111–120 of 682 posts
But surely it makes sense to stop digging up coal in the first place.
I would strongly suggest investigating the claims of http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli... that after mining, milling, and then being spread in the ocean, olivine rocks weather quickly and take out CO2. The estimated costs of large scale CO2 sequestration this way are surprisingly reasonable, and the technology is already available. Also the various ocean technologies are going to run into t…
What about doing it in landlocked major bodies of water? I'd sacrifice the Great Lakes for the climate.
We're going to need them.
We already have carbon removal technology. They’re called trees. [Edit] I’m not being facetious. 40% of emissions are as a result of poor land management. We’ll need all the technological help we can get, but if we can’t manage land as carbon stores - not sources, we’re not going to win this race.
This is Gustaf from YC. I wrote the first Carbon Removal RFS. Planting tree is actually a great carbon removal technology. Unfortunately most forest owners in the world don't know or don't have incentive to care the about the carbon impact the forest have on the climate. Biggest reason forests are taken down is to grow cattle for beef. If you are working on a startup to reverse this we'd like to fund it too
Are there issues with raising cattle on land with a trees spaced maybe every 10 feet or so? Does it have to do with herding the cattle? Feeding the cattle? Those I feel can be solved with technology, specifically IoT/Drones/Autonomous Bots.
It seems to me, if every livestock pasture in the world has trees every 10 feet, maybe less, it could have a pretty big impact. Combine the Apple orchard with the cattle grazing land. Use technology to efficiently operate both.
Edit: And speaking of cattle. I wonder if we can literally strap something onto the back of a cow that would be able to capture methane, burn the bio-mass, and collect everything to be retrieved later on and used/buried.
An elephant in the room not being discussed here are the propaganda networks that are persuading voters and preventing any kind of government action on climate. Disrupting these propaganda businesses is another necessary angle of attack for preventing climate change catastrophe.
For anyone who is interested in the Energy Industry in general, including Carbon Capture (CCS), I would recommend "The Energy Gang" podcast as well as "The Interchange". The guys who run the podcast are not long on CCS as a savior for 1.5 degrees C, but they are incredibly knowledgable about the space and dive into a lot of technical, policy, and economic minutiae that you wouldn't think would exist. I never exactly…
I love those podcasts. You should all listen to them. They are right that we have all the technologies we need to reach 1.5 degrees C. However we need massive acceleration of implementation of those technologies. Like a 10x improvement. We're not on track right now. The reason we need Carbon removal is because most IPCC forecast still assume a large % carbon removal. And it's going to be important for us to get back…
Taking a wider lens, my honest opinion is I think it's going to have to be a combination of a "Cuban Missile Crisis" moment for our society, and some sort of Moore's law effect on PV or battery storage.
Taking the analogy that Climate Change is the "Nuclear Arms Race" crisis of our generation, we haven't really had an event that has resonated with the populous to take an aggressive stance that blunts economics. It's shocking but true that the events of Super Storm Sandy (285 deaths), Katerina (1,833 deaths), and Puerto Rico/Maria (2,975 deaths) haven't been enough to really move the needle in the collective consciousness. It may a true disaster, on the order of Miami being rendered uninhabitable, in order for some entity above the state level to really instantiate something like a Carbon Tax.
But once we get there, I think the bottom falling out of solar pricing between now and 2025 has enough of an economic incentive to get us to 10% renewables, whereas it gets de-risked enough for the "big money" (think: Fed-backed Capital Markets ala infrastructure spending) to come in and take over. It is true that PV manufacturing doesn't exactly map onto chip manufacturing (it's not about nano scape per se, it's more about layering absorbing levels in a way that allows full capture), but ultimately I am hopeful we can get there.
Lastly ... solar is ultimately a empowering technology, in that anyone with land can use it. It's a perfect fit for a country where the laws were originally meant for a farming population (which is essentially what solar is). I think once a tipping point gets hit where gas prices stay between where they are now (maximum shale extraction cost) and ~$30 (when the Saudis start pumping), and solar goes below that, the discussion will be more around how many DC lines do we need to get electricity from the southwest to the rust belt, than whether renewables are what will save us from our energy troubles.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy [2] https://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/07/double-sided-solar-cell... [3] https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/29/us/puerto-rico-growing-death-...
At the rate we're setting up for a future where the entire ocean blooms, dies, and we're left with nothing. Already jellyfish are taking over. We're killing off so many life forms we're essentially going back in time to the precambrian era. Instead of looking for "quick fixes" like iron seeding, which has just as much a chance of going awry as Australia importing cane toads to deal with their crop insects, let's just…
At the rate we're setting up for a future where the entire ocean blooms, dies, and we're left with nothing. Already jellyfish are taking over. We're killing off so many life forms we're essentially going back in time to the precambrian era. Instead of looking for "quick fixes" like iron seeding, which has just as much a chance of going awry as Australia importing cane toads to deal with their crop insects, let's just…
It seems global warming politic's main focus is to implement a global carbon tax in one form or another. Proceeds from the tax are administered by a supra-national government. That's how the Paris accord worked and very credible global warming authorities said was the only solution to global warming. Does this company have a business model of being the recipients of the global carbon tax?
> that's how the Paris accord worked No, it isn't. The Paris accord was a non-binding document that tried to put in place a framework for coming up with solutions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#Nationally_det...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> An obvious step towards reducing CO2 emissions in the US would be raising taxes on gasoline. It seems we are past the luxury of looking for incentives to reduce CO2 emissions. It's about reducing CO2 emissions right now , no proxy allowed, no IFTTT schemes. There might be a bare minimum amount of CO2 allowed, it's fixed. We could monetize that but it doesn't matter. We can't go beyond that amount.
> There might be a bare minimum amount of CO2 allowed, it's fixed. I'm not sure I understand, are you suggesting an individual "carbon-quota" as a more radical way of slashing emissions than the "incentives" of a carbon tax? Depending on the tax rate, a carbon tax could produce reasonably expeditious results.