25 ms·

Solving climate change by abusing thermodynamic scaling laws

124 points by ckrapu 2y ago

pxeger1 2y ago
What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?
- fgeiger 2y ago
  I wonder the same. This proposal sounds like it is leeching nutrients from the ground and storing it for a long time (on a scale of centuries in the proposal). How do these nutrients cycle back for growing the food that we need? Or, for that matter, for the next round of biomass to freeze?
  - qludes 2y ago
    On a tiny scale I store them via humification in the top soil. In agriculture they manage the humus content of their soil anyway, for example in greenhouses they might have 20% instead of 2% in the surrounding fields. Someone armed with enough VC money could possibly do that on a really large scale and even monetize it via carbon offset certs and then just throw the C rich output of their giant bioreactor into the bottomless pit.
- ckrapu 2y ago
  Sadly, I don't think so. Many of these carbon burial/sequestration proposals all advocate just taking all of the plant matter and tucking it away, including the N and P.
  - avmich 2y ago
    I'd burn the wood, catch CO2 with oxides, store it as carbonates. The rest would go back to the environment.
  - baking 2y ago
    Eli Yablonovitch has been working on this for a while. I thought it was assumed that only the lignin would stay sequestered but I'm not finding those details. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217695120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217695120
    - ckrapu 2y ago
      I wasn't satisfied with his idea because it assumed that the biomass had to stay dry indefinitely, despite being locked behind an impermeable barrier. It's also not very convenient geographically, because raising crops (at least for low-value types like switchgrass) is not economically viable in the driest areas where they would be stored.
- Gibbon1 2y ago
  I had a very short back and forth with someone here. One thing makes you wonder about another. You calculate the cost of manufacturing hydrogen from water to feed into a the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. All you are doing is replacing the existing steam reformer with an electrolysis plant. But the what if is what if you can take a further step and directly create amino acids instead of ammonia. You go why do that. The answer is an acre of solar panels produces 25-50 times more energy than corn.
  - NickM 2y ago
    The answer is an acre of solar panels produces 25-50 times more energy than corn. This. It's widely underappreciated how much more efficient solar panels are than plants at harvesting sunlight. Forget amino acids, those are hard; if we could even just create sugar directly from electrical energy we could save a shit ton of corn being grown and turned into HFCS.
- throawayonthe 2y ago
  [dead]
- snarf21 2y ago
  Serious question (I'm not a biologist): How did the nitrogen, etc. get released when the plant material (that became oil) first died and got buried? Is this fundamentally different?
  - Filligree 2y ago
    It gets consumed and released by detrivores, i.e. fungus. This takes a long time, and wouldn’t work nearly as well these days because the fungus would eat the cellulose as well.
- nomadluap 2y ago
  You can pyrolize the wood by cooking it in an oxygen-free environment, cooking off almost all of the nitrogen and other nutrients and leaving nearly pure carbon in the form of charcoal. Off the top of my head, for a given amount of wood biomass, you can get about a 70% ratio of product to fuel if you use a high-efficiency wood fire to cook the wood itself. Then you can take that carbon, bury it in decommissioned open pit mines, or use it as a soil additive (biochar), where it will sequester the carbon for thousands of years and act as a fertilizer. You could also pair the biochar with a fast-growing swamp tree (willow?), re-incorporating the char into the areas around the willow plantation to create a sort of artificial peat bog which could also be useful for water storage and filtration.
prawel 2y ago
much better option than stratospheric aerosol injection, it’s easily reversible
8474_s 2y ago
wouldn't it be much simpler to just mass produce more furniture out of wood, instead of keeping the same-equivalent biomass frozen infinitely?
- philipkglass 2y ago
  There's not enough useful demand to tame CO2 this way. Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are currently about 37 billion tons per year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions That's enough CO2 to make 22.7 billion metric tons of cellulose per year, or ~2.8 tons per capita for Earth's 8.2 billion people. That's too much to to turn it all into furniture or even buildings.
  - scotty79 2y ago
    Maybe horizontal surfaces too? Like roads and pavements? Let's become industrial elves.
    - euroderf 2y ago
      Didn't there used to be a "Pave the Earth" meme ? Maybe update it for log roads.
  - sqeaky 2y ago
    Just for scale how tons of carbon are in an acre or hectare of corn, wheat, or other crop. Being able to say how many farms would need to do this to counter act our release could provide an interesting sanity check.
  - jjk166 2y ago
    The average house weighs 40-80 tons, so 2.8 tons per capita per year is a house every 14-28 years, which seems reasonable, plus infrastructure.
- edhelas 2y ago
  2/3 of the CO2 stored in forest is in the ground, not the trees, it's accumulated when the forest grows and is getting generations of trees. Cut those trees to do furniture and you'll release all this CO2, do a culture of tree decades after decades and you'll never store it back.
jacknews 2y ago
Or just burn the huge piles to charcoal (pyrolysis), then you're only storing carbon, and it certainly won't decay. Even use it as a soil enhancer.
- ckrapu 2y ago
  Let's say that we have a hollowed-out zone in the middle of the biomass pile where we tolerate limited oxidization so we can run a fire. If the rest of it is wet, maybe the heat from that combustion could pyrolyze a large radius of surrounding material since O2 flow into the system should be small.
  - jacknews 2y ago
    Indeed if you insulate the pile as the OP suggests, the entire pile should reach pyrolisis temperatures.
    - ckrapu 2y ago
      That does seem like a much better approach than freezing it, then.
philipkglass 2y ago
