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More important than carbon scrubbing, we need energy innovation and to make environmental damage illegal and stop allowing companies to profit off of it. See m

More important than carbon scrubbing, we need energy innovation and to make environmental damage illegal and stop allowing companies to profit off of it. See my other comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013495 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20013495

rjf72 7y ago
I think the argument that you posed in your other post to be challenged in one particular way. You claim that there is no time to deploy carbon scrubbing. I immediately see two major issues with this argument. The first is that greenhouse effects are not irreversible. As you remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, you change the heat equilibrium. Even feedback effects can be mitigated both by temperature change which reduces the feedback as well as by simply managing with their (causative) consequences - which tend to be an increase the gas emissions, by removing those emissions. In other words human social change does have a limited timeline of viability, but scrubbing does not. The second is that everything is relative to other options. The first major paper (to my knowledge) regarding imminent danger from climate change was published some 40 years ago. The first 'alarming' governmental report and subsequent media involvement was 30 years ago. Since then there's been effectively 0 change by reliance on social systems, treaties, agreements, and so on. Nearly all of the progress we have made is because natural gas became cheaper than coal, which would have happened with or without these agreements. I don't see this inability to effect social change in any way changing in the future. So by claiming there's not enough time to enact scrubbing (which by the earlier point is not necessarily a reasonable argument to begin with) you're suggesting that other viable alternatives can be enacted more rapidly - and I also see no reason to believe this to be accurate.
- jefflombardjr 7y ago
  > The first is that greenhouse effects are not irreversible. The UN clearly says there is a point of no return, could you please clarify what you are trying to say? https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/gaef3500.doc.htm https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/gaef3500.doc.htm edit: better report https://www.egu.eu/news/428/deadline-for-climate-action-act-strongly-before-2035-to-keep-warming-below-2c/ https://www.egu.eu/news/428/deadline-for-climate-action-act-... And what do you think about this type of scrubbing? https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-search-for-a-perfect-plant-that-could-stop-climate-change/92396 https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-search-for-a-perfect-pl...
  - rjf72 7y ago
    Sure, these reports are talking about the point of no return in terms of human activity having an effect. In the grand scale of climate humans play an extremely small role. For instance with CO2 we account for less than 4% of all emissions in the worldwide CO2 system. The reason that our effect is meaningful is because it's a system that's in equilibrium. CO2 was being absorbed and released in a fairly balanced system, though one that does tend to have its own cycles over time. So even small changes to the system can have a disproportionate effect. In other words imagine 2000 calories is what you need to sustain your weight at your current activity levels. And you increase the caloric intake just 5%. Even though you've added almost nothing to what you regularly consume, you're going to go from zero weight gain to some very non-zero amount of gain. You eat thousands of calories and then adding a hundred more suddenly makes you go from a-okay to weight gain? It's a logical but counter-intuitive problem. The exact same thing is happening with worldwide CO2 levels and the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases. But now enter feedback mechanisms. As the Earth heats up natural processes begin to release more and more CO2. For instance through the melting of permafrost or otherwise frozen gases (the likely culprit here). You reach a point that the Earth is producing enough additional CO2 that even if you instantly cut human emissions to 0 it would be unlikely to have any meaningful effect. So when the UN speaks of things such as irreversible change, they are speaking exclusively of solving the problem by reducing our emissions. Scrubbing does not have this problem. Instead of trying to change our role in the equilibrium (for instance trying to decrease those 100 calories) it works on the system as a whole. And you can scrub arbitrarily large amounts. You could even make places like Venus habitable again with scrubbing technology - though to emphasize - Venus is many many many orders of magnitude away from anything we would need to solve on Earth. There are also other grand motivations for developing it. For instance, atmospheric scrubbing, once well developed, could even begin to work as contingencies against life destroying natural or unnatural disasters - nuclear fallout, mega-volcano eruption, meteorite impact, etc. And the opposite (atmospheric injection) could help resolve natural disasters like gamma ray blasts which are one plausible explanation for the Ordovician mass extinction event. We're still just as vulnerable to many of these dangers today. So these are all very important technologies, but don't have a private economic incentive, so it's one area I think would be wise to consider increasing funding for. And again, there's no better time than now.
  - 7y ago

