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(Of course) there's a startup trying to commercialize this process. Lithos pays farmers to spread crushed volcanic rock on their farm fields to absorb atmospher

(Of course) there's a startup trying to commercialize this process. Lithos pays farmers to spread crushed volcanic rock on their farm fields to absorb atmospheric CO2, and then sells carbon capture credits to companies like Stripe, Alphabet, Shopify and Meta. https://www.lithoscarbon.com/ https://www.lithoscarbon.com/

lumost 3y ago
In my semi-informed opinion, this approach is the most likely to yield substantial CO2 reductions in the first half of the century. While industry is greening, the process is slow on the timescales required to arrest climate change. Industrial acceleration of existing carbon capture processes seem much more likely to yield results, in the latter portion of the century - carbon capture will still be useful to lower atmospheric CO2.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  Electricity decarbonization is the single most impactful thing anyone can do right now. But a large margin. Transportation decarbonization is the second most impactful thing. And anything else comes far behind those two. That said, just because some action isn't on the top 2, it isn't reason to stop doing it. And besides, yes, we will need to reduce the atmospheric CO2 at the second half of the century, and this is probably what will yield results fastest. It's all the better if we just start right now.
  - staplers 3y ago
    Always refreshing to see someone with their facts straight.
  - lumost 3y ago
    Electricity decarbonization won't occur in the amount required prior to 2060. We're still building net-new coal plants, and existing coal plants will be allowed to continue operating. The baseline load/peak load problem of renewables has yet to be solved (but progress is being made). I can see a world where globally the typical transit is a BEV for heavy equipment, transit, and some shipping all charged by renewables sometime in 2070-2080. However the lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and power plants being built today range from 20-50 years. We are unlikely to force early retirement of that infrastructure at a global scale within the next 20 years.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      > We're still building net-new coal plants I wonder about that. Will they be subsidized? At the same time are also closing down functional coal plants because their operational cost can't be recouped now that they compete with renewables. (Yeah, in all likelihood, everybody involved is actively refusing to think and talk about that on the hopes that they will have left this job by then. And the people putting money there are probably trying to sell their shares away to another loser before it.) Any way you cut it, those new coal plants will only get operational at all if people decide to constantly burn some money in them. > However the lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and power plants being built today range from 20-50 years. Yes, and that means we can replace up to 5% of our transportation emissions by year without increasing our capital depreciation. That is in stark contrast to the norm in that you are supposed to do some net investment to adapt to any random change. If you decide (by regulation, morality, or whatever) to actually sink money on the change, you can get there much faster.
      - vondur 3y ago
        I'm thinking the Coal plants will be built in newly industrializing economies, as it's the cheapest way to provide constant cheap power. China is still building Coal Power plants and so is India. The US hasn't built one in a decade and is closing existing ones.
        bamboozled 3y ago
        Renewables are cheaper than coal ?
        marcosdumay 3y ago
        It's complicated. But Coal can not survive in a market where both renewables and natural gas exist. The same applies to nuclear. When they are producing energy, renewables are about an order of magnitude cheaper than coal (and falling).
        tim333 3y ago
  - adolph 3y ago
    > just because some action isn't on the top 2, it isn't reason to stop doing it Since you don't quantify a cost-benefit of any action, how have you arrived to this effort ordinality? Given a ranking, would any efforts in combination have higher impact than a higher ranked effort alone?
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Well, I meant it by cost. The marginal costs for those top 2 are quite public. For electricity it's negative, electric cars cost some 30% more than normal ones. They are reasonably easy to estimate for things like spreading carbon-capturing rocks around (or you can use the price of phosphate-rich rocks, it should be similar). It's not a very expensive thing to do, but way more expensive than those 2. Marginally, there isn't a lot of synergy between those different options. But if you push them to levels much higher than the ones we have now it becomes clear that decarbonizing electricity will become a bottleneck to almost everything.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    > just because some action isn't on the top 2, it isn't reason to stop doing it. This this isn't wrong, be careful. Many of those proposing action outside of the top two are really trying to distract you from fixing the real problem. Many things outside of the top two need a ton of research before we can fix them - by getting you to spend your time and effort on that research you don't do anything about the top 2 which we can solve today. Thus the entrenched interests (mostly big oil) are pushing you to look at things outside of the top two knowing you can't solve them today, and while you are looking there they can sell more [oil or whatever].
    - jjk166 3y ago
