3 ms·

That's a very different model I was not even aware of. Do you have any others' in mind as well?

PaulHoule 6y ago
I was thinking about doing a kickstarter to rent a boat and seed the oceans with iron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization This is illegal under the U.N. law of the Sea but thanks to Don Rumsfeld the U.S. is not a party to that law so if you only use ports in the U.S., Chile and a handful of other countries, nobody will stop you. I wound up talking to some experts in the field and was told with no uncertainty not to try it, although I think the scientific arguments weren't entirely convincing. --- The gist of it is this. If you want to make people pay money to solve the global warming problems you run straight into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem if you build some system for shuffling money (e.g. "Carbon Credits") around you now have a new problem that people are going to steal it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron If you can create a fully economically competitive energy source or carbon removal system people will use it and our great-grandchildren will remember that we solved this problem. If we screw around with other things, the "way out" is that the 8 billion population ends up under 2 billion. CO2 emissions will not be a problem then, but our great-grandchildren will assign a death count that is roughly Hitler plus Stalin squared to our current political order. I don't know what political/economic system they'll end up with but the Roman experience would lead us to think that they'll reject everything our civilization believes in.
- maxbond 6y ago
  > I was thinking about doing a kickstarter to rent a boat and seed the oceans with iron Maybe don't though. - Phytoplankton blooms are often environmentally and economically harmful - There's no actual guarantee you'll sequester carbon. - Consider that the biomass may end up in an anaerobic environment and digested into methane. Now you've converted carbon dioxide into a greenhouse gas 23x more powerful. - Iron may well not be the limiting factor in that part of the ocean & you'll just release carbon from your exhaust - How much carbon did it take to create this iron? Edit: That being said, I do think that we should look to the Azolla Event as a model for how significant drawdown can be accomplished in a short timescale - but in controlled environments, not the ocean.

I was thinking about doing a kickstarter to rent a boat and seed the oceans with iron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization This is illegal under the U.N. law of the Sea but thanks to Don Rumsfeld the U.S. is not a party to that law so if you only use ports in the U.S., Chile and a handful of other countries, nobody will stop you. I wound up talking to some experts in the field and was told with no uncertainty not to try it, although I think the scientific arguments weren't entirely convincing. --- The gist of it is this. If you want to make people pay money to solve the global warming problems you run straight into https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem if you build some system for shuffling money (e.g. "Carbon Credits") around you now have a new problem that people are going to steal it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron If you can create a fully economically competitive energy source or carbon removal system people will use it and our great-grandchildren will remember that we solved this problem. If we screw around with other things, the "way out" is that the 8 billion population ends up under 2 billion. CO2 emissions will not be a problem then, but our great-grandchildren will assign a death count that is roughly Hitler plus Stalin squared to our current political order. I don't know what political/economic system they'll end up with but the Roman experience would lead us to think that they'll reject everything our civilization believes in.

maxbond 6y ago
> I was thinking about doing a kickstarter to rent a boat and seed the oceans with iron Maybe don't though. - Phytoplankton blooms are often environmentally and economically harmful - There's no actual guarantee you'll sequester carbon. - Consider that the biomass may end up in an anaerobic environment and digested into methane. Now you've converted carbon dioxide into a greenhouse gas 23x more powerful. - Iron may well not be the limiting factor in that part of the ocean & you'll just release carbon from your exhaust - How much carbon did it take to create this iron? Edit: That being said, I do think that we should look to the Azolla Event as a model for how significant drawdown can be accomplished in a short timescale - but in controlled environments, not the ocean.