rjf72 7y ago

I think the argument that you posed in your other post to be challenged in one particular way. You claim that there is no time to deploy carbon scrubbing. I immediately see two major issues with this argument. The first is that greenhouse effects are not irreversible. As you remove greenhouse gases from the atmosphere, you change the heat equilibrium. Even feedback effects can be mitigated both by temperature change which reduces the feedback as well as by simply managing with their (causative) consequences - which tend to be an increase the gas emissions, by removing those emissions. In other words human social change does have a limited timeline of viability, but scrubbing does not. The second is that everything is relative to other options. The first major paper (to my knowledge) regarding imminent danger from climate change was published some 40 years ago. The first 'alarming' governmental report and subsequent media involvement was 30 years ago. Since then there's been effectively 0 change by reliance on social systems, treaties, agreements, and so on. Nearly all of the progress we have made is because natural gas became cheaper than coal, which would have happened with or without these agreements. I don't see this inability to effect social change in any way changing in the future. So by claiming there's not enough time to enact scrubbing (which by the earlier point is not necessarily a reasonable argument to begin with) you're suggesting that other viable alternatives can be enacted more rapidly - and I also see no reason to believe this to be accurate.

jefflombardjr 7y ago
> The first is that greenhouse effects are not irreversible. The UN clearly says there is a point of no return, could you please clarify what you are trying to say? https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/gaef3500.doc.htm https://www.un.org/press/en/2018/gaef3500.doc.htm edit: better report https://www.egu.eu/news/428/deadline-for-climate-action-act-strongly-before-2035-to-keep-warming-below-2c/ https://www.egu.eu/news/428/deadline-for-climate-action-act-... And what do you think about this type of scrubbing? https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-search-for-a-perfect-plant-that-could-stop-climate-change/92396 https://www.ozy.com/fast-forward/the-search-for-a-perfect-pl...
- rjf72 7y ago
  Sure, these reports are talking about the point of no return in terms of human activity having an effect. In the grand scale of climate humans play an extremely small role. For instance with CO2 we account for less than 4% of all emissions in the worldwide CO2 system. The reason that our effect is meaningful is because it's a system that's in equilibrium. CO2 was being absorbed and released in a fairly balanced system, though one that does tend to have its own cycles over time. So even small changes to the system can have a disproportionate effect. In other words imagine 2000 calories is what you need to sustain your weight at your current activity levels. And you increase the caloric intake just 5%. Even though you've added almost nothing to what you regularly consume, you're going to go from zero weight gain to some very non-zero amount of gain. You eat thousands of calories and then adding a hundred more suddenly makes you go from a-okay to weight gain? It's a logical but counter-intuitive problem. The exact same thing is happening with worldwide CO2 levels and the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases. But now enter feedback mechanisms. As the Earth heats up natural processes begin to release more and more CO2. For instance through the melting of permafrost or otherwise frozen gases (the likely culprit here). You reach a point that the Earth is producing enough additional CO2 that even if you instantly cut human emissions to 0 it would be unlikely to have any meaningful effect. So when the UN speaks of things such as irreversible change, they are speaking exclusively of solving the problem by reducing our emissions. Scrubbing does not have this problem. Instead of trying to change our role in the equilibrium (for instance trying to decrease those 100 calories) it works on the system as a whole. And you can scrub arbitrarily large amounts. You could even make places like Venus habitable again with scrubbing technology - though to emphasize - Venus is many many many orders of magnitude away from anything we would need to solve on Earth. There are also other grand motivations for developing it. For instance, atmospheric scrubbing, once well developed, could even begin to work as contingencies against life destroying natural or unnatural disasters - nuclear fallout, mega-volcano eruption, meteorite impact, etc. And the opposite (atmospheric injection) could help resolve natural disasters like gamma ray blasts which are one plausible explanation for the Ordovician mass extinction event. We're still just as vulnerable to many of these dangers today. So these are all very important technologies, but don't have a private economic incentive, so it's one area I think would be wise to consider increasing funding for. And again, there's no better time than now.
- 7y ago