I'm going to share my own insane idea for drawing down atmospheric CO2. Capture CO2 as biomass or with direct air capture. Pyrolyze biomass to charcoal or use the Bosch reaction to recover pure carbon from CO2 chemically [1]. Then combine the carbon with silicon to form silicon carbide via the Acheson process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson_process Silicon carbide is extraordinarily resistant to mechanical erosion, oxidation, or any kind of natural degradation. Put the silicon carbide in a geologically stable desert and it could keep the carbon out of the carbon cycle until the sun grows hot enough to render the Earth uninhabitable. Continually extract and convert CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans until natural CO2 levels drop near zero and the desert is full of silicon carbide mountain ranges. As a mere mitigation for AGW, this is a stinker. It requires an order of magnitude more energy and complexity than direct air capture of CO2 (which itself is already too energetically demanding and complex). But if you have the Sahara-sized robotic solar farm and industrial complex to put it into practice, it makes a great doomsday weapon! Most actually-buildable doomsday weapons leave numerous survivors behind. Ordinary global nuclear war would barely deplete uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. Cockroaches would still survive cobalt salted nuclear warfare at the gigaton scale. Even an army of roving Terminators might eliminate multicellular life yet struggle to locate protozoans. But I think that Total Carbon Sequestration could end all life, not just the visible-to-the-naked-eye species. All life needs carbon. And no species (save humans, via technological means) is capable of extracting carbon from silicon carbide. So with a hundred trillion dollar investment in a fully autonomous complex of solar farms, carbon capture facilities, and silicon carbide factories, I believe that we could solve global warming and end all life on Earth. Just like the Earth will do naturally in about a billion years [2] as CO2 levels fall, but up to 10,000 times faster! I'm still working on a funding model and a rationale for why this should be done at all, but some things are inspiring just because they're possible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future
- AstralStorm 2y ago
  Direct CO2 capture is thermodynamically unviable, and literally every plan and attempt involving it was highly expensive in energy.
ospray 2y ago
The globe is mostly water. Ocean fertilization make a lot more sense than this for a whole bunch of reasons. The inter-continental sea floor automatically freezes all carbon that goes down there most of it is stored as methane. Just need a fleet of nuclear powered fertilizer ships to kick it off hopefully you get more fish as a result. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization
- AstralStorm 2y ago
  Unfortunately the plan is very dangerous as tectonic activity has a tendency to release it plus any hurricane or monsoon or thaiphoon or such has a tendency to destroy the installation or worse, move it somewhere where it will do damage to the ecosystem. Also, use solar and wind ships instead. We don't need to sink more nuclear material...
- cynusx 2y ago
  No need for fertilizer ships. The delivery of material to the center of Ocean vertices is essentially free. Any floating body winds up there eventually I wrote about it here: https://noverloop.substack.com/p/how-to-leverage-the-plastic-belt https://noverloop.substack.com/p/how-to-leverage-the-plastic...
- ckrapu 2y ago
  One downside: you have to ship all the carbon to the coast. Transport is a non-negligible consideration for all of this. Ideally, you just grow a ton of switchgrass in northern US / Canada / Siberia and store it nearby.
  - sqeaky 2y ago
    This is a downside, but big flat boats floating down river don't seem like big carbon releasers, bonus points if they use solar/wind to get back up river.
    - rjvs 2y ago
      Wouldn’t the bonus points be better allocated to making the boats from the carbon you’re wanting to sequester, so they don’t have to go back up-river?
wolfram74 2y ago
A structural question comes to mind, if the pipes are arrayed horizontally, how important is it to keep the pipes straight while they're being compressed by metric tons of biomass? Are they at risk of being squished closed? It's too late at night for me to ball park the pressures involved, but it'll be something like an extra atmosphere of pressure every 20 to 30 meters? This thing is over a hundred meters tall?
- ckrapu 2y ago
  Great point. I handwave this away by saying that most of the biomass will be frozen most of the time, providing the necessary structural support.
laserbeam 2y ago
I’m skimming through this and it feels like a well thought out research proposal with concrete next steps. My thermodynamics is too bad to comment on the approach but it looks cool. As long as setting up experiments for it is reasonable in cost, wouldn’t take too long to show results (before it’s too late for the planet), and can show that enough CO2 can be captured and long term costs make sense, then it sounds great! I hope some of the proposed next steps get funding. Commenting “wouldn’t Z be better instead” feels counterproductive to the discussion here.
- sqeaky 2y ago
  The idea proposed is so incredibly cheap, the only real cost is land and unskilled labor. This screams "government experiment" but we are doing less and less of that. If carbon credits actually become a thing, this might be a way to cheaply sink carbon. But there is so much graft and corruption in that space at the moment.
hnmullany 2y ago
Methane and nitrous oxide emissions from these piles would likely be rather high, potentially negating any carbon sequestration benefits
- aqme28 2y ago
  Methane would be extremeley high. The core of the pile might be frozen, but the unfrozen region would be anoxic and decomposing.
- ckrapu 2y ago
  This is definitely true. My hope would be that the thawed region would be a very thin shell overall, so the overall emissions as a fraction of total stored mass would be relatively low. Can you think of any ways to minimize anoxic activity in the thermally active area?
xbmcuser 2y ago
This year ie 2024 world will add more solar power than the total consumption growth. This is despite the tariffs and sanctions on Chinese panels and batteries. I think the world is at the cusp of dramatic change that would come faster if not for western countries trying to protect their industries. I think adding more renewables as fast as possible specially solar is the best option as this will make essentially energy free which will decrease carbon production as well as allow to use the energy to capture carbon. Maybe we can get some nuclear fission or fusion breakthrough in the future but adding solar, wind and batteries as fast as possible should be the main focus for now.
- bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  there was a quote, and I can't remember exactly so I paraphrase: "the person who creates a new form of energy for the world, without creating an equivalent heatsink, would be history's greatest monster", although I suppose that is very perfect being the enemy of the good.
  - codethief 2y ago
    I don't think that is "very perfect being the enemy of the good" at all. Any new energy source (like fusion) would be a very real threat to mankind, see also https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
    - hcurtiss 2y ago
      He very early assumes/disregards we remain confined to earth. In the face of exponentially growing energy resources, this is a terrible assumption.
      - carapace 2y ago
        Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun? The portion people who leave the Earth do not matter, the fate of the portion who remain remains the same. See "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101", Al Bartlett https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy.html https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati... Full length video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8
seu 2y ago
Nice idea, but the climate crisis is not solved with technology (we already know and have everything we need) but by politics and changing our consumption habits.
- criddell 2y ago
  People don’t want to change consumption habits and they aren’t going to vote for politicians who want to change consumption habits, so technology is the only hope.
  - ckrapu 2y ago
