Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere
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Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere
#2I'm a fan of the Climeworks concept, but the article and the Climeworks website fail to address the obvious question: what's the net sum of CO2 collected to CO2 created in creating the energy needed to power their plants?
Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere
#3Why would you want to do this? Nothing could be better for life on earth than to get some fossilized carbon back into the carbon cycle.
Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere
#4I'm a fan of the Climeworks concept, but the article and the Climeworks website fail to address the obvious question: what's the net sum of CO2 collected to CO2 created in creating the energy needed to power their plants?
50 tonnes a year per machine doesn't sound much, compared to just growing bamboo or something similar.
Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere
#5I'm a fan of the Climeworks concept, but the article and the Climeworks website fail to address the obvious question: what's the net sum of CO2 collected to CO2 created in creating the energy needed to power their plants?
Wouldn't that depend on the source of energy running the CO2 extractor?
Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere
#6I find that the idea of "climate engineers" and "geo engineering" has markers which will make it appeal to the same people currently peddling climate denial.
My running bet/prediction is that
1) the imbroglio in America on climate denial will continue,
2) most of the world will feel happy that they are doing less than it should, but more than the stat
3) Eventually someone will sell the idea of !!GEO ENGINEERING!! to the same people they feed all sorts of Denialism.
This will sell well because it has "WE'LL MAKE THE WORLD GREAT AGAIN! WITH HARD WORK AND GUMPTION", and will of course be subsidized by the Government so it will have "JOB CREATION!" written all over it. I could write a satirical Ad for it today, and be assured that its twin will play for real in 20 years.
While this comes across as deeply cynical (it isn't cynical enough), it's based on the debacle that is Environmental Protection, from before I started reading news papers in the 1980s.
The news today may be dominated by what America is doing, but lets not forget that it was and still is a MASSIVE uphill struggle to get people to care for decades.
And I am ignoring the effects of funding into Climate Denialism , and FUD campaigns.
In the end people are going to always choose themselves over the environment.
In a world where clean coal can be marketed, "Climate Engineering" sounds like an entire industry waiting to be born.
sorry, I wish I had something more optimistic to say.
Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere
#7I find that the idea of "climate engineers" and "geo engineering" has markers which will make it appeal to the same people currently peddling climate denial. My running bet/prediction is that 1) the imbroglio in America on climate denial will continue, 2) most of the world will feel happy that they are doing less than it should, but more than the stat 3) Eventually someone will sell the idea of !!GEO ENGINEERING!! to…
to add to your optimism:
* geoengineering avoids fixing the root problem by patching some (but not all) of the symptoms, and probably creating new symptoms
* the effects of climate change are not uniform over the globe, so for any application of geoengineering there will be winners and losers
* much research hasn't been done to figure out if the various geoengineering proposals are safe, and there is no test environment, there is only production
* geoengineering needs to be done at the same time as a serious effort to reduce both CO2 emissions and CO2 levels in the atmosphere
* but: some geoengineering options are cheap enough that single nations could unilaterally carry them out anyway, ignoring all of the above!
edit: all that said, the kind of stuff as described in the article needs to be scaled up. and a serious real world test needs to be done of doing something with the captured CO2. 50 tonnes / year is nothing. the scale of infrastructure needed to reverse current CO2 pollution is roughly the entire world fossil fuel economy, but running in reverse
assuming this proposal can be scaled up and there's something to do with the captured CO2, maybe this kind of thing is part of the solution
another open question is what to do with carbon in the ocean, to reverse ocean acidification
Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere
#8> quickly bonded over their shared loves for mountain climbing and beer
Didn't realize that was so unusual in Switzerland.
Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere
#9I find that the idea of "climate engineers" and "geo engineering" has markers which will make it appeal to the same people currently peddling climate denial. My running bet/prediction is that 1) the imbroglio in America on climate denial will continue, 2) most of the world will feel happy that they are doing less than it should, but more than the stat 3) Eventually someone will sell the idea of !!GEO ENGINEERING!! to…
In the last few months I have read a few articles on hackernews about converting carbon dioxide into usable fuel. My hope for the future is that we come up with a way to capture and convert carbon dioxide even if doing so requires electricity as this would make renewables cheaper and stop more carbon output.
Re: Climate Engineers Sucking Carbon Dioxide from the Atmosphere
#10I'm a fan of the Climeworks concept, but the article and the Climeworks website fail to address the obvious question: what's the net sum of CO2 collected to CO2 created in creating the energy needed to power their plants?
50 tonnes a year per machine doesn't sound much, compared to just growing bamboo or something similar.
"Each year, a hectare of Moso bamboo absorbs 5.1 tons of carbon"
http://inesad.edu.bo/developmentroast/2013/05/what-can-bambo...
You would need 10 Hectares of land to equal one of these machine. Sounds reasonably impressive to me. Even more impressive if the climework "tonne" is 2200 pounds and the bamboo ton is just 1000 pounds.