This is just symptom-chasing. Growth ideology in general, and capitalism in particular, are incompatible with the continued existence of a living planet. The problem space of replacing complex living systems with crude technological ones will be explored fully by these crazed systems in all possible directions even if/when this one symptom (climate breakdown) is countered with a narrow technofix.

The first crucial question is whether catastrophic damage to Earth's ecosystems is biologically inevitable given human cognitive capacities. Given a satisfactory answer to that (which I think unlikely), the next question is: how can we displace the cancerous ideology of limitless growth? These are obviously more challenging issues, requiring the recruitment of a far broader range of human capacities and knowledge than dangerous & blinkered technological capitalists can offer.

So I would love to get some feedback from this group on my takeaway from what I've learned of global warming.

The general consensus seems to be that gasses like carbon dioxide and methane heat cause an increase in global warming. I don't dispute that, but out of fun a few years ago on earth day I started crunching some numbers regarding our direct thermal pollution.

In the US our current consumption of gasoline alone is as 142.98 billion gallons per year[0]. At an average of 120,429 BTUs per gallon [1] that puts the US at ~17.219 quadrillion BTUs a year (in gasoline consumption alone)

Does this matter? Well at that scale we're talking about a Hiroshima Nuclear Bomb level event (15 Kilotons of TNT or ~60 Billion BTUs) every 0.54 minutes all day every day in this country when just considering American consumption of gasoline alone. If volcanoes are your thing, Mt. Saint Helens produced 24 megatons of thermal energy in its 6 years of eruptive activity. The US on the other hand produces the thermal equivalent of that every ~2.1 days... and again, that's just gasoline.

Most of our heat comes from gas which is converted directly to thermal energy. And then we have coal power...

Regardless of how "clean" you make it. We're talking about burning things to create energy so the basic law of the conservation of energy comes into play. And as hot air rises, it doesn't just magically become cooler... it dissipates that energy until it reaches an equilibrium. Thereby transferring energy into the geosphere.

And then when you explode things like natural gas or coal use, it's sometimes being used to heat, but even when it's being used to cool, we're not getting 1-to-1 efficiency. Air conditioners output more heat than they dissipate.

And if people use ACs more as atmospheric heat increases, we're talking about a positive feedback loop without even taking into account the thermal pollution of creating the energy by burning stuff in the first place. (Even nuclear plants tend to use ocean water for cooling - thereby directly heating the oceans)

I'm not saying carbon dioxide and methane aren't potentially catastrophic, but I don't think it makes sense to discount our direct thermal pollution as a potential cause. I only based figures in my argument on US gasoline consumption. That's a minor piece of the global energy pie.

Either way, reducing personal wattage through efficiency and reduced use seem to be pretty productive in terms of reducing my personal thermal impact so it seems like a step in the right direction whether thermal pollution is directly related to global warming or not.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10 [1]https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=about_ene...

I highly doubt capitalism is going to save us from climate change considering it has largely driven the problem.

Or we could just plant trees. Lots of them. Give people a small tax deduction per acre of forest on their property.

Stop polluting entirely and plant trees? All of these useless ideas above could be solved by getting rid of the endless growth required by capitalism, but nobody wants to give up their Alexa to save the entire population.

...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 purpose is to stand in a museum, one day, as a testament to how blindly we charged into the apocalypse. I only hope that museum's curated by our children, and not whatever species finds our remains.

For a good, hard look at why I believe this, read Naomi Klein's "This Changes Everything," and Peter Frase's "Four Futures."

If you're daring enough, you can follow those with Nancy Isenberg's "White Trash," and Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets" and "Witches, Midwives, & Nurses" for a deep look at how and how long we've been going wrong.

If that all doesn't make you straight up suicidal (let alone quit maintaining your startup pyramid scheme), I have more reading suggestions for how to turn this ship around.

YC should be investing in Deep Isolation.

http://deepisolation.com

This scientism approach to what is a problem of crumbling connections to our selves will get us nowhere. Instead of having the best minds of our generation flailing away at marginal gains within a flawed hypothesis, maybe we should embrace the Earth as the whole biological system that it is. These approaches are fixing the bruised elbow while the heart is laid bare and shooting spurts of blood onto the floor.

Ah, the irrelevance of YC has begun.

Could this endeavour be detrimental to the environment? (Please read my whole reasoning before calling me a Climate Change Denier or something like that)

I understand that humans are changing the Earth's environment, but with this we need to acknowledge that other organisms are doing it too. In particular plants have been taking CO2 from the atmosphere for ages and continue to do so. If you look at CO2 concentrations for long periods of time, you'll find that the levels of today are not very different from what has happened cyclically for hundreds of thousands of years.

The difference may be on the fact that now we are adding an extra influx of CO2 to the atmosphere, but in doing so we may be balancing greater concentrations of water vapour, which is a much more efficient greenhouse gas. If doubling the concentration of CO2 increases the temperature of the atmosphere, in say one degree, to gain another degree you'll need to double the concentration of CO2 again, so the effect of concentration of CO2 on temperature is logarithmic. Water vapour is much more efficient and by decreasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere we may increase the amount of water.

This is because of how photosynthesis (and agriculture) works. A plant breathes air in through small pores on their leaves called stomata. Doing so allows water to evaporate through those same pores. If the concentration of CO2 in the air is low, the plant will need to evaporate more water to absorb the same amount of CO2. On the other hand, if the plant doesn't have enough water to evaporate, it will close its stomata and the result will be lower growth and poor yield, simply because of the lack of carbon. Since nowadays many agricultural plots are using water from aquifers and other underground sources, we are actually putting into the environment much more water than would have been without agriculture. If we decrease the amount of CO2 we may push even further the plant's need for water and produce more water vapour, pushing even further the warming, since water is much more effective than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.

We may be fighting against the wrong enemy. And in doing so punishing unfairly the poorest of the world, who rely on fossil fuel for energy and those who will be the most affected when crop yields start falling and the water available becomes insufficient.

I haven't been able to find a global warming model that incorporates this effect, but if someone made it this far into this comment and knows of any model that does, I'll be very grateful to hear from it. If someone related to this project reads this, please discuss it. It may be a mute point because some reason that I don't know, but it may very well be an important one.

Just came here to say:

1) Thank you for doing this

2) You should have been doing this 10 years ago because it was exactly as obvious then that this kind of acceleration of investment was necessary, and YC sank millions of dollars into social media bullshit in the intervening period instead.

Given that every global warming/climate change prediction has been wrong so far, why would it make sense to believe the same political entity making predictions now? If you plug in the data from 10 years ago into any climate model, the prediction for now is wildly wrong.

A more prudent approach, in terms of believing that a prediction for the future may happen, would be to plug the data from a decade or more ago into a model and see if it accurately predicts now. If not, reject that model, try to do a root source analysis to find out what's actually happening, and try again.

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. Sorry, but you have to invest in saving as many people as possible.

Unfortunately, the politicians would never understand that.

Its actually funny. After decades of dystopian future being manifested in the literature and movies, we have come to believe that's it's all just another science fiction movie or a conspiracy theory.

We are heading towards a earth altering event, and we can't stop it.

Save yourself.

> 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.

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 data than the climate ones are.)

We should not be spending the valuable resource of startup founders on this problem. We should be spending it on creating enough wealth to bring everyone in the world out of poverty and giving them the tools to adapt to whatever happens in the future, including changes in climate.

Anyone thinking about or considering working on these technologies owes it to themselves to read Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet. Whatever you may think of the author's various statements on Peak Oil etc., the book is a worthwhile meditation on two very different approaches to our current crises.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-...

Would like to see YC address the economic incentive problem with carbon sequestering. How do you incentivize companies and individuals to capture C02? What lessons from the failed cap and trade systems can be adapted to a new "sequester and trade system"?

Solving this problem would open up resources to this field. Right now we suffer from global bystander/freeloader syndrome. The cost of global warming is spread to thin/gradual across the global population.

According to the World Bank[0], the US produces 75% more CO² per $1000 of economic output than the EU.

The US should be able to reduce that inefficiency delta to just over 5% by cutting CO² emissions by 40% without any impact on luxury whatsoever. This alone would cut worldwide CO² emissions by about 5.73%.

[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KD.GD

I'm worried that it's too late for carbon removal to prevent some of the worst effects (since no large scale carbon removal plan can be implemented overnight) and we need to look into more short-term ways of reducing warming such as albedo modification.

Or in the terms on this page, we need a Plan C.

[edit]

They actually do list this, I didn't notice at first since it's not a carbon removal technology.

According to 1st Geochange report (2010), anthropogenic factors don't play significant role in climate change

http://geochange-report.org/index.php?option=com_content&vie...

The post mentions the significant logistical challenges associated with moving large quantities of biomass and biochar. What about a mobile biochar production system? ie a device that could be delivered to a farm and towed through the field to convert waste biomass in-situ into biochar and till it directly into soil?

Getting really good at carbon capture (specifically direct air capture) could also have the side benefit of proving technologies that drive in-situ propellant production within the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars.

Similarly, this could drive a net carbon-neutral source of natural gas on Earth.

Cheap energy is the enabler for several of the solutions proposed among the comments.

I really see nuclear energy as the solution. The nuclear reactions are emission free, and the emissions in the supply chain to drive the reactions have very low emissions compared to other sources of energy.

I am a structural engineer of moderate capability. I have developed an engineering platform as a startup. If anyone is serous about doing one of these projects, I would love to speak with you about helping and about using my platform to design anything you need.

I work at a startup that is using AI to reduce emissions in industrial and data center contexts. I like the big sky approach of this post but so much savings / reduction is an execution question.

We are hiring so DM me if you would like to learn more!