      Conversely, hyper focusing on the top two can also be a distraction. There isn't a single pool of resources and labor that is being managed by a single entity. The people spreading rocks on fields are not the same people building solar panels or producing electric vehicles. Reducing funding spent on carbon capture does not inherently increase the funding for renewables. Researching cleaner concrete manufacturing does not inherently decelerate coal plant phase out. While reducing CO2 emmissions from the two biggest sources would be a huge win, people have been trying to achieve that for decades, and even in the most optimistic scenario it's a battle that will continue for another few decades. In the meantime there is a lot of other stuff that can be worked on in parallel. Waiting around for a silver bullet to solve everything is a great way to get nothing done, and so those who want nothing to get done point out the limitations of various proposals without putting forward options that put those specific resources to better use. Further, when you tell people that everything is insignificant compared to this one great challenge, and that challenge is something that people don't see much rapid progress on, it leads to defeatism - why should I buy an energy efficient heat pump when people on the other side of the world are currently building hundreds of coal plants? Again this is taken advantage of by malicious actors who turn that defeatism into resentment of even trying to make things better.
    - marcosdumay 3y ago
      Well, not on this one case. Spreading CO2 capturing material is a very viable way to help. And we must research capture anyway, because we surely will need it. This kind of action is the carbon credit system working like it was supposed to work, and a really good example to use to turn it into a tax that gets negative to whoever is capturing. But I do agree, one has to always be careful not to fall for polluter's propaganda.
  - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
    I think your top two are somewhere in the top three. We also need to get to a place, culturally, where we can have calm rational conversations about how many people we can reasonably ask this planet to support. At middling timescales, fewer people is better than greener tech. Some will see that as opting out of progress but there's really a lot of opportunity to offset it by doing a better job of investing in the people we already have.
    - proee 3y ago
      Why is this being downvoted? What is the argument for unregulated populations?
      - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
        It's hard to get elected on a "tell people they're not allowed to have kids" platform. I think there are less heavy handed ways to get us from a place where it's assumed that you'll have kids to a place where it's respected but not encouraged, but when people hear you talking about population growth as a problem to be solved, they immediately assume that you're about to propose something awful.
        bamboozled 3y ago
        It’s more likely hard to get get elected by impacting the. Economic growth story? People already having less kids.
    - Borg3 3y ago
      Thats right. Unfortunately, most people have they mindset fixed on never ending growth. We need more people, more cars, more everything. Yet, those people seems to barelly understand basic math and physics. Numbers do NOT lie. All that cool stuff that happened post WWII was because if cheap energy, very cheap. But its going to end. You can either have 10B ppl living in poor conditions or 200M people living in good conditions.
    - Terr_ 3y ago
      > We also need to get to a place, culturally, where we can have calm rational conversations about how many people we can reasonably ask this planet to support. I disagree, that's a dangerous trap. Oh, sure, it seems reasonable and sagacious at first glance, but that's what makes the eventual misdirection/procrastination so insidious! Long-term planning is not automatically wise planning. ________ To illustrate, imagine that: 1. There's a local park with houses around it. 2. Some people periodically dump their trash in it. 3. The trash-piles are getting kind of big and stinky now. 4. A well-meaning neighbor says: "What we really need is to get a place, as a community, where we can have calm rational conversations bout how many people can live near this park." 5. (Bonus) Many of the biggest trash dumpers agree: "Exactly, literally everybody here is to blame, and especially people moving in and/or having too many kids! The only way forward is a very thorough and lengthy symposium with multiple committees to develop recommendations to stop that kind of thing." ________ In that analogy, it's easier to see that your neighbor's proposal is--er--less than practical, because (A) the immediate problem isn't actually total visitor count,(B) we'll never reach full consensus, and (C) any consensus number would still meaninglessly unenforceable. So it can't really help, but it can harm by creating unnecessary discord and will prevent/delay practical changes like "Anything you bring must be taken back out", or "Littering: $X fine."
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    I’m not so convinced about the efficacy of transportation decarbonization, at least at the personal EV cars level. It kind of feels the same as when governments in California harp on personal water use and restaurants giving you a glass of water with your meal when the largest consumer of water use by a large margin is industry and farming. Looking at [1], COVID when probably the most number of people stopped driving and individual energy needs plummeted, our CO2 emissions and fossil fuel energy use dipped marginally. I think the reason is that shipping, airline, and commercial transportation (ie trucks) consume the most and those aren’t getting off fossil fuels any time soon. [2] indicates that cars and buses together contribute ~7% to global emissions. Aviation and shipping individually are bigger CO2 emitters than the total amount used by personal vehicles. Also these reports are hilarious (is that the right word?) to read. They use phase out to mean “no co2 emissions from this sector” while politicians say phase out to mean “no new sales/construction of co2 emitters in this sector”. Completely phasing it out will take much much longer. It’s good for us to do the work and cars are a meaningful contributor, but the biggest impact would actually be shipping + aviation + trucking. Unfortunately those are also the hardest problems and the ones EVs won’t touch any time soon (maybe trucking but even then I think we’re stuck with diesel for quite a while). Shipping probably needs nuclear power and aviation needs some kind of zero emission fuel (hydrogen probably won’t cut it). Heck we haven’t even removed lead from aviation fuel and that doesn’t even require an engine change. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
