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

We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

orbuch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

211–220 of 267 posts

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#211

Post by OJFord »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #200
OJFord wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, far cheaper products became available.

Obviously, if people are buying them. The point is if consumers prefer cheaper, lower quality products, then how is a business offering more expensive, higher quality products supposed to survive?

My point is that the cost of the cheapest got lower, due to industrialisation & globalisation, rather than a shift in habits as people started to think 'actually sod this expensive stuff that lasts a life time, gimme cheap & disposable'.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#212

Post by [deleted] »

jsomau wrote: post #195
acd wrote: post #120

We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due t…

I've been building a browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you're on a checkout page for a website and redirects you to a screen that shows you how long you had to work to earn the purchase you're about to make. The idea is to get people to more consciously consume and reduce their consumption. It still needs work, and I'm hoping to find a way to approximate the CO2 impact of their purchase…

[deleted]

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#213

Post by avmich »

rckoepke wrote: post #76
avmich wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, the idea is something similar to this - https://sesinnovation.com/ . You carefully compress incoming air. Separate water vapors (and liquids, and hopefully not solids) from it. Cool this air in thermal exchanger - at this point CO2 falls off. Then you pass that air through turbo detander, which returns you some energy, and get a pre-liquified air, which pass to the thermal exchanger. Clean air of normal temperatu…

> How much energy will you need? A lot. Air compression is not cheap, energetically. Chilling is also energetically expensive. You'll need to do both. This would be pretty much the "brute force" method, like O(n!) in software engineering. The concept would be to bring half the planet's atmosphere down to near its liquid temperature. Currently in most US homes, Air Conditioning (air cooling) contributes the majority o…

> Air compression is not cheap, energetically. Chilling is also energetically expensive. You'll need to do both.

Not exactly.

The idea is that you don't just compress air - and let the heated compressed air cool to the atmosphere in order to then expand it so it would cool some more, and then just release whatever's left back to the atmosphere. No, you use those leftovers to cool the incoming air - so you need to compress air spending less energy - and you also get the expanding air to help you to compress incoming air.

The principal point where you have non-reversibility is that extra cooling - making compressed cold air to do the work - which you need to reach necessary temperature. And you only need that temperature to separate gases; after that you can use the cold products to help with compression.

So - without colorful metaphors - I'd like to figure out how much energy will you need.

I see the approach of SES with flue gases. I'm not sure how it will look like with regular air.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#214

Post by nnq »

tehjoker wrote: post #206
nnq wrote: post #201

Look, it's cool that we consider all these fancy solutions, but we had and still have a more obvious solution of pricing-externalities into things - a proper carbon-tax and recycling-taxes for plastics high enough to make them undesirable, increase gas (and coal) prices enough to make electric everything look cheap and maybe even nuclear power look cheaper in the new comparison! Stop pending the argument that "it's p…

"Just take politics out of the equation! Or more precisely, take "democratic choice" out of this particular policy decision!" This is such a scary sentence! The problem of climate change has been cause precisely by a lack of democracy. The military, the large oil refiners, the design of our infrastructure has been deeply affected by corporate priorities at the expense of a manipulated populace. We have climate denial…

An on:

> The problem of climate change has been cause precisely by a lack of democracy

Well, yeah, but ya know, sometimes you treat cancer with radiation... Just like you sometime need to apply more force and violence to end a war sooner and minimize overall destruction. Expecting for the Marshall island's vote to be considered in the US or the EU is not practical problem solving.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#215

Post by avmich »

stouset wrote: post #67
avmich wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you calculate how much energy is required? You would use cooled separated products to pre-cool incoming stream of "dirty" air. CO2, having low concentration, won't fall off at -79C (or we'd have that effect in Antarctica today), but if you go to ~-140C, you'll have some results. Why cooling process will produce greenhouse gas? You'd use energy from "green" sources to compensate for required expenses.

> You’d use energy from “green” sources… This isn’t something you can just assert as if by magic. By using this kind of technology, you increase the total power requirements of our civilization. That power has to come from somewhere. If you earmark green energy sources for it, something else will need to use a dirty energy source. This remains true as long as green energy production falls short of planetary demand (m…

That's why I'm trying to estimate energy requirements of such a process. Somebody experienced with gas liquification could perhaps help.