Anyone else find it weird when people talk about "carbon removal" instead of "CO2 removal?" Maybe it's just me but "carbon removal" evokes "eradication of life" in a sci-fi way

For anyone who still clings to the weird, blinkered, narcissistic technofix superstition: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity...

Climate breakdown is not a problem worth tackling in isolation, because it is merely one prominent symptom of a general catastrophe. Capitalism will not allow evolved complex systems to continue to exist, because they can either be extracted directly for short-term profit, or destroyed in side-effects (appearing costless to the brutish actuarial mind) of other profit-making activities. Our home (the so-called 'environment', a term we really should abandon) cannot survive our way of life. We have no other home (Mars fantasies aside). Ergo, our way of life must change.

For flooding of the deserts, id like to determine the size and power requirements for a renewably powered valve-pumping section that will work in series to pump water along the required route.

I'm very happy to see this new interest in saving our planet among the tech elites (this includes the recent post from Bill Gates). Maybe we are not all too stupid to save our planet...

We need a video game where all global planetary effects are simulated. Like civilization or alpha centauri but with plot twist regarding global warming. Our children will finally get it.

Do carbon offset projects like Terrapass have any merit? I know it's not as good as selling my car and decking my life to planting trees, but is there any benefit at all?

I think discard/reduce most of the non life-essential technology is more important than inventing new technologies, than opening countless startups.

Like any sane person, I totally accept the global warming is real and most likely mostly man made. But rather than fighting that change which is already underway, can we not adapt to the higher temperatures and entropy? I appreciate that there's lots of side effects that we see as disastrous, but generally warmer = better for life in many parts of the earth. Most likely the positive outcomes of global warming do not outweight the negatives, but it looks like relatively very little attention is paid to what is most natural course of action - adaptation.

Desert flooding is out - long time back an article on solar energy in the desert pointed out that the desert isn’t dead.

It’s an ecosystem in its own right with specialised creatures that live there. Plus it’s not like the people in the Sahara are going to be happy that a bunch of people decide that their nation should be flooded.

Remember we can’t convince Brazillians to stop ranchers from decimating the rainforest.

Also that added water, if it is stable, will result in ,ore growth and human presence, adding to the heat engine. (Assuming people in the region don’t drain it for irrigation almost immediately )

Note that phytoplankton accounts for 50% of photosynthesis on the planet, already capturing 50 GtC/year.

Finally! I want to invest in YC batches just for this. Didn’t care to invest before.

Are there any crowd funding efforts out there for carbon removal?

I'm surprised by the hype around for-profit direct-air capture (DAC) companies because, unlike afforestation or biochar, which produce useful products, there is a very small market for CO2. Somewhat ironically, the biggest market for CO2 is for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which is exactly what it sounds like: it allows for more oil to be extracted from oil wells.

There is in fact no market for CO2 separated using DAC because it costs an order of magnitude more to separate CO2 (>$100/T) than its value on the market (max $15/T). So, the real question is, who is going to pay for it?

The companies currently operating in this space (e.g. Climeworks, Carbon Engineering) are doing so at a massive loss. In the case of Climeworks, they are pumping the CO2 to a greenhouse.[0]

I don’t think DAC alone can ever make sense, there has to be a second step in the process where the CO2 is converted into a marketable product, so that product displaces emissions. This means something like converting CO2 to plastic or fuel that would otherwise be produced using petrochemicals. Carbon Engineering recently announced that they are pursuing this. Of course, in addition to two technical breakthroughs that need to occur (cheap CO2 separation from air and cheap CO2 conversion to fuel), they will somehow have to get those fuels to be cost-competitive with current fossil fuels.

The thing to keep in mind is that CO2 emissions from man-made sources total 60 GT per year (pa). And eventually all 60 GT must be removed every year. To put this into perspective, the amount of oil produced globally by weight is about 5 GT p.a. The amount of CO2 produced is truly enormous.

The market for CO2 for EOR is about 80 Mtpa (around 1000x less than CO2 emissions)[1]. EOR actually makes some sense as we will be using oil for some time, the carbon footprint of EOR-extracted oil is lower than conventional oil.

At the end of the day, CO2 capture, especially DAC, seems more like something that is run at a loss for public benefit, like public transit, not as a for-profit enterprise.

[0] On the face of it, this seems great because the CO2 is being used, but the problem is that the plants would remove the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere whether they were grown with captured CO2 or not (they might just grow a bit faster in the greenhouse). In fact, the energy required for the carbon capture process means that the carbon footprint of the plants grown in the greenhouse using captured CO2 is likely higher than if they were grown outdoors!

[1] https://hub.globalccsinstitute.com/publications/global-statu...

I've been watching waay too many youtube videos about reforestation, agriculture and land management recently and I think I've learned a little from it (links at the end).

We no longer have the number of massive herds of animals that used to roam the plains/savannahs grazing, pooing and to a lesser extent escaping from predators.

This has meant that the grasslands are no longer trampled on and "fertilised". This has caused the grasses to die back, the soil to degrade, to not hold water and to turn to desert. (see the sahara, the outback, parts of china and the usa).

Subsequently we've tried to be really careful with the land and not over graze it etc. which tends to have the opposite effect than what is desired.

Now I also looked into reforestation because I thought trees were the answer. Grow trees sequester carbon etc. But it turns out the cost of doing this £/$ and water (desalination) would actually be outweighed by both the albido effect (green trees absorb more sunlight than deserts that reflect it back) and that trees don't really grow fast enough to have the impact required.

Getting back to the grasslands, it turns out that when you intensively drive a herd over grasslands the grass initially dies back but the root system expands, the plant grows quickly and sequesters carbon into the ground. It actually builds soil and traps carbon and it does it faster than previously thought. The ground is also more permeable to water so when big storms come it actually soaks up the water for later use rather than it running off and causing floods, erosion etc. Also grass is lighter (colour) than trees so the albido effect is not so bad.

This is just my understanding of one part of the problem. This is what I think may be a solution to that:

We need to change the way we manage livestock. Probably change legislation so they can't be kept indoors or feed grains (I think that is a big methane contributor as well). We should have grazing plans for entire countries that manage existing land well and restore broken land. We should stop eating them because we need a big herd to restore the land and we probably need to employ a lot of people to drive the herds (yeeha).

Grazing plans are simple, illiterate people seem to cope fine with them. We've got the technology to scale this and in the west we probably have the maps/surveys etc. to make this relative straight forward.

Whatever ends up being the solution to these problems we need to make government act. Historically the best way to do that has been non violent direct action. As we are at crisis point now (5yrs until the arctic has melted based on current melt) it is really our final option. You may be interested in joining the Extinction Rebellion to make this happen.

My interest grew from this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI But this video has a lot more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7pI7IYaJLI Why growing trees in the sahara won't work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfo8XHGFAIQ And this is long but has a lot of detail about holistically managing livestock and the effect on soil structure etc. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HmoAIykljk Finally the Extinction Rebellion - https://extinctionrebellion.org

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 curtail CO2 emissions.

Layering biochar mixed with compost on top of existing soil, and/or putting other biomass on top of that (Lasagne gardening, or no-till farming). The bugs and worms in the soil will move it around.

You can also drop it in when you plant (digging or double digging).

If someone can figure out how to make money to reverse climate change, that will be the end of climate change. The whole problem is that it's hugely expensive and only impacts each of us a tiny tiny bit _today_

For the curious, here's a website that thoroughly debunks Judith Curry's "science" : https://www.skepticalscience.com/Judith_Curry_arg.htm

There are few simple rules to count on. The stability of grasslands depends on circumstances, usually including a range of herbivores to prevent forestation. Mega-fauna, like mammoths used to contribute to grove and prairie creation by eating trees, before humans dominated.

I wrote this to dereke in another comment, I think it is relevant to understanding the present situation: > Two hundred years ago about 60% of the earth surface was covered in mature and native forest. The figure is less than 30% today. Most of the worlds fertile crops are grown on deforested land, on the soil which native forests developed through ecological diversity and lack of erosion. Most of the grasslands which are used for grazing, don't have the soil quality to support demanding crops.

https://www.britannica.com/science/deforestation

Telling people to read books to understand your argument is a form of gate-keeping that isn't going to convince anyone of your argument. If you can't express it yourself after having read 5+ books, why would I want to go through the same exercise?

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...

I happen to agree with all of these, on some level they're even obvious, to the extent that 99%+ of all environmental economists would support it.

However, it's naive to think anything close to resembling this could happen politically IMO. That's why we aren't at all close to doing it, even though it's "obvious".

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 carbon areas, and gived incentives to alternatives.

Actually making carbon economically unviable with our psychology works, obviously. I really, really hope we can figure out something else cheaper.

Finally, if we had a carbon sequestering method with no major side effects and clear costs, it would be psychologically easier to charge fossil burning industries and activities the cost of the CO2 emitted. Eg a fee of $30 per ton if that's the cost of sequestering. Of course, you'd need a way to measure the carbon impact of the sequestering, to make sure that process wasn't indirectly emitting carbon.

Reducing would also be highly useful, and I hope we will, but enpirically we don't seem to be built for it without some mechanism like what I described above. It's terrifying and dispiriting and I hope we figure out a way to work around our broken mass psychology.

That's not exactly how it works, of course. The people did not lower their quality of life to support the cause, per se, they did it to vanquish Those People. An actual enemy to focus on. And a pretty short timeline. Now you'd ask people to declare war on their own quality of life to fight a consequence which is necessarily vague over a timeline that likely exceeds the remaining lifespan of half of everyone alive today.

Good luck.

In the meantime I sure would like to try some mitigation techniques.

The government of the people, by the people, for the people.

We get what we vote for, for need to vote for backbones.

I still can't believe that ozone depleting CFCs and putting toxic lead in gasoline were the the inventions of the same guy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.

Given more time I'm sure he would have come up with other world destroying chemicals.