    - mnw21cam 3y ago
      > ...restaurants giving you a glass of water with your meal... Seriously? The average person in the westernised world probably uses something between 100 to 400 litres of water for washing and flushing per day, personal use actually in their house. And drinks around 2 litres in the same amount of time. External water use on behalf of that person for example for growing food and manufacturing things is even more. Having a glass of water wasted at a restaurant is a complete negligible non-issue. How ridiculous.
      - 3y ago
  - rsynnott 3y ago
    Eh, not sure about those top two. Depends on the circumstances, but in many countries there's _huge_ potential to reduce energy use via insulation improvement and that sort of thing.
- BurningFrog 3y ago
  Can it really be that simple? I'll remain skeptical until I see some numbers. But it would be cool if I could travel to a quarry and crush rocks for a while, and it would actually meaningfully help with the climate.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
  Carbon capture may be useful, even necessary, but the amounts needed to make any difference means that massive industrial processes are needed. As a species we emit 35 billion tons of CO2 per year. So I would think we're talking capture in at least the hundreds of millions tons a year range.
  - wkat4242 3y ago
    And also massive amounts of energy and materials required to build all the equipment to do it at that scale, and the land to place it. I don't see this being viable at a scale that matters until we've solved a lot of other problems first.
    - BurningFrog 3y ago
      The material already is somewhere. Why would it need to move?
      - wkat4242 3y ago
        I was thinking more of the electric carbon capture methods, building the machinery is a huge job that takes lots of material, at the scale needed to actually make a contribution that matters, we'll have to make so much energy and build, transport and maintain so much machinery that we'll change the face of the planet, causing its own huge negative effects. This volcanic rock thing doesn't sound like it is capturing enough to matter anyway as some people have already calculated.
  - lumost 3y ago
    Rocks are very dense. We are extremely good at mining and moving rocks. We produce 30 billion tons of concrete per year. Naively, you would expect that producing and distributing crushed rocks sufficient to capture carbon would be equivalent to at most 10x the concrete industry. In practice, it’s likely closer to 1x.
    - GeoAtreides 3y ago
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  My just as semi-informed opinion is just the opposite. All the evidence I have seen suggest that carbon credits amount to little more than greenwashing. There was a discussion just a couple of weeks ago here on HN about a project which gave more efficient cooking stoves and sold the estimated savings in terms of carbon as credits. Only problem was that it massively underestimated the actual carbon saved. A couple of years ago the Guardian did some investigating where forests which was under no threat of deforestation being sold as carbon credits as if they had saved the entire forest from deforestation. Probably in part confirmation bias, but also I don't think that a fix to a market that has externalities is to ductape it with a new market that has new externalities. That just provides more loopholes for evasion. Estimating carbon emissions avoided by a project is a messy and subjective process in the best of cases. Even more so when large amounts of capital is at risk. Currently it looks like companies get the PR benefits of being "net emissions neutral" while the carbon credits they purchased to become so will be shown to be little more than fraud a couple of years later.
  - rcxdude 3y ago
    For sure not all carbon credits are created equal, and a lot (especially the cheaper ones) are bunk. For any project which claims to be carbon neutral through purchasing credits, you need to look at what those credits are actually doing and assess whether it is actually removing carbon from the atmosphere or not. Basically don't throw the baby out with the bathwater: most carbon credits are bunk, but don't assume that any given project is bunk just because they are selling carbon credits.
    - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
      Except that this makes the entire concept bunk, because what the company cares about is the ability to claim carbon neutrality in their PR, which they'll do by choosing the credits that are the cheapest, which will be the ones that are a fraud. The actual way to fix this is to price carbon. You don't get money for not burning down a forest, you pay money if you burn down a forest, or burn coal. Then you refund all of that money to the public so it isn't a net tax, it's just an incentive to not emit carbon, because only the people who emit carbon pay the tax but everybody gets the refund.
- vlovich123 3y ago