    I was hoping that this proposal would be a uniquely unilateral one. If a single state or province in the USA or Canada committed to this plan (and if it worked as well as I optimistically propose, and provided enough nutrients) then they could singlehandedly put away enough carbon to actually solve the problem.
  - siffin 2y ago
    That's a bleak point of view and simply untrue. People have been shown to shift their view on consumption habits. Social technology is the only tech that matters, as it's not just the carbon, it's also the plastic pollution, biosphere destruction, ocean acidification etc. If we don't change the poeples want's, we can never have a stablish society.
- amelius 2y ago
  Yes, if we just banned ads I suspect that would already greatly affect our consumption.
- Spivak 2y ago
  If this is our solution then it's going to actually be solved when a good chunk of humanity gets wiped out. Because I don't see this happening when our dominant economic system demands growth and consumption. Disappointing our science fiction missed the mark on this one assuming humanity would be wiped out by super-weapons and not by inadvertently changing our world to be uninhabitable faster than we can adapt to it. Here's to hopefully dying before it gets too bad!
RhysU 2y ago
Are the going prices for carbon credits sufficiently high that this approach could be commercialized?
aqme28 2y ago
Is there some plugin I'm missing for the LaTeX to render, or did they miss a step when publishing?
- ckrapu 2y ago
  I had an issue with an out-of-date mathjax configuration, sorry! I've updated it. Is it still not rendering? It looks fine in my browser.
FooBarBizBazz 2y ago
Why doesn't the obvious thing, i.e., making charcoal, work? You can call it "biochar" if you want. A big pile runs the risk of catching fire, but if it's mixed with soil I'd think it won't burn. Is there some slow oxidation process to worry about? I'd think that charcoal briquettes, pencil leads, and soot would all last essentially forever. Plus, you can harness the pretty-high-grade heat energy extracted during the charcoal-making, to run heat engines or for other uses. So it's basically a way to use biology to get some solar power, and to sequester carbon at the same time. If you're talking about only the charcoal-making, then this is prehistoric technology, and if you throw heat engines into the mix then you're at maybe an 1880s tech level. Seems easy? I guess the "giant pile of frozen vegetables" method is even simpler in some ways (pipes being the only tech), but it also seems less stable, and it doesn't return the non-carbon nutrients to the soil. What am I missing?
- pstrateman 2y ago
  Simple math unfortunately. To offset global human CO2 production you'd need to biochar all plant matter several times a year.
  - FooBarBizBazz 2y ago
    This feels like a "yes, and" thing, where the most important use of effort is to reduce production (and we're nowhere close yet), but at some point we'll need to also do capture to deal with production that is truly unavoidable, and, if we're dreaming, to achieve net negative production, for the purpose of returning to preindustrial levels. But yeah, if you're burning coal with one hand and making charcoal with the other, it's all pretty pointless.
    - pstrateman 2y ago
      Reducing production is simply impossible. There's billions of people on earth who are desperately poor compared to even the poorest American. There is absolutely no chance those people just accept their position as ultra poor. If individuals want to reduce their CO2 output the only viable strategy is to buy and permanently store fossil fuels.
schiffern 2y ago
>we avoid most capital expenditures... since no provision must be made for moisture management or geotechnical engineering No summer rains in this (presumably agricultural) project area? I see no math for heat transfer due to rainwater percolation through the pile. "Assuming all voids are filled with water" is great and all, but (with apologies to Jurassic Park) water... uh... finds a way. Meltwater will even tunnel its way through compacted glacial ice. Plus the "dry" insulation layer won't stay dry for long.
- ckrapu 2y ago
  Good catch :) I thought about this for awhile and the gap between harvest time for many crops and first frost isn’t enough to get more than a few inches of rainfall in most agricultural regions with favorable economics. I think the wetness will wreck the insulation of the first meter or so, but won’t lead to much convective heat transfer if the outside never gets saturated. A big if, to be sure. As an aside, it’s common practice to leave large piles of grain outside overwinter in the central USA and it’s not optimal, but they certainly don’t saturate the whole way through with water.
  - schiffern 2y ago
    Beyond that gap time period, I was thinking more about longer-term storage and heat transfer. What happens over the second summer? Grain piles have free drainage so we don't expect saturation, but if water freely drains through this system it seems problematic.
    - ckrapu 2y ago
      The spring-summer timeframe is the biggest issue to deal with here. I think that this design would have to have a sacrificial layer with decomposing, anoxic material which degrades during the warmer months. Perhaps it could be mitigated with various expedients to decrease the ambient temperature like flooding the surrounding landscape or putting a shade over the pile. This scheme only makes sense if the amount of biomass added every year is much larger than the amount which is present in this external layer. Anecdotally, my father has told me about soaked hay bales out in the pasture which still had a frozen interior core by late May.
microbug 2y ago
no one understands uncertainty
carapace 2y ago
I'm reminded of Pykrete: > Pykrete is a frozen ice composite, originally made of approximately 14% sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86% ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight). > Pykrete features unusual properties, including a relatively slow melting rate due to its low thermal conductivity, as well as a vastly improved strength and toughness compared to ordinary ice. These physical properties can make the material comparable to concrete, as long as the material is kept frozen. > Since World War II, pykrete has remained a scientific curiosity, unexploited by research or construction of any significance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete
semiinfinitely 2y ago
nice glad its solved now. great headline
- yazzku 2y ago
  Capitalism will live yet another day, whew. We can keep on with the destruction of the environment with this just one little trick.
aaron695 2y ago
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pfdietz 2y ago
The problem with all biomass-based solution is the low efficiency of photosynthesis. This is why producing liquid fuels from biomass cannot be a general drop-in replacement for petroleum.
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  I have seen efficiency figures vary from as low as 0.1% upwards of 10% but it seems difficult to quantify. My shoot from the hip intuitive thought is that the massive amount of plant matter it took to make petroleum demonstrates how inefficient it is to get energy in that chemical state. A fools errand to try and do it over. It has been said that Coal/Gas/Oil is a half billion years of stored solar energy. That is wildly inaccurate for many reasons, but even if we are using a few thousand years of stored energy, that is still a wide gap to cover.
  - pfdietz 2y ago
