Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
ckrapu.github.io
ckrapu.github.io
Trying to reverse that process by taking a fraction of one year's plant growth and sequestering it is probably 5-6 orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change.
https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/571/how-muc...
This paper made an attempt at a comparison of fossil fuel use versus agricultural biomass production: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-annual-production...
I think plants convert 120 GtC from the atmosphere into biomass every year (ref https://www.worldbioenergy.org/uploads/Factsheet_Biomass%20p...) - obviously this is very roughly balanced by how much CO2 is naturally returned to the atmosphere. The additional anthropogenic CO2 emissions are 37 GtC.
So there is theoretically enough biomass for us to sequester - if we could do all that work without dramatically increasing our CO2 emissions...
I want to counter the implication by saying that the problem of solving climate change is easy in concept but complex in implementation.
The concept is that we must reduce GHG in the atmosphere and oceans, and reduce the amount of new GHG added there.
The solution can contain hundreds of minor actions working on concert, some certainly have more impact than others, but they all contribute, such as for example:
- Taxes on emissions.
- Incentives on sustainable actions.
- Local changes such as improved public transportation and cycling.
- Electric transportation.
- Large scale battery storage.
- Renewable energy sources.
- Better insulated houses can avoid peaker plants needed in winter cold snaps for heating, and summer heat wave air conditioning.
- large scale (industrial) carbon capture.
- Re-forestation (where the tree is not immediately burned but instead used long-term in e.g. housing and furniture).
- High speed rail to offset flights.
- Incentivise local tourism rather than long-haul flights for vacations.
- Social changes such as adjusted diet to be better (e.g. less beef, more lamb, poultry, and especially vegetables).
- Right-to-repair and related social changes that lead to a thriving second-hand-market.
For example, the EU Common Charger Directive (aka the USB-C Law) is expected to reduce e-waste by 12 000 tonnes yearly in the medium-long term and reduce GHG emissions ~to~ by 900k tonnes yearly. That may not look like nearly enough in the grand scheme of things, but once you do a handful of those it starts moving the needle.
a) not likely to work
b) equally unlikely to cause a change on the scale needed.
c) will likely come with unpredictable and unwanted side effects caused by trying to force society to change (which is most often requires threats of violence and the loss of civil rights)
That's an assumption.
I'm usually in favour of fixing the original problem, as so much of what is wrong with society would be simpler to fix by focusing on the source, but we prefer technological solutions rather than be confronted with changing our behaviour.
The problem with global warming is the source of the issue is extremely large, complex to reverse, and extremely difficult behaviour to change because it underpins economy. It is also one that is guided by economy on a global scale of supply and demand, making a single country green tends to just displace emmission to a poorer country (see what happened with coal).
For GHG I think the human forces at play are way too strong. This one needs a solution that will unfortunately allow for GHG, because the weaning off on a global scale is way longer than you think, and reversing it is going to takel even longer.
It's too late, we need climate engineering, i.e controlling the temperate with other mechanisms.
We saw this in action during the transition to cleaner shipping fuels a couple of years ago. I'm not suggesting we polute more, but controlling temperate with particulates clearly works.
The rest will happen without extra nudging just because doing it "the wrong way" will be too expensive.
By feeding carbon tax money into carbon extraction we can eventually start reducing amount of carbon in atmosphere.
Therefore tax should be increased gradually, year by year, spread out for ~10 years.
Don't cry over spilled milk. It is spilled. But don't throw the rest just because the glass is now half empty.
As otherwise, in 30 years, we'll be in the same exact spot.
Best is the enemy of good.
What is your point?
But ideas that tackle 0.00001% of the problem are more useful as a counterexample of what doesn't work.
I haven't looked into large scale technical solutions to climate change, but they seem quite unlikely to scale in relation to the consumption of fossil fuels.
Sure, coal-burning plants could add carbon capture at the source. But as we decarbonize, we will be left with the use cases like aviation and off-grid mobility where carbon capture at source isn't feasible technically or economically.