  Something everyone seems to ignore is thermodynamics when it comes to recapture. Capturing co2 will require at least roughly the same amount of energy as we got releasing it. In practice quite a bit more. I don’t care how cheap solar panels get, recapture is insanely expensive. There’s a reason none of the carbon recapture companies talk about how much energy they use per ton of co2 captured. For a sense of scale, last year we emitted 40Gigatons of co2 in the air. If I’m reading [1] correctly this corresponds to over 120k TWh of energy that we generated from just that co2. That’s an insane amount of energy capacity we need to overbuild past net 0 (and it’s cute when people think solar will get us there by 2050). And these numbers are still growing each year and at best we maybe have put a dent in the second order derivative but we haven’t started the downward trend. And COVID showed how much of an impact a mass scale reduction in personal co2 caused when basically most people stopped driving - it was a blip in [1]. This shows us roughly the impact that EVs attached to renewables will have - most of the CO2 is from industry, shipping, airline transit, concrete, etc. Those things are decarbonizing very very slowly and it’s not a “slow and then all at once” kind of thing. The only way to overbuild enough capacity is to build an insane amount of fission power plants, but I suspect we’re rapidly crossing the point where even that would work since the ecological damage caused by global warming isn’t going to be reversed (eg the ice caps won’t reform, the extinct species won’t come back, etc). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels Edit: for those downvoting me, I would appreciate if you explained where I’m factually incorrect. Unless the downvote is just an emotional response to uncomfortable data, which I understand.
  - jjk166 3y ago
    That would only be true if you were trying to change carbon back into energy dense hydrocarbons. Accelerated weathering exposes rock that reacts with CO2 without any external energy input. The reaction actually produces energy, though not enough to be used as a practical power source. You need to do work to expose the rock, but this can be orders of magnitude less than the energy released when the CO2 was produced.
    - vlovich123 3y ago
      OK point taken, but that’s actually a very small point when you run the numbers. Industrial scale direct air capture technology right is ~1200KWh per ton of CO2. And this energy cost is non linear - as we scale up, the lower CO2 concentration in the air will result in higher energy costs being needed to extract the remaining. I don’t think exposing the rock will be cheaper or can even scale as a process but harder to say. But that energy used is largely waste - sure we’ll maybe find a use for some of the co2 but then that’s also not sequestration and will release some of the captured co2 back into the air. Using those numbers means we’d need to be spending 48TWh to capture the carbon we emit each year, which is almost half of our current global energy production. Those are massive numbers. Of course you could overbuild less and slowly extract the co2, but then climate change gets even more baked in.
wiz21c 3y ago
website: "With 3 tons of basalt application you can capture up to 1 ton of CO2. Our software optimizes both for crop yield and carbon capture — making your land as productive as possible while you earn revenue from carbon removal." Should I read: 1 CO2 ton effectively captured after discounting CO2 emitted for basalt extraction and dispersion ?
- dylan604 3y ago
  no, it sounds to me that it requires 3 tons of basalt to capture 1 ton of CO2. it does not read like it is making any claims beyond that. it reads to me as if you're putting words into it on your own.
- dj_gitmo 3y ago
  I am also curious how much carbon is released to extract and spread that 3 tons. I'm guessing it's still a net carbon-negative, but that's still a lot of material to be moving around.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  It's gross not net. The way they minimize is that they use basalt waste (so they don't dig for it, it's been dug for) and they deliver as local as they can so there's hopefully low transport costs. I don't know if moving basalt waste is something mines already do and if they specifically count that. I suppose one could argue that by reducing the cost of getting that waste away, they're effectively incentivizing mining. You'd need a more sophisticated model to see if this will work.
  - barbazoo 3y ago
    This probably makes more sense in a context where mining and transport was done carbon neutrally. Similar to how switching to an EV doesn't automatically lower your CO2 bill if the electricity you use is dirty but it allows for decentralized improvements (i.e. renewable energy) that roll out without the individual having to do anything.
- mytailorisrich 3y ago
barbazoo 3y ago
Thanks for sharing!!! This is all voluntary right? As far as I can tell [1] the US doesn't have a carbon pricing system so this is really dependent on companies being interested in the positive PR this leads to? [1] https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/map_data https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/map_data
wkat4242 3y ago
Why put this on farmland? We need farmland to produce food. And it can be used for other plants too which capture CO2. Better put this absorbing rock in places we don't need for other stuff like deserts and salt lakes
- entropicdrifter 3y ago
  It doesn't hurt the soil nor the crops and there are already people actively managing the soil composition of farmland. Logistically it's much easier to ship stuff to farms than the middle of nowhere because there are existing supply lines.
- ben_bai 3y ago
  It is also a fertilizer, providing Carbon and Minerals to the farmland.
- jandrewrogers 3y ago
  Crushed basalt can be used as a substitute for mined fertilizer that would need to be applied anyway, notably potassium and phosphorus. It is one of the reasons volcanic soils tend to be fertile. The rock leaches significant quantities of mineral that are important for plant growth.
picadores 3y ago
Eh, wouldn't it be more feasable to just frake the rock and then solarpump atmospheric cases into it, fracture it ever futher? And use ice water to ever expand the fractures? Basically just a solar farm that pumps air underground, ocassionally pumping and then cooling water?