    The 10% is for algae, I think. And that requires juicing the liquid with enough CO2 so they can continue to photosynthesize. If you're DACing that much CO2, you might as well just sequester it.
analog31 2y ago
>>> raise crops for biomass (sequestering CO2) and freeze them in huge aboveground piles during winter by running pipes through the middle Isn't this what the arctic tundra is, without the pipes?
- DaoVeles 2y ago
  Pretty much. The only pipes in the arctic tundra are oil pipes actively trying to stop this freezing process.
- ckrapu 2y ago
  Exactly.
avidiax 2y ago
Oil formed over millions of years at a rate of about 80,000 barrels / year. We consume 36.4 billion barrels of oil per year. That means we consume oil about 455,000 times faster than it was originally produced. And this is just oil; I'm not counting coal and natural gas. Trying to reverse that process by taking a fraction of one year's plant growth and sequestering it is probably 5-6 orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change. https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/571/how-much-oil-is-created-each-year https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/571/how-muc...
- adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
  especially since modern farming heavily uses oil based pesticides
  - ckrapu 2y ago
    I think it's more like 3-4 orders of magnitude (i.e. 1000 or 10000 of these sites), but yes, it would take quite a few to completely offset CO2 emissions.
- iamthemonster 2y ago
  But only a very miniscule fraction of carbon ends up as oil. This paper made an attempt at a comparison of fossil fuel use versus agricultural biomass production: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-annual-production-of-major-biomass-types-in-agriculture-and-forestry-and-fossil_fig1_240531181 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-annual-production... I think plants convert 120 GtC from the atmosphere into biomass every year (ref https://www.worldbioenergy.org/uploads/Factsheet_Biomass%20potential.pdf https://www.worldbioenergy.org/uploads/Factsheet_Biomass%20p...) - obviously this is very roughly balanced by how much CO2 is naturally returned to the atmosphere. The additional anthropogenic CO2 emissions are 37 GtC. So there is theoretically enough biomass for us to sequester - if we could do all that work without dramatically increasing our CO2 emissions...
- Y-bar 2y ago
  You're not wrong. That said I want to take issue with one thing: Between the lines there is a suggestion that doing a small positive action is useless. But that implies that there is either a silver bullet-type solution where doing only one major thing will resolve the problem of climate change, or that there is no possible way we can resolve it. I want to counter the implication by saying that the problem of solving climate change is easy in concept but complex in implementation. The concept is that we must reduce GHG in the atmosphere and oceans, and reduce the amount of new GHG added there. The solution can contain hundreds of minor actions working on concert, some certainly have more impact than others, but they all contribute, such as for example: - Taxes on emissions. - Incentives on sustainable actions. - Local changes such as improved public transportation and cycling. - Electric transportation. - Large scale battery storage. - Renewable energy sources. - Better insulated houses can avoid peaker plants needed in winter cold snaps for heating, and summer heat wave air conditioning. - large scale (industrial) carbon capture. - Re-forestation (where the tree is not immediately burned but instead used long-term in e.g. housing and furniture). - High speed rail to offset flights. - Incentivise local tourism rather than long-haul flights for vacations. - Social changes such as adjusted diet to be better (e.g. less beef, more lamb, poultry, and especially vegetables). - Right-to-repair and related social changes that lead to a thriving second-hand-market. For example, the EU Common Charger Directive (aka the USB-C Law) is expected to reduce e-waste by 12 000 tonnes yearly in the medium-long term and reduce GHG emissions ~to~ by 900k tonnes yearly. That may not look like nearly enough in the grand scheme of things, but once you do a handful of those it starts moving the needle.
wiskinator 2y ago
Or. And I’m just spit balling here. Plant super long lived trees. Redwoods live for >200 years. Eucalyptus grow very quickly and might be a good option too.
- marcyb5st 2y ago
  I can do you one better. Plant those trees and when their growth (in terms of sequestered C02/year) start to plateau you cut them and either use them for construction or bury them in places where the conditions are right for coal formation. Since we understood the "coalification" process we can also manufacture such sites close to where said trees are planted. In the latter case you bury the trees and forget them because accelerating coal synthesis is energy intensive, and so you can't really reuse that coal as it would be a net negative in our energy budget. So you either are sequestering C02 and using it to create houses that will be around at least few decades (and in the process maybe also decrease the material cost of such constructions) or permanently sequester it in a way that only a few % of the sequestered C02 gets back into the atmosphere. I can't find anymore the article that explains what I mentioned, but the issue is that is not economically profitable (is costs $$$ without generating a return with the current laws). However, I believe that if you account the damage climate change is doing around the world it is.
littlestymaar 2y ago
Instead of freezing plants we can more simply drop them in oxygen deprived seas, like the bottom of the black sea. The problem is the scale that is required, we generate so much CO2 that capturing it would require to build the biggest industry on earth dedicated to this (several time that of concrete)
jeisc 2y ago
we created the problem by abusing technology so I doubt more technology will solve it. We need to change our consumerism culture from throw away to keep forever.
- zizee 2y ago
  Given that it is proving near impossible to get everyone to "do the right thing", technology is the only realistic way out of this.
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
"Microsoft .NET C# (fsharp is completely open and does not have these issues)" There you go. Everyone should use F#
FrustratedMonky 2y ago
""I hope other companies follow Gitpod's lead and support the high achievers that our digital society is built upon by enabling them to become independent artists that build truly open ecosystems"" This a great idea. It forgets that most artist starve. The meme of the "Starving Artist" working as a barista, is not in our cultural zeitgeist for nothing.
derdi 2y ago
On the one hand: Nice formulas. On the other hand: Glaciers are melting, even in Iceland. Keeping stuff frozen seems pretty difficult in practice. Also, one of the formulas for air flow through the pile seems to assume 90 straight days of constantly freezing temperatures. I doubt there is prime agricultural land where you get that.
nayuki 2y ago
Oddly related to today's video from Half as Interesting about covering up snow on ski slopes during the summer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB3rYfJjcMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB3rYfJjcMk
lolive 2y ago
The best option is a global deadly disease. #thanosWasRight

