
Carbon Removal Technologies - sama
http://carbon.ycombinator.com
======
btilly
I would strongly suggest investigating the claims of
[http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli...](http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/olivineagainstclimatechange23.pdf)
that after mining, milling, and then being spread in the ocean, olivine rocks
weather quickly and take out CO2. The estimated costs of large scale CO2
sequestration this way are surprisingly reasonable, and the technology is
already available.

Also the various ocean technologies are going to run into the same
environmental complaints as the idea of seeding otherwise barren areas of the
ocean with missing metals, causing algae blooms that sink to the bottom. See
[https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-
ocea...](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/iron-dumping-ocean-
experiment-sparks-controversy/) for a discussion of some of those. (And see
[https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/28/iron-
fer...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/04/28/iron-
fertilisation-of-the-oceans-produces-fish-and-sequesters-carbon-dioxide-so-
why-do-environmentalists-oppose-it/#61cb86cb7419) for a more laudatory article
about this in the general press.) If you can deal with the regulatory
concerns, the existing low-tech solution is one of the cheaper ways of
removing CO2 that is known.

Speaking personally, I understand the qualms of environmentalists but consider
the possibility of local toxic algae blooms to be a less serious environmental
disaster than the otherwise certain ocean acidification that will wipe out all
shellfish species worldwide. Yeah, nobody wants to accept a bad outcome, but
in this case I think it is better than the alternative.

~~~
matznerd
I am working on a non-profit that is utilizing Schuiling's research and is
actually getting this project done. We are scouting beaches right now for a
"wiggle" tank, which is a sort of see-saw like device where we can gather data
to affirm the real world dissolution rate. The chemistry, however, is sound
that each 1 ton of olivine will sequester 1.25 tons of carbon.

By the end of 2019 we hope to have our first olivine on the beach. The project
will be funded by donations, but we will also be selling olivine/peridot
jewelry that's price equates to actual tons of olivine we will dump on the
beach. Raw olivine is currently ~$20-$25/ton and the average us person puts
out 15-20 tons of CO2/year. The next closest technology for sequestering
carbon is well over $150/per ton.

For more info and access to the full text studies, visit
[https://Climitigation.org](https://Climitigation.org) and Project Vesta
[https://ProjectVesta.org](https://ProjectVesta.org)

~~~
drankula3
> Raw olivine is currently ~$20-$25/ton and the average us person puts out
> 15-20 tons of CO2/year.

Globe-scale carbon sequestration would increase demand for olivine massively.
Would mining operations be able to scale appropriately without prices going
through the roof?

~~~
cbkeller
Geologist here. Can't speak to the economics, but there's no shortage of
mineable olivine, mostly in areas where mantle lithosphere that was formerly
below oceanic or island arc crust has been "obducted" on the continental crust
and thrust up to the surface (the mantle is mostly olivine). These are called
ophiolites, and they're not uncommon in places where you used to have a
destructive plate boundary:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiolite](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ophiolite)

~~~
ianai
Google says there’s 2.996×10^12 tons of carbon in the atmosphere. I’m
guestimating we have about 1/3 of that which needs to be pulled out to correct
for emissions to this point. Do we have access to that amount of olivine?

Thank you so much for your comment!

Edit-As to pricing, if olivine is a common byproduct of other activities and
generally common in that sense then obtaining 1 ton of olivine is the cost to
move it. Then they need to process and disburse it. That seems like a cheap
process.

Edit2-the non-cheap part of this seems the dispersal. How long will it take to
disperse all that olivine?

~~~
ben_w
> I’m guestimating we have about 1/3 of that which needs to be pulled out to
> correct for emissions to this point.

For the moment, that’s a slight overestimate; we’re a little over 400ppm, and
pre-Industrial levels were about 300ppm, so we “only” need to remove 1/4 (and
we don’t really need to go back all the way to preindustrial levels, it was
about 325ppm in 1970)

~~~
ianai
With 20/ton of olivine it’s still around a 20 trillion dollar industry (just
that cost alone)!

------
GreeniFi
We already have carbon removal technology. They’re called trees.

[Edit] I’m not being facetious. 40% of emissions are as a result of poor land
management. We’ll need all the technological help we can get, but if we can’t
manage land as carbon stores - not sources, we’re not going to win this race.

~~~
gustaf
This is Gustaf from YC. I wrote the first Carbon Removal RFS.

Planting tree is actually a great carbon removal technology. Unfortunately
most forest owners in the world don't know or don't have incentive to care the
about the carbon impact the forest have on the climate. Biggest reason forests
are taken down is to grow cattle for beef. If you are working on a startup to
reverse this we'd like to fund it too

~~~
ISL
If you'd like to fund trees, one could start buying land and start protecting
trees.

