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Carbon Removal Technologies

carbon.ycombinator.com

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Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#541

Post by taneq »

doon123 wrote: post #503
super-serial wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome - I would be one of the people who would pay $400 to be carbon neutral each year. You should think big and do a Kickstarter with $25 gifts up to $5k gifts... For $400 I want a t-shirt that says "I'm carbon neutral. Do you have the rocks to become carbon neutral too?" with a pic of olivine rocks and your website url.

You'll pay $400 to be carbon neutral!? Why don't you just stop eating meat, stop driving, stop whatever else that you do and have a smaller carbon footprint naturally, instead of living a carbon lavish life and paying some money to be called carbon neutral. Its like bribing your way out of jail after you have done the crime. [EDIT]: removed expletives

After all, being carbon neutral is about punishing you for your self-indulgence, not anything to do with actually being neutral in terms of carbon emissions.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#542

Post by workycacc »

doon123 wrote: post #503
super-serial wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's awesome - I would be one of the people who would pay $400 to be carbon neutral each year. You should think big and do a Kickstarter with $25 gifts up to $5k gifts... For $400 I want a t-shirt that says "I'm carbon neutral. Do you have the rocks to become carbon neutral too?" with a pic of olivine rocks and your website url.

You'll pay $400 to be carbon neutral!? Why don't you just stop eating meat, stop driving, stop whatever else that you do and have a smaller carbon footprint naturally, instead of living a carbon lavish life and paying some money to be called carbon neutral. Its like bribing your way out of jail after you have done the crime. [EDIT]: removed expletives

Why does it have to be one or the other? Why not both? Why not more?

We don't know if the OP already has a fairly low carbon footprint, or has done all they can to reduce it.

Cumulative effort and reducing carbon footprints on many fronts is what we need.

Things like:

- Walk / Cycle where you can. Use public transport where you cant.

- Have your heating / AC lower.

- Stop using single use plastics.

- Eat less meat.

- Swap all your bulbs to low power equivalents.

- Take shorter showers.

- Turn off your work monitors / PC when you leave the office. (Assuming tech population here)

- Switch to a power provider that only uses 100% renewable power. (Like bulb in the UK)

- Support a charity that is planting trees or is fighting to save the rain forest.

- Donate/pay to have some charity/company do some carbon removal for you.

- Change your browsers default search engine to Ecosia (Bing results and they plant trees with the profits)

Lots of tiny things can be done now, with relatively little effort. In parallel with companies and researchers work on better carbon capture techniques.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#543

Post by red-tea »

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

Stopping our reliance on animal products is the next big change for humanity. People will look back on these times like we look back on times of slavery and tyranny. Either that or we die.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#544

Post by cwkoss »

I'm curious about pickled compost of fast-growing grass to avoid CO2 release by keeping it anarobic so it produces lactic acid instead during fermentation.

An acre of lawn grass can sequester several tons of CO2 each year. I bet properly managed, you could achieve 10x that by optimizing growth cycle. If we could harvest and store it without releasing it, might turn into a useful agricultural product: bokashi.

My napkin math puts it as needing within orders of magnitude of acres used for US corn production for the 40 Gt/yr target, but does not account for energy use.

Also, more wood construction? Wood is 50% carbon, but because CO2 is only ~1/3 carbon by weight, every pound of wood represents ~1.5 pounds of carbon out of the atmosphere. If can grow, harvest and use ~13 billion tons of wood a year, that wood satisfy yearly 40gt target. Seems like forests can grow roughly a ton of wood per acre.

If we can redirect wood waste (sawdust/chips) to livestock operations efficiently, the material could be used as bedding to absorb waste and then be buried/composted for agricultural use. Less CO2 release and counteract soil depletion, so subsequent generations of plants will grow yet more vigorously.

Mixture of factors is likely best solution. I think Joel Salatin could probably save the planet if we let him.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#545

Post by vanderZwan »

wdewind wrote: post #334
bbojan wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grassland, if properly managed, can sequester more carbon than a forest. This is related to the (unintuitive) fact that grasses are more efficient producers of organic matter than trees. Joel Salatin has done some great work related to this and collected decades worth of data. So the irony is that we could grow more beef and pull carbon out of the air at the same time, only if we cared. But we don't, it's easier to s…

> So the irony is that we could grow more beef and pull carbon out of the air at the same time, only if we cared. I want this desperately to be true as someone who loves meat but everything I've read tells me it's not. There is definitely a nice symbiotic relationship that exists between cows grazing and grasslands but it is significantly more expensive to raise animals this way, and you can raise significantly fewer…

> The main issue with cows is methane, not carbon

Although objectively it makes the most sense if we all eat less meat or even go vegan (in terms of bang-for-the-buck), from what I understand the methane problem is mostly a result of them not being fed a healthy diet.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#546

Post by dereke »

PeterisP wrote: post #321
samstave wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, my idea would be the following: 1. Automate tree/crop planting 2. Reform regulations stipulating that planting of trees/crops/plants should be required on any and all uninhabited lands, as a matter of "imminent domain" regardless of the land owner. Perhaps even as a tax incentive to land owners. 3. The development of a maintenance and management policy and system around all that is planted 4. In conjunction…

Do you feel that #2 is a plausible goal that can be realistically achieved within a decade? I'm not really seeing any political will to do something like this, and without buy-in and cooperation from those who actually can make such regulations (and, effectively, authorize massive expenditures to make this happen) the other points don't really matter.

