91–100 of 341 posts
Even if this is actually feasible and does not have negative environmental impacts, I don't see countries implementing it on their beaches where a lot of tourism is located. For example in Mexico Riviera Maya, Cancún, Holbox, etc, the main selling point are the white beaches and turquoise sea.
If you work backwards, climate change is a giant man-made disaster that literally can only be countered by a just-as-big man-made solution. Green sand on a beach is like, not as big as millions of cars on roads.
That's not logical. Just because a disaster was made by machines doesn't mean machines are the solution.
Sand won't stop millions of carbon emitting cars on the road. We need bigger solutions.
Mine olivine rock, spread it on a small percentage of tropical marine beaches with high levels of tide energy, remove CO2 from the atmosphere. What could possibly go wrong? Edit: not sure why the downvotes. Perhaps I should have explained my skepticism more clearly? Any geo-engineering initiative almost always fails to predict the unintended consequences for the environment - e.g. perhaps one day we'll discover that…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not talking about this one project, but multiple projects going on at the same time. And yes we can measure it daily but do we know what's the lag? If we remove 1mln tons of CO2 from the atmosphere today, will it show up in the results tomorrow? If not, do we know how that's going to affect the climate?
We are decades into pumping vastly more carbon into the atmosphere than is sustainable. We're not going to accidentally flip that problem upside down without noticing years in advance.
Hey, heads up to anyone associated with Project Vesta... currently your webshop shows an empty store[0]. Also, if executed right then this project could market itself. Travel "influencers" love to show off unique beaches and destinations, and uniquely coloured beaches are always a huge hit. By marketing these beaches appropriately it will generate a lot of attention and (hopefully) a lot of funding for the project. G…
Hi, if you'd like to donate at this point please check out https://projectvesta.org/donate where we currently have our "Grain of Hope" necklace available. It is a single grain of olivine, suspended in a sand timer vial, to symbolize that although time is ticking, it is not too late to stop (and reverse) the damage. Since we do not have a beach yet where we can place olivine, we were originally not planning to offer t…
Dissolving olivine on beaches means releasing nickel into the environment. What is the effect of the release of many megatons of this element?
We are aware of potential issues with nickel contamination in olivine and will be testing/monitoring for it. Nickel is found in formations of olivine where nickel replaces some of the magnesium ions in their crystal lattices, however, if we do have a large reserve with high content of nickel, we have a technique available to plant nickel hyperaccumulating plants above the crushed olivine to phytomine the nickel conte…
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/06/16/my-first-billg-rev...
Interesting! I didn't know olivine was that plentiful. There is said to be a problem with shortage of construction sand leading to beaches being stripped for sand. So this would solve a secondary problem at the same time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
4,000 ppm was a period far before humans or advanced primates, and very different flora. 200ppm is around the level humanity, and much of the flora we share the planet with, evolved. It's the level we started to develop from, to farm. Nature and the planet has no ideal, it copes with whatever there is. Humanity on the other hand would appear best served by the level we evolved with - 200ppm or thereabouts. 400ppm cau…
Greenhouse owners generally spike their air to 1200-1500ppm CO2. That's the compromise between best cost and best for the plants and is lower than these species evolved in. As to humans, 400ppm causes zero problems, matter of fact, OSHA says 1000ppm for continuous exposure. NIOSH says 10,000 ppm for a 10 hour work shift. For instance: https://inspectapedia.com/hazmat/Carbon%20_Dioxide_Exposure_...
I'd say that's far from zero problems.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My main point was about developing countries. Eric himself noted that "the idea is to utilize mines within 300 km (186 mi) of the destination beach" and "or many of the first beaches, we will be looking to use tailings piles (waste rock) from previously dug and developed mines, as well as the infrastructure from those mines, such as rail for transport". The idea is summarized in this image [1], which shows mines and…
Shouldn't the thing pay for itself in climate impact costs avoided?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It already happens in nature 4000 ppm CO2 was found in nature far before pre-industry came along. Does the fact that anything "happened in nature" make it "ideal?" What is the globally "ideal" level of CO2 anyway? Certainly 200ppm is an order of magnitude low when considering the ideal for plants.
4,000 ppm was a period far before humans or advanced primates, and very different flora. 200ppm is around the level humanity, and much of the flora we share the planet with, evolved. It's the level we started to develop from, to farm. Nature and the planet has no ideal, it copes with whatever there is. Humanity on the other hand would appear best served by the level we evolved with - 200ppm or thereabouts. 400ppm cau…
If by "end of us" you mean human extinction, I'm curious why you think that. Reducing the co2 in a building to whatever level one wants is cheap enough (by bubbling air through water mixed with soda lime or lime) that it seems to me feasible for a few million humans to survive indefinitely even without major advances in technology. (I am assuming that the cost of a co2 measuring device, currently over $1000, could be driven way down before they would be needed in large numbers as part of the machinery to reduce co2 levels inside buildings.)
Wouldn't most food crops would grow much better at 4000 ppm than they do now?
People would be able to go out into the 4000-ppm-co2 outdoors for hours at a time with no obvious serious problems. (I exposed myself to higher levels than that for years by sleeping in a very small room with very low "draftiness". Not recommended of course.)
Co2 at 4000 ppm would kill billions of us and make the survivors miserable and is certainly something I wish for humankind to avoid, but that is different from human extinction.