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Hey, let me play the devil's advocate here and say that these are nothing but knee jerk reactions. Call me cynical or pessimistic, but the time has already passed. Maybe we should focus on saving as much as we can. Funding a few companies may be the right thing to do, but shouldn't it have been ten years ago. Or were the smartest people on the planet were hoping that it would all just go away. It's already too late.…
I know this is going to get downvoted but I have to say it: the problem is not CO2, the problem is CO2 alarmism. The models on which the IPCC predictions of doom are based do not match the data. Even the IPCC admits that in the AR5. The actual data says that CO2-driven warming is not enough to worry about. (Not to mention that the prediction of doom also depends on economic models which are even worse at matching dat…
I don't know enough about the data to contribute any thoughts on it. Could be valid, could be incomplete/inaccurate. However, I don't think this is an either/or situation, and wouldn't it be great if we contributed some time and focus on making sure that there is a world left in which the impoverished can be helped?
It is if the alarmists have their way and we commit trillions of dollars in resources to CO2 mitigation. That's trillions of dollars that can't be spent to create wealth and bring people out of poverty. That's a lot of opportunity cost.
To be clear, YCombinator's money is theirs and they can invest it however they choose. I don't know what fraction of their total investment will end up being committed to this. My objection is to the "existential threat" language, which makes it seem as though they would be willing to drop everything else and commit all of their resources to this effort. (After all, if it really were an existential threat, why wouldn't they? How could they justify funding any other startups?)
What I took away most was that carbon removal is now firmly a part of mitigating climate change. It's part of "Plan A" but also there is so much from the previous "Plan A" that will still need to work on. There are a number of carbon-capture technologies on current emissions that need to be deployed from power plants to cement factories.
All Power Labs, a company that makes biomass gasifiers, has estimates for the amount of carbon their technology can sequester ( http://www.allpowerlabs.com/carbon ). This appears to be the most viable process forward, as not only can one create a ton of electricity, hot water and air, but also biochar which sequesters carbon in the soil in a beneficial way for an estimated 10k years. (full disclosure, I'm an ex emplo…
Isn't the challenge that biomass gasification systems require fairly pure feedstock (ie cubes of hardwood)? Has anyone succeeded in developing a feedstock-agnostic gasification system?
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…
Carbon Engineering and Climeworks are two incredible companies working on Direct Air capture and Air-to-Fuel and we'd like to fund more companies like them. There are less than 5 companies worldwide that are serious about getting Direct Air Capture to scale. The world need more bets that that on such a promising technology
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Its sequestration efficacy is not well-established yet. I think that more experiments should be run to better quantify the effects. Some environmentalists oppose even additional research-scale trials. Some proponents of iron fertilization have internalized "some environmentalists oppose this, and efficacy still has large error bars" as "it probably works great but technophobic environmentalists want us to suffer depr…
From the appearances, it has a lot of potential. Iron is extremely plentiful and has a very large impact on the small systems it was tried. It is possible that inefficiencies take such a toil that it stops being viable, but it's not the opposition that make people think it can have a large impact.
Hey, let me play the devil's advocate here and say that these are nothing but knee jerk reactions. Call me cynical or pessimistic, but the time has already passed. Maybe we should focus on saving as much as we can. Funding a few companies may be the right thing to do, but shouldn't it have been ten years ago. Or were the smartest people on the planet were hoping that it would all just go away. It's already too late.…
What a lovely message. Thanks for that.
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Why not build houses from trees that will take carbon out 100-200 years from cycle.
Not just houses but any kind of building. There is an architectural movement called Mass Timber where the buildings are not just framed in wood but are virtually solid wood. It actually solves a lot of problems around building cavity thermodynamics, by eliminating the cavities. A large scale mass timber building sequesters a huge amount of carbon.
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> 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.
The United States fully intends to reverse course on that and fire up coal plants in order to something something jobs. The reason it was falling was because of strict emissions standards and a strong EPA, both of which are basically gone.