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So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

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Re: So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

#81

Post by jonahbenton »

tito wrote: post #57
dynm wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't want to stop anyone from debating the merits of using plants for carbon sequestration. But the ones explaining why my article did such a bad job of explaining those merits are kind of eye-opening, yes.

Same here, I wonder if there’s some missing conversation in the hacker news community about climate. Seems like some people really wanna talk about it even off topic. I get to spend plenty of time working on climate already, so I was particularly interested in the indoor air pieces. Someone below suggested there’s a ventilation system alternative. I wonder what you could do with a little miniaturized direct air captu…

Long ago I ordered an indoor algae system from a couple of CMU PhDs. It is very cool, it looks cool and has a nice water flow backgroundy sound, the algae grows quickly, allegedly doing the co2 consumption equivalent of 20 houseplants. Space efficient! But immaterial relative to human co2 production.

Re: So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

#82

Post by fragmede »

asdfman123 wrote: post #37
gamegod wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, this is great that demonstrates how ridiculous carbon capture and storage is. I just can't imagine us paying to do something like this at scale, when we have a much more straightforward alternative: Stop burning fossil fuels, and use clean energy instead. Right? Like why even both going through the effort of carbon capture, when we're still going to have to stop burning fossil fuels anyways, in order to fix th…

If you can find a way to get other people to stop burning carbon, let us know. I know that sounds dismissive but I mean it. There's no magic wand.

Exactly. Getting other people to behave a certain way is different from a team going off and doing something, like marine cloud brightening to raise the Earth's albedo.

Re: So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

#83

Post by culi »

cineticdaffodil wrote: post #77
Aunche wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ocean breathes in and out too. Very little carbon sinks down to the sea floor. The ocean does happen to absorb a lot of CO2, but that's from acidification rather than photosynthesis.

You could induce artificial algea blooms. All that needs is iron and light + water soluble co2 and / or o2. If you are greedy you pump light down into the depths , go cubic instead of quadratic?

Intentional oceanic iron fertilization (OIF) is actually well-studied. Unfortunately it carries risks of ecological disruption and can lead to deoxygination (dead zones). Which would long-term hinder our ability to repeat this. It also often leads to methane and nitrous oxide emissions which are both very potent (though shorter lived) greenhouse gasses

Re: So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

#84

Post by quickthrowman »

tito wrote: post #55
toasty228 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humanity has taken on much bigger challenges before and succeeded. Feel free to list them, we're basically reverse terra forming ourselves out of existence at that point, I don't think we've done anything even remotely close to that scale in such time frame

During World War II, the United States spent 40% of its GDP on the war. So we can spend big on things when we decide to. That would be the equivalent of $12 trillion per year today, and we would clean up the climate in a jiffy with that. It would be a huge opportunity for job creation, manufacturing, innovation. It’s wild as a society we’ve convinced ourselves that stabilizing the climate is a cost instead of a massi…

> During World War II, the United States spent 40% of its GDP on the war. So we can spend big on things when we decide to.

The United States wasn’t the only one spending that much on war, that’s why we were able to do so. What incentive do countries have to spend money on carbon capture? Any money spent on that is money not being invested in generating more wealth, so there is zero incentive to move first, you’ll just fall behind and become economically and potentially physically vulnerable.

If we could convince all major powers to all spend money on carbon capture, it would work great. That’s a simple ask but an almost impossible thing to negotiate.

Otherwise, there’s no incentive to act first, there’s actually great incentive to not act first.

I desperately wish the world could work together on this problem, but I don’t see why we would given the situation.

Re: So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

#85

Post by wizzwizz4 »

vitally3643 wrote: post #18
roughly wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all physics at the bottom. Nature doesn't have APIs.