You are right that there is no political will right now. We need to make it happen.

Historically non violent direct action has been successful in changing politics (see womens suffrage, civil rights movement). This is the primary goal of the Extinction Rebellion http://extinctionrebellion.org

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#547

Post by ed_balls »

PeterisP wrote: post #384
ed_balls wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you want to buy the land? Raise the money for seedling, get volunteers/robots to plant them. Pay people to maintain trees on land (which should require 0 effort). You can come up with some clever designs to make it a tourist attraction and make some extra cash. Plenty of room for improvements. Let say you can have 100 000 trees per square km. If 40 trees gives you 1 ton of carbon per year then spending $25 000…

Well, because to the first approximation pretty much all land is used - any land thats suitable to be a forest but is not already a forest is only that way because it's used for grazing or farming, otherwise it would overgrow naturally (though not as efficiently as with planting). If you want to increase the amount of woodland, you have to decrease the amount of pastures or farmland, so you have to either buy that la…

I pretty sure that are that 10 mln km^2 around the word that is not use (Canada, Alaska, Syberia and patches of land around the world)

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#548

Post by phyller »

> Genetically engineered phytoplankton might be used to photosynthetically convert CO2 into an ultra-stable carbon sequestration medium

If you downvote this please leave a note with what is wrong with my logic.

This is so wildly irresponsible. Every time I hear of these mega projects to remove CO2 I get scared. Let's try to think about this coolly and logically for a minute.

Our planet is used to change. Our ecosystem is ready to deal with change, and CO2, and heat. It takes a lot of hyperventilating to even imagine a way in which global warming destroys life on Earth. Worst case scenario is stronger weather, higher oceans, and change of ecosystems. Maybe we get forests in Antarctica again. Maybe North America becomes one big desert. Or a jungle. Life adapts.

The biggest existential climate threat is a permanent ice age. Our planet has been slowly sequestering carbon for eons. The ice ages last longer than the warm periods. All of human history has been in a warm period. You want to genetically engineer little organisms that we can in no way control, to remove carbon from our atmosphere? Sounds like a great way to kill everything on the face of the earth and turn our giant spinning miracle into just a big ice ball. Just one team needs to do it one time, take that decision into their own hands.

Think of hurricanes becoming routine in some parts of the world. Then think of literal miles of ice, flexing the tectonic plates as they crush everything beneath them, creeping towards the equator.

I'm not going to even address the other ideas right now. We have a small fraction of the understanding and intelligence to be making these kinds of decisions. Just my opinion, but the best thing we can do for now is stop adding carbon to the air, and learn more about this world we live in.

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#549

Post by gchq-7703 »

linuxkerneldev wrote: post #538
anonuser123456 wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with carbon taxes are the incentives to cheat. The US is probably being the 'most honest' by simply saying we won't implement them. In China and India they would simply misreport their emissions and not pay the tax. And of course, you can't hit the carbon targets w/out getting India & China on board. In the absence of a world governing body with teeth (e.g. space aliens with a death ray), you can't enforc…

> The US is probably being the 'most honest' by simply saying we won't implement them. In China and India they would simply misreport their emissions and not pay the tax. Uhm, is there some data backing up your claim that we are honest and that China and India are dishonest. I mean, we really should think twice about accusing other countries of dishonesty after our whole weapons of mass destruction invasion debacle,…

I'm surprised you didn't mention the obvious one that only a couple of years ago Volkswagen was caught faking released emissions in the US [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal

Re: Carbon Removal Technologies

#550

Post by graeme »

graeme wrote: post #360
astrodust wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 4°C increase in temperature will lower people's quality of life a whole lot more than any minor inconvenience you'll have to endure in the short term. If the government had any backbone at all they'd rally people around the idea of committing to it and getting it done. In World War II people lowered their "quality of life" to support the cause. It can be done.

This is true, but I fear the time horizons are too long for mass human psychology. WWII was a short term emergency. That seems to be what springs people to action. Incentives are another way. I still think a global carbon tax agreement would be a good idea: companies work together to implement carbon taxes and cut income taxes or a local equivalent. That helps eliminat the problem of production offshoring to cheaper…

Can't edit, but should have been "countries work together to implement carbon taxes", not companies.
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