> Studies on happiness--as hard as that is to objectively study--show it is more closely related to social status than absolute and total consumption.

> In other words, the SUV or sports car apparently has more to do with making people happy by making them look to be of higher social status than the actual utility of those goods.

The first statement doesn't imply the second. Low social status can make someone unhappy, but that doesn't imply that consuming more doesn't make them happy.

In fact, I'm not even sure how much "materialism" is to blame for global warming. I know plenty of people who care more about "experiences" than "material goods" -- and in turn massively contribute to global warming by flying a lot. Equally, I don't view someone as wanting to live in a reasonably sized home in suburbia as necessarily materialistic, even though living there can introduce huge CO2 emissions from driving a lot.

You can cut emissions even more by eliminating the need for cars, but as that would put a huge dent in the automotive-central industrial complex that is the United State, nothing short of apocalyptic conditions are going to make that happen.

For talking about links between wealth and happiness, it matters greatly what absolute level of wealth you are talking about. Within first world countries, the link between between wealth and happiness is weak. But when comparing between countries that are rich versus on the brink of starvation, the correlation is one of the strongest known.

This may seem contradictory makes sense if you think of it in terms of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. If you are at the base level of meeting your physiological needs for food and shelter, wealth directly helps you meet those needs and makes them happier. If you can take care of that, the law and order that brings you safety is again correlated with being in a wealthier society. But beyond that, the correlation vanishes because wealth doesn't give you love, esteem or self-actualization.

There isn’t. There won’t be. Fair warning, this is a cynical, but honest comment, and it’s not defeatist, but acceptance of our collective nature.

I’ve roughly gauged most of our species moves on climate accurately so far.

I bet that We are going to go full bore on geo engineering. It’s the perfect eco-poli-socio fix, and is a perfect storm to fill a lot of our mental blind spots.

Geo engineering is jobs, and economic spending. It’s great PR, and it’s a BIG moonshot style project, so the optics are stupendous. Which politician wouldn’t like to say “we secured billions in funding for jobs protecting our environment, by creating factories that absorb carbon from the air”

It doesn’t even have to work, for people to sell it.

Create a military industrial complex style system with geo engineering at its root, and soon humanity will be performing biospheric surgery.

There’s a specific vein of cynical realism, that acknowledges both humanities ingenuity and it’s emtrapment to its darker natures.

We will stick to a carbon positive economy, because no one can turn around and tell the world “its over, the good days are gone, and now when we price environmental costs to everything, the markets will tank.”

Too many goods are cheap because externalities aren’t priced in. A price rise in plastic costs will end product lines and packaging.

This will push people to alternatives which are worse (paper takes more water than plastic, and decays causing eventual spoilage and replacement.)

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.

Here’s my crazy idea: nuclear powered high pressure differential centrifugation.

Under centrifugal force fluids separate into bands based on mass. The same principle as oil and water separating under gravity. Use giant centrifuges to spin compressed air until it separates into bands, then extract the bands corresponding to greenhouse gasses.

I don’t know the energy requirements for this or if there is a better way of doing it. But if you’re looking for blue sky thinking, that’s what I’ve got.

I'd like to propose a different scale removal, for anyone that may have the means to do it: home and office CO2 scrubbers.

CO2 concentrations are higher indoors, and they're affecting our cognitive ability. Atmospheric concentrations are going to be high for human cognition, especially in dense urban areas.

Better indoor ventilation will help, but if outdoor air already has higher than optimal CO2 concentrations, scrubbing that air is the only option left. Given the number of air changes needed (assuming 10X), a home unit would need to scrub CO2 from around 100,000 liters of air a day per person.

Small-scale removal is likely much more expensive than industrial BECCS or other carbon capture technology - but the value proposition would be fresher air for healthier, smarter workplaces and homes. Sell me cartridges of enzymes, and take spent ones with bicarbonate for reconditioning, and I can feel like I'm helping the planet a bit while making my life nicer.

https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-dire...

Is anyone aware of measures of public acceptance of carbon removal vs carbon reduction (emit less)?

My thoughts are that people may be more willing to invest in carbon removal as it allows them to continue to live their same life. They see it as "I can continue to pollute since we can just remove the CO2." Similar to how some people may view eating and dieting... "I can eat bad now, I'll just go on a diet later."

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 employee).

Equally exciting are the biomass gasifiers that utilize Stirling engines, such as those made by Microgen (http://www.microgen-engine.com/) as they are external combustion engines which are quieter and have better runtimes and maintenance cycles.

That was an amazing read. The fun thing, is that I started the draft of a quite similar post a couple of weeks ago. That's a great example of definite optimism. The fact that the post mentions but doesn't expand on outer-space solutions it's a bummer.

Artificial photosynthesis.

Basic idea is a nanoscale metal-organic "hack" of common bacteria systems to develop efficient pathways for the conversion of sunlight and CO2 into useful fuels. Massive search and simulation required to find ideal candidates. Which could then be incorporated directly into carbon emission sources such as factories and power plants.

One recent example is hybridizing M. thermoacetica with "magic" Au22 nanoclusters

https://chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/harvesting-solar-fuels-t...

If anyone's reading this. I'm really passionate about this crossing of tech and environmental issues & awareness. I have a tiny carbon footprint myself, I am super conscious about everything: no car/no emissions/ tiny electricity and water bills compared to everyone else in the city/food&waste minimization etc

If anyone needs a developer and/or marketing engineer with a passion for automation (think very advanced Zapier) hit me up because I'd rather work with you than working for the next "Crypto currency company". Look at my profile for how to contact me!

Goddamit no

>About 10% of the world's surface is desert, which is cheap, uninhabited, unproductive land that is drenched in some of the most powerful solar radiation on the planet.

Land doesn’t have to be productive to be protected. Deserts are ecosystems, and this kind of “changing the wild forest frontier to mans will!” thinking is how we landed up without forests in the first place!

From desert hare, to toads that come out once a year when it rains, to cactii, snakes, insects, and many other creatures - deserts are filled with living creatures.

Is this stewardship of the planet or just ensuring habitability for humans?

For an overview of 80+ startups working in carbon removal, check out AirMiners: http://www.airminers.org/explore

Energy is needed to separate CO2 into carbon and oxygen. At the individual molecular scale, this can't be much. How many can I separate at once with my hands?

If we invent a device that helps us to physically separate oxygen from carbon, humans and farm animals could do it. It would be like milling grain, or washing clothes.

Idea: create filters which are big enough for carbon to pass through, but not oxygen. Then "squeeze" a bunch of air through, and wipe away the carbon on one side. Like a cheesecloth made of carbon nanotubes...

I feel like this would make a really interesting sim video game. Start with a certain amount of capital, research and build, and try to save the world from carbon :)

What about changing our diets?

> Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, more than the combined exhaust from all transportation [1]

Are you will to fund any product ideas that will be willing to encourage a paradigm shift/or smooth shift with regards to a more eco and animal fríendly lifestyle?

[1] http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/

It seems global warming politic's main focus is to implement a global carbon tax in one form or another. Proceeds from the tax are administered by a supra-national government. That's how the Paris accord worked and very credible global warming authorities said was the only solution to global warming. Does this company have a business model of being the recipients of the global carbon tax?

For a great in depth but still understandable look at the race to zero emissions, including carbon capture technologies, I highly recommend this series from Quartz: https://qz.com/on/race-to-zero-emissions/

Some of my notes on why carbon sequestration is a no-go for civilization to achieve lithospheric homeostasis.....:

5 Billion Cubic Meters of Oil are produced Annually by humanity.

30Bn Tons of CO2 generated.

60% is un-sequesterable because it is small and/or mobile.

40% is sequestrable and large scale/stationary.

12 Billion Cubic Meters of CO2 are thus sequestrable.

You must liquefy CO2 before putting it into the ground.

50% -70% efficiency in converting it to a liquid that we can shove into the ground.

6 to 8.4 Billion Cubic Meters of Liquefied CO2 are thus Sequestrable.

Shoving 6 to 8.4 billion cubic meters of liquefied CO2 into ground is no small matter.

Think about it this way, humanity built an entire industry focused on an annual extraction of 5Bn Cubic Meters of Oil over a time span of 100+ years with refineries and complex processes spanning multiple countries, geographies, regulations, wars, and land rights.

Also, who’s going to buy sequestered carbon?

The reality is that something like this will require spinning up an entire Trillion dollar market.

Hi, there's a lot of interest comments in this thread, we have found, in our own experience, is that now we have a much create of push at all levels than we used to from individuals to governments even though the latest is still being to slow. We believe that the future looks much better in brighten, that we are still on time to move from phase 2 back to (the improbable) phase 0 and we are working to make this happen and will continue until the job is done. :D

We believe though there is still a lot to be done, and not just in CO2 capture, but in air pollution in general.

Here's the website: http://http://www.pureairindustries.com/

I appreciate the focus here and applaud all progress and work related to any kind of carbon capture/sequestration technologies. These approaches are necessary and important.

BUT

I think it is too often overlooked that a fundamental prerequisite for making any meaningful progress in this area predicates on cheap, affordable, abundant "clean" energy. Anytime you talk about hydrolysis, desalination, or increasing concentrations of CO2 in a gas or a solution - each of those processes require non-trivial amounts of energy to do at scale and the limitations are often in the realm of physics. Ultimately, energy from somewhere is needed to break the bonds of the CO2 so it can bond to new inert compounds and that requires lots of energy.

I do understand the direction of travel here (and notwithstanding the idea that most geo-engineering and other "solutions" seem to carry James Bond Villan levels of unintended consequences) what I feel is missing is tackling the elephant in the room.

The article says it clearly "It's a collective action problem the world has been unable to solve"

Well, can we place a call out for investment in innovative solutions to collective action.