The only thing that will really work (has the right magnitude of effect) is to stop digging carbon out of the ground and burning it without capturing the carbon at the source, or block the sun's rays so that more energy is reflected to space.
Further, the commonly touted claim that it takes millions of years for oil to form is only relevant if your goal is to naturally produce extractable oil. The carbon sequestration is practically instantaneous, it just takes millions of years of deposition for the sequestered carbon to get deep enough to turn into oil. Renewable oil is never going to be a thing, but sequestering carbon through biomass is at least possible.
And note that any realistic solution to climate change demands a reduction in fossil fuel consumption, but with sequestration less reduction is necessary, and the very large amount of carbon already emitted can be removed.
The portion people who leave the Earth do not matter, the fate of the portion who remain remains the same.
See "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101", Al Bartlett
https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati...
Full length video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8
Likewise, the humans who live on other planets can be consuming local energy without heating Earth, and the people still on Earth would still get the value of their inventions, discoveries and writings.
No. It doesn't matter, unless you postulate that the people left behind have zero population growth and constant energy dissipation, which seems unrealistic?
In any event exponential growth in human energy consumption is physically unrealizable. Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.
- - - -
The point is that anyone who good enough at physics to invent a free energy generator also understands why it must be kept secret. Some secrets keep themselves. That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them. Like the Philosophers' Stone the point of the technology is the internal transformation it engenders when you actually confront the thing itself.
Why does it seem unrealistic? More than that, you only need one of those things. You could have population growth with declining energy consumption if energy use is moved off-planet (even if the population benefits from the off-planet use), or increasing local energy use per-capita if local population is declining, e.g. because the number of people leaving to explore other planets is higher than the population growth rate.
> Eventually the whole solar system resembles a red giant star, and sooner than you might think.
The universe is a lot bigger than the solar system.
> That's why you can't buy one even though there are videos on the YT showing how to make them.
Uh, nope. That's not why you can't buy one.
Watch the Bartlett lecture.
At this point I'm just repeating basic physics and math at you. I think we both have better things to do with our time. Have a good day.
…put them in space how far away from Earth exactly? If they're too close, the heat they radiate away will end up on Earth again. If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.
So put a mirror on the Earth side of it?
> If they're too far away, latency & maintenance will become an issue.
There are many compute tasks where latency is irrelevant. To take a recent example, AI model training. It does not matter if the compute farm is a few light minutes away when the computation itself is going to take days to months.
Maintenance is performed locally. It's not as if you're going to have Earth and then a single solitary server farm on the far side of the Sun. By the time this becomes relevant to planetary energy there are multiple space stations with permanent staff.
It seems whether or not you can keep maintenance staff close-by would depend on the temperatures of those server farms. Yes, the regime in which this could work might be fairly large but remember that we're talking about exponential growth of energy production here and the whole reason behind moving the power plants (and server farms) to deep space was that they were emitting enough heat to affect planet-level thermodynamics.
But it does? I think you're confusing energy density with power density. The former is an integral over time and would be monotically increasing with time since nuclear fusion would allow us to basically pull energy out of of thin (ok, maybe not so thin) air.
The Earth sheds its own heat into outer space via black body radiation, and we can help this process by shedding heat in specific infrared bands that pass right through the atmosphere. We already have radiative cooling paints that do this, and they can achieve sub-ambient air temps in full sunlight:
* https://www.sri.com/fcd_technology/self-cooling-paint-a-pass...
* https://hackaday.com/2023/07/03/cooling-paint-you-can-actual...
We might be able to somehow collect heat (with superconductors? I don't know) and beam it into space, but that still doesn't solve the problem.
Please watch the Bartlett lecture, please?
And with all the time that CO2 remains in the atmosphere it is not enough to just extract a bit less, thing that still may take years to be achieved, all that was managed to be captured by some expensive carbon capture technology is probably orders below of how much we increased emissions. Absolute global numbers matters here.
