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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?

#61

Post by worik »

Tiktaalik wrote: post #39
nadermx wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you stop it? I don't think the greed of the super rich is per say the problem. Perhaps there needs to be a shift in economic incentive

We need to make it profitable to do the good things and not profitable to do the bad things. This way people will do the good things and not the bad things. The most straight forward way to do this would be to make doing the bad things more expensive, which means taxing carbon emissions. Alongside this would be to create alternatives that are cheaper and easier to use. Unfortunately this would mean actually spending…

> The most straight forward way to do this would be to make doing the bad things more expensive, which means taxing carbon emissions.

Yes. This is the solution starting in 1990. It is too late now, for this to be the solution. It is a good idea, but.

We are going to have to shut down hole industries, and the owners will loose their investment. We are going to have to make a lot of very rich people, ordinarily rich.

This is very hard to do in a democracy.

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

#62

Post by prottog »

user982 wrote: post #36
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…

A clarion call for humanity to wage open war on nature.

That is all of human history, from the moment we wrapped animal hide around us and picked up a sharp rock. Humanity didn't get to be the dominant life-form on the planet by asking nature nicely to please not bother us.

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

#63

Post by analog31 »

rjtc wrote: post #57

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.

Unfortunately, fertilizer presently has a large carbon footprint

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

#64

Post by alvarezbjm-hn »

Solvency wrote: post #44
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…

Stop CAFO. Grassfed, grass finished cows only. The US once had millions of free roaming bison. The landscape was never more fertile.

CAFO: Concentrated animal feeding operation.

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

#65

Post by variant »

What does success look like in the climate change fight? Is there a point where victory can ever be declared? Is that a "correct" temperature (what is it) or a CO2 PPM number (what's ideal)? When industry and scientists stop lobbying for money to fight it?

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

#66

Post by sokoloff »

interroboink wrote: post #47
gregschlom wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

gregschlom's law of headlines on HN: "Any headline on Hacker News that ends in a question mark will have a comment mentioning Betteridge's law of headlines" I'm not joking. It's been done so often that it doesn't add much to the conversation at this point. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... - over 2,000 hits.

Yet be mindful of the Ten Thousand[1] when scorning reiteration. I, for one, had never heard of Betteridge's law (: [1] https://xkcd.com/1053/ (though surely everyone has seen that comic zillions of times, by now)

> though surely everyone has seen that comic zillions of times, by now

I see what you did there. Nice!

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

#67

Post by mordymoop »

jansan wrote: post #22

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

So many different cheap, easy options to at least partly remedy the problem and possibly reverse it, but the only possibility seriously discussed is a civilization-destroying and politically unrealistic austerity.

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

#68

Post by worik »

scotty79 wrote: post #50
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…

If you don't care about harvesting it you might want to bioengineer something that will grow on the coast of Namibia and seed it there. This coast pretty much can't be used for anything.

What could possibly go wrong?

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

#69

Post by jorgen123 »

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…

Here is a calculation done by project Drawdown. Potentially 2.5 to 4.72 gigatons CO2e reduced/sequestered over a 30 year period: https://drawdown.org/solutions/seaweed-farming

It is one of many viable solutions and humanity is working on many or most of them. We need them all. Seaweed would be great as cattle feed is one of the pathways this highlights.

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

#70

Post by alas44 »

variant wrote: post #65

What does success look like in the climate change fight? Is there a point where victory can ever be declared? Is that a "correct" temperature (what is it) or a CO2 PPM number (what's ideal)? When industry and scientists stop lobbying for money to fight it?

Ideally, pre-industrial levels of CO2 ppm and stabilization of planetary scale changes (ocean dilatation, melting of glaciers etc). Because of inertia at this scale, for the second part we are already in trouble, even if we were able to magically stop emitting CO2 today
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