No, blowing H2S and SO2 into the stratosphere is cheaper.
The probability that this will end up happening leaves me feeling glad to be mortal.
As in glad you won't live long enough to see it?
Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?
31–40 of 199 posts
Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?
#32It's a cool idea but I don't see how this is a viable long term solution, even if done at a large scale. Global oil production is on the order of 90M barrels/year, each barrel contains about 300 lbs of oil, so we're currently producing something like 27B lbs (~12B kg) of oil per year. I'm not sure how much of this ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere versus e.g. plastics, but I think it's safe to say we're probably emitting at least 1B lbs/kg carbon into the atmosphere per year just based on these numbers.
Seaweed grows quickly, but it's almost entirely water by mass, and this strategy will really only work in coastal regions. If this strategy was adopted at a wide scale globally how much time does this really buy us? And this isn't even considering things like the unknown ecological effects of the plan.
Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?
#33No (to the question in the title), this is someone trying to sell a magic solution. You do not need to fight climate change, we need to stop it. And the first thing that needs to stop is the greed of the superrich. Unless the seaweed gives a conscience to the superrich then no, seaweed cannot help.
Okay cool, so what is your timeline for how long will it take to stop humans from being greedy? You realize any solution that is "rich people stop being greedy" is no solution at all?
Who are these greedy people exactly?
“Being greedy” is having food on the table, a roof over my head, and a few nice things?
Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?
#34Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?
#35It's a cool idea but I don't see how this is a viable long term solution, even if done at a large scale. Global oil production is on the order of 90M barrels/year, each barrel contains about 300 lbs of oil, so we're currently producing something like 27B lbs (~12B kg) of oil per year. I'm not sure how much of this ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere versus e.g. plastics, but I think it's safe to say we're probably emitt…
I’m wondering what pitfalls we’ll fall into here. Twenty years ago algae hyped up many of the same benefits and that didn’t really pan out.
Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?
#36No (to the question in the title), this is someone trying to sell a magic solution. You do not need to fight climate change, we need to stop it. And the first thing that needs to stop is the greed of the superrich. Unless the seaweed gives a conscience to the superrich then no, seaweed cannot help.
> You do not need to fight climate change, we need to stop it. The correct answer is neither; we need advanced technologies and material wealth that will allow us to master the environment more robustly. Consider that in the past 50 years of climate change, the human population more than doubled yet the number of deaths from climate-related causes dropped to one-third[0], mainly due to the growing wealth of developin…
A clarion call for humanity to wage open war on nature.
Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?
#37No
The cow burp effect is a myth. With five minutes thinking about it, is easy to see why is a no solution. I have explained here before why will not work.
Most of the seaweeds are water. And the dry matter is salty.
Coastal areas are extremely busy. You can't remove Honk Kong city to culture seaweeds. You can't block maritime traffic routes to culture seaweeds, or stop all commercial fishing near the shore, or ban tourism. In most areas is a no-way.
And there are other problems and obstacles that could be spotted easily by biologists, for example that water temperature is rising.
Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?
#38I am skeptical of any remedy to climate change that’s not reducing emissions. Whatever you do, be it seaweed, carbon capture or other stuff, would have to be done on an insane scale to make a difference. Who knows what the side effects of growing that much seaweed would be ?
Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?
#39No (to the question in the title), this is someone trying to sell a magic solution. You do not need to fight climate change, we need to stop it. And the first thing that needs to stop is the greed of the superrich. Unless the seaweed gives a conscience to the superrich then no, seaweed cannot help.
How do you stop it? I don't think the greed of the super rich is per say the problem. Perhaps there needs to be a shift in economic incentive
We need to make it profitable to do the good things and not profitable to do the bad things. This way people will do the good things and not the bad things.
The most straight forward way to do this would be to make doing the bad things more expensive, which means taxing carbon emissions.
Alongside this would be to create alternatives that are cheaper and easier to use.
Unfortunately this would mean actually spending money, making investments in public works, and changing things away from the status quo, and apparently this is impossible.
So we're going to sleep walk into our doom rather than do basic things like making gas more expensive and building public transit.
Re: Could seaweed be the 'fastest and least expensive' tool to fight climate change?
#40It's a cool idea but I don't see how this is a viable long term solution, even if done at a large scale. Global oil production is on the order of 90M barrels/year, each barrel contains about 300 lbs of oil, so we're currently producing something like 27B lbs (~12B kg) of oil per year. I'm not sure how much of this ends up as CO2 in the atmosphere versus e.g. plastics, but I think it's safe to say we're probably emitt…
I like this back-of-the-envelope estimate, but it's even worse than that.
The carbon in oil is lightweight relative to the two oxygens it combines with (atomic weights 12 and 16 respectively) from the air, so 1kg of oil emits about 3kg of CO2!
Punchline: we emit around 34 gigatons of CO2 per year.