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If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them. I would expect that the people who only care about profits t
by msandford 5y ago
If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them. I would expect that the people who only care about profits to quickly allocate capital to this endeavor (if it's profitable) up until the point where diminishing returns makes it less profitable. Hopefully that doesn't happen until we're slowly decreasing CO2 versus slowly increasing.
Even just cutting the growth rate by half would do a lot, and it would give international bodies like the UN some footing to establish a carbon price. Right now the carbon market is highly illiquid; nowhere near enough people are able to manufacture credits. If you could guarantee that it's always possible to make more credits that changes the political and perhaps even economic dynamic.
- dataflow 5y ago> If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them. That would just leave us where we're at right now, right? Even with emissions not increasing (unlikely...), we'd still need 60k just to decrease CO2 levels at the same rate... meaning it'd take several decades to bring them to acceptable levels. We'd probably need a few times that many facilities to be able to do this at the pace we need...
- s1artibartfast 5y agoToday is not a bad place to be, especially compared to many of the other potential outcomes.
- pstuart 5y agoIt beats the alternative that's likely to happen, which is "oops, nobody told me it was going to break!"
- jjk166 5y agoIf you held emissions constant, yes, but realistically you'd also be reducing emissions at the same time.
- toomuchtodo 5y agoWe'll have to build an assembly line for them.
- gorkish 5y ago1 facility for every ~100k people isn't unreasonable. It's like building an air treatment plant for every water treatment plant there is. Anyway, while these plants are busy reprocessing the entire planet's atmosphere they can do other useful things besides removing CO2.
- mikro2nd 5y agoInterested to know what those "other things" might be.
- smileysteve 5y agoAny activity with carbon that doesn't involve aerobic activity. Creating soil (worms or bokashi vs compost), creating plastic, creating pencil lead.
- DanTheManPR 5y agoThat gives an interesting sense of scale to the problem. Dealing with C02 emissions is similar to water waste treatment, both in concept and in scale of infrastructure required.
- cyberge99 5y agoOr go the rasberry pi route and produce household units inexpensively or free DIY plans. Crowd-source it to municipalities and makers.
- pokstad 5y agoYou mean trees?
- boplicity 5y agoTree aren't great for carbon capture. They take up land space, which then has to be reserved for those trees. Then, they eventually die, and decompose, which means a new tree has to grow to re-capture the carbon that is released when the tree decomposes. Better to put the excess carbon back underground, where it came from.
- haimez 5y agoThe term is “sequestration”. You are correct that trees are a temporary capture, and even then- only when you plant woodlands that did not previously exist. Given enough time, the trees that are planted will decompose or burn in a forest fire to become net neutral. Trees buy time, but they aren’t a clean up plan.
- sdenton4 5y agoTrees decomposing and being consumed by other trees is literally how it's worked for untold millions of years, so doesn't seem like a problem to me ... Forests also provide local cooling, improve the water cycle, and aid biodiversity. A world with forests is a healthier world.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- adrianN 5y agoTrees dying and not decomposing is how we got all that coal that we're now turning back to CO2.
- dTal 5y agoWhy would it be economical? It's burning power. There's no business model beyond "get governments to pay".