Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches

projectvesta.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 341 posts

Re: Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches

#261

Post by adrianN »

fiblye wrote: post #231

So we need to mine and strip the earth of materials at rates far beyond anything we’ve ever done before, then load it up on a fleet of ships larger than anything we have today, all burning the filthiest bunker fuel there is at unprecedented rates to manage the largest shipping operation ever, and dump it all on isolated, natural beaches far from human eyes. Plus we need to check the purity of all of this to ensure no…

No, alternatively we radically change how we produce energy, how we transport goods and people and how we heat homes. Don't make it sound easy. Reducing consumption only buys time. We need an absolutely massive effort.

Re: Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches

#262

Post by adrianN »

secfirstmd wrote: post #171
lallysingh wrote: post #127

We'll ultimately need a bunch of techniques working together. I suspect this would even be effective with less than 1. But really, what's the cost? That's the main factor. It may be a reasonable way to shove money at poorer countries to do manual work to solve the rich countries' problems.

What's the cost of not taking preventative steps now and having to take reactive steps though?

We have reasonably good estimates for the costs now, but nobody really knows whether reactive steps later are even possible.

Re: Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches

#263

Post by krageon »

kragen wrote: post #97
rwallace wrote: post #29

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.

If I'm not mistaken, the Earth contains several times as much olivine as it contains crust.

To my no doubt uneducated mind, I am living on the crust so I don't understand what you mean by this statement. Can you explain what the difference is?

Re: Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches

#264

Post by wazoox »

The question of the impact of mining has been talked about in the thread. But there's another important: what could be the local ecological impact of dropping large quantities of artificial olivine sand on beaches where it was not present, particularly on the local flora and fauna?

Re: Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches

#265

Post by usrusr »

marcusverus wrote: post #210
usrusr wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The opposite of innovation is business as usual. Taxation always leads to innovation, sometimes they are not exclusively in the field of accounting.

Do you have any support for your claim that taxation leads to innovation?

The sibling fields of tax evasion and tax avoidance are both full of creativity.

If you want more technical examples, taxation systems that tried to get hard at personal transportation while mostly omitting business use led to both the SUV and to modern diesel. We may dislike both outcomes and making a bigger car more comfortable isn't exactly difficult, but the technology in modern diesel engines is absolutely amazing, even if adjusted for cheating. And clearly evidence to taxation influence, as it was exclusively developed in countries that went for fuel type instead of vehicle mass for being soft on commercial transport.

PS: and just think of the things some Finns are supposedly willing to do to extract a little bang from a given quantity of alcohol, taxation is the exclusive driver of that.

Re: Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches

#266

Post by usrusr »

inflatableDodo wrote: post #258
marcusverus wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any support for your claim that taxation leads to innovation?

I don't know about 'leads to', I mean, innovation quite clearly precedes taxation, otherwise it would be rather difficult to invent it, but taxation definitely directly funds far more innovation than the private sector does, at least if we are talking about fundamental research.

I was boldly going with a universal quantifier ("always") which might be a bit of an exaggeration, but I wasvery careful of getting the direction right. "All taxation leads to (some form of) innovation" is a very different statement from "all innovation comes from taxation".

Re: Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches

#268

Post by p0nce »

matznerd wrote: post #243

Hi HN, I am Eric Matzner, the Co-Founder of Project Vesta and I have been responding to all of the questions on this thread and will continue to answer them, but I just wanted to say thank you for all of the interest. When YC posted their Carbon Removal Technologies Requests for Startups page[1] about 8 months ago, I responded to a comment on the post where @btilly[2] mentioned one of the research papers that our pro…

Thanks for doing this!

Re: Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches

#269

Post by lmm »

tom_mellior wrote: post #251
ForHackernews wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, can you explain why you think counteracting 10% of emissions would have "a pretty huge impact"? The best science from the IPCC suggests we have to cut net carbon emissions by 50% by 2030 in order to have a moderate chance of avoiding the most catastrophic effects of the climate disaster. I'm not saying 10% isn't ambitious, but it's entirely insufficient to the scope of the problem.

We need to eliminate actul emissions. As in, actual exhaust gases coming out of cars and planes and snokestacks, not just mathematically offset "net" emissions. There is no way around that. Then, on top of that, an additional 10% through this scheme looks pretty useful.

> We need to eliminate actul emissions. As in, actual exhaust gases coming out of cars and planes and snokestacks, not just mathematically offset "net" emissions. There is no way around that.

How so? What difference is there between emitting zero and emitting x kilograms and sequestering x kilograms?

Re: Project Vesta – Mitigating climate change with green sand beaches

#270

Post by rob74 »

credit_guy wrote: post #110

“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…

The first question that came to my mind was how much CO2 would be generated by moving this amount of rock (if they theoretically were able to produce it, of course)?
Post reply on HN