124 points by ckrapu 2y ago

What are you gonna do about all the nitrogen etc which the plants need? Are there good ways to reextract these nutrients from dead plant material without releasing loads of carbon at the same time?

fgeiger 2y ago
I wonder the same. This proposal sounds like it is leeching nutrients from the ground and storing it for a long time (on a scale of centuries in the proposal). How do these nutrients cycle back for growing the food that we need? Or, for that matter, for the next round of biomass to freeze?
- qludes 2y ago
  On a tiny scale I store them via humification in the top soil. In agriculture they manage the humus content of their soil anyway, for example in greenhouses they might have 20% instead of 2% in the surrounding fields. Someone armed with enough VC money could possibly do that on a really large scale and even monetize it via carbon offset certs and then just throw the C rich output of their giant bioreactor into the bottomless pit.
ckrapu 2y ago
Sadly, I don't think so. Many of these carbon burial/sequestration proposals all advocate just taking all of the plant matter and tucking it away, including the N and P.
- avmich 2y ago
  I'd burn the wood, catch CO2 with oxides, store it as carbonates. The rest would go back to the environment.
- baking 2y ago
  Eli Yablonovitch has been working on this for a while. I thought it was assumed that only the lignin would stay sequestered but I'm not finding those details. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217695120 https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2217695120
  - ckrapu 2y ago
    I wasn't satisfied with his idea because it assumed that the biomass had to stay dry indefinitely, despite being locked behind an impermeable barrier. It's also not very convenient geographically, because raising crops (at least for low-value types like switchgrass) is not economically viable in the driest areas where they would be stored.
Gibbon1 2y ago
I had a very short back and forth with someone here. One thing makes you wonder about another. You calculate the cost of manufacturing hydrogen from water to feed into a the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia. All you are doing is replacing the existing steam reformer with an electrolysis plant. But the what if is what if you can take a further step and directly create amino acids instead of ammonia. You go why do that. The answer is an acre of solar panels produces 25-50 times more energy than corn.
- NickM 2y ago
  The answer is an acre of solar panels produces 25-50 times more energy than corn. This. It's widely underappreciated how much more efficient solar panels are than plants at harvesting sunlight. Forget amino acids, those are hard; if we could even just create sugar directly from electrical energy we could save a shit ton of corn being grown and turned into HFCS.
throawayonthe 2y ago
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snarf21 2y ago
Serious question (I'm not a biologist): How did the nitrogen, etc. get released when the plant material (that became oil) first died and got buried? Is this fundamentally different?
- Filligree 2y ago
  It gets consumed and released by detrivores, i.e. fungus. This takes a long time, and wouldn’t work nearly as well these days because the fungus would eat the cellulose as well.
nomadluap 2y ago
You can pyrolize the wood by cooking it in an oxygen-free environment, cooking off almost all of the nitrogen and other nutrients and leaving nearly pure carbon in the form of charcoal. Off the top of my head, for a given amount of wood biomass, you can get about a 70% ratio of product to fuel if you use a high-efficiency wood fire to cook the wood itself. Then you can take that carbon, bury it in decommissioned open pit mines, or use it as a soil additive (biochar), where it will sequester the carbon for thousands of years and act as a fertilizer. You could also pair the biochar with a fast-growing swamp tree (willow?), re-incorporating the char into the areas around the willow plantation to create a sort of artificial peat bog which could also be useful for water storage and filtration.

prawel 2y ago

much better option than stratospheric aerosol injection, it’s easily reversible

8474_s 2y ago

wouldn't it be much simpler to just mass produce more furniture out of wood, instead of keeping the same-equivalent biomass frozen infinitely?

philipkglass 2y ago
There's not enough useful demand to tame CO2 this way. Anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are currently about 37 billion tons per year: https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions That's enough CO2 to make 22.7 billion metric tons of cellulose per year, or ~2.8 tons per capita for Earth's 8.2 billion people. That's too much to to turn it all into furniture or even buildings.
- scotty79 2y ago
  Maybe horizontal surfaces too? Like roads and pavements? Let's become industrial elves.
  - euroderf 2y ago
    Didn't there used to be a "Pave the Earth" meme ? Maybe update it for log roads.
- sqeaky 2y ago
  Just for scale how tons of carbon are in an acre or hectare of corn, wheat, or other crop. Being able to say how many farms would need to do this to counter act our release could provide an interesting sanity check.
- jjk166 2y ago
  The average house weighs 40-80 tons, so 2.8 tons per capita per year is a house every 14-28 years, which seems reasonable, plus infrastructure.
edhelas 2y ago
2/3 of the CO2 stored in forest is in the ground, not the trees, it's accumulated when the forest grows and is getting generations of trees. Cut those trees to do furniture and you'll release all this CO2, do a culture of tree decades after decades and you'll never store it back.

jacknews 2y ago

Or just burn the huge piles to charcoal (pyrolysis), then you're only storing carbon, and it certainly won't decay. Even use it as a soil enhancer.

ckrapu 2y ago
Let's say that we have a hollowed-out zone in the middle of the biomass pile where we tolerate limited oxidization so we can run a fire. If the rest of it is wet, maybe the heat from that combustion could pyrolyze a large radius of surrounding material since O2 flow into the system should be small.
- jacknews 2y ago
  Indeed if you insulate the pile as the OP suggests, the entire pile should reach pyrolisis temperatures.
  - ckrapu 2y ago
    That does seem like a much better approach than freezing it, then.

