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Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

nationalgeographic.com

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Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

#51

Post by ben_w »

bequanna wrote: post #33
snapcaster wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay cool, so what is your timeline for how long will it take to stop humans from being greedy? You realize any solution that is "rich people stop being greedy" is no solution at all?

Who are these greedy people exactly? “Being greedy” is having food on the table, a roof over my head, and a few nice things?

Each of those words may be carrying more load than you intended.

Food on the table — Rice, lentils, peas: not greedy; Beef burgers, caviar, civet coffee: kinda is.

Roof over your head — traditional hut, not greedy; penthouse suite in Dubai, greedy.

A few nice things? So many options. Once was, aluminium and purple(!) both cost more than gold. Is it "a nice thing" or "greedy" for me to fly to some paradise island for a week vacation? Or to own a fursuit? Or a normal suit? Or to get an electric bike instead of a manual one?

(I'm in favour of raising everyone to the level of current royalty; I think this can be done without wrecking everything, but we have to solve some problems first).

Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

#52

Post by cpeterso »

From 2022: Running Tide is facing scientist departures and growing concerns over seaweed sinking for carbon removal:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/06/16/1053758/running-...

> At least several of the departures were due, in part, to concerns that the company’s executives weren’t paying sufficient attention to the potential ecological effects of its plans. Some employees were also disturbed that Running Tide was discussing more controversial practices, including adding nutrients to the ocean to stimulate macroalgae growth.

Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

#53

Post by thechao »

gdudeman wrote: post #40
eklitzke wrote: post #32

It's a cool idea but I don't see how this is a viable long term solution, even if done at a large scale. Global oil production is on the order of 90M barrels/year, each barrel contains about 300 lbs of oil, so we're currently producing something like 27B lbs (~12B kg) of oil per year. I'm not sure how much of this ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere versus e.g. plastics, but I think it's safe to say we're probably emitt…

I like this back-of-the-envelope estimate, but it's even worse than that. The carbon in oil is lightweight relative to the two oxygens it combines with (atomic weights 12 and 16 respectively) from the air, so 1kg of oil emits about 3kg of CO2! Punchline: we emit around 34 gigatons of CO2 per year.

My argument is that we're probably going to kill the Gulf of Mexico, anyways, with global warming; so, let's go ahead and dump 34 gigatons/year of serpentine in it. That'll 0-out the CO2 we're releasing, at the cost of dramatically changing the Gulf's ecosystem. At this point, I really do think we (humanity) are going to have to make some pretty hard trade-offs.

Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

#54

Post by baq »

eklitzke wrote: post #32

It's a cool idea but I don't see how this is a viable long term solution, even if done at a large scale. Global oil production is on the order of 90M barrels/year, each barrel contains about 300 lbs of oil, so we're currently producing something like 27B lbs (~12B kg) of oil per year. I'm not sure how much of this ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere versus e.g. plastics, but I think it's safe to say we're probably emitt…

Yeah last time it happened (on a scale which is hard to imagine we could achieve) it took a 800k years to reduce CO2 ppm by ~2850, this is a leisurely rate of 3.56ppm/1k years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azolla_event

Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

#55

Post by alvarezbjm-hn »

bequanna wrote: post #33
snapcaster wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay cool, so what is your timeline for how long will it take to stop humans from being greedy? You realize any solution that is "rich people stop being greedy" is no solution at all?

Who are these greedy people exactly? “Being greedy” is having food on the table, a roof over my head, and a few nice things?

Being greedy is declaring the food and the house is yours, and kick everybody accordingly. Then you offer as little food as possible in exchange for 18 hour shifts of housekeeping

Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

#56

Post by prottog »

ethanbond wrote: post #27
prottog wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You do not need to fight climate change, we need to stop it. The correct answer is neither; we need advanced technologies and material wealth that will allow us to master the environment more robustly. Consider that in the past 50 years of climate change, the human population more than doubled yet the number of deaths from climate-related causes dropped to one-third[0], mainly due to the growing wealth of developin…

We also extincted broad swaths of our ecosystem while keeping the rich westerners well air-conditioned. So… you know. No free lunch. Hope we, as biological creatures borne of a billion-year old evolutionary process, don’t actually need the system that birthed us (for some reason).

My sincere hope is that the poor non-Westerners will also be well air-conditioned. And yes, you are quite right that there is no free lunch. In my analysis, the opportunity cost of going all-in on degrowth and solar/wind is precisely that the global poor will remain poor.

I'm by no means advocating that we destroy nature for the fun of it! But if the alternative is between us destroying nature or nature destroying us, I know which side I'm going to pick.

Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

#57

Post by rjtc »

Most of the ocean is desert lacking the limiting nutrients of nitrogen, phosphorous and iron. If we can cheaply fertilize large swathes of the ocean with these limiting nutrients in a controlled manner, then this could trigger massive algae blooms that on sinking sequester massive amounts of carbon.

Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

#58

Post by _fizz_buzz_ »

gdudeman wrote: post #40
eklitzke wrote: post #32

It's a cool idea but I don't see how this is a viable long term solution, even if done at a large scale. Global oil production is on the order of 90M barrels/year, each barrel contains about 300 lbs of oil, so we're currently producing something like 27B lbs (~12B kg) of oil per year. I'm not sure how much of this ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere versus e.g. plastics, but I think it's safe to say we're probably emitt…

I like this back-of-the-envelope estimate, but it's even worse than that. The carbon in oil is lightweight relative to the two oxygens it combines with (atomic weights 12 and 16 respectively) from the air, so 1kg of oil emits about 3kg of CO2! Punchline: we emit around 34 gigatons of CO2 per year.

But wouldn't it be a carbon chain again in the seaweed without oxygen? So, we can ignore the weight of the oxygen? Still, the numbers are huge. But I think at this point we have try everything at once.

Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

#59

Post by FrustratedMonky »

marssaxman wrote: post #26
jansan wrote: post #22

No, blowing H2S and SO2 into the stratosphere is cheaper.

The probability that this will end up happening leaves me feeling glad to be mortal.

Wait? Is someone really planning to do it? I just read 'Termination Shock' and it was big plot point. Didn't think anybody would really do it.

Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?

#60

Post by pvaldes »

worik wrote: post #43
pvaldes wrote: post #37

No The cow burp effect is a myth. With five minutes thinking about it, is easy to see why is a no solution. I have explained here before why will not work. Most of the seaweeds are water. And the dry matter is salty. Coastal areas are extremely busy. You can't remove Honk Kong city to culture seaweeds. You can't block maritime traffic routes to culture seaweeds, or stop all commercial fishing near the shore, or ban t…

> Coastal areas are extremely busy. No. Ports are busy. The coast is huge. Most of it, on the wet side, is mostly not busy at all Sea lanes are further out, land dwellers on the dry bit.

If you think that you can obtain a permit to put such eyesore as a seaweed farm in front of Copacabana, well... good luck with it.

But we could of course build it in the middle of nowhere, and then spend lots of fuel to move the product to the far-far-away markets, and even feel good about our ecological trace for a couple seconds.

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