And yes, it is not possible to just stop extracting fossil fuels and try to solve our energy needs with what we have built so far. But time is running out (if it is not over already). Severe drop in consumption should be in the map too, there was a shortlived dent in the trends around 2020.
Annoyingly, one big problem is that we've allowed NIMBY's to make it illegal to build homes near jobs, so people who can't afford homes near work are often stuck driving long distances to work through no fault of their own.
Also, rich people can decide to pay for expensive upgrades to their homes (switching to heatpumps, upgrading electrical wiring for efficient solar/wind usage, solar panels, high voltage chargers for electrical vehicles), while poorer home owners (many of whom are on fixed income), aren’t able to do those things.
Similarly, it can make sense to help people improve their home's efficiency, and in some places grants are available for this (insulation, etc.). Though in many cases you're using renters' taxes to make the homeowner wealthier, which isn't really fair.
https://www.canada.ca/en/department-finance/news/2024/02/can...
EV subsidies can help build demand for the vehicles. As adoption grows, charging becomes more widely available and manufacturing costs come down with volume.
You are right we are still expanding the use of fossil fuels. But we do seem to be on a path where the peak usage is happening in the reasonably near future. The faster than expected adoption of renewables is bringing that moment forward.
I regularly read what Bloomberg NEF publishes on this topic. They published an interesting article recently: https://about.bnef.com/blog/designing-and-delivering-net-zer...
They are calling for short term policy changes to accelerate things. Most of those policies are simply about incentivizing people doing the right things.
[1] https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-20...
Delaying a renewable facility from earning money for years when it has to borrow everything up front to start is extra deadly. I want proper environmental review though, to the extent it's possible to have that without it being weaponized by NIMBYs to simply run out the clock on a project's viability.
It’s not clear to me how much the power grid will matter in ten years. I can imagine cities using substations to route N solar installations to M bidirectional EV chargers, I guess. For places as or less dense than suburbs, it’s not obvious that it makes sense to bother.
If we had it fill the south half of our roof, that’d jump to 99-100%. For the remaining one percent, we could just drive to a fast charger to pick up enough electricity to run the house for 2-3 days in complete darkness.
The power grid keeps burning cities down, and then they pass the cost on to consumers.
Off grid is already more reliable than the grid, and the price of it keeps halving. At the same time, extreme weather events keep increasing the cost of the grid and lowering its reliability.
If the power company would bury their lines, then all of these issues would go away, but that will never happen with our current political system.
https://ourworldindata.org/global-energy-200-years
1. Share of solar is negligible 2. New sources of energy have always come on top of existing sources, never replaced them
Although you insist that new sources "always come on top" you're either just observing that the chart was designed this way (facile) or you didn't look at the actual data closely.
In 2014 there was more "traditional biomass" (ie people burn stuff) than today. Since this practice is extremely inefficient it makes sense to see it phased out, cooking food over a literal log fire is simple but that's the only upside.
Also Solar looks like about 2.5% to me. How is that "negligible" ? Is the population of Bangladesh "negligible"? That's about 2.5% of the world's population.
Sure, it's finite, but we will run out of oil and natural gas much faster than of coal. There are centuries worth of known economically viable coal reserves. Even more, if we count low-quality lignite and peat reserves.
I mean that new energy sources came in addition to existing ones. We consume as much wood as we ever did. Coal didn't reduce wood usage. Oil didn't reduce coal and so on...
Also, please notice that between 2021 (the date of your link) and today the amount of global solar power quadrupled and the growth is exponential.
Like any physical process, it’s likely to be limited and follow something more like a Logistic function, which looks exponential at the start but ceases to follow that curve forever (which matters for making multi-decade projections).
Electrification results in 2x-5x less energy use for nearly every large energy application. Take, for example, heat humps. Fossil fuels are only something like 95% efficient, whereas heat pumps product 200%-500% efficient. Same goes for EVs over fuel engines, etc.