Yes, except parent is correct. Physcial and chemical mean very different and specific things in this context. Calling photosynthesis a physical reaction is flatly incorrect no matter how you want to look at it. It is a physics reaction, sure, but "physical reaction" specifically means a Newtonian mechanical, reversible process at the macro scale. A "chemical reaction" specifically means a (trivially) irreversible qua…

> but "physical reaction" specifically means a Newtonian mechanical, reversible process at the macro scale.

Or friction.

Re: So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

#86

Post by nate_meurer »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #61

I have had the same impulse to reduce CO2 to about half(Close to pre-industrial levels 200 to 280 ppm). Of course my first thought was CO2 scrubbing by chemical means, plants are obviously silly. But was convinced not to pursue given the fact that 1. Cognitive decline starts above 600 ppm according to air quality studies. 2. Levels below 200 ppm are actually dangerous.

> Cognitive decline starts above 600 ppm according to air quality studies.

According to an older, small study of short duration (Mendell and Fisk at LBNL), the results of which are heavily disputed. Since 600 ppm isn't too much higher than the current level of 400+ ppm, this study is the one most commonly cherry-picked in order to instill fear in people that climate change is getting ready to damage our brains.

Just for comparison, the CO2 composition of exhaled breath is around 40,000 ppm (~4%), which is the reason that it's totally normal for CO2 concentrations in enclosed spaces like bedrooms and classrooms to reach several thousand ppm. CO2 levels in submarines average well over ten times atmospheric, and routinely reach well over 10,000 ppm.

In none of these situations have researchers found a clear and convincing long-term impact on cognitive performance. Short term yes, but our bodies and brains adapt. Some compensations appear incomplete, but others are possibly sufficient to incur health benefits from high CO2 concentrations. Notably, high CO2 levels cause blood vessels to dilate, increasing the flow of oxygen to tissues including the brain. There is in fact ongoing research into medical therapies using concentrated CO2.

Re: So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

#87

Post by frankus »

prhn wrote: post #71

OK, so we can’t use plants. What are the options, then? In my apartment I’m running 2 AirGradients. One in the bedroom and one in the main room. Awesome little devices, btw. They monitor temp, humidity, CO2, TVOC, and various particulate matter metrics. They expose prometheus metrics for scraping, and can be configured through a REST API to never phone home. I’ve got grafana alerts set up to push notifications to my…

"Residential CO2 scrubber" seems like the sort of gadget eccentric rich people would buy, sort of a distributed DAC system.

Re: So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

#88

Post by sephamorr »

tito wrote: post #49
sephamorr wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think what you really want is an Energy Recovery Ventilator. It cycles in fresh air and uses an intercooler to limit the heat and humidity loss.

That’s cool. Is that something that you’ve built or installed? Even if that is a better solution, I am personally curious about an indoor carbon dioxide zapper, since what I work on is carbon dioxide removal at planetary scale.

I haven't installed one yet, but plan to in my house. I'll probably end up buying an assembly, but they seem pretty spendy for what is really a very cheap BOM.

Re: So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

#89

Post by frankus »

Another way of looking at this is that--while it doesn't have to be edible--you have to grow plant matter inside your house at a rate equivalent to what everyone in there consumes as food.

Even if you found like an algae or something that converted CO2, light, and water into fat, 2400 kCal would be ~300g per person, per day, or not too short of a normal package of butter.

Re: So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

#90

Post by frankus »

frankus wrote: post #87
prhn wrote: post #71

OK, so we can’t use plants. What are the options, then? In my apartment I’m running 2 AirGradients. One in the bedroom and one in the main room. Awesome little devices, btw. They monitor temp, humidity, CO2, TVOC, and various particulate matter metrics. They expose prometheus metrics for scraping, and can be configured through a REST API to never phone home. I’ve got grafana alerts set up to push notifications to my…

"Residential CO2 scrubber" seems like the sort of gadget eccentric rich people would buy, sort of a distributed DAC system.

Honestly this seems like a super long-shot but at least semi-plausible avenue for putting DAC on the sort of learning curve that took lithium batteries from "high-end camcorder" to utility-scale storage.
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