Spending that money on intensive lobbying and forest advocacy in rapidly-
deforesting countries could have an impact, too.

The trick, of course, is that neither of these techniques compound for the
individual nor a startup. They are pure charity for the planet.

~~~
samstave
Actually, my idea would be the following:

1\. Automate tree/crop planting

2\. Reform regulations stipulating that planting of trees/crops/plants should
be required on any and all uninhabited lands, as a matter of "imminent domain"
regardless of the land owner. Perhaps even as a tax incentive to land owners.

3\. The development of a maintenance and management policy and system around
all that is planted

4\. In conjunction with the RFS for flooding deserts, develop a multi-stage
water transfer to desert desalinization ponds, then to be used in irrigation
of the tree planting efforts.

We already have autonomous farming combines with excellent ability to harvest
crops and plant seed. They should be put to use at scale in panting trees.

Further, we could make an effort to employ the vast amounts of humans with
little opportunity to be productive to build, plant and deploy a massive
effort such as this.

We dont need to try to do everything with robots, when we have millions and
millions of humans.

If we are so progressive and smart, maybe learning how to manage a labor force
in the millions to accomplish a great work such as terraforming a desert is
someting we should attempt again.

~~~
aoner
RE: 1. Automate tree/crop planting:

[https://www.biocarbonengineering.com/](https://www.biocarbonengineering.com/)
These guys use drones to shoot tree seeds in the ground.

Also regarding terraforming a dessert, I think one of the biggest problems
with is the number of water needed in the area, but I do think that this will
be a really interesting part of the solution. Maybe the increase of land
prices due to the decrease of arable land might make such ventures more
profitable. There's a great ted talk about reversing desertification:
[https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_worl...](https://www.ted.com/talks/allan_savory_how_to_green_the_world_s_deserts_and_reverse_climate_change/transcript?language=en)

~~~
thinkling
Around here, tree farms replant by hiring people who plant hundreds to
thousands trees per day per person and are paid for piece-work, a fraction of
a dollar (~$0.20?) per treelet planted.

Given that you need to do this once every 25-40 years (maturity cycle of the
tree), is doing it with drones really that big a win?

~~~
aoner
I'm also not sure how much of a big win the drones are. Proper forest
management is probably way more important. So protecting against illegal
logging and making sure that whenever trees are almost dying to take them out
so that they don't rot and replant a new one.

------
all_usernames
I recently heard about Carbon Engineering, a B.C. Canada based firm that is
extracting carbon from the atmosphere and making liquid fuel -- they call it
"recycled fuel." Apparently it can be used in existing combustion engines. And
it is already up and running.

Something on the order of 10,000 of these industrial plants could get us
carbon neutral rather quickly.

[https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-
company-...](https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/b-c-company-says-
it-is-sucking-carbon-from-air-making-fuel-1.4696817)

~~~
gustaf
Carbon Engineering and Climeworks are two incredible companies working on
Direct Air capture and Air-to-Fuel and we'd like to fund more companies like
them. There are less than 5 companies worldwide that are serious about getting
Direct Air Capture to scale. The world need more bets that that on such a
promising technology

~~~
aoner
Hi Gustaf, I read earlier that you are more interested in Direct Air Capture
technologies than others. Do you have any specific reasons?

I think another way we could look at things is finding "cheap" forms of carbon
that would have otherwise been burned/left to rot and reprocess those into
building materials.

~~~
yazaddaruvala
I'm not Gustaf, but I'll try to answer this.

The return on investment for a lot of Carbon capture/sequestering is not
lucrative (or at least the business models are not yet apparent). The long
term VC angle for air to fuel seems straight forward.

\- Mars alone will be a huge market for such technology. Driving a lot of
demand 100-200 years out (if not a big market in 20-40 years).

\- Shanghai, et-al, need air filters. Now imagine a filter which also
generates a sellable resource; fuel. I imagine that machine would sell quite
well in those markets.

\- With the right level of efficiency, a new era of "sail" boats could be
powered by reclaimed fuel from air. Imagine the market for a cargo/cruise ship
leaving port with an empty fuel tank, and days later reaching the destination
port with a full tank and its goods delivered.

\- With the right level of efficiency, this only improves the efficiency of
coal plants. Burning coal for electricity but also reclaiming the CO2 for
fuel.

