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Climate change will create the first trillionaire. Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it. Find everything that requires stable land and predi

• tabtab 7y ago
  Siberia will be the next California ;-)
  • tito 7y ago
    Wow! Here's a review of Siberia's climate by 2080: "Even under mild climate change, they estimate a five-fold increase in the potential human capacity." https://www.newsweek.com/russia-siberia-habitable-climate-change https://www.newsweek.com/russia-siberia-habitable-climate-ch...
    • tabtab 7y ago
      I remember a news crew interviewing Russian citizens on the street about climate change. One guy said, "I welcome global warming, it's f&cking cold here!"
    • swader999 7y ago
      Except permafrost melts into muskeg which is too expensive to farm or build roads on.
    • Delk 7y ago
      Too bad that will be offset by desertification and other negative changes elsewhere in the world.
  • Havoc 7y ago
    I shall patent a automatic mozzie zapper
• pjc50 7y ago
  Who's going to pay for it?
  • marviel 7y ago
    perhaps those who wish to survive, after the initial wave of effects begin to be felt
  • tito 7y ago
    likely individuals, not governments. We bought our way into this problem.
    • pjc50 7y ago
      But the number of people who will is very obviously tiny. For any well-off individual, it's cheaper to buy their way out of the downsides. Everyone else is wondering about rent and (in the US) healthcare with a lot more immediacy. We can see this from the low takeup of carbon offsets.
  • a-priori 7y ago
    As one example, imagine that someone invents a process to manufacture gasoline using carbon extracted from the air, at a price that's cost competitive with gasoline extracted from the ground. Any car running on that as fuel would immediately become carbon-neutral, and it could be produced anywhere on the planet. Almost overnight you could make the entire automotive industry carbon neutral (burning this gasoline would merely return the carbon into the air that was sequestered when the gas was produced) without needing to replace all the cars on the road. Who would pay for it? Everyone. Individuals would buy manufactured gasoline to power their cars. Governments all over the world would subsidize its production both for environmental reasons (to meet Paris targets), and for energy security to reduce their dependence on oil imports. That would be a license to print money and could probably produce a trillionaire.
    • tito 7y ago
      Exactly. Elon Musk announced a few weeks ago that SpaceX Starship will be fueled from atmospheric carbon. They're building a process to pull carbon fuel out of the air on Earth -- and on Mars. Relevant quote on YouTube from Starship Update, queued up here: https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3850 https://youtu.be/sOpMrVnjYeY?t=3850
• rapsey 7y ago
  FED money printing and the subsequent bubbles will create the first trillionaire.
  • mc3 7y ago
    Zimbabwe beat them to it
    • wuliwong 7y ago
      Good point. I am a 100 trillionaire in Zimbabwe dollars.
      • robocat 7y ago
        If anyone wants to start a business selling suitcases of money from hyperinflation countries, I really really want to buy one large suitcase full (preferably money with English writing from a known county, Zimbabwe seems a likely candidate!). Or perhaps prop money (although it needs to seem like a realistic Western currency). Or maybe zero dollar banknotes?
• Obi_Juan_Kenobi 7y ago
  You mean geo-engineering specifically, or just a transition to a renewable economy? Olivine weathering and ocean cloud seeding both seem like reasonably likely solutions that each cost on the order of 10's of billions. Major doubts that addressing carbon will be a big money maker. But obviously the carbon economy is huge, so the renewable economy will at least that big.
  • tito 7y ago
    In terms of "What's a Promising Area to Work On", I'm excited about all of it. I've expanded my description to include the renewable economy as well as the carbon economy.
• jeffreyrogers 7y ago
  I don't really see that happening. Most of the things you've suggested would require large amounts on energy to produce. I don't see energy getting cheaper over the next 50-100 years. It seems to me that climate change and reduced dependency on fossil fuels we lead to reduced globalization and population reduction.
  • tito 7y ago
    The cost of energy will go near zero. The marginal cost of an electron captured with solar is free. Solar is starting to beat fossil fuel installations already, below $0.05 USD per kWh. This was not predicted even by the biggest cheerleaders even 10 years ago: "In 2017, the solar industry achieved SunShot’s original 2020 cost target of $0.06 per kilowatt-hour for utility-scale photovoltaic (PV) solar power three years ahead of schedule, dropping from about $0.28 to $0.06 per kilowatt-hour (kWh)." [1] Sunshot goal for 2030 is $0.03 per kWh. [1] https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030 https://www.energy.gov/eere/solar/sunshot-2030
    • monk_e_boy 7y ago
      Someone is going to cover the Sahara with solar panels and make some serious cash. Bonus points for automating the production of solar panels out of sand.
      • tito 7y ago
        Call it "Sand to Solar". Some of the best ideas start out as jokes, I googled for this because I was curious: "New technology allows heated sand to generate electricity, presenting a viable new option for investors to focus on." https://oilandenergyinvestor.com/acq/new-energy-from-sand-what-you-need-to-know/ https://oilandenergyinvestor.com/acq/new-energy-from-sand-wh...
