitation and perhaps suicide. There is a reason people don’t dare say it.

Fewer people is already on the way. We just need to pass the bump and things will be good. Demographic lag is a real pain.

Electricity is shifting massively towards renewable production so there really is no need to consume less of it (and we need more anyway - electrifying the part of the planet without electricity is a very significant gain in quality of life).

Less meat is also significantly engaged. Consumption is rising because the population is rising.

Meanwhile, we need effective solution now not in thirty years so any things which reduce the quantity of CO2 in the atmosphere is good to take.

> There's one sure strategy for beating climate change and no one dares speak it out loud.

No idea of what you are talking about. What you are pushing is sadly the only thing we hear about as most environmentalists in the west are actually looking to force people to change lifestyle because of what they believe to be morally right rather than solve our actual issues. I wish we had more people working on solutions and less people proselytizing their new religion but well, that's how it is.

Human transportation is less than 35% of transportation pollution - most of it is moving _stuff_, usually cheap junk between factories. Not food or even finished products.

Your electricity usage doesn't go to people. Residential electricity use is ~20%. It's not your air conditioner.

Meat doesn't even enter into calculations. While it consumes biomass, changes to feed easily offset it's greenhouse gas output.

And, as the above shows, it's not people living their lives that causes global warming. It's not people in their homes or going on vacation or even leaving the tap running or the AC on a bit much.

You could, as a person, do all of the things and convince your neighbors to do them to.. and you would change almost nothing.

Stop buying junk, buy less, and push the commercial and office sectors to fix their behavior. Stop sending entire planes to move a 2 or 3 people.

Electricity + meat + (long-distance) travel comes to less than half of emissions in developed countries. Expand that to all transportation and you're just over half. Furthermore, electricity is probably the easiest sector to decarbonize (construction might be the hardest).

Regenerative agriculture is a great carbon sink. It's more hands on and management intensive, something hard to scale, though, so big Ag isn't interested.

Famine. What you're asking for is famine and war.

That "sure strategy" won't work.

Anything less than net-zero carbon will cause catastrophe. So unless you want to reduce to 0, your strategy won't work.

OTOH, net zero is possible with other strategies. For example, switch to zero-carbon electricity generation, switch from fossil fuels to electricity for 98% of the carbon sources and use carbon capture to offset the remaining 2%.

It sounds like a motto for people who want those outcomes, even if technology somehow let us have more electricity, more people, more meat, and more travel.

There's only one bottom line, CO2 and methane in the atmosphere must decrease. That means real carbon storage that outweighs the oil that's pumped. Preferably with less human and animal suffering.

We could stop all emissions tomorrow and it wouldn't be enough, because the CO2 level is already too high.

You’re free to give up modern conveniences. You’re even free to stop living if you truly feel there are too many people. Or we can keep living, keep enjoying our advancements, and find a way to make it work in a way that keeps the climate stable. Like I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t leave my immediate geographic area. I don’t want to live in a world where I can’t have kids. I would rather have kids with the potential that they inherit a destroyed Earth. At least in this case there is hope they inherit something other than a peasant’s lifestyle.

People like electricity, meat, and travel a lot. Just because it’s a strategy that would work doesn’t mean it needs to be done that way.

There's a fine line between solving a problem and giving up. Your answer seems to cross into "giving up" territory.

If part of your solution is less people it is a non-starter. The only solutions for less people are imposed child restrictions, war, or genocide. If you force less electricity and less meat you will get less people by starvation and death from the elements. How about solutions that dont kill people.

None of that, just less oil and billionaires.