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Carbon Removal Technologies

carbon.ycombinator.com

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Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#121

Post by 52-6F-62 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #103
ttul wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How about investing in lobbying? If $10B were sent to politicians, perhaps they’d implement a carbon tax? The future of the world is presently in the hands of pasty white men on Capitol Hill. Why not sequester their carbon (hot air) first?

Lol, from this morning's news: https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/tasker-carbon-tax-plan-trud... Some of the future is in the hand on "hands of pasty white men on Capitol Hill". Other parts of the future are in the hands of more enlightened leaders.

Eh, don't worry. This is partly in response to some of the pasty white men in provincial parliaments at present. (Looking at you, Ontario and Manitoba). Thank god the PM & Fed is trying to get on top of it.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#122

Post by dv_dt »

recusancy wrote: post #114
guelo wrote: post #58

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.

Unfortunately there's no profit motive for this.

Of course there is, for companies with technology to reduce or reverse the carbon in our atmosphere there's a giant profit potential.

This of course balanced by the interests of those protecting their current cash flows in established carbon releasing industries.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#123

Post by BeefySwain »

thereisnospork wrote: post #118
astrodust wrote: post #90

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…

Sure we could curtail CO2 emissions, but that means lowering people's quality of life which is a hard sell.

For first world countries? Sure. For developing countries, we are talking mass starvation and death.

I guess that could be considered "lowering people's quality of life" though.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#124

Post by nostromo »

astrodust wrote: post #90

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…

> let's just curtail CO2 emissions

We are though. Most people I talk to don't know that the US peaked CO2 emissions ten years ago and it's been falling every since - in per capita, per GDP, and absolute terms.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#125

Post by tlb »

khrbrt wrote: post #75
peacetreefrog wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... stupid to contemplate while we're still increasing carbon emissions." Ok, let us know your plan for reducing carbon emissions and when and how we can expect it to happen.

Easy. Stop subsidizing fossil fuel exploration, extraction, and movement (ie. pipelines). Make carbon emissions expensive, and you'll see them go down. Levy a revenue neutral carbon tax which anually redistributes to consumers the "average" tax per person. Stop subsidizing suburban sprawl. Build more high density housing near mass transit. Walkable neighborhoods and such. These are all obvious things we should have s…

Transportation is only 14% [0] of greenhouse gas emission, and passenger cars are about half of that. While driving less can help, even reducing it to zero won't prevent serious climate change. So we need other solutions as well.

[0] https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/My-plan-for-fighting-clima...

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#126

Post by jpfed »

ergothus wrote: post #37
kanzure wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My personal preference is an inflatable sun shield method like these 10,000 kilometer-wide objects: "Self-deployed, extremely large low mass space structures" http://diyhpl.us/~bryan/papers2/space/Self-deployed%20extrem... I don't think people realize how a lot of these problems are solvable for only a few billion dollars... It's an engineering problem, mainly. Someone just spends the money and goes and fixes the pro…

I'm skeptical - You've shown a proposal, not a reality. (and the proposal didn't even mention a "shield" that I saw, but I may have skimmed past it). I didn't see a price tag, nor a timeline. Money can boost research speed, but not remove the need entirely. Second, If the cross section of the earth is 1.2x10^14 m^2, one of these would...well, we don't know, because the link mentioned volumes and length (the 10k km is…

>Third, and most importantly, you've just decreased the amount of energy coming to earth. You've not solved the problem, you've changed it.

There's a lot of EM that neither chlorophyll nor existing PV can use. Hopefully a sunshade would be chosen that selectively works on those less-useful bands. I hope that someone is looking into aerogels for this purpose; they can cover a lot of area per unit mass and have tunable optical properties.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#127

Post by JBReefer »

rexpop wrote: post #4

...are stupid even to contemplate while we're still increasing carbon emissions. If you actually cared about the impact — and weren't just cynically cashing in on environmentalism's recapitulated caché — you'd be shorting big markets. The biggest threat to the world is unbridled capitalism, which VC's like you are incapable of abandoning. May as well ask a fish to bicycle. This post is a pitiable joke, whose highest…

This doesn't sound relevant to carbon fixation:

"Witches, Midwives, & Nurses, first published by the Feminist Press in 1973, is an essential book about the corruption of the medical establishment and its historic roots in witch hunters. In this new edition, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English have written an entirely new chapter that delves into the current fascination with and controversies about witches, exposing our fears and fantasies. They build on their classic exposé on the demonization of women healers and the political and economic monopolization of medicine. This quick history brings us up-to-date, exploring today's changing attitudes toward childbirth, alternative medicine, and modern-day witches."

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#128

Post by loeg »

all_usernames wrote: post #71

I recently heard about Carbon Engineering, a B.C. Canada based firm that is extracting carbon from the atmosphere and making liquid fuel -- they call it "recycled fuel." Apparently it can be used in existing combustion engines. And it is already up and running. Something on the order of 10,000 of these industrial plants could get us carbon neutral rather quickly. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-co…

That helps with reducing emissions (modulo inefficiency) but since we're already past the point where that was sufficient, we still need to sequester additional carbon without burning it.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#129

Post by nixonpjoshua1 »

gustaf wrote: post #72
GreeniFi wrote: post #2

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

Another major issue is the removal of mangrove ecosystems which are great at long term deposition of carbon (mostly driven by shrimp farming).

Our company is working on these issues by trying to reduce demand for meat and seafood by creating alternatives to it, but I think the problem is so large it needs to be tackled from multiple angles. As you term it both Phase I and Phase II type solutions.

What worries me is that the Phase II type solutions are going to be mostly a political problem at least much more than they are technical problems, and political problems are much harder to fix than technical problems where the solutions can be market driven rather than based on international consensus. I think with enough creativity most Phase I type solutions can be market driven and be accomplished without achieving consensus.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#130

Post by abledon »

ISL wrote: post #108
gustaf wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you'd like to fund trees, one could start buying land and start protecting trees. Spending that money on intensive lobbying and forest advocacy in rapidly-deforesting countries could have an impact, too. The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.

we need a black mirror-esque social credit score system where based on the individuals revenue, and what corporation they work for they have a 'tree quota' they need to fulfill. this could be hours volunteered at a global tree planting foundation, $$ donated to public works companies who plant the trees. I suppose if someone only made a small amount of $ and hid the rest behind their corporation , corporations would also have to be responsible in the system and donate $ to plant trees. website would be something like tree.global ... we need some way to tie all the world (or atleast continents) together under one government, a .global domain name or something.

EDIT: after reading other comments on how trees arent the greatest solution, replace trees with the best option and tie it to a continent wide / global wide black mirror credit score system.

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