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.
I don’t think you should be downvoted. People really don’t like it because it is clearly not the optimal way to solve the problem, but we should take the possibility seriously instead of down voting anyone who brings it up as something that might happen. We are letting anthropogenic global warming happen because it’s cheaper in the very near term. But climate change is a real thing and will have real, life-threatenin…
And on top of that I don't think it'd even be possible to know who deployed the SO2.
The stuff isn't uranium and not much is needed. Any nation with an airplane should be able to get away with it.
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…
All of these systems are going to require radical construction of hundreds and hundreds of nuclear reactors.
This has economics of scale benefits, and I expect reactors such as the ones discussed in this video: https://youtu.be/7gtog_gOaGQ
to be produced on a factory line extremely quickly.
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.
Calcium carbonate is a better fit - see Gates’s experiments. Likely to still be disastrous, but better than sulfur dioxide
This sounds cool from a tech-nerd perspective, but of course it all is pretty futile if we don't get emissions under control. The video says 10 gigatons/yr by 2050. Our 2019 emissions were ~36 gigatons. I.e. even if capture is successful, it needs to be accompanied by aggressive emissions reductions for us to even get to neutral, let alone reversing damage. I'm guessing Musk had some thought process around the expect…
Those 36 gigatons aren't largely a result of consumer behaviors, but industry (which, admittedly, increases as a function of demand) Reducing footprints through innovation will go a ways. Changing "culture" (i.e. coerced minimalism) is a thing, but it's a band-aid solution on a leaking hoover-dam; virtue signaling for the most part. Carbon footprints scale up with population. Everyone eats, wants gadgets, wants a hom…
I actually think all people in the developed world - rich people of course most of all, but “commoners” too - do need to learn to be content with a lot less. Before the industrial era, the average person in England owned 36 objects. And that’s counting like 1) table 2) bowl 3) cup 4) knife. The way people in America and Europe have been taught to live in the last century - even the lower-middle and working class, let alone the rich - is inherently unsustainable, and can never be sustainable. “Buy less sh*t” should be the first and most powerful front in our fight against climate change, but it isn’t because we are selfish and gluttonous beasts.
Yeah, but I'm not interested since the real solutions are generally off limits. The $100M is what I really want (or even $1M would be nice). In fact what i really want is to be employed to enter competitions like this and Gates' toilet competition. I'm just too dumb.
If you find a way please consider me for your team :-) My current attempt to support projects like these is to make them as accesible as possible on https://carbonremoved.com You get your $1M and I will include your removal method in our portfolio!
The real issue is consumption. This drives CO2, various pollution, factory farming, deforestation, decline of natural species (eg fish stocks), etc. Some Indian states recently announced efforts to basically cap the number of children at 2. Although China has expanded it's policy from 1 to 2 and is now suggesting that 3 may be ok.
Most types of carbon capture technology [1] being touted are credit cards for climate change: You burn enough fuel to generate 4MJ worth of heat... Your internal combustion engine generates 1MJ worth of mechanical effort from this... You use this to propel a 2 ton vehicle... Carrying 1 person... To take part in the rat race or indulge in some consumerism. [2] The carbon dioxide sits in the atmosphere for 50 years whe…
Genuine question - if CO2 half life in the atmosphere is less than 50 years, why are we so concerned about it? Wouldn’t the problem solve itself given that we are both reaching peak consumption of fossil fuels and that they are expected to deplete with the next century? In other words, wouldn’t the co2 concentration go down naturally within the next 100 years even if we let thing run naturally?
Time to quit my job and become an inventor (actually something I thought was a real thing when I was a kid). My idiot-layman brain says buy it from AirGas or capture from large emitters and pipe it into a geological structures like the do for storing helium. It could probably only get to gigatons if it's worldwide and we have enough geological structures capable of containing it.
I thought the same thing as a child. Recently I realized that programming and making apps is like being an inventor. When I make applications for other people to use, is that not akin to making some kind of new machine or tool?
No, because the lynchpin of these physical technologies we need are going to be just that, physical. No amount of neural networking or cryptocurrency mining is going to be anything other than peripheral to the advancements based on basic research in physical science.
If the solution to carbon capture comes from a company like Deepmind (ala protein folding), i'll eat my shoe.
A decade sounds like a pretty good start. If we could combine that with transitioning away from lawns and towards gardens / orchards (like even on highway medians!), imagine the savings in terms of shipping food.
Highway medians are lawn for safety reasons. Planting an orchard between two lanes of traffic going 75 mph would result in a ton of fatalities
Seems like you'd intentionally plant many small/short trees that will act as nice crash barriers, not large strong trees that act like brick walls. Orchards tend to be short trees anyway.
Hitting the tree equivalent of those sand-filled barrels sounds a lot better than dissipating that same energy by either A) flipping, or B) colliding with oncoming traffic.
It would be interesting to see the videos of "crash testing" various types of orchards!
Most types of carbon capture technology [1] being touted are credit cards for climate change: You burn enough fuel to generate 4MJ worth of heat... Your internal combustion engine generates 1MJ worth of mechanical effort from this... You use this to propel a 2 ton vehicle... Carrying 1 person... To take part in the rat race or indulge in some consumerism. [2] The carbon dioxide sits in the atmosphere for 50 years whe…
Genuine question - if CO2 half life in the atmosphere is less than 50 years, why are we so concerned about it? Wouldn’t the problem solve itself given that we are both reaching peak consumption of fossil fuels and that they are expected to deplete with the next century? In other words, wouldn’t the co2 concentration go down naturally within the next 100 years even if we let thing run naturally?
Nevertheless, plants and trees won't do it. They grow pretty much everywhere already where they can. Nature is better at reclaiming those areas than we are - there are an estimated three trillion trees in the world. Then there's the problem that there's no significant process that turns trees into sequestered carbon for longer than the trees' lifespan. The reason it's important to keep saying this is that lots of peo…
> They feel all accomplished and that they did their part. But if that doesn't have any real impact on the problem, then we've done lots of work, used up people's goodwill, but not dented the problem. Does the evidence support that people's goodwill get "used up"? It seems as plausible a theory to me that, when people get involved and take direct action, it ends up driving them to take further actions. Being personal…
>Does the evidence support that people's goodwill get "used up"?
That's a good question. I assume it will be both for different groups of people. From my personal experience it seems to be that way, but I'm unaware of any studies on the subject.