3 ms·
The other way to promote plankton growth is through mimicking whale excreta. The https://www.whalexfoundation.org/ https://www.whalexfoundation.org/ is engaged
by emmelaich 2y ago
The other way to promote plankton growth is through mimicking whale excreta. The https://www.whalexfoundation.org/ https://www.whalexfoundation.org/ is engaged in this. We have far fewer whales in the ocean that we had hundreds of years ago. Ocean plankton, specifically phytoplankton, accounts for approximately 40% of the total global carbon captured and stored.
The hard part is actually measuring how much carbon you can sequester per kg of 'fake' whale poop.
Recent Bloomberg video: https://youtu.be/ZnXHJD0UI5U?t=812 https://youtu.be/ZnXHJD0UI5U?t=812
(Disclosure - I am peripherally involved.)
- ksec 2y ago>The hard part is actually measuring how much carbon you can sequester per kg of 'fake' whale poop. Do we have a rough estimate of this number? I assume the cost of whale poop can be low once it is mass manufactured. But the real cost is the actual deployment?
- emmelaich 2y agoWe do, we have a model and some experimental data. I can get back later for you with some numbers. Later .. 200 litres of 'aqua food' for one tonne of sequestered carbon.
- ksec 2y agoHow long does it take to capture that one tonne of carbon? Our Annual CO2 emission is about 40B tons. In order to be Carbon Negative we need to capture 60 - 80B tons / year. That is about 80B x 200 Litres of Aqua Food. Or 16 Trillion Litres. Roughly 3 to 4 times the amount of soft drinks Coca cola sold per year. And doing it continuously for 20 years we would revert back to about 80s.
- mystified5016 2y agoWe can't do it all this way. For every ton of carbon absorbed you add some multiple of that in plankton biomass. I'm no ocean ecologist, but it seems like there might be several consequences to adding billions of tons of plankton to the ocean
- emmelaich 2y agoIt dies and sinks to the bottom of the ocean.
- marcosdumay 2y agoNo form of carbon capture can offset our current emissions. Also, it's incredibly stupid to use capture for that anyway, as it's always much cheaper to cut the emissions at the source. Carbon capture is for offsetting historical emissions, and the few niche ones that are so hard to replace that we'll need decades of research.
- Tade0 2y agoSo it was actually pirates all this time: https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pirate_Global_Warming_Graph.gif https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pirate_Global_Warm... Being a get-rich-quick alternative to whaling, piracy captured enough of the workforce to slow down the extinction of whales. I jest, of course, but it's fun to look for ways a mere correlation might be a causal relationship.
- singularity2001 2y agoInstead of mimicking whale excretes we could ... let real whales excrete. that is doing everything to preserve remaining whale populations and encourage the formation of new populations.
- XorNot 2y agoWe can do more then one thing at a time.
- matthewmacleod 2y agoEvidence suggests we can't really even do one thing at a time.
- RetroTechie 2y agoHehe.. to get more whales in the oceans, not doing something is a good start.
- emmelaich 2y agoDefinitely, I'd love for there to be more whales!
- mystified5016 2y agoCan't be more whales if the oceans boil before they can repopulate