What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?
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Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
91–100 of 178 posts
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#92I'm going to share my own insane idea for drawing down atmospheric CO2. Capture CO2 as biomass or with direct air capture. Pyrolyze biomass to charcoal or use the Bosch reaction to recover pure carbon from CO2 chemically [1]. Then combine the carbon with silicon to form silicon carbide via the Acheson process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson_process Silicon carbide is extraordinarily resistant to mechanical ero…
Hmm. Assuming I’m on board with apocalypse, this kinda seems like a hat on a hat. Couldn’t we destroy the magnetosphere and vent the atmosphere with less energy than it would take to get all that carbon out? Or, hell, deorbit the moon one more time? I guess it’s harder to ramp up that tech in secret/with a benign excuse.
Plus a lot of it’s in living beings — you’d either have to find and harvest/burn all of them manually (or wait for the decomposition cycle to get it in the air I suppose?). At that point, you might as well go with a classic Skynet-style small-arms-based doomsday!
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#93Oil formed over millions of years at a rate of about 80,000 barrels / year. We consume 36.4 billion barrels of oil per year. That means we consume oil about 455,000 times faster than it was originally produced. And this is just oil; I'm not counting coal and natural gas.
Trying to reverse that process by taking a fraction of one year's plant growth and sequestering it is probably 5-6 orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change.
https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/571/how-muc...
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#94Oil formed over millions of years at a rate of about 80,000 barrels / year. We consume 36.4 billion barrels of oil per year. That means we consume oil about 455,000 times faster than it was originally produced. And this is just oil; I'm not counting coal and natural gas. Trying to reverse that process by taking a fraction of one year's plant growth and sequestering it is probably 5-6 orders of magnitude too little to…
especially since modern farming heavily uses oil based pesticides
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the US, the rate at which we install utility scale solar and wind is currently limited by how quickly we can upgrade the grid to support it, with interconnect wait lists taking over 5 years in some areas[1]. Lifting tariffs wouldn't speed things up without fixing that first. [1] https://emp.lbl.gov/news/grid-connection-backlog-grows-30-20...
Interconnect is going to be old news once batteries and balance-of-system costs get low enough. Local microgrids at the substation level are going to be the way to go, with only a minority of current traveling long distances (except for certain natural features, i.e. hydroelectric)
Our car can run our all-electric house for days. We have more than one car.
It’s not clear to me how much the power grid will matter in ten years. I can imagine cities using substations to route N solar installations to M bidirectional EV chargers, I guess. For places as or less dense than suburbs, it’s not obvious that it makes sense to bother.
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
The spring-summer timeframe is the biggest issue to deal with here. I think that this design would have to have a sacrificial layer with decomposing, anoxic material which degrades during the warmer months. Perhaps it could be mitigated with various expedients to decrease the ambient temperature like flooding the surrounding landscape or putting a shade over the pile. This scheme only makes sense if the amount of bio…
With intentionally wet hay (or similar) I would start worrying about spontaneous combustion. https://news.okstate.edu/articles/agriculture/2020/stotts_br... https://www.beefmagazine.com/livestock-management/-what-are-... Perhaps worthwhile to annually top with a cover membrane (possibly bioplastic) to control moisture? Maybe even two layers (bottom airtight and top vapor permeable), sandwiching the dry "insulation" t…
Any idea is enlivened by the possibility of criticality and runaway thermal energy production as the melting hay produces heat, thus melting more hay and so on.
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#97Or. And I’m just spit balling here. Plant super long lived trees. Redwoods live for >200 years. Eucalyptus grow very quickly and might be a good option too.
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#98Instead of freezing plants we can more simply drop them in oxygen deprived seas, like the bottom of the black sea.
The problem is the scale that is required, we generate so much CO2 that capturing it would require to build the biggest industry on earth dedicated to this (several time that of concrete)
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#99This year ie 2024 world will add more solar power than the total consumption growth. This is despite the tariffs and sanctions on Chinese panels and batteries. I think the world is at the cusp of dramatic change that would come faster if not for western countries trying to protect their industries. I think adding more renewables as fast as possible specially solar is the best option as this will make essentially ener…
This should reduce carbon emissions, but the dow.stream consequences seem complex and difficult to anticipate. For instance, what happens to human consumption of other resources when energy becomes essentially free? How much cheaper does it become, say, to exploit, extract, refine, and manufacture? And if extraction becomes cheaper, maintaining oil infrastructure becomes arguably a simple matter of industrial convenience: why bother to change when it's only becoming cheaper?
Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws
#100we created the problem by abusing technology so I doubt more technology will solve it. We need to change our consumerism culture from throw away to keep forever.