lumost 3y ago

In my semi-informed opinion, this approach is the most likely to yield substantial CO2 reductions in the first half of the century. While industry is greening, the process is slow on the timescales required to arrest climate change. Industrial acceleration of existing carbon capture processes seem much more likely to yield results, in the latter portion of the century - carbon capture will still be useful to lower atmospheric CO2.

marcosdumay 3y ago
Electricity decarbonization is the single most impactful thing anyone can do right now. But a large margin. Transportation decarbonization is the second most impactful thing. And anything else comes far behind those two. That said, just because some action isn't on the top 2, it isn't reason to stop doing it. And besides, yes, we will need to reduce the atmospheric CO2 at the second half of the century, and this is probably what will yield results fastest. It's all the better if we just start right now.
- staplers 3y ago
  Always refreshing to see someone with their facts straight.
- lumost 3y ago
  Electricity decarbonization won't occur in the amount required prior to 2060. We're still building net-new coal plants, and existing coal plants will be allowed to continue operating. The baseline load/peak load problem of renewables has yet to be solved (but progress is being made). I can see a world where globally the typical transit is a BEV for heavy equipment, transit, and some shipping all charged by renewables sometime in 2070-2080. However the lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and power plants being built today range from 20-50 years. We are unlikely to force early retirement of that infrastructure at a global scale within the next 20 years.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    > We're still building net-new coal plants I wonder about that. Will they be subsidized? At the same time are also closing down functional coal plants because their operational cost can't be recouped now that they compete with renewables. (Yeah, in all likelihood, everybody involved is actively refusing to think and talk about that on the hopes that they will have left this job by then. And the people putting money there are probably trying to sell their shares away to another loser before it.) Any way you cut it, those new coal plants will only get operational at all if people decide to constantly burn some money in them. > However the lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and power plants being built today range from 20-50 years. Yes, and that means we can replace up to 5% of our transportation emissions by year without increasing our capital depreciation. That is in stark contrast to the norm in that you are supposed to do some net investment to adapt to any random change. If you decide (by regulation, morality, or whatever) to actually sink money on the change, you can get there much faster.
    - vondur 3y ago
      I'm thinking the Coal plants will be built in newly industrializing economies, as it's the cheapest way to provide constant cheap power. China is still building Coal Power plants and so is India. The US hasn't built one in a decade and is closing existing ones.
      - bamboozled 3y ago
        Renewables are cheaper than coal ?
        marcosdumay 3y ago
        It's complicated. But Coal can not survive in a market where both renewables and natural gas exist. The same applies to nuclear. When they are producing energy, renewables are about an order of magnitude cheaper than coal (and falling).
      - tim333 3y ago
- adolph 3y ago
  > just because some action isn't on the top 2, it isn't reason to stop doing it Since you don't quantify a cost-benefit of any action, how have you arrived to this effort ordinality? Given a ranking, would any efforts in combination have higher impact than a higher ranked effort alone?
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Well, I meant it by cost. The marginal costs for those top 2 are quite public. For electricity it's negative, electric cars cost some 30% more than normal ones. They are reasonably easy to estimate for things like spreading carbon-capturing rocks around (or you can use the price of phosphate-rich rocks, it should be similar). It's not a very expensive thing to do, but way more expensive than those 2. Marginally, there isn't a lot of synergy between those different options. But if you push them to levels much higher than the ones we have now it becomes clear that decarbonizing electricity will become a bottleneck to almost everything.
- bluGill 3y ago
  > just because some action isn't on the top 2, it isn't reason to stop doing it. This this isn't wrong, be careful. Many of those proposing action outside of the top two are really trying to distract you from fixing the real problem. Many things outside of the top two need a ton of research before we can fix them - by getting you to spend your time and effort on that research you don't do anything about the top 2 which we can solve today. Thus the entrenched interests (mostly big oil) are pushing you to look at things outside of the top two knowing you can't solve them today, and while you are looking there they can sell more [oil or whatever].
  - jjk166 3y ago
    Conversely, hyper focusing on the top two can also be a distraction. There isn't a single pool of resources and labor that is being managed by a single entity. The people spreading rocks on fields are not the same people building solar panels or producing electric vehicles. Reducing funding spent on carbon capture does not inherently increase the funding for renewables. Researching cleaner concrete manufacturing does not inherently decelerate coal plant phase out. While reducing CO2 emmissions from the two biggest sources would be a huge win, people have been trying to achieve that for decades, and even in the most optimistic scenario it's a battle that will continue for another few decades. In the meantime there is a lot of other stuff that can be worked on in parallel. Waiting around for a silver bullet to solve everything is a great way to get nothing done, and so those who want nothing to get done point out the limitations of various proposals without putting forward options that put those specific resources to better use. Further, when you tell people that everything is insignificant compared to this one great challenge, and that challenge is something that people don't see much rapid progress on, it leads to defeatism - why should I buy an energy efficient heat pump when people on the other side of the world are currently building hundreds of coal plants? Again this is taken advantage of by malicious actors who turn that defeatism into resentment of even trying to make things better.