Can we fix democracy - both where it lives but could do better and where it does not live at all?

I don't accept that "Social Media" already does this. We need more

In short - Let's have investment and innovation in the democracy and freedom space (as well as) in the carbon sequestration space.

Just because you like them, should that trump significant threats to the environment or or civilisation?

I rather like spending money, but I know I only have a certain budget. Consequently I only spend what money is available rather than only depending on how much I want things.

I feel we should look at the environment in the same way; decide our carbon budget, and work within what's possible according to that, rather than start with what is palatable to the individual and working backwards.

Keeping our environment habitable seems like something we have to do rather than a nice-to-have.

The most impactful technology would be some sort of financial instrument to fund known and future carbon reduction techniques which could be implemented independently (or with the help) of governments.

Besides CO2, Caron removal should also target other greenhouse gas with much higher potency like Methane/CH4 [1], which is the central point of why livestock is a big cause of global warming in Gate's Note about Climate Change Quiz.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane

[2]: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Climate-change-quiz

Any plan to massively capture CO2 should take into account that removing too much CO2 from the atmosphere would cause a mass extinction of land-based plant life if CO2 levels fall below 150 ppm.

Yes or they don’t work.

I’ve spent way to much time as lay man trying to penetrate Econ speak to get the issue, but the crux seems to be this:

Currently markets and goods don’t price the cost of economic damage into products.

So plastics are cheap as hell because they don’t reflect clean up costs.

This means we have plastic straws which are so cheap on a per unit basis, that you can sell 100s in a single bundle.

Saran Wrap, packaging plastic, tooth brushes, phones, pens, toothpicks, mugs, wires, buttons, and billions of other items are extremely cheap.

Now imagine if ALL of them went up by a small amount.

Then recall, that for the developing world the difference between a 0.01 cent plastic cost and 0.05, is an increase in packaging cost for cheap goods like single use detergent sachets, or single use shampoo packets.

Of course, this will directly reduce usage of those goods, which is the intended purpose, but the fact is that those goods being cheap means people can grow faster without worrying about the issues which arise.

Carbon curtailment is fundamentally energy consumptive. We will spend more energy to capture carbon. We would have to create a system which is carbon negative in itself (after power and maintenance costs are calculated), and then pay for the whole thing,

Taxing goods to price externalities is probably the most efficient way to achieve it.

Only based on the idea of QoL that comes from economics, where it's measured by money exchanged. That's the less important definition, IMO, just a poor approximation of real QoL.

What if we would make such an advanced filter, and then make it mandatory in cars. That way cars would 'clean' the air. You'd need to find a process that scales though, so that the 'dirty' filters are processed in a way to get out the carbon and use it somewhere.

Not doing anything has a certainty of turning the ocean to a mild acid, with disastrous effects that are already becoming visible in coral bleaching and shellfish die offs. And carbon that is already in the atmosphere and not yet dissolved is only going to make it worse.

We are at the point of choosing between what disasters we will suffer, rather than figuring out how to not have a disaster.

> Iron particles [...] Find another solution.

Technically, seeding the ocean with iron particles is a suspension, not a solution. Luckily, the common technique is to use Iron(II) sulfate, which mixed with water does create a solution!

It seems obvious to me that this is unrealistic - that we're not going to do the cuts that we "need"; People will not get worried enough to take the steps necessary to avert it, it's simply not going to happen, and it's wishful thinking to expect that people will change their behaviour so much before they have immediate first-hand horrible effects (and those effects won't happen before it's too late). If that is our plan, then why not just wish for rainbow-farting unicorns to fix our ecosystem, it's just as likely to happen but more effective? Everything we know about people's psychology, social structures and politics seems to indicate that if the global population will be given a choice between those reductions and a slow-motion catastrophe, they'll pick policies that result in this catastrophe. Such reductions won't be made unilaterally or willingly, they might happen only if enforced with extreme violence (i.e. short-term threats instead of long-term horrible expectations) but no one sufficiently powerful seems willing to fight internal unrest or threaten international wars to enforce drastic measures for the sake of preventing climate change.

So we have to start with an assumption that emission cuts of the required scale are not going to happen (or, at least, are not going to happen soon enough), and look for more realistic alternatives than convincing 7 billion people to voluntarily downshift their lifestyle by 2050. Large scale carbon sequestration is one such alternative option.

But that UN report is based on predictions we know with 100% certainty to be incorrect. That's politics, not science. Science says "learn to do math before telling everyone the world is ending".

The global rate of extreme poverty has dropped from 29% 20 years ago to less than 9% today. You need a solid argument for how these actions would reverse the incredible drop in poverty and start us in the other direction, not just the usual factually wrong conventional wisdom.

Look at the study, not just the summary. What does "preindustrial levels" mean? Preindustrial includes over 4 billion years, including years with no life on earth. It includes the absolute highest and absolute lowest levels of atmospheric CO2 ever in the history of the planet. They chose a very low level that would give them the biggest results, and compared it to a hypothetical future level which isn't actually possible to achieve because there's not enough carbon stored in all the fossil fuels on the planet to get close to it if we burned every drop. Yes, record low atmospheric CO2 means shellfish have slightly thicker shells. Does that have an actual benefit for shellfish, much less entire global ecology? Those low CO2 levels are unquestionably bad for other things, like plants, and humans. Shellfish survived previous high CO2 levels just fine, we have the fossils, they existed. They can go ahead and have slightly thinner shells, while we have more plants and more food.

Also, we're talking about coral bleaching and it being blamed on CO2 despite absolutely no evidence, and despite the fact that some coral reefs are seeing normal growth, while others which are in major pollution streams from Asian rivers are seeing bleaching events. But it has to be CO2 because Al Gore says so! Ignore the billions of tons of toxic waste being pumped into the Ocean by China and India and Africa! Europeans and North Americans are the problem with their evil CO2! They need to become poor like everyone else to save the planet!

Another geo-engineering idea is to speed up this mixing by pumping air deep down into the oceans. Personally (as a PhD geoscientist), I think that taking CO2 out of the air, compressing it to a liquid, and re-injecting it back into the geologic formations that the oil came from in the first place, is the procedure for getting rid of CO2 that is least likely to screw things up even more. It would just go back where it came from (many caveats, but basically can work).

Start raising a tax on CO2 emissions and at the same time start paying people to put it in the ground. Raise the price on both each year and you could reach equilibrium pretty fast. Should have started 20 years ago, but now is better than never. Maybe start at increasing it at $10 dollars a ton/year. $10/ton is about $4 per barrel of oil. If people saw that sequestering CO2 would pay $100 a ton in a decade the research and excitement around the ideas would be huge and likely encourage many breakthroughs. Isolated solar and wind farms extracting CO2 from the air and pumping it underground could be a huge business.

Edit: $10/ton CO2 is more like $4 a barrel than the $2 I originally wrote. Source: https://pyrolysium.org/how-much-co2-produced-by-burning-one-...

You can say that if you like, but I tend to err on the side of scientific evidence. Even the hysterians most scary claims merely suggest that we "are headed for" ocean PH levels that are "unheard of in 25 million years". And yet the shellfish people are trying to tell us will die from slightly thinner shells have been around for a couple of hundred million years.

Because most CO2 emissions are from industry, not humans, per capita statistics mean very little (especially since these industries ship their products globally). Per capita statistics are championed by industry because they shift blame to citizens and paint the false picture that citizens are entirely responsible for the nation's output.

This means it is more effective to use a metric like CO2 emitted per $1000 GDP because it reflects how polluting industry is in each country. See link attached and sort. It is also important to remember China and India (especially) are far from industrializing, and Western nations' emissions are dropping (they peaked 10-15 yrs ago).

In reality, some combination of CO2/capita and CO2/$1000GDP is the most effective for determining how polluting a country is.

Environmental policy is dictated at a national level. And this is why I put pressure on the Chinese state (again, NOT the people). A bigger portion of their emissions are caused by industry than in most countries). The Chinese state and only the Chinese state has the ability to reduce industrial emissions in their country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...

Or make direct fuels out of it :P /s (that would not work, otherwise you've created a perpetuum mobile). Would be interesting if you could use your car's surface as a kind of anode.

The problem is the existence of these techniques will be used to justify inaction elsewhere. They also do nothing to tackle acidification.

And it’s not as if the world has been standing still over the last decades, huge progress has been made and many technologies are at the borderline of being economical or cheaper than the alternatives, and are continually falling in price. Once we push the boulder over the crest of the hill it will roll down unaided. The economy can change much quicker than we think.

Here's the thing. Environmentalists have been warning about climate change for generations now. Calling for replacements for fossil fuel and for drastic cuts in emmissions and consumption. Basically nobody acted. And now the situation is becoming dire. Suddenly curtailmennt is off the table because it's no longer enough? It's never even been tried or seriously considered. Pretty much no developed country is on track for reducing CO2 emmissions by a large enough fraction. And yet, somehow, we're now expecting those self same countries to become proficient at geo engineering on a scale massive enough to revert climate change? It's a farce.

Coal consumption has already peaked in the USA, France, UK, Canada, (probably) China, and a number of other countries. Emissions intensity and absolute emissions from the electricity sector has already peaked in multiple countries. The cost of electrifying automobiles and generating low-emissions renewable electricity is much lower than a generation ago.

On the other hand, global fossil fuel use has not peaked yet. Global population has not peaked yet. Many countries have worse cost-and-schedule problems with attempted deployments of nuclear reactors than they did 40 years ago. We are barely reaching "maybe starting to flatten out emissions" -- actually trending down toward zero is just a mirage in the distance at present. The opportunity to stabilize the climate just by cutting emissions is now in the past.