philipkglass 2y ago

I'm going to share my own insane idea for drawing down atmospheric CO2. Capture CO2 as biomass or with direct air capture. Pyrolyze biomass to charcoal or use the Bosch reaction to recover pure carbon from CO2 chemically [1]. Then combine the carbon with silicon to form silicon carbide via the Acheson process: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acheson_process Silicon carbide is extraordinarily resistant to mechanical erosion, oxidation, or any kind of natural degradation. Put the silicon carbide in a geologically stable desert and it could keep the carbon out of the carbon cycle until the sun grows hot enough to render the Earth uninhabitable. Continually extract and convert CO2 from the atmosphere and oceans until natural CO2 levels drop near zero and the desert is full of silicon carbide mountain ranges. As a mere mitigation for AGW, this is a stinker. It requires an order of magnitude more energy and complexity than direct air capture of CO2 (which itself is already too energetically demanding and complex). But if you have the Sahara-sized robotic solar farm and industrial complex to put it into practice, it makes a great doomsday weapon! Most actually-buildable doomsday weapons leave numerous survivors behind. Ordinary global nuclear war would barely deplete uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. Cockroaches would still survive cobalt salted nuclear warfare at the gigaton scale. Even an army of roving Terminators might eliminate multicellular life yet struggle to locate protozoans. But I think that Total Carbon Sequestration could end all life, not just the visible-to-the-naked-eye species. All life needs carbon. And no species (save humans, via technological means) is capable of extracting carbon from silicon carbide. So with a hundred trillion dollar investment in a fully autonomous complex of solar farms, carbon capture facilities, and silicon carbide factories, I believe that we could solve global warming and end all life on Earth. Just like the Earth will do naturally in about a billion years [2] as CO2 levels fall, but up to 10,000 times faster! I'm still working on a funding model and a rationale for why this should be done at all, but some things are inspiring just because they're possible. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bosch_reaction [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future

AstralStorm 2y ago
Direct CO2 capture is thermodynamically unviable, and literally every plan and attempt involving it was highly expensive in energy.

ospray 2y ago

The globe is mostly water. Ocean fertilization make a lot more sense than this for a whole bunch of reasons. The inter-continental sea floor automatically freezes all carbon that goes down there most of it is stored as methane. Just need a fleet of nuclear powered fertilizer ships to kick it off hopefully you get more fish as a result. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization

AstralStorm 2y ago
Unfortunately the plan is very dangerous as tectonic activity has a tendency to release it plus any hurricane or monsoon or thaiphoon or such has a tendency to destroy the installation or worse, move it somewhere where it will do damage to the ecosystem. Also, use solar and wind ships instead. We don't need to sink more nuclear material...
cynusx 2y ago
No need for fertilizer ships. The delivery of material to the center of Ocean vertices is essentially free. Any floating body winds up there eventually I wrote about it here: https://noverloop.substack.com/p/how-to-leverage-the-plastic-belt https://noverloop.substack.com/p/how-to-leverage-the-plastic...
ckrapu 2y ago
One downside: you have to ship all the carbon to the coast. Transport is a non-negligible consideration for all of this. Ideally, you just grow a ton of switchgrass in northern US / Canada / Siberia and store it nearby.
- sqeaky 2y ago
  This is a downside, but big flat boats floating down river don't seem like big carbon releasers, bonus points if they use solar/wind to get back up river.
  - rjvs 2y ago
    Wouldn’t the bonus points be better allocated to making the boats from the carbon you’re wanting to sequester, so they don’t have to go back up-river?

wolfram74 2y ago

A structural question comes to mind, if the pipes are arrayed horizontally, how important is it to keep the pipes straight while they're being compressed by metric tons of biomass? Are they at risk of being squished closed? It's too late at night for me to ball park the pressures involved, but it'll be something like an extra atmosphere of pressure every 20 to 30 meters? This thing is over a hundred meters tall?

ckrapu 2y ago
Great point. I handwave this away by saying that most of the biomass will be frozen most of the time, providing the necessary structural support.

laserbeam 2y ago

I’m skimming through this and it feels like a well thought out research proposal with concrete next steps. My thermodynamics is too bad to comment on the approach but it looks cool. As long as setting up experiments for it is reasonable in cost, wouldn’t take too long to show results (before it’s too late for the planet), and can show that enough CO2 can be captured and long term costs make sense, then it sounds great! I hope some of the proposed next steps get funding. Commenting “wouldn’t Z be better instead” feels counterproductive to the discussion here.

sqeaky 2y ago
The idea proposed is so incredibly cheap, the only real cost is land and unskilled labor. This screams "government experiment" but we are doing less and less of that. If carbon credits actually become a thing, this might be a way to cheaply sink carbon. But there is so much graft and corruption in that space at the moment.

hnmullany 2y ago

Methane and nitrous oxide emissions from these piles would likely be rather high, potentially negating any carbon sequestration benefits

aqme28 2y ago
Methane would be extremeley high. The core of the pile might be frozen, but the unfrozen region would be anoxic and decomposing.
ckrapu 2y ago
This is definitely true. My hope would be that the thawed region would be a very thin shell overall, so the overall emissions as a fraction of total stored mass would be relatively low. Can you think of any ways to minimize anoxic activity in the thermally active area?

xbmcuser 2y ago

This year ie 2024 world will add more solar power than the total consumption growth. This is despite the tariffs and sanctions on Chinese panels and batteries. I think the world is at the cusp of dramatic change that would come faster if not for western countries trying to protect their industries. I think adding more renewables as fast as possible specially solar is the best option as this will make essentially energy free which will decrease carbon production as well as allow to use the energy to capture carbon. Maybe we can get some nuclear fission or fusion breakthrough in the future but adding solar, wind and batteries as fast as possible should be the main focus for now.

bryanrasmussen 2y ago
there was a quote, and I can't remember exactly so I paraphrase: "the person who creates a new form of energy for the world, without creating an equivalent heatsink, would be history's greatest monster", although I suppose that is very perfect being the enemy of the good.
- codethief 2y ago
  I don't think that is "very perfect being the enemy of the good" at all. Any new energy source (like fusion) would be a very real threat to mankind, see also https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist/ https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/2012/04/economist-meets-physicist...
  - hcurtiss 2y ago
    He very early assumes/disregards we remain confined to earth. In the face of exponentially growing energy resources, this is a terrible assumption.
    - carapace 2y ago
      Do you imagine we will box up our terrestrial waste heat and launch it into the sun? The portion people who leave the Earth do not matter, the fate of the portion who remain remains the same. See "Arithmetic, Population and Energy: Sustainability 101", Al Bartlett https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_population_energy.html https://www.albartlett.org/presentations/arithmetic_populati... Full length video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sI1C9DyIi_8

seu 2y ago

Nice idea, but the climate crisis is not solved with technology (we already know and have everything we need) but by politics and changing our consumption habits.

