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

$100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

xprize.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 469 posts

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#191

Post by dumbfoundded »

datameta wrote: post #109
mchusma wrote: post #94

Elon is such an amazing force in the world. This prize is great, and overdue. Not surprised to see Elon involved.

Everything he does is in some way to make the post-scarcity far future of The Culture more attainable. For all of his social flaws this thought alone gives him my deep respect. I don't think he is infallible but in my opinion a lot of attempts at character assassination don't truly understand the underlying purpose of why he does what he does. I still look at developments in his companies with a critical eye - for ex…

The biggest problem with Elon and it's not just him or his fault is that the biggest barrier is our political systems. $100M is like a small city's annual budget. In Ashland, OR the city budget is $140M/year with about 20,000 residents. This prize is not going to solve anything. Even if Elon spent all of his money on this prize, it would still be a drop in the bucket compared to how many resources our political systems control. As much as these well intentioned billionaires try, they're never going solve anything important.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#193

Post by brightball »

kisamoto wrote: post #56

There's a few "plant trees" or "terraform the sahara" comments in here. For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0]. Not only that but it would still take a century for the trees to reach maturity. Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again. [0] https://science.sciencemag.or…

Depends on the tree.

Empress seems to be the ideal candidate.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2019-08-02/we-alread...

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#194

Post by tito »

alexose wrote: post #190
tito wrote: post #162

I'm curious what people here think about their own role in a prize like this. Are you interested in joining a team? Starting a company? Working on gigaton scale carbon removal? I've been working on carbon removal for the past few years, eager to help anyone who is considering actually making a leap into this industry for their own curiosity or even career. That said there are plenty of other massive juicy challenges…

I would work on this problem for free. Climate change is an existential threat to my life in Southwest Oregon.

Heck yeah! Check out my other comment about Boot Up - may be a helpful start

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#195

Post by floppiplopp »

chris_overseas wrote: post #127

I'm curious to hear what people here think of Project Vesta? https://www.projectvesta.org/ (No affiliation, just intrigued by what they're promising)

It's one of the best options we know that could work. Basically grind up readily available basalt with technology we already have at scale and dump it into the oceans and onto agricultural soils - which is quite beneficial for soil structure, too. But I'm afraid it's not going to be sexy enough for technocratic phantasies and it cannot be monetized through some kind of futuristic looking devices.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#196

Post by otterley »

BitwiseFool wrote: post #31
re-al wrote: post #28

Why cant we just plant more trees? Or let the trees we have grow bigger, to soak up all that extra carbon?

>"Why cant we just plant more trees?" We can, and we certainly should, but that does not solve the problem because those trees will eventually die and that carbon will cycle back through the biosphere. Mankind extracted a ton of carbon from the ground, where it was locked away, and we put it back into the air. People are trying to find ways of putting all that extra carbon back somewhere where it won't affect the cyc…

Dead trees lie on the ground, with all their sequestered carbon sitting there. It's not like the carbon is going back into the atmosphere, at least not without some process like combustion. Coal is basically dead trees. Before we started extracting coal and burning it, it was harmless to the atmosphere.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#197

Post by flavius29663 »

lucb1e wrote: post #175
flavius29663 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Our 2019 emissions were ~36 gigatons The plants absorb about 25% of that and the oceans another 25%. If we absorb 10 gigatons yearly by 2050, that might be good enough.

Wait, 36 originally × .75 from plants × .75 from oceans - 10 captured = 20¼ Gt. I think you're off by about 10 Gt? And that's assuming the ocean and plants will infinitely capture more and more carbon, which I sincerely doubt as well, but I'll go ahead and assume you mean this as a bridging method to get us another decade or two to finalize real solutions.

it's actually 36 - (36x0.25) - (36x0.25) - 10 = 8.

But yeah, we would have to reduce our emissions by at least 8GT to get to zero. That is totally doable, advanced economies are already reducing CO2 at a faster rate than 25% over 30 years: the US has reduced it's emissions by 1GT in 10 years (16% reduction).

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#198

Post by eloff »

hitpointdrew wrote: post #135
kisamoto wrote: post #56

There's a few "plant trees" or "terraform the sahara" comments in here. For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0]. Not only that but it would still take a century for the trees to reach maturity. Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again. [0] https://science.sciencemag.or…

>For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0]. Not even, say you could transform the Sahara to rain forest, awesome right? I mean it would be an incredible feat, but it would give you exactly 0 with reducing carbon. Contrary to popular belief the Amazon rain forest aren't the "lungs" of the planet, the Amazon rain forest is basically net 0.…

The Amazon rain forest is not net zero because of animals. It's net zero (actually net negative last I heard) because humans are burning it to make way for agriculture.

Trees sequester carbon. They also return that carbon to the atmosphere eventually, but as long as they're replaced by new trees, that's fine. That's not what's happening in the Amazon.

From a carbon perspective forests for timber are even better because then we keep several generations of trees worth of carbon locked up in our structures. It's also an easier sell because that has real economic value.

From a biodiversity perspective it's not as good to have monoculture crops of any kind, including trees.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#199

Post by brightball »

tohmasu wrote: post #137

I get the feeling there's a "snake eating its own tail" aspect here. Assuming carbon sequestration can be done at scale, it will likely require energy, maybe even a lot of energy. So where's this energy going to come from? Well... global energy demand is increasing as-is and the winners are: coal, oil and "natural" gas (which is a fossil fuel): https://www.statista.com/statistics/222066/projected-global-... Even assu…

Honestly, if carbon capture is effective for the power requirements that it has...build a nuclear facility dedicated to the carbon capture tech.

Re: $100M xPrize for Carbon Removal

#200

Post by rcpt »

kisamoto wrote: post #56

There's a few "plant trees" or "terraform the sahara" comments in here. For some context, if we planted trees wherever we could around the world we can only undo a decades worth of emissions[0]. Not only that but it would still take a century for the trees to reach maturity. Our use of technology threw nature out of balance and we need to use technology to get the balance back again. [0] https://science.sciencemag.or…

It does seem unlikely that we'd be able to control temperatures without resorting to sulfur dioxide.

It'll probably start a war, but once natural resources start getting scarce I fully expect the affected nation to deploy SO2.

Post reply on HN