I feel like humanity is moving toward making the changes it needs, and has a better toolset for those changes than before, but is changing much slower and later than it should have. We're out of completely safe options and have to try to navigate between various risky options. I can understand the perspective of people who feel like we're acting too late and there is no chance of industrial civilization surviving into the 22nd century, even though I don't share that perspective.

If we assume that global emissions will continue to grow at the current rate, or increase exponentially, the situation appears more dire than it really is. Renewable energy is getting cheaper every year, and fossil fuels are getting more expensive. Some sources of c02 fixation are more efficient when the c02 levels in the air are higher. Also as energy gets to be cheaper overall, the cost of sequestering goes down.

Renewable energy saw a ~30% growth from 2008 to 2017, but in percentage points of the total energy consumption, that's only a 5%-point increase. The remaining 30%-point reduction in coal consumption was covered primarily by increased natural gas usage.

I'm sure you're aware that one of the "engineers from oil and gas companies" that I mentioned is Dr. Flannery, an author of the literal bible of computational numerical methods [1]. I'm sure you're aware that Monckton has no formal mathematical training and that his complaints against terrestrial climate models include the "fact" that they didn't predict warming on Pluto.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numerical_Recipes

reference on monckton for others: https://www.skepticalscience.com/Monckton_Myths_arg.htm

Yes, it's harder to out-compete fossil projects that have already been built, already paid off their capital costs, and incur just operational costs going forward. Some of those fossil projects (like Saudi oil fields that cost only $10/barrel) are not going to be economically forced into early retirement by any foreseeable lower-emissions energy source.

Note that there is also quite a bit of already-built fossil capacity that can be retired early by economic pressures. Not every big fossil project has operational costs as low as Saudi oil.

For example, the Navajo Generating Station is the largest American coal plant west of the Mississippi River. It was built in the 1970s. It has a stable, low cost for coal since it is supplied by the nearby dedicated Kayenta Mine. Just a few years ago it was planned to run until 2044. But the falling costs of gas and renewables have made it economically uncompetitive. It's now going to close at the end of 2019, 25 years early:

https://www.azcentral.com/story/money/business/energy/2017/0...

I agree on the broader point that fossil fuel emissions won't be curbed quickly without active regulator intervention. Since that intervention may arrive late-or-never in different nations, it's one of the reasons that I believe active carbon dioxide removal measures will be necessary in addition to emissions reduction efforts.

My hope is that newly-built or soon-to-be-built O&G production sites will be converted to have CO2 capture and just export electricity or hydrogen. We have all the tech, it's just that someone needs to force O&G operators to do it.

Operators, by the way, love this concept. It means they can continue production basically forever, if they want. But there's a big economic disadvantage in being the first mover, which is why we need government regulations forcing it.

I was afraid that the new administration would follow through on its promise to increase American coal use and extraction. Fortunately, it has not.

https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/coal.php

https://www.utilitydive.com/news/westmoreland-chapter-11-mar...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mission-coal-bankruptcy-marks-5...

I was under the impression that we've "done well" because natural gas generation has come online like crazy and proves more economical than coal and INCIDENTALLY cleaner to burn.

I'm not sure how long (absent intelligent policy) til we hit peak natural gas and the balance naturally shifts back towards dirty energy sources.

I.e. policy helps, but economics had as much to do with it

Even with a lot of political will to increase coal, the economics won't permit it. Natural gas, and now renewables in many circumstances, are the clear economic winners.

And the reason it was falling is natural gas / hydraulic fracking, which emits far less carbon for the energy produced.

The EPA can lay claim to many environmental successes, but this isn't one of them.

The main reason it is falling is because of natural gas substituting for coal in the power sector and that will continue to happen due to the low prices for natural gas.

That's just angsting about short term partisan politics. The trends remain positive for the longer term. Don't let whatever Trump says this week blind you to the long term.

Find a way to build georedundant electricity links from stable solar fields in e.g. the Sahara or so, up to Europe, with a reliable capacity of ~ 1 TW or maybe even closer to 5 TW, along the feeding solar arrays, and we can use existing ways to store energy for nightly use to wean Europe of natural gas in about a decade.

The largest one build seems to be 10 GW between Xinjiang and Anhui. It's still quite a bit from the scale we'd need to wean of natural gas however.

Baseless? https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13053040

Do you have a reference for a single climate model prediction that's come true? In most other areas dealing with science, if the theory does not predict the reality, then the validity of the theory is questioned.

I'll take it a step further and say I don't think sequestration will work if economically productive materials or systems can't be made out of the resulting carbon. Humanity is too shortsighted to fix it without gain. It's worth investing not only in the technologies that can halt climate change, but also the technologies that will enable us to survive as we endure increasingly volatile climate change.

Hi, thanks just working to apply the hard work of Schuiling and others. Glad to hear that the pricing makes sense to you as well. I love trees and suggest we plant as many of them as possible, but the problem with using them as a means of carbon sequestration is that you have to protect them for 50+ years from pests, fire etc.

If the trees were to burn, all of that carbon you worked so hard to sequester would be released, so it is not foolproof and decades of sequestration can be rolled back in hours. Whereas once the olivine grains are on the beach, it is going into the seafloor in a pretty much irreversible chemical reaction.

As for the rate of olivine weathering, it is the fastest of any major rock-forming silicate mineral and is further accelerated by the abrasions of rock, and by microbes. The rate of sequestration depends on the size of the particles, and how much is spread per each beach. Many of the calculations affirming the data have been measured from static piles of olivine tailings (pilings of rock that sit as "waste" in mines sites.) Those rates alone are impressive, but we are looking to utilize the beaches to further increase the rate of weathering to at least 20 microns per year. At that rate, a grain of olivine with a diameter of 100 microns will dissolve in around 5 years.

"Our experiments show that olivine grains when kept in motion weather fast because continuous mutual impacts remove reaction-inhibiting silica from the surface and tiny µm-size slivers are produced allowing a fast chemical reaction. The application of olivine and other (ultra)mafic minerals like serpentine in high-energy shallow marine environments can make a significant contribution in the fight against climate change. The counteracting effect on ocean acidification is immediate."

Here is the basic reaction:

Mg2SiO4 + 4 CO2 + 4 H2O −→ 2 Mg^2+ + 4HCO3^- + H4SiO4

CO2 is consumed, and Mg2+, Fe2+, H4SiO4 and HCO3^- are produced.

This paper has the best calculations and a lab experiment demonstrating the rate. https://climitigation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Rolling...

This one is good as well and discusses the tailing pilings and importance of microbes alone in possibly accelerating the rate up to 4,000x https://climitigation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Olivine...

The CO2 expenditure of the whole operation, including mining, milling, and transport, has been calculated to be about 4% of the amount of CO2 that is captured by the olivine. The financial cost of mining, milling, and transporting rock is about $7/ton.

We are not planning to do any new mining for the first allotments of olivine though, as there are literally "tons" of piles of olivine-rich rock sitting as "tailings" on the property of old mines.

This already excavated rock was mined in the pursuit of the mineral deposits below it and are considered "waste" by these mines. Kind of like buying a used car instead of having a new one created, that rock's CO2 is already accounted for. So, in this case, we do not have to mine it, only transport (ideally in an efficient manner like a train) and then mill it and spread it on the beach.

To piggyback onto this comment, it really is a matter of rates, of chemical kinetics. The current increase in CO2 from fossil fuel burning and related human activities has occurred at a rate that is geologically instantaneous. There is no real precedent for this. CO2 has indeed been higher in the geologic past (e.g., Cretaceous maximum, early Paleozoic prior to vascular plant systems), but these increases are likely tied to very leisurely evolving cycles of plate tectonics and enhanced volcanic CO2 fluxes. Higher pCO2 during these periods produced warmer, wetter climates that drive enhanced rates of silicate weathering. The result? High pCO2, somewhat lower pH, yes, but also higher carbonate alkalinity in seawater as well, which gave rise to higher, not lower, saturation states for marine carbonate minerals, and are associated with higher rates of biomineralization (e.g. Steven Stanley's periods of 'hypercalcification'). So it's really a matter of the balance of rates. "Natural" rates of C oxidation via the slow uplift of buried organic carbon are far slower than what we have produced via fossil fuel burning of coal, hydrocarbons. In this process, silicate weathering acts as an essential thermostat through the feedback to chemical weathering of crustal silicates. This has been understood for quite awhile.

Hi, yes the ecological considerations should be made carefully. Let's look at some examples though, if we were to offset 100% of the next 100 years of anthropogenic CO2 emissions with olivine, it would only change the Mg-concentration of the ocean from something like 1296 to 1296.8 ppm and the bicarbonate content from 42 to 45 ppm. These changes are considered within the normal range of ocean water.

Most of the ocean though is experiencing catastrophic increases in ph and need some sort of anti-acid, which is what is amazing about the reaction from olivine. It almost sounds too good to be true, but the resulting solution from the reaction is alkaline. Its addition to the water actually deacidifies the ocean in the local area.

Further, one of the breakdown products in the reaction is silicate, which is a limiting factor for diatoms. Diatoms are particularly hit hard by climate change and are important in the base of the food chain. Diatoms provide food for the entire ecosystem from fish and birds. Diatoms themselves may also actually be responsible for moving significant amounts of biomass to the deep ocean as they sink (further reducing CO2). They also compete with dinoflagellates, which are the cause of red tides and could be useful in stemming their increased occurrence by counterbalancing their rapidly increasing populations.

That said, you are right that the addition of olivine should be carefully considered, especially for specific areas. We know already to avoid areas that are adapted to acid conditions, such as peatlands, because increased alkalinity could accelerate the breakdown of peat and speedup methane release.

I think you're overstating the problem with carbon released from decaying wood.

Trees newly planted now will net-absorb carbon for the next 50-100 years, exactly the time period when we need to bring the carbon balance under control until we have our energy used cleaned up and other technologies developed. When the newly planted forest matures, trees fall and rot, but new growth takes their place. So it doesn't release a large amount of carbon, but enters a steady state roughly carbon-neutral.