criddell 2y ago
People don’t want to change consumption habits and they aren’t going to vote for politicians who want to change consumption habits, so technology is the only hope.
- ckrapu 2y ago
  I was hoping that this proposal would be a uniquely unilateral one. If a single state or province in the USA or Canada committed to this plan (and if it worked as well as I optimistically propose, and provided enough nutrients) then they could singlehandedly put away enough carbon to actually solve the problem.
- siffin 2y ago
  That's a bleak point of view and simply untrue. People have been shown to shift their view on consumption habits. Social technology is the only tech that matters, as it's not just the carbon, it's also the plastic pollution, biosphere destruction, ocean acidification etc. If we don't change the poeples want's, we can never have a stablish society.
amelius 2y ago
Yes, if we just banned ads I suspect that would already greatly affect our consumption.
Spivak 2y ago
If this is our solution then it's going to actually be solved when a good chunk of humanity gets wiped out. Because I don't see this happening when our dominant economic system demands growth and consumption. Disappointing our science fiction missed the mark on this one assuming humanity would be wiped out by super-weapons and not by inadvertently changing our world to be uninhabitable faster than we can adapt to it. Here's to hopefully dying before it gets too bad!

RhysU 2y ago

Are the going prices for carbon credits sufficiently high that this approach could be commercialized?

aqme28 2y ago

Is there some plugin I'm missing for the LaTeX to render, or did they miss a step when publishing?

ckrapu 2y ago
I had an issue with an out-of-date mathjax configuration, sorry! I've updated it. Is it still not rendering? It looks fine in my browser.

FooBarBizBazz 2y ago

Why doesn't the obvious thing, i.e., making charcoal, work? You can call it "biochar" if you want. A big pile runs the risk of catching fire, but if it's mixed with soil I'd think it won't burn. Is there some slow oxidation process to worry about? I'd think that charcoal briquettes, pencil leads, and soot would all last essentially forever. Plus, you can harness the pretty-high-grade heat energy extracted during the charcoal-making, to run heat engines or for other uses. So it's basically a way to use biology to get some solar power, and to sequester carbon at the same time. If you're talking about only the charcoal-making, then this is prehistoric technology, and if you throw heat engines into the mix then you're at maybe an 1880s tech level. Seems easy? I guess the "giant pile of frozen vegetables" method is even simpler in some ways (pipes being the only tech), but it also seems less stable, and it doesn't return the non-carbon nutrients to the soil. What am I missing?

pstrateman 2y ago
Simple math unfortunately. To offset global human CO2 production you'd need to biochar all plant matter several times a year.
- FooBarBizBazz 2y ago
  This feels like a "yes, and" thing, where the most important use of effort is to reduce production (and we're nowhere close yet), but at some point we'll need to also do capture to deal with production that is truly unavoidable, and, if we're dreaming, to achieve net negative production, for the purpose of returning to preindustrial levels. But yeah, if you're burning coal with one hand and making charcoal with the other, it's all pretty pointless.
  - pstrateman 2y ago
    Reducing production is simply impossible. There's billions of people on earth who are desperately poor compared to even the poorest American. There is absolutely no chance those people just accept their position as ultra poor. If individuals want to reduce their CO2 output the only viable strategy is to buy and permanently store fossil fuels.

schiffern 2y ago

>we avoid most capital expenditures... since no provision must be made for moisture management or geotechnical engineering No summer rains in this (presumably agricultural) project area? I see no math for heat transfer due to rainwater percolation through the pile. "Assuming all voids are filled with water" is great and all, but (with apologies to Jurassic Park) water... uh... finds a way. Meltwater will even tunnel its way through compacted glacial ice. Plus the "dry" insulation layer won't stay dry for long.

ckrapu 2y ago
Good catch :) I thought about this for awhile and the gap between harvest time for many crops and first frost isn’t enough to get more than a few inches of rainfall in most agricultural regions with favorable economics. I think the wetness will wreck the insulation of the first meter or so, but won’t lead to much convective heat transfer if the outside never gets saturated. A big if, to be sure. As an aside, it’s common practice to leave large piles of grain outside overwinter in the central USA and it’s not optimal, but they certainly don’t saturate the whole way through with water.
- schiffern 2y ago
  Beyond that gap time period, I was thinking more about longer-term storage and heat transfer. What happens over the second summer? Grain piles have free drainage so we don't expect saturation, but if water freely drains through this system it seems problematic.
  - ckrapu 2y ago
    The spring-summer timeframe is the biggest issue to deal with here. I think that this design would have to have a sacrificial layer with decomposing, anoxic material which degrades during the warmer months. Perhaps it could be mitigated with various expedients to decrease the ambient temperature like flooding the surrounding landscape or putting a shade over the pile. This scheme only makes sense if the amount of biomass added every year is much larger than the amount which is present in this external layer. Anecdotally, my father has told me about soaked hay bales out in the pasture which still had a frozen interior core by late May.

microbug 2y ago

no one understands uncertainty

carapace 2y ago

I'm reminded of Pykrete: > Pykrete is a frozen ice composite, originally made of approximately 14% sawdust or some other form of wood pulp (such as paper) and 86% ice by weight (6 to 1 by weight). > Pykrete features unusual properties, including a relatively slow melting rate due to its low thermal conductivity, as well as a vastly improved strength and toughness compared to ordinary ice. These physical properties can make the material comparable to concrete, as long as the material is kept frozen. > Since World War II, pykrete has remained a scientific curiosity, unexploited by research or construction of any significance. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pykrete

semiinfinitely 2y ago

nice glad its solved now. great headline

yazzku 2y ago
Capitalism will live yet another day, whew. We can keep on with the destruction of the environment with this just one little trick.

aaron695 2y ago

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pfdietz 2y ago

The problem with all biomass-based solution is the low efficiency of photosynthesis. This is why producing liquid fuels from biomass cannot be a general drop-in replacement for petroleum.

DaoVeles 2y ago
I have seen efficiency figures vary from as low as 0.1% upwards of 10% but it seems difficult to quantify. My shoot from the hip intuitive thought is that the massive amount of plant matter it took to make petroleum demonstrates how inefficient it is to get energy in that chemical state. A fools errand to try and do it over. It has been said that Coal/Gas/Oil is a half billion years of stored solar energy. That is wildly inaccurate for many reasons, but even if we are using a few thousand years of stored energy, that is still a wide gap to cover.
- pfdietz 2y ago
  The 10% is for algae, I think. And that requires juicing the liquid with enough CO2 so they can continue to photosynthesize. If you're DACing that much CO2, you might as well just sequester it.

analog31 2y ago

>>> raise crops for biomass (sequestering CO2) and freeze them in huge aboveground piles during winter by running pipes through the middle Isn't this what the arctic tundra is, without the pipes?