  - marcosdumay 3y ago
    Well, not on this one case. Spreading CO2 capturing material is a very viable way to help. And we must research capture anyway, because we surely will need it. This kind of action is the carbon credit system working like it was supposed to work, and a really good example to use to turn it into a tax that gets negative to whoever is capturing. But I do agree, one has to always be careful not to fall for polluter's propaganda.
- __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
  I think your top two are somewhere in the top three. We also need to get to a place, culturally, where we can have calm rational conversations about how many people we can reasonably ask this planet to support. At middling timescales, fewer people is better than greener tech. Some will see that as opting out of progress but there's really a lot of opportunity to offset it by doing a better job of investing in the people we already have.
  - proee 3y ago
    Why is this being downvoted? What is the argument for unregulated populations?
    - __MatrixMan__ 3y ago
      It's hard to get elected on a "tell people they're not allowed to have kids" platform. I think there are less heavy handed ways to get us from a place where it's assumed that you'll have kids to a place where it's respected but not encouraged, but when people hear you talking about population growth as a problem to be solved, they immediately assume that you're about to propose something awful.
      - bamboozled 3y ago
        It’s more likely hard to get get elected by impacting the. Economic growth story? People already having less kids.
  - Borg3 3y ago
    Thats right. Unfortunately, most people have they mindset fixed on never ending growth. We need more people, more cars, more everything. Yet, those people seems to barelly understand basic math and physics. Numbers do NOT lie. All that cool stuff that happened post WWII was because if cheap energy, very cheap. But its going to end. You can either have 10B ppl living in poor conditions or 200M people living in good conditions.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    > We also need to get to a place, culturally, where we can have calm rational conversations about how many people we can reasonably ask this planet to support. I disagree, that's a dangerous trap. Oh, sure, it seems reasonable and sagacious at first glance, but that's what makes the eventual misdirection/procrastination so insidious! Long-term planning is not automatically wise planning. ________ To illustrate, imagine that: 1. There's a local park with houses around it. 2. Some people periodically dump their trash in it. 3. The trash-piles are getting kind of big and stinky now. 4. A well-meaning neighbor says: "What we really need is to get a place, as a community, where we can have calm rational conversations bout how many people can live near this park." 5. (Bonus) Many of the biggest trash dumpers agree: "Exactly, literally everybody here is to blame, and especially people moving in and/or having too many kids! The only way forward is a very thorough and lengthy symposium with multiple committees to develop recommendations to stop that kind of thing." ________ In that analogy, it's easier to see that your neighbor's proposal is--er--less than practical, because (A) the immediate problem isn't actually total visitor count,(B) we'll never reach full consensus, and (C) any consensus number would still meaninglessly unenforceable. So it can't really help, but it can harm by creating unnecessary discord and will prevent/delay practical changes like "Anything you bring must be taken back out", or "Littering: $X fine."
- vlovich123 3y ago
  I’m not so convinced about the efficacy of transportation decarbonization, at least at the personal EV cars level. It kind of feels the same as when governments in California harp on personal water use and restaurants giving you a glass of water with your meal when the largest consumer of water use by a large margin is industry and farming. Looking at [1], COVID when probably the most number of people stopped driving and individual energy needs plummeted, our CO2 emissions and fossil fuel energy use dipped marginally. I think the reason is that shipping, airline, and commercial transportation (ie trucks) consume the most and those aren’t getting off fossil fuels any time soon. [2] indicates that cars and buses together contribute ~7% to global emissions. Aviation and shipping individually are bigger CO2 emitters than the total amount used by personal vehicles. Also these reports are hilarious (is that the right word?) to read. They use phase out to mean “no co2 emissions from this sector” while politicians say phase out to mean “no new sales/construction of co2 emitters in this sector”. Completely phasing it out will take much much longer. It’s good for us to do the work and cars are a meaningful contributor, but the biggest impact would actually be shipping + aviation + trucking. Unfortunately those are also the hardest problems and the ones EVs won’t touch any time soon (maybe trucking but even then I think we’re stuck with diesel for quite a while). Shipping probably needs nuclear power and aviation needs some kind of zero emission fuel (hydrogen probably won’t cut it). Heck we haven’t even removed lead from aviation fuel and that doesn’t even require an engine change. [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
  - mnw21cam 3y ago
    > ...restaurants giving you a glass of water with your meal... Seriously? The average person in the westernised world probably uses something between 100 to 400 litres of water for washing and flushing per day, personal use actually in their house. And drinks around 2 litres in the same amount of time. External water use on behalf of that person for example for growing food and manufacturing things is even more. Having a glass of water wasted at a restaurant is a complete negligible non-issue. How ridiculous.
    - 3y ago
- rsynnott 3y ago
  Eh, not sure about those top two. Depends on the circumstances, but in many countries there's _huge_ potential to reduce energy use via insulation improvement and that sort of thing.
BurningFrog 3y ago
Can it really be that simple? I'll remain skeptical until I see some numbers. But it would be cool if I could travel to a quarry and crush rocks for a while, and it would actually meaningfully help with the climate.
mytailorisrich 3y ago
Carbon capture may be useful, even necessary, but the amounts needed to make any difference means that massive industrial processes are needed. As a species we emit 35 billion tons of CO2 per year. So I would think we're talking capture in at least the hundreds of millions tons a year range.
- wkat4242 3y ago