~~~
Xixi
I don't see how you could make a "sail" boat powered by reclaimed fuel from
air, as there is no fuel in the air. You will need a source of energy to
convert the CO2 to fuel. In nature the most common (to my knowledge) CO2 ->
fuel process is called photosynthesis, and is powered by the sun.

CO2 -> fuel consumes energy (that is stored in the fuel). Fuel -> CO2 releases
it.

~~~
yazaddaruvala
Sorry, in the case of "sail" boats, I worded it poorly before. Wind turbine-
like "sails" could act as a propulsion source when the wind direction is
correct, and generate energy and funnel the air into the CO2 -> fuel machine
when the direction of wind is non-optimal for propulsion.

I agree in all of the cases I mentioned there would always need to be _some_
energy source.

------
gingerbread-man
An obvious step towards reducing CO2 emissions in the US would be raising
taxes on gasoline. Americans are driving ever larger and less fuel-efficient
cars in part because gas prices have remained steady or fallen in real terms
since the 70s. In fact, Ford announced a few months ago that they will stop
selling passenger cars in the US (except the Mustang), to focus on more
popular trucks and SUVs.

But this is just about the least politically palatable policy imaginable.
Democrats don't like it because it's a very regressive tax—the working poor
across much of the country drive to work in older, less efficient cars. And
besides being opposed to any "new taxes," the rural Republican base would be
hit especially hard by this as well.

~~~
johnchristopher
> An obvious step towards reducing CO2 emissions in the US would be raising
> taxes on gasoline.

It seems we are past the luxury of looking for incentives to reduce CO2
emissions. It's about reducing CO2 emissions _right now_ , no proxy allowed,
no IFTTT schemes.

There might be a bare minimum amount of CO2 allowed, it's fixed. We could
monetize that but it doesn't matter. We can't go beyond that amount.

~~~
gingerbread-man
> There might be a bare minimum amount of CO2 allowed, it's fixed.

I'm not sure I understand, are you suggesting an individual "carbon-quota" as
a more radical way of slashing emissions than the "incentives" of a carbon
tax? Depending on the tax rate, a carbon tax could produce reasonably
expeditious results.

~~~
johnchristopher
Yes, I was unclear, sorry. What I mean is: "There might physically be an
amount of CO2 that can be released without compromising our ecosystem. That
amount is fixed. We can't borrow on it and repay it later."

------
WhompingWindows
Can we discuss space sunshades? Assuming the cost of getting freight to orbit
goes down substantially as companies like SpaceX ramp up launches, what's the
limiting parameter on some sort of sunshade over the north and/or south pole?
Is it indeed the cost of launching the sunshade, or are there other factors at
play which make the space sunshade unrealistic? What materials would be
reflective and resilient and cost-effective to block the sun? Would polar
blockers be enough to cool the planet as a whole and stop warming, or would
multiple sunshades spread around the globe be better?

Also, generally, what about increasing cloud cover in general? Wouldn't this
reap a huge reward for cooling the planet? I know it doesn't remove gasses and
prevent ocean acidification, however it may help with heat-related issues.

~~~
natosaichek
Anything you can do in space would be cheaper on earth. So rather than shading
the pole by spreading ~100,000 sq. km of material in orbit, instead ask why we
wouldn't spread the same shade cloth / reflective mylar etc. on the surface of
the earth. Then you realize how much of a colossal project it is and how
completely impractical is is.

