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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?

#171

Post by DoreenMichele »

merouan wrote: post #170
aydyn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no other possibility except a technical solution. Expecting humans to change their behavior collectively, across the globe, is magical thinking.

Here’s the thing: actually, we need the behavior of a _very small_ number of humans to change: the rich. Not only is their personal CO2 consumption the majority of personal CO2 consumption, but the capital they control drives the behavior and policy of everything else. This is a far easier problem to solve. I’ll leave the solution to your imagination.

Sadly, many of them would rather plan to ruin the world and then flee to a (cough) "safehouse" (cough) in New Zealand than in any way get a clue.

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

#172

Post by suoduandao2 »

raffraffraff wrote: post #149
K0balt wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion is the key. Replace all of our dirty energy, and produce enough surplus to sequester carbon. We should be pursuing fusion as if the survival of the planet depends on it…because it is likely that it does.

What if fusion is impossible though, from an engineering perspective? Why not continue to pursue fission using safer, modern reactor designs? It works. The timelines for fusion, if it ever works, are too long.

We already have a conveniently-placed fusion reactor that's boing to be operational for a few billion years.

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

#173

Post by throw10920 »

nologic01 wrote: post #82

There won't be any ingenious, miracle carbon removal solution and various proposals may even be flirting with ecological disasters of planetary proportions. Anything that expands our footprint in order to mitigate our footprint is a dubious direction. Reminds of an apprentice wizard that panics and invokes a sequence of spells, each one worse than the other. Discussions and thinking around sustainability underestimat…

Do you have any evidence whatsoever that your claims are true? It looks like you have an agenda to push but no sources to support it. Is there any scientific backing to these ideas? (not to climate change, but ideas like "Climate change is but one symptom of the anthropocene")

...not to mention the extremely emotional language meant to manipulate instead of argue with evidence.

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

#174

Post by ben_w »

analog31 wrote: post #152
ben_w wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many crop fertilisers have that issue, but fertiliser is not only one thing. One hypothesis is that algae are limited by some single resource which could be gradually dropped out the back of cargo ships as they cross oceans, seeding carbon-absorbing algal blooms as they go. (I heard about this nearly 20 years ago, so I assume that has either been tested or banned since then…)

I'm thinking mainly about the Haber-Bosch process, which runs on methane, and feeds more than half of the world's animal population. As mentioned in a sibling comment, it could run on some other heat source, but that hasn't been demonstrated yet on the scale of agriculture.

Indeed, that's one of the main possibilities I guessed you were thinking of; for triggering algal blooms, one of the things suggested was iron. (And given it was immediately going into salt water, ore would presumably have been fine… if the hypothesis was correct).

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

#175

Post by pvaldes »

selimthegrim wrote: post #159
pvaldes wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes tell us more about the notably clean bays of Rio de Janeiro

This is not about being clean or not, is about being previously occupied by another activity that is economically much stronger so you just can't compete or displace them. All the good places near the coast are heavily occupied yet so, where do they want to culture all this volume?. The other companies have enough money to buy you off of the road and build an hotel, or are the only remaining place suitable for the local authorities to place the new airport

And not all places are suitable to grow brown algae. (Not they aren't. Algae are not so easy to grow as National Geographic seem to suggest. They have predators also). Chinese grow a lot of Palmaria since thousands years and the trend is to replace it for its relatively low value by Hectare, either transform it into crab farms to increase the benefits, or turn it into a developed urban area.

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

#176

Post by pvaldes »

dang wrote: post #165
dpflan wrote: post #6

Here are more related HN posts 1. Banking on the Seaweed Rush - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35322725 2. Ocean Farming: Seaweed is having its moment in the sun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35176560

Thanks! Macroexpanded: Banking on the Seaweed Rush - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35322725 - March 2023 (46 comments) Ocean Farming: Seaweed is having its moment in the sun - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35176560 - March 2023 (45 comments) Amazon funds seaweed farming at offshore wind farm to test CO2 capture - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34839380 - Feb 2023 (91 comments) Feeding cows seaweed…

Almost all of this articles are based in wild extrapolation from the same unique source. This is bad science and time will prove that is a false solution (In my arrogant opinion). Models in biology are not always linear.

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

#177

Post by Springtime »

roboticmind wrote: post #90
jorgen123 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It doesn't do as much as you think for cattle feed as most the high % numbers you see touted are only looking at feedlot emissions - which are only 11% of overall cattle emissions. Actual reductions are pretty small >What’s more, feeding cattle algae is really only practical where it’s least needed: on feedlots. This is where most cattle are crowded in the final months of their 1.5- to 2-year lives to rapidly put on…

The authors' argument about the 8.8% reduction hinges on both their assumption that it wouldn't be feasible to add to cows' diets on pastures and the uncertain possibility their guts would adapt and mitigate the effectiveness.

Yet the articles they cite (which both quote the same study) describe that on a diet of 0.75% seaweed (0.25% more than the research I saw years prior) only some cattle didn't like the taste and there was an unspecified reduction in feed intake, which hardly seems the foregone conclusion the Wired authors make it out to be. While the aspect about cows' gut reactions long term is also unknown, though one of their links mentions both a 72 and 90 day trial which showed no gut adaption or reduction in effectiveness which is said to be hopeful since 'most adaptations happen within a few weeks'.

Ironically the On Pasture link Wired cites for their argument against is more neutral/optimistic and also mentions that two other more common types of seaweed reduce methane output by 20% and encouraged experimenting with for cattle diets.

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

#178

Post by ben_w »

merouan wrote: post #170
aydyn wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no other possibility except a technical solution. Expecting humans to change their behavior collectively, across the globe, is magical thinking.

Here’s the thing: actually, we need the behavior of a _very small_ number of humans to change: the rich. Not only is their personal CO2 consumption the majority of personal CO2 consumption, but the capital they control drives the behavior and policy of everything else. This is a far easier problem to solve. I’ll leave the solution to your imagination.

Kinda, but most people on this website are in the global top 1%, and 1% is both a small percentage and still 80 million people.

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

#179

Post by ben_w »

woleium wrote: post #166
K0balt wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fusion is the key. Replace all of our dirty energy, and produce enough surplus to sequester carbon. We should be pursuing fusion as if the survival of the planet depends on it…because it is likely that it does.

Still need to be concerned with the amount of latent heat generated on the planet surface

Eventually yes, but that's not the immediate problem.

400 years to boil the oceans, but that kind of timescale means we can have 300 years of business as usual followed by using a von Neumann probe to rearrange Mercury into a Dyson swarm, at which point the Earth's temperature is under total external control because we can switch the sun off when we don't like the heat.

OK, so more like "hiding" the sun — switching it off is still possible with a Dyson swarm but I don't know how long that takes — but from the point of view of Earth it might as well be switching it off.

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

#180

Post by sokoloff »

WastingMyTime89 wrote: post #139
sokoloff wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of the emissions are people-related: https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissions/global-greenhouse-gas-emiss... People who want food, transportation, electricity, heat, concrete, etc.

That’s a sector breakdown of emission. That doesn’t address my point at all. Everything human is people related at some point or we wouldn’t be doing it. As you can see the most emitting sector is energy production. That’s mostly driven by countries using coal as energy source and countries with significant oil and gas reserves. It is a lever at the strategical and political level. Same with industry where gains are…

May be worth noting that the US burns more coal today than China on a per-capita basis.
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