        • AareyBaba 7y ago
          I wasted more time than I care to think reading that article. There is no mention of how the technology works. A vague reference to an academic project in the UAE. Most of the article is just filler fluff. This is a marketing article to investors for this authors "wealth building energy advantage".
• gnode 7y ago
  I'm pessimistic about governments coming together and coordinating an expensive effort to avert climate change. I also think the world is on a course to become increasingly divided and rivalrous, such that collaboration would be less likely, and nations less willing to compromise on their economic competitiveness. I think if there is an effort made (which there will probably have to be), it'll be something cheap and dirty, like stratospheric aerosol injection.
  • tito 7y ago
    Same here regarding govts coming together. I think individuals have a huge role to play. The rise of the climate hackers.
  • pm90 7y ago
    The reason there seems to be so much rivalry today is because only the shitty, attention grabbing and warmongering leaders and nations get all the attention. In the meanwhile, you have most nations around the world living and making progress peacefully. Nations that can be easily convinced by some form of aid or assistance to get on the bandwagon. Don't be fooled by the news media. Most peoples of the world just want to live and let live. However, if the leadership of the US continues to be dominated by anti-science racist right-wingers, I am sorry to say, this won't happen. That is probably the biggest threat to any progress, not inter-government cooperation.
    • GrayTextIsTruth 7y ago
      > anti-science racist right-wingers... is probably the biggest threat to any progress don't really know what race has to do with it, but big international banks are a bigger threat since they won't let any nation unplug from the global economy. follow the money.
      • pm90 7y ago
        Racism is a strong indicator of lack of integrity and a belief in the scientific process. If you believe that people are less intelligent because of the color of their skin (despite numerous scientific evidence failing to show any correlation between race and intelligence) it’s a good indicator that you don’t believe in the scientific method.
• rwmurrayVT 7y ago
  That AirMiners site takes 30 seconds to load.
  • tito 7y ago
    Hmm, wonder why that is. Loads fast for me!
• jes5199 7y ago
  This is interesting to me because it’s such a cultural blindspot: the left-wing point of view is that energy efficiency is the only way forward, and the right-wing point of view is that more traditional fuels is the only way forward. But solar panels seem to have a version or Moore’s law - and even a single doubling of efficiency from here would completely revolutionize our energy economy (and dramatically shake up world politics!). Two doublings and we have a green future. Three or more doublings and we suddenly have the biggest energy surplus in human history. It might be a little slower than the computing revolution - but it also might not be. If this is 1980, and solar is at the Apple II phase, the next 30 years are going to be wild.
  • johnmorrison 7y ago
    Solar panel efficiency does not have an analogue to Moore's law, and their efficiency physically cannot double two or more times. Solar cell record efficiency is 46%, that only gives room for 1.12 doublings theoretically, and thermodynamics is nasty in the real world so we probably cannot even get past 1 doubling from here.
    • philipkglass 7y ago
      You are correct about thermodynamic efficiency. I interpreted it to be about economic efficiency. In which case one or more doublings of kWh output from dollar input is still a stretch but plausible. Modern rooftop solar modules haven't even doubled efficiency from 40 years ago, but they have improved cost per kilowatt hour by more than 100x.
      • johnmorrison 7y ago
        Yeah, I tend to agree with you here. The difference I see is that solar has already been heavily invested in and developed recently, so it's probably near the limit of today's material science. My personal philosophy about technological progress is based heavily on the idea that material science is the principle barrier to what we can accomplish. That's why humanity's progress is recounted in "ages" named by material. So, I think solar panels can get maybe 2-10x more economical, whereas other options like new hydrocarbon sources, fission, and fusion can probably all get at least 10x more economical than the maximum possible with solar, purely due to the physical limitations of the technology.
• safog 7y ago
  One thing I've never been able to figure out is that given Crispr, why it wouldn't be possible to engineer an organism that can suck much more CO2 out of the air than any existing tree / algae could. Even more ideal if we can make a good building material out of the engineered plant to sequester Carbon. It's easy to see how the manual selection process would work here - plant a bunch of trees, see how much O2 each produces and pick Top N and repeat. Of course, this needs thousands of years to run manually because the improvement with each generation would be minimal. Is the issue that we don't know what gene(s) control photo-synthesis?
  • SamBam 7y ago
    Not my area of expertise, but I would assume that there is an efficiency limit, much like there is for solar panels. Remember that organisms can't just pull CO2 out of the air for free. Plants do it via photosynthesis, which requires the sun's energy. There is a maximum amount of energy falling on each organism, and I would guess that there is some theoretical limit to the efficiency of photosynthesis that is well below that limit.
    • safog 7y ago
      Yup I agree with you almost entirely. The only thing I was thinking of was if evolution would optimize for the amount of energy a plant receives vs other things like survival, reproduction etc and how much efficiency we can gain by optimizing purely for photosynthesis. Also I don’t know if plants are adapted to the high CO2 atmosphere yet so even if evolution optimized the ability of a plant to photosynthesize, given this happened in relatively low CO2 environments like forests and without man made climate change, it’s possible that human intervention can improve it.