Old sources of energy get replaced all the time. Not sure why you think that's not the case...
See this amazing flow chart on useful vs. rejected energy:
So I'm okay with people spending a little effort on step 2 of the plan now, especially given that we don't have yet proven technology to realise it.
> Pykrete is a frozen ice composite, originally made of approximately 14% sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86% ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight).
> Pykrete features unusual properties, including a relatively slow melting rate due to its low thermal conductivity, as well as a vastly improved strength and toughness compared to ordinary ice. These physical properties can make the material comparable to concrete, as long as the material is kept frozen.
> Since World War II, pykrete has remained a scientific curiosity, unexploited by research or construction of any significance.
Someone armed with enough VC money could possibly do that on a really large scale and even monetize it via carbon offset certs and then just throw the C rich output of their giant bioreactor into the bottomless pit.
You calculate the cost of manufacturing hydrogen from water to feed into a the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. All you are doing is replacing the existing steam reformer with an electrolysis plant.
But the what if is what if you can take a further step and directly create amino acids instead of ammonia. You go why do that. The answer is an acre of solar panels produces 25-50 times more energy than corn.
This. It's widely underappreciated how much more efficient solar panels are than plants at harvesting sunlight.
Forget amino acids, those are hard; if we could even just create sugar directly from electrical energy we could save a shit ton of corn being grown and turned into HFCS.
Off the top of my head, for a given amount of wood biomass, you can get about a 70% ratio of product to fuel if you use a high-efficiency wood fire to cook the wood itself.
Then you can take that carbon, bury it in decommissioned open pit mines, or use it as a soil additive (biochar), where it will sequester the carbon for thousands of years and act as a fertilizer.
You could also pair the biochar with a fast-growing swamp tree (willow?), re-incorporating the char into the areas around the willow plantation to create a sort of artificial peat bog which could also be useful for water storage and filtration.
Capture CO2 as biomass or with direct air capture. Pyrolyze biomass to charcoal or use the Bosch reaction to recover pure carbon from CO2 chemically [1]. Then combine the carbon with silicon to form silicon carbide via the Acheson process:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson_process
Silicon carbide is extraordinarily resistant to mechanical erosion, oxidation, or any kind of natural degradation. Put the silicon carbide in a geologically stable desert and it could keep the carbon out of the carbon cycle until the sun grows hot enough to render the Earth uninhabitable. Continually extract and convert CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans until natural CO2 levels drop near zero and the desert is full of silicon carbide mountain ranges.
As a mere mitigation for AGW, this is a stinker. It requires an order of magnitude more energy and complexity than direct air capture of CO2 (which itself is already too energetically demanding and complex). But if you have the Sahara-sized robotic solar farm and industrial complex to put it into practice, it makes a great doomsday weapon!
Most actually-buildable doomsday weapons leave numerous survivors behind. Ordinary global nuclear war would barely deplete uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. Cockroaches would still survive cobalt salted nuclear warfare at the gigaton scale. Even an army of roving Terminators might eliminate multicellular life yet struggle to locate protozoans.
But I think that Total Carbon Sequestration could end all life, not just the visible-to-the-naked-eye species. All life needs carbon. And no species (save humans, via technological means) is capable of extracting carbon from silicon carbide. So with a hundred trillion dollar investment in a fully autonomous complex of solar farms, carbon capture facilities, and silicon carbide factories, I believe that we could solve global warming and end all life on Earth. Just like the Earth will do naturally in about a billion years [2] as CO2 levels fall, but up to 10,000 times faster! I'm still working on a funding model and a rationale for why this should be done at all, but some things are inspiring just because they're possible.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
CO2 capture might be economically unviable but nothing physically prevents it from working.
And the amount of CO2 gathered by direct air capture is also negligible, so you can't just hand wave a position that one negligible amount is obviously greater than another.
