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Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

ckrapu.github.io

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Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#151

Post by jjk166 »

avidiax wrote: post #93

Oil 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…

Note this is an issue with averages. The conditions that produce oil deposits are rare, and last for geologically short periods. If you average out all oil ever produced by all time over which oil has been forming, the number is quite low, but during those periods of time the rate is orders of magnitude higher.

Further, the commonly touted claim that it takes millions of years for oil to form is only relevant if your goal is to naturally produce extractable oil. The carbon sequestration is practically instantaneous, it just takes millions of years of deposition for the sequestered carbon to get deep enough to turn into oil. Renewable oil is never going to be a thing, but sequestering carbon through biomass is at least possible.

And note that any realistic solution to climate change demands a reduction in fossil fuel consumption, but with sequestration less reduction is necessary, and the very large amount of carbon already emitted can be removed.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#153

Post by jjk166 »

philipkglass wrote: post #6
8474_s wrote: post #4

wouldn't it be much simpler to just mass produce more furniture out of wood, instead of keeping the same-equivalent biomass frozen infinitely?

There's not enough useful demand to tame CO2 this way. Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are currently about 37 billion tons per year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions That's enough CO2 to make 22.7 billion metric tons of cellulose per year, or ~2.8 tons per capita for Earth's 8.2 billion people. That's too much to to turn it all into furniture or even buildings.

The average house weighs 40-80 tons, so 2.8 tons per capita per year is a house every 14-28 years, which seems reasonable, plus infrastructure.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#154

Post by 7speter »

CalRobert wrote: post #126
lumb63 wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am a fan of a carbon tax, but one issue I’ve never seen addressed by proponents is the regressive structure of the tax. Oftentimes the poorest areas are using the most carbon-intensive energy sources and thus stand to be hurt the most by a carbon tax. There is little the average poor person can do to avoid this Similar logic applies for, e.g. EV subsidies - the people most capable of dishing out the cash to secure…

Within a given area rich people tend to use more carbon. Poor people are less likely to be taking international flights, etc. Annoyingly, one big problem is that we've allowed NIMBY's to make it illegal to build homes near jobs, so people who can't afford homes near work are often stuck driving long distances to work through no fault of their own.

Rich people can afford electric cars while poor people won’t be able to, even if the car is used, through the next decade. If anything, SUV prices will drop like a rock…

Also, rich people can decide to pay for expensive upgrades to their homes (switching to heatpumps, upgrading electrical wiring for efficient solar/wind usage, solar panels, high voltage chargers for electrical vehicles), while poorer home owners (many of whom are on fixed income), aren’t able to do those things.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#155

Post by derdi »

On the one hand: Nice formulas.

On the other hand: Glaciers are melting, even in Iceland. Keeping stuff frozen seems pretty difficult in practice.

Also, one of the formulas for air flow through the pile seems to assume 90 straight days of constantly freezing temperatures. I doubt there is prime agricultural land where you get that.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#157

Post by arresin »

Self-Perfection wrote: post #140
Y-bar wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not wrong. That said I want to take issue with one thing: Between the lines there is a suggestion that doing a small positive action is useless. But that implies that there is either a silver bullet-type solution where doing only one major thing will resolve the problem of climate change, or that there is no possible way we can resolve it. I want to counter the implication by saying that the problem of solving…

The only thing we need to implement from your list is the carbon tax. But it has to be sufficiently high. The rest will happen without extra nudging just because doing it "the wrong way" will be too expensive. By feeding carbon tax money into carbon extraction we can eventually start reducing amount of carbon in atmosphere.

Imagine the money collected being awarded on a per tonne basis for each tonne of carbon you can extract and reliably sequester.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#158

Post by arresin »

xbmcuser wrote: post #19

This 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…

It is crazy to me that there are any tariffs anywhere on solar panels. You can make them more efficiently? Great.

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#159

Post by hcurtiss »

carapace wrote: post #150
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original claim was essentially that energy use can't increase past a certain point because it would result in too much energy density. The obvious flaw in the claim is that it assumes no ability to increase the volume of space in which the energy use takes place, which is an invalid premise. Space is really big.

No, dude, even if you postulate FTL spaceships, the size of the Universe doesn't matter, you always eventually become an explosion. All exponential growth curves are S-shaped. At this point I'm just repeating basic physics and math at you. I think we both have better things to do with our time. Have a good day.

Yeah, Ehrlich will be right any day now. Just you watch . . .

Re: Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

#160

Post by AnthonyMouse »

carapace wrote: post #150
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The original claim was essentially that energy use can't increase past a certain point because it would result in too much energy density. The obvious flaw in the claim is that it assumes no ability to increase the volume of space in which the energy use takes place, which is an invalid premise. Space is really big.

No, dude, even if you postulate FTL spaceships, the size of the Universe doesn't matter, you always eventually become an explosion. All exponential growth curves are S-shaped. At this point I'm just repeating basic physics and math at you. I think we both have better things to do with our time. Have a good day.

We don't even know for sure that the universe is finite. You're going to run out of hydrogen before you run out of somewhere to put the heat.
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