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>People always want to believe doom and gloom for some reason, but humans are an incredible animal. We have always found solutions and adopted them because in m
by DoctorOetker 4y ago
>People always want to believe doom and gloom for some reason, but humans are an incredible animal. We have always found solutions and adopted them because in most cases what is right also happens to be what works best.
https://proteindirectory.com/alt-protein-database/?_ingredients=co2 https://proteindirectory.com/alt-protein-database/?_ingredie...
For example these 6 companies are working on single cell protein (SCP) food from CO2 + energy input, by for example hydrogenotrophs. This may sound like technology that is not democratically accessible, as they are found for example in hydrothermal vents. However they are also found in more mundane places like soil, or ... the human gut, and hence faeces.
Let the world turn to shjt ... for dinner. Finding out how to culture them is probably the bigger challenge. An open science community on how to collect, identify, culture these would probably have the highest impact on combating climate change per buck of effort.
Solein / Solar Foods was recently featured on HN, with claimed figures of protein production efficiency:
SCP protein is about 20x more efficient than vegetable protein
SCP protein is about 200x more efficient than animal protein (and vegetable protein is about 10x more efficient than vegetable-protein fed animal protein)
Incidentally this implies SCP-protein fed animal protein to be about 2x as efficient as vegetable protein!
It turns out plants (or at least the cells of plant roots) can release proteases and absorb the resulting smaller peptide fragments, but it seems far from obvious that it is cost-effective to feed single cell protein to plants especially in competition with other consumers of soil proteins...
To grow these hydrogenotrophs you need CO2 and hydrogen and some trace minerals.
I suggest using radiative cooling near the south pole to:
* condense CO2 out of air
* to generate electric power by using the local (cold) environment as the hot bath, and the atmospheric infrared window (8-13 micrometers) as the cold bath. This way energy generation does not heat the polar environment (to the contrary it helps cool the poles).
* this energy can then be used make hydrogen, and heat well isolated ovens in which the cultures are grown.
So we can generate large amounts of food on otherwise unused area (without competing with solar panels or agriculture for land use), helping to cool the environment, helping to remove CO2, lowering demand of agricultural land by competing on price point, allowing us to rewild large amounts of agricultural land.
Any yearly surplus could be turned into a form of low bio-accessibility and buried where it came from...
While I'm on the climate change topic: we've known for a long time how to help water freeze over (Snomax, Pseudonomas Syringae) to ensure the basic human necessity of sliding down a snow covered hill on wooden planks but don't know how to help the ocean freeze over?
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7ec7/8b0733c1cdae7ced5d7388f10bc0a8f3cd42.pdf https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7ec7/8b0733c1cdae7ced5d7388...
or 1989:
https://journalofweathermodification.org/index.php/JWM/article/view/351/392 https://journalofweathermodification.org/index.php/JWM/artic...
the seasonal ice region is the region around the poles which melt and refreeze each year, the ocean in this region is super-cooled (a meta-stable state):
https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2020GL090242 https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/202...
why don't we sprinkle ice nucleating proteins (INP's) in this region? especially shortly around fall (northern hemisphere) or spring (southern hemisphere) when it is about to refreeze. If it starts freezing over a month earlier its reflecting light a month earlier... If we could actually farm ice, without dumping the heat in the local environment, but by actually reflecting energy to space, it might make sense at some point to ship eventual superfluous ice around the world to increase the energy efficiency of thermal power plants (fossil fueled, nuclear,... for as long or short as we still utilize them). This would also result in freeze desalinated sea water in the destination country.