191–200 of 341 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In Canada, the national carbon price will go to $50 by 2022. So it will very shortly be profitable in Canada.
That's assuming we don't have a Conservative government later this year.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone's problem, no?
Not really. Poor countries don't have expensive infrastructure investments in the current climate, so can adapt to climate change by moving a few miles. Moving New York City and Los Angeles is much harder, and the loss much more expensive.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay, no, it's not. You're being silly. We could always fire the Clathrate Gun... (^_^) But you bring up an interesting point: there's no going back. This really is the Anthropocene Age and we're going to have to manage the planet from now on, now that we can, now that we know.
How am I being silly? Logically if the same conditions caused an Ice age in the past and we take steps to replicate those conditions in the present then this is a genuinely possible outcome. How is this not something to think about?
Second, this is actually totally something to think about, and it seems to me like matznerd & co. are thinking about this very clearly and scientifically.
The reasons I think it's kind of silly to worry about olivine weathering triggering an ice age is that it seems to me (again, NOT an expert) that we would have enough warning to deal with it, now that we know it's something we have to deal with.
We could put less olivine out than we had planned, or remove some (make it into concrete or something), or even just burn off fuel or release methane to counteract the cooling.
Like I said, you are bringing up an important point: we can no longer pretend that we're not already "geoengineering" our home world.
"We are as Gods, we might as well get good at it."
I would be significantly less skeptical about this if it were significantly less ambitious. I'm sure there are low-hanging opportunities where this makes a good amount of sense. Places where there are olivine-rich mine tailings -- somehow uncontaminated by heavy metals -- adjacent to a tropical shoreline. In those instances, then yeah, I'm sure it makes good sense to just shove them over to the beach and let decompos…
We are not pitching this as "THE" solution, but as "a" solution that can scale up to and beyond the global level of yearly CO2 emissions. Even after the "low-hanging opportunities" it makes a good amount of sense, as mining olivine is not difficult and there are large reserves on every continent. You are incorrect that olivine mining at a large scale would incur tremendous energy costs, it will not. I would suggest y…
Well jeez. I know it's not a popular thought on HN, but climate change is a problem of such scale that it's going to need government-level funding and oversight to find and validate geoengineering solutions, and global-level funding and coordination to implement them. This third-way aspiration to a non-government solution just seems like a pipe dream.
Could it be the case that contemporary governments and economies are just simply not structured to be forward thinking in this way? What if, in analogy to the transition out of feudalism, the next evolution of government and economies is one that allows for spending on future outcomes in a way that is impossible now? I have no idea what those institutions would look like -- I only know that hoping to solve global pro…
I'm confused that this is a quesiton that you're asking, as opposed to something that is blatantly obvious. The United Nations declared as such recently:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/mar/18/ending...
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/climate-change-capitalism-eco...
"Trusting that the free market capitalist dynamics will get us
there, that of course is not going to happen," report co-author
Paavo Järvensivu, an academic who specializes in economics and
culture at Bios, says in a phone call with HuffPost. Economies
that rely on the power of markets, notes the report, don’t even
recognize the problem as they’re too focused on short-term
profits to take account of longer-term issues like climate change
and environmental destruction.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…
http://innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/olivine...
Estimates in this paper put it at 250bn per year.
It strikes me as imminently doable, and as an additional benefit would eliminate the issue of ocean acidification as well, which in my view is a much larger problem than simply temperature change. Like a human extinction scale problem.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm an advocate that places like YCombinator should be pushing the places they invest in to take this seriously. Every company should have to present an environmental action plan and plan to become Carbon Neutral as part of its investment strategy. Right now, because it's the right thing to do, in future, because environmental exposure is a huge risk for companies YC has led the world in tech investments and growth/v…
Good luck convincing anyone whose goal is to make money cheaply
It costs about $1 to transport an oil barrel 1000 miles. 35 billion oil barrels are transported each year. So transporting that olivine rock will cost an order of $250B. This will compensate for the yearly co2 emissions , ~38B tons. With carbon offsets priced at $15-$40 per ton - so there's potential for profitability .
Profitability? Put that idea away for a moment. We need to look at this through other lenses as well. Our very lives on Earth depend on our ability to remove greenhouse gasses from the atmosphere. In that light, profitability is a rather weak criterion by which to judge projects like this.
“To carry out this plan, it will take a volume of 7 cubic miles of olivine rock placed on 2% of the world high-energy, tropical shelf-seas each year.” To put this in perspective, the global annual oil production is about 1 cubic mile [1], and concrete production is about half a cubic mile [2], [3] (4.4 BN tons at 2.4 t/m3 = 1.83 cubic km = 0.44 cubic miles) [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubic_mile_of_oil [2] ht…