You might kill off plants though frozen seeds are viable for an extended period, but the incoming ice age is going to preserve aglee until atmospheric CO2 returns to normal even if we’re talking millions of years.
Not all life is connected to earths atmosphere. That doomsday weapon is missing caves which contain multicellular life across geologic timescales. The ecosystems dependent on chemical synthesis at deep ocean vents would similarly be unaffected.
That's a good point and I don't see a way around it.
> All life needs carbon. And no species (save humans, via technological means) is capable of extracting carbon from silicon carbide.
Could you also produce for the sizeable and growing SiC market? It'd be cool if your source was competitive (assuming green H2 level subsidies).
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As you know, once we achieve net-zero (2050), we'll have to accellerate into net-negative. From the hip, maintaining current growth of renewables (17% YoY), we'll cover expected demand 2045-2050. Then what?
Methinks each and every carbon sequestion idea and strategy should be attempted. Like starting with obscene funding amounts for yearly DARPA style x-prizes. Winners advance to the next round.
And hopefully some of the strategies are scaling in time to soak up the excess production.
1) Can the other side just nuke most of it?
2) Isn't it cheaper to build a few thousand nukes instead of a Sahara-sized solar farm?
Plus a lot of it’s in living beings — you’d either have to find and harvest/burn all of them manually (or wait for the decomposition cycle to get it in the air I suppose?). At that point, you might as well go with a classic Skynet-style small-arms-based doomsday!
I think that both of these require far more energy than keeping carbon locked out of terrestrial circulation (and hence out of living things). Don't you have to destroy the Earth's iron core to destroy the magnetosphere? You barely have to scratch the Earth's crust in my scheme. Of course my scheme requires much more time to work, so it's not very flashy.
This idea came to me while considering that most science fictional planet-sterilizing weapons use imaginary physics (The Three Body Problem, Revelation Space, the Xeelee Sequence, The Forge of God...) or, at the very least, a stellar-scale expenditure of energy (The Killing Star). What's the most energy-efficient approach that is compatible with known physics?
Total carbon sequestration doesn't work against a prepared adversary with near-peer technology, but it works great as an alien device for quietly exterminating life from selected planets. The thing is like an invasive species made of silicon that no carbon-based life can compete or coexist with.
My hope would be that the thawed region would be a very thin shell overall, so the overall emissions as a fraction of total stored mass would be relatively low. Can you think of any ways to minimize anoxic activity in the thermally active area?
Commenting “wouldn’t Z be better instead” feels counterproductive to the discussion here.
If carbon credits actually become a thing, this might be a way to cheaply sink carbon. But there is so much graft and corruption in that space at the moment.
Isn't this what the arctic tundra is, without the pipes?
Also, use solar and wind ships instead. We don't need to sink more nuclear material...
The delivery of material to the center of Ocean vertices is essentially free. Any floating body winds up there eventually
I wrote about it here: https://noverloop.substack.com/p/how-to-leverage-the-plastic...
>we avoid most capital expenditures... since no provision must be made for moisture management or geotechnical engineering
I see no math for heat transfer due to rainwater percolation through the pile. "Assuming all voids are filled with water" is great and all, but (with apologies to Jurassic Park) water... uh... finds a way. Meltwater will even tunnel its way through compacted glacial ice.
Plus the "dry" insulation layer won't stay dry for long.
I thought about this for awhile and the gap between harvest time for many crops and first frost isn’t enough to get more than a few inches of rainfall in most agricultural regions with favorable economics.
I think the wetness will wreck the insulation of the first meter or so, but won’t lead to much convective heat transfer if the outside never gets saturated. A big if, to be sure.
As an aside, it’s common practice to leave large piles of grain outside overwinter in the central USA and it’s not optimal, but they certainly don’t saturate the whole way through with water.
Grain piles have free drainage so we don't expect saturation, but if water freely drains through this system it seems problematic.
This scheme only makes sense if the amount of biomass added every year is much larger than the amount which is present in this external layer.