That's called bio-char, and is referenced in the submitted link here.

I pictured DJI drones dropping seed bombs, but taking a look it seems a lot more impressive than that. Very cool--hope this takes off!

I agree that political action is incredibly important. Carbon tax, carbon incentives etc. I don't believe we need to change our political system in order to stop climate change. And if we had to that would make it far more difficult to do.

Even if countries implemented carbon tax and carbon incentives like many have it doesn't change that we innovation. Modern cheap verification systems, Marketplace's like Nori.com

This doesn't make sense, the trees themselves are valuable. Why flood the market with cheep tree's and make useful stuff out of them. As suggested earlier, we can use way more trees in our building materials ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18286855 )

Wood buildings using Cross-Laminated Timber (CLT), which doesn’t significantly burn. Cool!

People are. But that's just one bet. There are lots of components in the ecosystem needed to make everything succeed

Yes, I was unclear, sorry. What I mean is: "There might physically be an amount of CO2 that can be released without compromising our ecosystem. That amount is fixed. We can't borrow on it and repay it later."

Underground power can solve tree fall issues. But it is much more expensive, both initially, and when any repairs or new connections are needed. The number of repairs likely goes down, but time to repair goes way up. In some areas, soil conditions make it pretty much impossible.

Trenching for the install may require more plant disturbance than would be needed to maintain nearby trees on a regular basis.

Distributed generation and redudnant distribution can help reduce the impact as well. Everything costs money though.

> can you imagine how much the US Navy would pay to produce jet fuel on board carriers (nuclear power!) and eliminate a need for underway replenishment?

They're already working on that too.

Since this would be over the poles, agriculture would not be impacted. There would likely be a substantial impact to ecology of these regions, depending on size of the shade of course.

This wasn't really an accusation that China / India are less moral, only that they will game the system differently than the US will. I mean... I put 'most honest' in quotes to imply the US is not really honest. No state actor is honest or moral, they all act in their own national interests.f

For all the instances you reference, you think India or China don't have an equivalent moral failing? Cultural revolution? Great leap forward? Tienanmen square? Great firewall?

As for India, go look up "most polluted city in the world." The top 5 are located in India and 9 of the top 10 are in India. Do you expect them to implement carbon taxes when they can't even clean up their own air?

The whole point of this thread is that we need a technology solution with the underlying reasoning that political solutions have been and will remain untenable.

Agreed. We still need a massive holy shit moment (millions displaced?) vs. bigger CA fires or more heatwaves (which Europe mostly enjoyed this summer) or a few strong hurricanes.

It's way too late for that. Recent UN report basically says we're hosed by 2040.

We do not have decades to develop a mature space-mining and construction industry.

Isn't Baikal much larger?

I'm in New Zealand and trees grow here like weeds. A hectare of pine trees reaches maturity in 25 years and holds 200 odd tons of carbon. Once mature, those trees can be harvested and the carbon locked away in furniture, buildings, etc. As far as I know, it doesn't matter where on the planet the carbon is being sequestered, so a global view will likely be more effective.

See my sibling answer next to yours for an explanation of why the oceans were not then acidic despite the higher atmospheric CO2 levels. If you wait a few thousand years, ours won't be either. But shellfish who depend on their calcium bicarbonate shells not dissolving can't afford to wait a few thousand years while bathed in a mild acid...

I agree with your main point, but I'm pretty sure that evolution and adaptation work for humans too and there are an awful lot of human beings.

None of this is to discount the potentially severe (unknown, scary) risks, but I don't think human extinction is really in play due to a warming climate. The most serious risk I'm aware of is that high CO2 content in the atmosphere will interfere with human respiration. Evolution will handle this, just like it handled human beings living in the Himalayas.

How is this not fear-mongering? Most people will be fine with a 5deg C global increase.

I don't think you need fart bags, cows fed seaweed emit significantly less methane -https://e360.yale.edu/features/how-eating-seaweed-can-help-c....

Cattle is one main reason, second one is clearing forest for industrial agriculture like soybean and palm oil plantations. Third one is logging for wood products.

Essentially they are all because of overpopulation and massively increased demand for these products.

Combining trees and livestock has been done for centuries and is called Silvopasture:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvopasture

It's the feed for the cattle that takes up the most space, and that is directly replacing rainforests.

As long as those houses don't burn down...

Yes, you are correct. Cheap energy is the main input to Direct-Air-Capture. Overflow energy from Solar and Wind is a great source of that.

Interesting; I'd seen this before but forgotten about it.

Don't think it works here though - if the pressure of reflected sunlight is counteracting gravity, then I don't see how the statite can be acting as a sunshade. If it were in position for that, the sunlight would be pushing it toward the Earth, no?

If anything this sounds more like the reflectors often proposed for Martian terraforming, which are designed to heat the planet rather than cool it.

Earth is is not even close to a closed system. There's a giant thermonuclear explosion factory in space that pumps insane amounts of energy into our system. If earth was a closed system it could not harbor life as entropy increased.

This is not necessarily true as demonstrated by Steven Chu's 'Paint the Earth White' campaign.

Unfortunately, you still need to convince the billionaire that the project will make him into a 10-billionaire, otherwise he’ll just keep it in the bank, or bathe in it or whatever rich people do with all the vast piles of money they are sitting on.

There's no innate profit potential for this technology. If the governments decide to pay lots and lots and lots of money to sequester carbon, then there's a giant profit potential for anyone who can do it. But note the "if" - as of now, there's no indication that they're going to do so; and if/when it comes to such an emergency that they will, they might as well nationalize (or 'globalize') that tech and implement the solutions at-cost without any meaningful profit for the owners of these technologies; if push comes to shove enough so that the major powers of the world will be willing to invest a nontrivial share of their GDP in fighting climate change, honoring international intelectual property agreements will be the least of their concerns.

That's the question I was wondering. Paying a few hundred dollars to be carbon neutral seems good (at least if it's not just to a way to allow guilt-free consumption) but but:

- we need to be sure we are paying for the carbon we trap minus the one we released

- we need to be sure releasing that much olivine in the complex and living system that is the ocean is not going to have a terrible impact on it

- we need to be able to adjust according to profile. I use planes a lot and I buy bitcoins, yet I'm veggie and don't own a car. I'm probably not at the middle of the Gausse line but I don't have a clear picture of where I am.

Hi, the CO2 expenditure of the whole operation, including mining, milling, and transport, has been calculated to be about 4% of the amount of CO2 that is captured by the olivine.

We are not planning to do any new mining for the first allotments of olivine, as there are literally "tons" of piles of olivine-rich rock sitting as "tailings" on the property of old mines.

This already excavated rock was mined in the pursuit of the mineral deposits below it and are considered "waste" by these mines. Kind of like buying a used car instead of having a new one created, that rock's CO2 is already accounted for. So, in this case, we do not have to mine it, only transport (ideally in an efficient manner like a train) and then mill it and spread it on the beach.

Check this paper for more details on the calculations: https://climitigation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Olivine...

What they are discussing is simply an acceleration of a natural process: the carbonate-silicate cycle[1]. Silicate rocks are transformed into carbonate rocks through weathering. This captures CO2 from the atmosphere.

When carbonate rocks are transformed back into silicates through metamorphosis or magmatism the CO2 is released back into the atmosphere.

This definitely has the potentially for the long-term capture of CO2. For example in about 600 million years increased solar output will disrupt the carbonate-silicate cycle, resulting in the increased weathering of rocks and the capture of enough CO2 that C3 plants, which make up 99% of existing plant species, will no longer be able to live on earth. [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate%E2%80%93silicate_cyc... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

But that's missing the point. You're saying that we have to then sell these two messages - one of which is being supported by actors that are not acting in good faith.

Message 1: yes, this could have unpredictable and devastating consequences in new and exciting ways, and you are directly responsible for it.

Message 2: (current message) we shouldn't do that and you're already doing enough because you have a more fuel efficient truck than you had in the 90's, and you use LED lights.

For most people, that's what's in the back of their head, I would argue. (note that I'm not agreeing with either).

How do you sell that?

There is not only one kind of "action" available to take.

What do you think about perennial grains that sequester carbon underground, like Kernza?

https://www.greenbiz.com/article/could-perennial-grains-be-n...

More than that, articles like https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fertilizing-ocean... indicate that the sequestration efficacy varies widely based on a variety of parameters that we do not yet know enough to control. In particular the type of diatom that blooms matters. A lot. And it isn't obvious how to get the one that you want.

Furthermore there is a question of what happens when deep ocean currents turn over the ocean. Does that CO2 come back out? We don't know. And that is the difference between solving the problem versus kicking it down the road for a few centuries.

But still environmentalists have moved to get all research into the topic shut down. Which I think is shortsighted at best. We have a big enough problem and few enough plausible options that I don't believe we should shut this one down.

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.

No, it wasn’t.

Trees (esp. those suitable for paper) either burn or fall over and rot, both of which release most of the carbon they used to store.

Fossil fuels used to be trees, and they were well sequestered. Paper would eventually become something similar when buried.

I assume any serious paper production company replants the tree, so you start with a tree and end with a tree and landfilled paper.

The reason I'm so interested in Direct Air Capture is:

- It's primarily a tech solution which allows for scale. If you build one Machine you can build a million. It won't actually require very much space, it need access to cheap energy and abilities to store/sequester the CO2 captured.

- Technology have the benefit that can be optimized and optimized and optimized to the point where the cost is not very high. The less tech the less changes for optimization

- There is a big risk many countries won't meet their responsibility. Getting wealthy democracies onboard is hard enough. We need a scalable way to solve this that doesn't require everyone to help because they prob won't after all

- Any negative emission solution that requires a large land-mass will create other problems (dealing with land-owners etc).

