The Zayed Sustainability Prize has launched a US$600K award for Climate Action | Hacker News Reader

The Zayed Sustainability Prize has launched a US$600K award for Climate Action

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32 pointsteleforce19 comments

Effective climate action will need several orders of magnitude more money than 600K :) However well-meaning, cute high-school projects and rural third world ingenuity is not going to cut it. This is a problem best addressed by Manhattan/Apollo project approaches (huge funding for science). The incentives are not there unfortunately, what's more there are quite a few working in the opposite direction.

YCombinator might be the literal antithesis to the suggestion that $600k isn't a meaningful sum of money in the face of large problems.

Tell me which of the large problems solved by YC companies - including those with 8-9 figures of investment rounds not just the initial seed the 600k compares to - can be likened to the challenges of climate action. There are the ones doing nuclear fusion and similar; by comparison the average YC company tackles relatively small problems both in outcome and challenges encountered.

The website says the winner is Kelp Blue[1][2]. Or was that last year's winner?

Either way, it's a cool effort I wasn't previously aware of! Kelp seems like a very good idea.

1. https://zayedsustainabilityprize.com/en/winners/winners

2. https://kelp.blue/co2-removal/

Explain like I’m 5 how the answer isn’t deceloped nations going balls to the wall on planting trees and bamboo?

Developed nations have to drastically cut emissions too, and that means developing new technologies and new ways of life. It’s not enough to plant trees and bamboo. That won’t capture enough carbon to fix the issue.

Look at the size of the machinery we use to dig up fossil fuels. You need an even greater amount of machinery to bury trees and bamboo to undo the damage. Who's going to pay for that?

Exactly this. The infrastructure to put carbon back in the ground would need to be approximately much larger than the entire infrastructure to extract it.

We’re currently around 100 million barrels of oil per day.

You forgot about profits. /s

Well, shit. It was fun while it lasted. Sorry future generations.

I swear in about a 100 years from now people are gonna want to exhume the graves and defile and mutilate and urinate upon the corpses of everyone who said "Who's going to pay for that?"

Tree planting might be able to offset some several percent of fossil fuel use. For the rest, the only option is to not keep burning that fossil fuel.

Apart from tree planting, technical processes of removing carbon from the atmosphere require a ridiculous amount of energy (and much more than the useful energy we got from burning the fossil fuel that released that carbon in the first place), and we're really going to need all that green energy for replacing fossil fuel usage, so carbon capture technology isn't really a serious answer either.

If you're comfortable with ballpark estimates, "the entire net profit of the fossil fuel industry since inception" is probably a lower bound.

There was an article someone posted on hacker news previously (I couldn't find the link unfortunately, maybe someone can help me out).

It didn't refer to developed nations, but it was saying that there are companies that were already planting lots of trees, but the type of the trees they were planting were negatively impacting the biodiversity.

I don't remember if that meant that the trees weren't native to that region which was leading to problems or if they only picked two types of trees to plant (perhaps because they were the cheapest) which may not be diverse enough.

We could reasonably plant ~1tn trees without encroaching on current food production levels (although we'd have a fairly catastrophic impact on biodiversity). This would sequester around 100Gt of CO2. So far, we've emitted about 2800Gt of CO2, with around 950Gt remaining in the atmosphere (the rest is already in trees/oceans etc).

So at the moment we could sequester all of the excess CO2 that's still up there in the atmosphere, in exchange for significantly altering the natural world.

However, planting 1tn trees takes time, and trees take a very long time to grow and sequester carbon. Once they're fully matured, they stop sequestration. While they're growing, humans would continue emitting ~35Gt CO2 per year at current levels, with "business as usual" projections of ~100Gt per year in 2100 (in the word "4 degrees of warming" scenario).

So although planting lots of trees is a valuable tool in the carbon sequestration arsenal, we really need fairly radical decarbonisation alongside it, if it's to be anything more than buying a decade at the end of the century.

Cant do that fast enough, and it takes too much land... its generally old large trees that sequester more carbon - maybe not cutting those down yields better bang for buck.

Were almost at +1.5C, at current plateau of peak global emissions that will increase at around 0.3C per decade, taking us to around +2C in 15 to 20 years..

+2C is not really compatible with large human population - food production, water supply, shelter, peak heatwaves, storms etc.

So we need a way to survive "peak heat" - only things to bring the heat down are removing CO2 at massive scale, or reflect more sunlight over the oceans by increasing cloud cover by solar radiation management geoengineering, such as releasing Sulphur particulates.

We know the latter works because we can measure the cooling effect that higher sulphur in shipping fuels had, before we made shipping fuels 'cleaner'.

For more info, I recommend these talks :

Leon Simons: Aerosol Demasking and Global Heating https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPAnoSt6FnY

Dr Peter Irvine : Could solar geoengineering have a role in future climate policy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgaB5VS-oOw

Hansens recent "Global warming in the Pipeline" :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-7WalxKtB8

https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889

P(are we alone) = more less

"My kingdom for a horse!"

...but go on then, it's better than nothing I suppose.

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