Anecdotally, my father has told me about soaked hay bales out in the pasture which still had a frozen interior core by late May.
https://news.okstate.edu/articles/agriculture/2020/stotts_br...
https://www.beefmagazine.com/livestock-management/-what-are-...
Perhaps worthwhile to annually top with a cover membrane (possibly bioplastic) to control moisture? Maybe even two layers (bottom airtight and top vapor permeable), sandwiching the dry "insulation" to avoid moisture ingress from both sides. If the area-to-volume ratio is so favorable the cost might be managed.
Thank you, very interesting proposal and discussion. I'm all for it!
Plus, you can harness the pretty-high-grade heat energy extracted during the charcoal-making, to run heat engines or for other uses. So it's basically a way to use biology to get some solar power, and to sequester carbon at the same time.
If you're talking about only the charcoal-making, then this is prehistoric technology, and if you throw heat engines into the mix then you're at maybe an 1880s tech level. Seems easy?
I guess the "giant pile of frozen vegetables" method is even simpler in some ways (pipes being the only tech), but it also seems less stable, and it doesn't return the non-carbon nutrients to the soil.
What am I missing?
To offset global human CO2 production you'd need to biochar all plant matter several times a year.
But yeah, if you're burning coal with one hand and making charcoal with the other, it's all pretty pointless.
There's billions of people on earth who are desperately poor compared to even the poorest American.
There is absolutely no chance those people just accept their position as ultra poor.
If individuals want to reduce their CO2 output the only viable strategy is to buy and permanently store fossil fuels.
My shoot from the hip intuitive thought is that the massive amount of plant matter it took to make petroleum demonstrates how inefficient it is to get energy in that chemical state. A fools errand to try and do it over.
It has been said that Coal/Gas/Oil is a half billion years of stored solar energy. That is wildly inaccurate for many reasons, but even if we are using a few thousand years of stored energy, that is still a wide gap to cover.
This a great idea.
It forgets that most artist starve.
The meme of the "Starving Artist" working as a barista, is not in our cultural zeitgeist for nothing.
On the other hand: Glaciers are melting, even in Iceland. Keeping stuff frozen seems pretty difficult in practice.
Also, one of the formulas for air flow through the pile seems to assume 90 straight days of constantly freezing temperatures. I doubt there is prime agricultural land where you get that.
The problem is the scale that is required, we generate so much CO2 that capturing it would require to build the biggest industry on earth dedicated to this (several time that of concrete)
In the latter case you bury the trees and forget them because accelerating coal synthesis is energy intensive, and so you can't really reuse that coal as it would be a net negative in our energy budget.
So you either are sequestering C02 and using it to create houses that will be around at least few decades (and in the process maybe also decrease the material cost of such constructions) or permanently sequester it in a way that only a few % of the sequestered C02 gets back into the atmosphere.
I can't find anymore the article that explains what I mentioned, but the issue is that is not economically profitable (is costs $$$ without generating a return with the current laws). However, I believe that if you account the damage climate change is doing around the world it is.
Social technology is the only tech that matters, as it's not just the carbon, it's also the plastic pollution, biosphere destruction, ocean acidification etc.
If we don't change the poeples want's, we can never have a stablish society.
Here's to hopefully dying before it gets too bad!
There you go. Everyone should use F#
Is it still not rendering? It looks fine in my browser.
Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are currently about 37 billion tons per year:
https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions
That's enough CO2 to make 22.7 billion metric tons of cellulose per year, or ~2.8 tons per capita for Earth's 8.2 billion people. That's too much to to turn it all into furniture or even buildings.
Cut those trees to do furniture and you'll release all this CO2, do a culture of tree decades after decades and you'll never store it back.
An approach like this could benefit from crops which are not productive for humanity otherwise, but which grows much faster and eats CO2 cheaper than trees.
Does that mean “stop replanting forests?” Absolutely not.