  And also massive amounts of energy and materials required to build all the equipment to do it at that scale, and the land to place it. I don't see this being viable at a scale that matters until we've solved a lot of other problems first.
  - BurningFrog 3y ago
    The material already is somewhere. Why would it need to move?
    - wkat4242 3y ago
      I was thinking more of the electric carbon capture methods, building the machinery is a huge job that takes lots of material, at the scale needed to actually make a contribution that matters, we'll have to make so much energy and build, transport and maintain so much machinery that we'll change the face of the planet, causing its own huge negative effects. This volcanic rock thing doesn't sound like it is capturing enough to matter anyway as some people have already calculated.
- lumost 3y ago
  Rocks are very dense. We are extremely good at mining and moving rocks. We produce 30 billion tons of concrete per year. Naively, you would expect that producing and distributing crushed rocks sufficient to capture carbon would be equivalent to at most 10x the concrete industry. In practice, it’s likely closer to 1x.
  - GeoAtreides 3y ago
_Algernon_ 3y ago
My just as semi-informed opinion is just the opposite. All the evidence I have seen suggest that carbon credits amount to little more than greenwashing. There was a discussion just a couple of weeks ago here on HN about a project which gave more efficient cooking stoves and sold the estimated savings in terms of carbon as credits. Only problem was that it massively underestimated the actual carbon saved. A couple of years ago the Guardian did some investigating where forests which was under no threat of deforestation being sold as carbon credits as if they had saved the entire forest from deforestation. Probably in part confirmation bias, but also I don't think that a fix to a market that has externalities is to ductape it with a new market that has new externalities. That just provides more loopholes for evasion. Estimating carbon emissions avoided by a project is a messy and subjective process in the best of cases. Even more so when large amounts of capital is at risk. Currently it looks like companies get the PR benefits of being "net emissions neutral" while the carbon credits they purchased to become so will be shown to be little more than fraud a couple of years later.
- rcxdude 3y ago
  For sure not all carbon credits are created equal, and a lot (especially the cheaper ones) are bunk. For any project which claims to be carbon neutral through purchasing credits, you need to look at what those credits are actually doing and assess whether it is actually removing carbon from the atmosphere or not. Basically don't throw the baby out with the bathwater: most carbon credits are bunk, but don't assume that any given project is bunk just because they are selling carbon credits.
  - AnthonyMouse 3y ago
    Except that this makes the entire concept bunk, because what the company cares about is the ability to claim carbon neutrality in their PR, which they'll do by choosing the credits that are the cheapest, which will be the ones that are a fraud. The actual way to fix this is to price carbon. You don't get money for not burning down a forest, you pay money if you burn down a forest, or burn coal. Then you refund all of that money to the public so it isn't a net tax, it's just an incentive to not emit carbon, because only the people who emit carbon pay the tax but everybody gets the refund.
vlovich123 3y ago
Something everyone seems to ignore is thermodynamics when it comes to recapture. Capturing co2 will require at least roughly the same amount of energy as we got releasing it. In practice quite a bit more. I don’t care how cheap solar panels get, recapture is insanely expensive. There’s a reason none of the carbon recapture companies talk about how much energy they use per ton of co2 captured. For a sense of scale, last year we emitted 40Gigatons of co2 in the air. If I’m reading [1] correctly this corresponds to over 120k TWh of energy that we generated from just that co2. That’s an insane amount of energy capacity we need to overbuild past net 0 (and it’s cute when people think solar will get us there by 2050). And these numbers are still growing each year and at best we maybe have put a dent in the second order derivative but we haven’t started the downward trend. And COVID showed how much of an impact a mass scale reduction in personal co2 caused when basically most people stopped driving - it was a blip in [1]. This shows us roughly the impact that EVs attached to renewables will have - most of the CO2 is from industry, shipping, airline transit, concrete, etc. Those things are decarbonizing very very slowly and it’s not a “slow and then all at once” kind of thing. The only way to overbuild enough capacity is to build an insane amount of fission power plants, but I suspect we’re rapidly crossing the point where even that would work since the ecological damage caused by global warming isn’t going to be reversed (eg the ice caps won’t reform, the extinct species won’t come back, etc). [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels Edit: for those downvoting me, I would appreciate if you explained where I’m factually incorrect. Unless the downvote is just an emotional response to uncomfortable data, which I understand.
- jjk166 3y ago
  That would only be true if you were trying to change carbon back into energy dense hydrocarbons. Accelerated weathering exposes rock that reacts with CO2 without any external energy input. The reaction actually produces energy, though not enough to be used as a practical power source. You need to do work to expose the rock, but this can be orders of magnitude less than the energy released when the CO2 was produced.
  - vlovich123 3y ago
    OK point taken, but that’s actually a very small point when you run the numbers. Industrial scale direct air capture technology right is ~1200KWh per ton of CO2. And this energy cost is non linear - as we scale up, the lower CO2 concentration in the air will result in higher energy costs being needed to extract the remaining. I don’t think exposing the rock will be cheaper or can even scale as a process but harder to say. But that energy used is largely waste - sure we’ll maybe find a use for some of the co2 but then that’s also not sequestration and will release some of the captured co2 back into the air. Using those numbers means we’d need to be spending 48TWh to capture the carbon we emit each year, which is almost half of our current global energy production. Those are massive numbers. Of course you could overbuild less and slowly extract the co2, but then climate change gets even more baked in.