~~~
throwaway5752
Earth is a closed system, so the shade cloth on Earth would simply warm up and
reradiate the absorbed energy as infrared. Reflective mylar would see a
portion of the reflected sunlight (which would have warmed the atmosphere upon
entry) trapped by the greenhouse effect.

~~~
coltonv
Earth is is not even close to a closed system. There's a giant thermonuclear
explosion factory in space that pumps insane amounts of energy into our
system. If earth was a closed system it could not harbor life as entropy
increased.

------
zackmorris
I was just talking with my uncle a few days ago who has sailed around the
Caribbean. He said there are meters-thick piles of what he thought was algae
piling up on beaches. From a search:

[https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/mysterious-masses-
se...](https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/06/mysterious-masses-seaweed-
assault-caribbean-islands)

So looks like this is Sargassum (brown seaweed). I feel like any large-scale
geoengineering to combat carbon will probably involve growing something like
this over large areas in the middle of the ocean and then burying it.

This would only be feasible if it scales by the square or cube. I'm thinking a
genetically modified plant designed to grow in single stalks or sheets
hundreds of miles long so that it can be wound up by some kind of continuous
process. It could use a traditional coal power plant modified to burn some
small portion (say 1%) of the plant itself.

Sure there are side effects and unintended consequences from this but cut me
some slack, it's only my first idea!

------
louprado
"It's time to invest and avidly pursue a new wave of technological solutions
to this problem - including those that are risky, unproven, even unlikely to
work".

I had a recent crackpot idea that falls into the "unlikely to work" category
since my background is not chemistry.

Given that a modern automobile's tailpipe emissions are mostly C02 + H20,
those molecules can be converted into ethylene (C2H2) using known efficient
electro-catalytic processes. The conversion of ethylene gas to a polyethylene
(plastic) is well known and has the added benefit of being exothermic.

The end goal is for my car to output a lump of plastic I can drop into the
recycling bin instead of CO2.

But my gut tells me that:

1) There is no way to speed up the reactions to keep up with the 80 liters per
second of tailpipe exhaust (~40rps * 2.0 liter engine) without this system
being impractically large and/or requiring energy intensive compressors.

2) No one, including me, wants to drive around with a tank of hydrogen and a
tank of ethylene gas.

But still, it might be fun to hack on something like this assuming I can do it
safely. If anyone has any feedback, or has experience making polyethylene, I
would be grateful for feedback even if it is negative. Thanks.

~~~
thereisnospork
The short answer is that while that reaction works in a beaker, it is too
slow, inefficient and fragile. Plus there's also the thermodynamic perpetual
motion machine in using the energy from a combustion reaction to reverse that
combustion reaction.

Basically you'd need a second car worth of engine to generate the electricity
to convert 1/3ish of the co2 from the first engine to ethylene (the rest winds
up as methane, ethane, and CO.). Plus storage, maintenance and misc.

There are a few reviews by Hori that are more or less the gold standard on the
chemistry if you want to read more. Unfortunately the literature is full of
fud though.

------
wuschel
> The question then becomes, whether we can create new genetic chemistries
> that are not based on DNA, but some new genetic polymer?

Is this article a PR piece? I am a bit annoyed by the lack of reflection in
this naive approach to develop xeno-biology and let it loose in our (only)
planetary habitat.

If it were the only statement of the kind in the sub-articles, it would be
fine. There is, however, a strong disregard for second/third systems effects.
Radical approaches alone do not cut it, they have to 'fit'.

Not that it is easy to do in the first place, but please think about the
ecosystem as a whole. It is hard to take these type of statements seriously -
but this is YC here, an outlet with a lot of media impact. Please communicate
a _responsible_ call for action.

------
chimere
Charm Industrial [1] was recently mentioned on HN, with a novel approach to
BECCS using grass to produce carbon-negative hydrogen. Grasses are the
highest-yielding biomass per acre and thus the cheapest CO2 removal option. It
also helps if you can make a profitable product from that biomass, like Charm
is doing with hydrogen.

Not much info online, but we have a weekly climate newsletter [2], or you can
ask me (cofounder)

[1]
[https://www.charmindustrial.com/about/](https://www.charmindustrial.com/about/)

[2] [https://charmindustrial.us18.list-
manage.com/subscribe?u=aaf...](https://charmindustrial.us18.list-
manage.com/subscribe?u=aafd4c7577e4bc2bfc20baa47&id=3e4a6db592)

------
peacetreefrog
Good. More and more, reducing GHG gas emissions politically or through any
sort of international agreement looks like a pipe dream.

I think Kyoto is a good example. Take (liberal and environmentally
enlightened) Canada -- their Kyoto target was 6% reduction (compared to 1990
levels) in emissions by 2012. Did they come close to meeting it? No, instead
they were on track to be 25% over their 1990 emissions and dropped out in 2011
in order to avoid paying billions in fines.

It's even more depressing when you consider that even if Kyoto HAD been fully
implemented (by every country), it wouldn't have done enough actually stop
global warming.