You have to build these cleaning devices, and you'll need to build energy sources for them. We do have both power and increase in power supply with time; the question is specific numbers, which I'm trying to estimate.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#216

Post by avmich »

rckoepke wrote: post #84
avmich wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you calculate how much energy is required? You would use cooled separated products to pre-cool incoming stream of "dirty" air. CO2, having low concentration, won't fall off at -79C (or we'd have that effect in Antarctica today), but if you go to ~-140C, you'll have some results. Why cooling process will produce greenhouse gas? You'd use energy from "green" sources to compensate for required expenses.

-140C only works for CO2-rich streams (> 10%). As the partial pressure of CO2 decreases, you'll need to get asymptotically closer to the melting point of oxygen/nitrogen. You'll also need to increase the pressure, but again that only gets you reasonable temperature gains if the partial pressure of CO2 is >>0mmHg. Currently it is 0.3mmHg @ 400ppm. In short, this is not a viable method for removing CO2 from the atmosph…

> -140C only works for CO2-rich streams (> 10%).

The chart in the article by the link suggests -140C would work for pressure of 0,0004 atm.

How did you get that number - >10% ?

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#217

Post by nradov »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #202
baq wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

don't call it tax, call it carbon dividend and give the collected money away to citizens.

This has been the Canadian model and the Right has still weaponized the worst kind of vitriol against it (despite a carbon tax being the most market friendly mechanism). Opponents of carbon tax and similar measures need to decide which they like less... some lost profits, an escalating carbon tax, and reshuffling their investment portfolios -- or food riots, mass migration, the massive resurgence of left wing populis…

Canada is likely to be spared the worst effects of climate change due to geography so it might not seem like such a serious problem to them. Even under the worst case scenario, Canada will still be self sufficient in staple crops. And any mass migrations will have to pass through the USA first.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#218

Post by BurningFrog »

jsomau wrote: post #195
acd wrote: post #120

We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due t…

I've been building a browser extension called Curb Your Consumerism that detects when you're on a checkout page for a website and redirects you to a screen that shows you how long you had to work to earn the purchase you're about to make. The idea is to get people to more consciously consume and reduce their consumption. It still needs work, and I'm hoping to find a way to approximate the CO2 impact of their purchase…

Let's say this works, and people spend less. That means they get more and more savings.

Eventually everyone will have huge bank accounts, but live simple lives?

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#219

Post by lotsofpulp »

OJFord wrote: post #211
lotsofpulp wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously, if people are buying them. The point is if consumers prefer cheaper, lower quality products, then how is a business offering more expensive, higher quality products supposed to survive?

My point is that the cost of the cheapest got lower, due to industrialisation & globalisation, rather than a shift in habits as people started to think 'actually sod this expensive stuff that lasts a life time, gimme cheap & disposable'.

Oh, I see what you mean. But I think people do choose to cheap and disposable for things they think they won't need. The rule of thumb for household tools is you go to harbor freight and buy the cheapest thing, and only go higher end if and when it breaks or can't do the job. Similar with electronics that keep changing or furniture if you keep moving.

I myself don't see any value to furniture of better quality than IKEA, since my kids won't want it, and I don't gain any utility of getting something of higher quality.

There's also probably some confluence with people's buying power stagnating forcing them to buy cheaper goods.

Re: We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

#220

Post by askesum »

BurningFrog wrote: post #189
acd wrote: post #120

We need to stop consuming like there is no tomorrow. This is driven by advertisement convincing consumers they should buy products they may not need. Secondly we need to make products which lasts a life time. I see root cause that we need to remodel the economy from market economy consumerism to a circular sustainable economy. Most current economists is saying expand expand expand, but that increases co2 levels due t…

I'm sorry, but this is nonsense. The atmospheric CO₂ rates come from burning too much fossil fuel. Not from people wanting things. If you consume and produce things in a way that doesn't release net CO₂, that is perfectly fine from a climate perspective, even if the products are meaningless artefacts of a materialistic life that will never make you happy. I understand the impulse toward a simpler, less materialistic…

When almost all of the money supply is generated through lending the amount of new loans must be as large as(and because of hoarding even larger) the amount of amortizations for the money supply to remain constant.So we have a system that is dependent on growth, even growth that causes environmental problems.
Post reply on HN