  • madamelic 7y ago
    >One thing I've never been able to figure out is that given Crispr, why it wouldn't be possible to engineer an organism that can suck much more CO2 out of the air than any existing tree / algae could. Jurassic Park Effect. Just because we can doesn't mean we should. CRISPR is pretty unknown and releasing man-made organism we don't know every little thing about could topple the ecosystem incredibly quickly. Not to mention how incredibly divisive it would be to do so.
• crispinb 7y ago
  Discontent amongst world populations is growing, with wildfire riots increasingly breaking out. The root cause of this discontent is the gross inequality encouraged by (amongst other forces) contrepreneur culture. The near-term world is not going to be hospitable to the uber-rich, fortunately in my view. The world's masses are coming after them.
  • antocv 7y ago
    You wish. Just like the early socialists of 19th century wished. Many of his suggestions are outright harmful, like pulling water out of air. Same thinking got us in this mess in the first place, hey just pull out oil of the ground and burn it.
    • crispinb 7y ago
      Oh yes and no I guess. A certain Schadenfreude would ensue for sure. But as I'm pretty sure it's too late to save our civilisation now, it'll be a lot of chaos & suffering for not much.
  • TearsInTheRain 7y ago
    Is climate change really tied to wealth inequality or are you just looking for a way to rationalize your blood lust?
    • crispinb 7y ago
      Well it's tied in one direction: poorer populations will suffer for the material benefit of richer ones. My nation is quite explicit about this - our government is on record as being happy for Pacific nations to lose their land as long as Australia continues 'economic growth'. And we'll even allow them to labour for us in exchange! The other direction is conceivable: more equal populations may be less liable to vanity status purchases, and less resistant to equitably-distributed change. Perhaps hard to prove either way. Anyway, that's not much to do with my comment which was merely noting that disaster capitalists trying to make trillions from climate change may meet mass resistance. As for my alleged blood lust - well I doubt the discontent will result in many billionaires being torn limb from limb. Though as many seem to think paying their fair share of tax would be pretty much equivalent, why not?
• SlowRobotAhead 7y ago
  > Find everything that eats fossil fuels and electrify it You start off with a free lunch fallacy. Open an led bulb sometime. You’ll find a large heat sink, at least one fiberglass circuit board, 30-100 electronics components with their own printing / cases / production footprints, ROHS-exempt parts have heavy metals like lead and mercury, you’ll find metal stampings and plastic coated wire, there will be plastic lenses and injection molded mounts, there will be LEDs themselves of course which have tens of thousands of hours time into their design that come from specialized facilities... all the production and shipping and testing and development that goes into each bulb. ... remember old light bulbs? Glass, a wire, a metal thread. Remember the argument that LED bulbs will last 10 years? They don’t. Tell me... which one do you think will be better in a landfill? I still think it’s the right move to go with LED bulbs overall - but I’ve been around the world, I’d like to think I have a sense of scale. When I see people write “just make it electric” i think of things like but not limited to my bulb example and I’m confident that person doesn’t understand much on making things at scale.
  • tito 7y ago
    Never said it would be easy. But fossil fuel powered light bulbs aren't the long term solution, and renewable-powered bulbs definitely are.
• abledon 7y ago
  so.... elon musk?
• mc3 7y ago
  > Climate change will create the first trillionaire. > Elon Musk There you go...
• jacques_chester 7y ago
  > Climate change will create the first trillionaire. Never attribute to a changing world that which can be attributed to inflation.
• jason0597 7y ago
  >Instead of water line pipes, pull water out of the air. I thought this story was put to bed a long time ago? [0] [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVsqIjAeeXw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVsqIjAeeXw
  • tito 7y ago
    Check it out, this is a different implementation that works! "A new device that sits inside a shipping container can use clean energy to almost instantly bring clean drinking water anywhere–the rooftop of an apartment building in Nairobi, a disaster zone after a hurricane in Manila, a rural village in Zimbabwe–by pulling water from the air." https://www.fastcompany.com/90253718/a-device-that-can-pull-drinking-water-from-the-air-just-won-the-latest-x-prize https://www.fastcompany.com/90253718/a-device-that-can-pull-...
• jariel 7y ago
  This is an ideological statement, which I do not believe is based in reality. There have always been 'meta causes' of various kinds, and they didn't create billionaires. If there were something very specific about the sector that created such conditions one might be inclined to agree, but I'm doubtful. 'Climate Change' is like 'AI' in that it will affect everyone, everywhere, in every industry, but there might very well be very few 'AI companies' that are huge, in much the same way there may be very few 'climate change' specific companies. Consider that the 'climate change' movement is well afoot and has been for quite a long time ... and where are the billionaires? Oil rights can be acquired at some scale, solar and wind, not really. If someone advanced some nuclear tech, lobbied to get approval to build a lot of cookie-cutter plants built around America, had major subsidies, huge protective moats (i.e. $10B entry point to get in the game) tons of IP and know-how - like the 'Space X' of Nuclear - then maybe we could see a billionaire there. But I don't see any companies or entities on the horizon, or on the theoretical horizon that would validate this claim. I think people might think it's true because the 'want to believe it's true' but that doesn't make it true or even more likely. That said ... it's probably a 'promising area' to work in.