I'm not Gustaf, but I'll try to answer this.

The return on investment for a lot of Carbon capture/sequestering is not lucrative (or at least the business models are not yet apparent). The long term VC angle for air to fuel seems straight forward.

- Mars alone will be a huge market for such technology. Driving a lot of demand 100-200 years out (if not a big market in 20-40 years).

- Shanghai, et-al, need air filters. Now imagine a filter which also generates a sellable resource; fuel. I imagine that machine would sell quite well in those markets.

- With the right level of efficiency, a new era of "sail" boats could be powered by reclaimed fuel from air. Imagine the market for a cargo/cruise ship leaving port with an empty fuel tank, and days later reaching the destination port with a full tank and its goods delivered.

- With the right level of efficiency, this only improves the efficiency of coal plants. Burning coal for electricity but also reclaiming the CO2 for fuel.

Also other greenhouse gasses, like methane capture from landfills.

The problem is you now need some actual structure rather than just some thin sheets / inflatable structure or whatever. Further applying even small amounts of force across huge sheets adds up while as you say it's acting like a solar sail.

That is to say it's clearly still possible, just not as cheap as people are assuming.

My proposal is to send up a robot, capture a smallish asteroid, and have it use the material to weave/spin out a shield. The robot sits at the edge and spins and weaves away. More robots would be employed as the shield grows. Honestly, I've not worked out all the details. I'd love to hear what others think. Is this just pie(sheet) in the sky? Or is this the salvation of humankind.

You could just "bury it and don't burn it". The US already has a Strategic Petroleum Reserve. Assuming that you can recycle something close enough to the original petroleum, you could even process the recycled fuel into durable petroleum products instead of consumable ones (lubricants, plastics, etc.)

Or you could sell it to SpaceX and have them ship it all to Mars, so someone can use it to fuel their Mars rovers and terraform Mars.

I didn't address all the possible nuances, but for the purposes of being precise: "reforestation at the scale necessary to act as an effective carbon sink is uneconomical".

As you must know, trees accelerate their carbon sequestration as they get larger. Also, fruit and nut agricultural species are frequently not robust enough, fast growing enough, or zone hardy enough to be good candidates for this either.

Yes, trees have economical value. Trees an a AGW-countering scale carbon sink are not. I'm in favor of a carbon tax/credit system in part for this reason.

Isn't that tearing them down, not putting them up?

> 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.

Probably the most important advantage sunshades have over other kinds of geoengineering megaprojects is that they can be trivially (compared to their construction costs, that is...) turned off. If they turn out to be very harmful in some previously unforeseen way, we can choose to not have them anymore.

That is not so for, for example, seeding lots of nutrients for algae over the continental shelf.

>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.

My core argument is that using technology to help curb CO2 emissions is a way to solve the problem that is something we can do, and that ideological solutions - let's rework our society or kill half the population - aren't as easy. To say that we should turn from a growth-based economy to a sustainable economy is much more difficult to create a plan of action for than to create a technological solution.

Ideological solutions have their own stains on history as well, compared to technical solutions - Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all have something to say about that.

There's no need to attack technical solutions as an epidemic on society. If you argued that society is an epidemic on society, that's a different story, but I would counter and say that there exist bad and good rich people, as well as bad and good technological outcomes, and bad and good ideological outcomes. To cherry pick the bad aspects is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

You are certainly correct that there is limestone rock and that it derives from skeletons of diatoms etc..

Consider this (caricaturized) argument: suppose most artificial mummies are mummified humans, that does not mean most humans end up mummified!

please check out the sibling comment by philipkglass, the referenced text has a section on calcite compensation, and the previous section detailing the saturation horizon. At high enough pressure calcite prefers being dissolved again.

Consider a calcite diatom cap, close to the beach, since it is above the saturation horizon, it won't dissolve soon, now consider a diatom dropping dead over the mariana trench, so the calcite starts sinking, until it passes the saturation horizon, now the pressure is clearly high enough to prefer being dissolved...

Geologist here. Can't speak to the economics, but there's no shortage of mineable olivine, mostly in areas where mantle lithosphere that was formerly below oceanic or island arc crust has been "obducted" on the continental crust and thrust up to the surface (the mantle is mostly olivine). These are called ophiolites, and they're not uncommon in places where you used to have a destructive plate boundary: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiolite

More importantly, how much carbon does olivine mining burn per ton? Is this scheme still carbon-negative if we account for that (and transportation)?

Hi, yes it does appear possible to not only increase the mining capacity, but that doing so will actually bring the price down to around $10-$12/ton. To do the total sequestration of anthropogenic (human-caused) CO2 release per year with olivine, it would require approx ~7km^3 of rock (23 gigatons or billion tons). This is compared to the ~10km^3 of oil equivalents we retrieve from the earth each year. And the ~20 gt of construction minerals mined each year. There are individual mines (for other types of materials) that have excavated volumes of greater than ~25 km^3.

To bring the planets atmospheric CO2 concentrations back to pre-industrial levels would likely require around 30-50 new olivine mines globally. The good news though is that olivine is extremely common, making up 80% of the mantle. Almost every country has olivine/dunite deposits, and so countries with cheap labor and lack of other viable export commodities would be ideal places to open mines, which would also help create jobs for them (and ones that actually help the planet).

> Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively. Would mining operations be able to scale appropriately without prices going through the roof?

Prices wouldn't go through the roof, because the demand isn't there at higher prices. A significantly higher price would make other methods of sequestration attractive instead.

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.

Do note that "not enough by itself" doesn't preclude "important part of the puzzle for how to do it".

Is your app eventually meant to turn a profit, and if so how? Or, are you doing this on a nonprofit basis and planning to keep it as such?

This is great. We need a verified system where know exactly where each dollar is spend and how many CO2 tons are saved per dollar spent

Good now via my response to your parent?

Thank you, well said.

I think that's the point.. Grow more trees and use the wood and the tables and books that are created are carbon that used to be in the air.

Depending on how high in the atmosphere the aerosols are added, they remain aloft for a few weeks to a few years. It's not a long-term commitment to altering the atmosphere's composition like burning fossils has been. This is in fact one of the arguments raised against solar radiation management: that the temperature rebound could be terrifyingly rapid if SRM is stopped. But that danger applies to space sunshades too.

> You could get environmentalists or governments to pay you to bury it.

It isn't sufficient to punt the cost onto a small group with shared political bent (environmentalists). There simply aren't enough of them to bear the costs, and it creates perverse incentives for carbon consumption for everyone else.

Yes, I think environmentalists have been trying to encourage governments to pay for carbon sequestration etc for quite some time. Mandated emissions reductions and increased fuel efficiency, carbon offset taxes, and funding carbon sequestration (burying) are all sides of the same coin.

> You can't avoid public policy when it comes to solving climate change, but if you can bury reserves of atmospherically-extracted hydrocarbons in the ground, that's an easy budget line item and not a massive fight that requires coordination among literally every industrialized nation.

Potato, potato. It's still additional funding, and good luck getting a conservative-majority senate to pass funding for anything other than the military and social security.

Yes, there is some use for carbon products, assuming people dispose of them by recycling or burying rather than burning. But I don't think it comes close to the volume needed to really restore pre-20th century atmospheric carbon levels.

Also concrete industry produces huge amounts co2 so chancing concrete to less co2 intense options helps lot.

With 20/ton of olivine it’s still around a 20 trillion dollar industry (just that cost alone)!

Is L1 the most efficient for a fixed size? The difference is ~6000 km for LEO versus 1.5 million km for L1 to the Earth's center and the r^2 law means you need to put a lot more area in L1 than in LEO, even after discounting for the fact that in LEO it'll be on the wrong side of the Earth half the time. Filling up appreciable fractions of LEO might have it's own problems.

LEO to L1 is not that bad using solar sails or ionic propulsion.

There are going to be real trade-offs to any orbit, but I think the minimum cost is going to be above X mass in L1 means X mass into LEO as you can't use less mass than that in any other orbit.

Washington State is voting this week on a carbon tax. That future is now, should voters choose it.

Agreed. I think the highest leverage at this point is actually in political realms, when it comes to climate change.

It's just infuriating that a $100/ton tax could fix the problem in a perfectly reasonable manner and government has their head in the sand.

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.

Doesn't that further a bidding war where the chief winners are sell-out politicians?

Reminder to be civil during dialogue.

I am really grateful for the text you mentioned, but it did not change my opinion on this technology as a carbon removal technology, it only confirmed what I understood. However, it is very well written and I will probably reference others to it whenever I can. The only minor mistake I could detect was a "boron" when clearly carbon was intended. If you have a similar quality text detailing the relevant parameters of adding carbonated rocks to counter the acidification I would be interested.

I was discussing the claimed carbon removal aspect, so I now disregard the acidification aspect...

In my analogy I stand corrected and should have stated that the bottle of water represented the surface seawater, since there is no free fast oceanic mixer. The surface water is equilibrating much faster with atmosphere than the whole water column of the ocean.

You defend the technology by mentioning that the average residence time is about 200.000 years, but that is for all inorganic carbon across the whole depth of the ocean, not just the surface layer! As you say there is not enough mixing, so dissolved inorganic carbon in surface seawater has a much shorter residence time. The long residence time is dominated by the slow movement of deep sea water...

So unless the proposal is augmented with either a huge oceanic mixer, or with dumping the carbonate over the mariana trench (if it dissolves there, it will take a long time before it reaches atmosphere again), lacking these augmentations we are dissolving carbonates in surface seawater, and the carbonate ions can equilibrate back to CO2 so it really is just emissions foisted of as capture...

If it stays in the solid say calcite CaCO3 state as opposed to being dissolved, then it does not affect the alkalinity of the surface water...