wiz21c 3y ago

website: "With 3 tons of basalt application you can capture up to 1 ton of CO2. Our software optimizes both for crop yield and carbon capture — making your land as productive as possible while you earn revenue from carbon removal." Should I read: 1 CO2 ton effectively captured after discounting CO2 emitted for basalt extraction and dispersion ?

dylan604 3y ago
no, it sounds to me that it requires 3 tons of basalt to capture 1 ton of CO2. it does not read like it is making any claims beyond that. it reads to me as if you're putting words into it on your own.
dj_gitmo 3y ago
I am also curious how much carbon is released to extract and spread that 3 tons. I'm guessing it's still a net carbon-negative, but that's still a lot of material to be moving around.
renewiltord 3y ago
It's gross not net. The way they minimize is that they use basalt waste (so they don't dig for it, it's been dug for) and they deliver as local as they can so there's hopefully low transport costs. I don't know if moving basalt waste is something mines already do and if they specifically count that. I suppose one could argue that by reducing the cost of getting that waste away, they're effectively incentivizing mining. You'd need a more sophisticated model to see if this will work.
- barbazoo 3y ago
  This probably makes more sense in a context where mining and transport was done carbon neutrally. Similar to how switching to an EV doesn't automatically lower your CO2 bill if the electricity you use is dirty but it allows for decentralized improvements (i.e. renewable energy) that roll out without the individual having to do anything.
mytailorisrich 3y ago

barbazoo 3y ago

Thanks for sharing!!! This is all voluntary right? As far as I can tell [1] the US doesn't have a carbon pricing system so this is really dependent on companies being interested in the positive PR this leads to? [1] https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/map_data https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/map_data

wkat4242 3y ago

Why put this on farmland? We need farmland to produce food. And it can be used for other plants too which capture CO2. Better put this absorbing rock in places we don't need for other stuff like deserts and salt lakes

entropicdrifter 3y ago
It doesn't hurt the soil nor the crops and there are already people actively managing the soil composition of farmland. Logistically it's much easier to ship stuff to farms than the middle of nowhere because there are existing supply lines.
ben_bai 3y ago
It is also a fertilizer, providing Carbon and Minerals to the farmland.
jandrewrogers 3y ago
Crushed basalt can be used as a substitute for mined fertilizer that would need to be applied anyway, notably potassium and phosphorus. It is one of the reasons volcanic soils tend to be fertile. The rock leaches significant quantities of mineral that are important for plant growth.

picadores 3y ago

Eh, wouldn't it be more feasable to just frake the rock and then solarpump atmospheric cases into it, fracture it ever futher? And use ice water to ever expand the fractures? Basically just a solar farm that pumps air underground, ocassionally pumping and then cooling water?