DaoVeles 2y ago
Pretty much. The only pipes in the arctic tundra are oil pipes actively trying to stop this freezing process.
ckrapu 2y ago
Exactly.

avidiax 2y ago

Oil formed over millions of years at a rate of about 80,000 barrels / year. We consume 36.4 billion barrels of oil per year. That means we consume oil about 455,000 times faster than it was originally produced. And this is just oil; I'm not counting coal and natural gas. Trying to reverse that process by taking a fraction of one year's plant growth and sequestering it is probably 5-6 orders of magnitude too little to stop climate change. https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/571/how-much-oil-is-created-each-year https://earthscience.stackexchange.com/questions/571/how-muc...

adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
especially since modern farming heavily uses oil based pesticides
- ckrapu 2y ago
  I think it's more like 3-4 orders of magnitude (i.e. 1000 or 10000 of these sites), but yes, it would take quite a few to completely offset CO2 emissions.
iamthemonster 2y ago
But only a very miniscule fraction of carbon ends up as oil. This paper made an attempt at a comparison of fossil fuel use versus agricultural biomass production: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-annual-production-of-major-biomass-types-in-agriculture-and-forestry-and-fossil_fig1_240531181 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Global-annual-production... I think plants convert 120 GtC from the atmosphere into biomass every year (ref https://www.worldbioenergy.org/uploads/Factsheet_Biomass%20potential.pdf https://www.worldbioenergy.org/uploads/Factsheet_Biomass%20p...) - obviously this is very roughly balanced by how much CO2 is naturally returned to the atmosphere. The additional anthropogenic CO2 emissions are 37 GtC. So there is theoretically enough biomass for us to sequester - if we could do all that work without dramatically increasing our CO2 emissions...
Y-bar 2y ago
You're not wrong. That said I want to take issue with one thing: Between the lines there is a suggestion that doing a small positive action is useless. But that implies that there is either a silver bullet-type solution where doing only one major thing will resolve the problem of climate change, or that there is no possible way we can resolve it. I want to counter the implication by saying that the problem of solving climate change is easy in concept but complex in implementation. The concept is that we must reduce GHG in the atmosphere and oceans, and reduce the amount of new GHG added there. The solution can contain hundreds of minor actions working on concert, some certainly have more impact than others, but they all contribute, such as for example: - Taxes on emissions. - Incentives on sustainable actions. - Local changes such as improved public transportation and cycling. - Electric transportation. - Large scale battery storage. - Renewable energy sources. - Better insulated houses can avoid peaker plants needed in winter cold snaps for heating, and summer heat wave air conditioning. - large scale (industrial) carbon capture. - Re-forestation (where the tree is not immediately burned but instead used long-term in e.g. housing and furniture). - High speed rail to offset flights. - Incentivise local tourism rather than long-haul flights for vacations. - Social changes such as adjusted diet to be better (e.g. less beef, more lamb, poultry, and especially vegetables). - Right-to-repair and related social changes that lead to a thriving second-hand-market. For example, the EU Common Charger Directive (aka the USB-C Law) is expected to reduce e-waste by 12 000 tonnes yearly in the medium-long term and reduce GHG emissions ~to~ by 900k tonnes yearly. That may not look like nearly enough in the grand scheme of things, but once you do a handful of those it starts moving the needle.

wiskinator 2y ago

Or. And I’m just spit balling here. Plant super long lived trees. Redwoods live for >200 years. Eucalyptus grow very quickly and might be a good option too.

marcyb5st 2y ago
I can do you one better. Plant those trees and when their growth (in terms of sequestered C02/year) start to plateau you cut them and either use them for construction or bury them in places where the conditions are right for coal formation. Since we understood the "coalification" process we can also manufacture such sites close to where said trees are planted. In the latter case you bury the trees and forget them because accelerating coal synthesis is energy intensive, and so you can't really reuse that coal as it would be a net negative in our energy budget. So you either are sequestering C02 and using it to create houses that will be around at least few decades (and in the process maybe also decrease the material cost of such constructions) or permanently sequester it in a way that only a few % of the sequestered C02 gets back into the atmosphere. I can't find anymore the article that explains what I mentioned, but the issue is that is not economically profitable (is costs $$$ without generating a return with the current laws). However, I believe that if you account the damage climate change is doing around the world it is.

littlestymaar 2y ago

Instead of freezing plants we can more simply drop them in oxygen deprived seas, like the bottom of the black sea. The problem is the scale that is required, we generate so much CO2 that capturing it would require to build the biggest industry on earth dedicated to this (several time that of concrete)

jeisc 2y ago

we created the problem by abusing technology so I doubt more technology will solve it. We need to change our consumerism culture from throw away to keep forever.

zizee 2y ago
Given that it is proving near impossible to get everyone to "do the right thing", technology is the only realistic way out of this.

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

"Microsoft .NET C# (fsharp is completely open and does not have these issues)" There you go. Everyone should use F#

FrustratedMonky 2y ago

""I hope other companies follow Gitpod's lead and support the high achievers that our digital society is built upon by enabling them to become independent artists that build truly open ecosystems"" This a great idea. It forgets that most artist starve. The meme of the "Starving Artist" working as a barista, is not in our cultural zeitgeist for nothing.

derdi 2y ago

On the one hand: Nice formulas. On the other hand: Glaciers are melting, even in Iceland. Keeping stuff frozen seems pretty difficult in practice. Also, one of the formulas for air flow through the pile seems to assume 90 straight days of constantly freezing temperatures. I doubt there is prime agricultural land where you get that.

nayuki 2y ago

Oddly related to today's video from Half as Interesting about covering up snow on ski slopes during the summer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB3rYfJjcMk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PB3rYfJjcMk

lolive 2y ago

The best option is a global deadly disease. #thanosWasRight