It does seem tricky. A worthy adversary even.

Look 10 years out in the future though and I think it is easy to imagine 1) many more people care about this 2) the urgency they feel is increased. Can we start with the Patagonias of the world (there are many others) and build some traction? Can we make it something that young employees want and bring transparency to which companies participate? If it can give a slight edge to McKinsey over Bain for example, the cost is trivial.

[Update regarding above: no YC interview, which is understandable based on where things currently stand]

I'll have to check them out, thanks for sharing. I did hear of another blockchain carbon project, but this one seems more promising at first glance.

> 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 of them per sq ft.

The main issue with cows is methane, not carbon (edit: carbon dioxide*), anyway.

Grassland does not tend to develop soil, so if employed in feeding cattle, the cattle is where the carbon is "sequestered" to - into and through them, out the rear end. If the grass is cut and harvested (at some expense) instead of fed to cattle, then we get a lot of carbon negative hay to do something with. Bury it maybe (to sequester) or biofuels (to release again).

With traditional timber plantations we get the carbon in a load of timber mostly. Build with some of it, pulp and burn the rest. Timber plantations tend not to build soil either.

With relatively unheard of silviculture - the detailed management of mixed forest, the optimum efficiency of carbon absorption can be arranged with select and native symbiotic species, while producing wood and foods and building soil mass. In addition to economic (and atmospheric) services advanced management of mixed forestry and groves can tolerate and support ancient plant and animal species - for future generations - which have been critically devastated by the persistent strategy of individuating production goals.

We don't need to get any smarter at all, we need to get wiser. There is plenty enough grassland now, its time to grow trees.

It may, but the last one lost by a pretty decisive margin. I have received a half dozen large glossy mailers funded by oil companies urging me to vote no on 1631, and have seen zero mail advertising for "yes." Which gets back to the fact that there's little lobbying/advertising money for curbing emissions and a lot of money spent against curbing emissions.

You can already compensate your Co2 online and it's not that expensive. Generally the companies are replacing very inefficient processes in developing countries.

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

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 with the RFS for flooding deserts, develop a multi-stage water transfer to desert desalinization ponds, then to be used in irrigation of the tree planting efforts.

We already have autonomous farming combines with excellent ability to harvest crops and plant seed. They should be put to use at scale in panting trees.

Further, we could make an effort to employ the vast amounts of humans with little opportunity to be productive to build, plant and deploy a massive effort such as this.

We dont need to try to do everything with robots, when we have millions and millions of humans.

If we are so progressive and smart, maybe learning how to manage a labor force in the millions to accomplish a great work such as terraforming a desert is someting we should attempt again.

Also is this a suggestion that a company that did just this would be accepted and funded?

That's an interesting option, but I wonder how a company might sustain itself doing this.

Lease land to eco-friendly activities like zipline adventures or something?

Also sounds like a good reason for expansion of National Parks services.

So does anyone know why this isn't happening more? Surely there are plenty of super wealthy tech titans, Hollywood stars, etc. that care about climate change. They could buy up rural land that is suitable for forestry and start planting trees, or prevent deforestation. Even small time donors could make an impact. Land in the US is cheap, right? What am I missing?

>The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.

"Doesn't concentrate wealth exponentially; BZZT rejected!"

At some point, we apparently forgot that wealth/power inequality itself massively contributes to environmental problems.

* If you have no political power, you can't defend yourself and your land from pollution.

* If a large portion of the society has no political power, a large portion of the society cannot defend themselves and their land from pollution.

* In a society with extreme wealth, the price mechanism can't "kick in" to protect increasingly-scarce renewable resources (ie saving a species from extinction). Donella Meadows gives a much better explanation than I can, using fisheries as an example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMmChiLZZHg&t=18m48s

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.

I'm seriously considering doing this myself. I've got some money set aside, and a smallish group (~20) people who are interested in contributing time, smaller amounts, etc. I'm no tech billionaire, but there's definitely areas where I could buy a few dozen acres of land.

I've been researching what's involved in reforesting, and it looks like a ton of work and a non-trivial cost. And maybe not the most efficient dollar / CO2 ratio, but also something that has the nice side effect of having a living forest around. (And also the side effect of providing exercise, access to the outdoors, etc.)

Right. And that charity is https://www.coolearth.org/. They don't buy land but they protect trees.

Supposing you can re-orient parts of the "huge solar sail" then wouldn't it become rather like the sail of a ship or the wing of a plane, and be usable as a control surface for maneuvering?

I'd imagine that in the neighborhood of L1 you would try to find some equilibrium point a little closer in to the sun so that the force of the solar wind matches gravitational pull to the sun. If you start drifting in to the sun, you expose more surface area, and if you're drifting towards the Earth, you re-orient the sail to absorb less solar wind.

Carbon Engineering already captures CO2 for $100/tonne. They published a paper on it https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3

http://carbonengineering.com/

“Individual DAC plants can be placed in any country and in multiple climates, and can be built to capture one million tons of CO2 per year. At this large scale, our technology will be able to achieve costs of $100-150 USD per ton of CO₂ captured, purified, and compressed to 150 bar.”

I should add: BC’s carbon tax will reach $50/t by 2021, which is half way to viability for Carbon Engineering.

I think the idea is that the tax would dis-incentivize emissions, so the cost of capture is irrelevant.

It is useful to be aware and as such it is good to know the effectiveness of each action.

Going car-less for a year is similar to going vegan for three years or doing 3 crossing of the Atlantic by plane. Switching over to buy exclusively "green energy" is almost twice as effective in reducing CO² emission compared to a vegan diet per year. All those are high impact changes, while home energy efficiency improvements are medium to low impact changes, with wall insulation estimated to be about 50% compared to eating less meat and up to 10th compared to a vegan diet.

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aa7541

Price signals are one way to do this. This will hit people unequally though, so probably needs some other things at the same time.

Ie if energy price is raised a lot, it will make poor people's lives a lot harder suddenly.

But currently the price of things is very much disconnected from the climate impacts

I'm also not sure how much of a big win the drones are. Proper forest management is probably way more important. So protecting against illegal logging and making sure that whenever trees are almost dying to take them out so that they don't rot and replant a new one.

Mob grazing does not need more work, and it reportedly needs no fertilizer and less land, and it was noticed years ago - this is how it is clearly fantasy at this stage. The strategy would have transformed existing beef and dairy economics within years of discovery.

Won't the rise of automation result in a lot of people without jobs ? They could start working on sustainable food.

Sounds like a win / win.

Do you have any carbon offset schemes you recommend? I feel like there are a lot of BS offsets out there.

Not quite what you were after, but I saw this Twitter thread that claims (with evidence) that the greenhouse gas contributions of meat and agriculture are overstated: https://twitter.com/fleroy1974/status/1053398265817894914

The pH will change only very slightly if you add CaCO3 to distilled water, because CaCO3 is very poorly soluble. I also agree that adding CaCO3 to seawater would not sequester carbon dioxide. But releasing basic metal cations via weathering silicates like olivine will sequester carbon dioxide. The difference is that the starting olivine does not contain carbonate, whereas in your example there is already carbonate in the starting CaCO3.

Schematically:

A) H2O + CO2 <=> H2CO3

Equilibrium favors left hand side, but water exposed to atmosphere becomes slightly acidic from right hand side.

B) Mg2SiO4 + 2 H2CO3 => 2 MgCO3 + SiO2 + 2H2O

Equilibrium strongly favors the right hand side. But the reaction is strongly kinetically hindered with naturally occurring large lumps of rock. This is why it will take a very long time for natural silicate weathering processes to absorb the extra CO2 that humans have recently added to the atmosphere.

C) CaCO3 + H2CO3 <=> 2 CaHCO3

Equilibrium favors left hand side, but limestone can be solubilized from right hand side reaction at a low rate (or faster in presence of high CO2/water concentration).

Note that the metal in the silicate of the left hand side of B can be various alkali and alkaline earth metals, but magnesium dominates in olivine.

EDIT: "CO2 Mineral Sequestration Studies in US" by Golberg et al appears to be the best reference to the thermodynamic and kinetic aspects of magnesium silicate weathering that I can easily find outside of a paywall.

https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1208898

This paper is focusing on a different way to accelerate weathering: apply wet, concentrated, hot CO2 to crushed silicates. The olivine-crushing proposal discussed here on HN takes a different approach to accelerated weathering: crush and disperse larger quantities of silicates, but do not try to heat or pre-concentrate the CO2. Just let the ambient conditions of the atmosphere and oceans work on crushed rock (this is still far faster than natural weathering).

The key takeaway from this paper is on pages 3 and 4: magnesium silicate carbonation is exothermic (thermodynamically favored). Once magnesium silicate reacts with CO2, it would take more energy to undo the reaction and put that CO2 back in the atmosphere.

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 land from the previous owner (because they won't be able to graze or plant there anymore) or take it from them by force.

Grassfed does not necessarily lead to more methane production, it depends on the mix of grass and secondary vegetation, on the grain mix being compared to, and on potential supplements.

https://prairiesoilsandcrops.ca/articles/volume-1-3-print.pd...

I think the analysis I saw was that it's energetic enough that the entire mining + grinding + "burning" process is energetically favorable. Which I found pretty astounding, but I think that points more to the incredible efficiency of mining and industrial processes than anything.

I think that was also at elevated temperature in a carbonic acid solution, so basically the fastest possible "weathering".

I agree that my estimate could be too big, but I do think there is a potential to increase the forestation in the north. Because of the warmer climate, Iceland can grow aspen. The government is planning to grow tree in a large part of the island, but the have a problem with free roaming sheeps. The land the can only sustain shrubs and moss could grow trees now.

Some countries are increasing the forestation as well https://www.citylab.com/environment/2018/01/northern-forest-...