IMO, basically any political/collective effort is doomed to fail, even if the
alternative is disaster. It's going to take something like this --
carbon/albedo reduction/capture technologies that can be implemented by
smaller groups of people (not nation states) and probably will be if things
get really bad.

~~~
christophclarke
The issue with the Kyoto Protocols (and most multilateral agreements) is that
there is no recourse from the international community for leaving the
agreement. The only enforcement is for members, and there is no penalty
against not being a member or real economic benefits for being a member.

There is a place for international agreements, but only if structured properly
and flexible enough to change with the timescale they are meant to mature in.

------
ciconia
Whatever the solution is to global warming and the looming ecological crisis,
I don't believe it lies in _more_ technology.

The only viable solution in my opinion is for people to realise that our
planet's resources are finite and that we need to accept this fact. AS others
here have stated, moving from a growth-based economy to a sustainable one is
the only way forward. Sustainability and technological startups are
diametrically opposed.

~~~
spyckie2
Wow, this is really skewed towards the 1%, even if you meant it the other way.

You do know that the global middle class yearly income is 1-3k a year, right?
That's probably less than a typical American food budget.

It's fine if you want the US to stop growing. But the rest of the world would
desperately like to grow more. And that's 90% of the world's population.

It's also naive to think it's easier to redistribute wealth globally than it
is to create technology. Redistribution only comes through bloodshed. At least
with technology you can build it through hard work, effort, and ingenuity.

~~~
schiffern
> It's fine if you want the US to stop growing. But the rest of the world
> would desperately like to grow more. And that's 90% of the world's
> population.

I see the old "[technological] man's burden" is as magnanimous as ever. ;)

Why is the rest of the world desperately poor? It's absurd to imagine that
it's because the free enterprise West wants to help that 90%, but is held back
by... anti-growth activists. Nothing could be further from the truth. In
reality colonialism (aka stealing from that 90%) never ended, it just got
better PR and privatization.

> Redistribution only comes through bloodshed.

Agreed, and most of the wealth redistribution in the world today is _upward_
(as 'the rich getting richer' implies). Since we're having the consequent
bloodshed anyway, why not redistribute wealth in the other direction to
maximize hedonic good?

Warren Buffett put it best: "There's class warfare all right, but it's my
class — the rich class — that's making war, and we're winning."

> At least with technology you can build it through hard work, effort, and
> ingenuity.

...implying[1] technology doesn't cause bloodshed. Talk about a skewed
perspective!

Just to arbitrarily pick a (hardly unique) example, what do Amazonian
tribespeople think of technology? What have _their_ experiences been?
[https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/12/uncontacted-
trib...](https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/12/uncontacted-tribes-
illegal-gold-brazil/)

Why was that gold suddenly economical to prospect/mine? Technology.

How were these people massacred so efficiently? Technology.

Why was there such an enormous power imbalance between these two populations?
_Technology._

"Technology" may look fine-and-dandy to the person behind the keyboard
(especially for those who personify it by unconsciously imagining that
'technology' pays their salary), but never forget that all our technological
artifacts were ripped out of the ground at some point, typically after using
third-world government corruption to steal the land from its former
inhabitants. We're merely rich enough that we can push that devastation "far,
far away."

[1] or perhaps I'm misinterpreting, and you're just saying that technology
brings hard work _in addition to_ bloodshed?

~~~
spyckie2
My core argument is that using technology to help curb CO2 emissions is a way
to solve the problem that is something we can do, and that ideological
solutions - let's rework our society or kill half the population - aren't as
easy. To say that we should turn from a growth-based economy to a sustainable
economy is much more difficult to create a plan of action for than to create a
technological solution.

Ideological solutions have their own stains on history as well, compared to
technical solutions - Stalin, Mao, and Hitler all have something to say about
that.

There's no need to attack technical solutions as an epidemic on society. If
you argued that society is an epidemic on society, that's a different story,
but I would counter and say that there exist bad and good rich people, as well
as bad and good technological outcomes, and bad and good ideological outcomes.
To cherry pick the bad aspects is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.

~~~
schiffern
...assuming there is a technological solution.

My core argument is that "endless growth = good" is an ideological problem,
and it requires an ideological solution. Without changing the goal of the
system, _any_ tech solution will inevitable be used simply to enable more
growth (see: Jevon's Paradox).

Here's part of a talk by seminal systems theorist Donella Meadows, who
explains it better than I: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-
xVc&t=13m55s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HuIoego-xVc&t=13m55s)

>There's no need to attack technical solutions as an epidemic on society.

We do need to be _realistic_ about technology, including its downsides. I'm
countering the one-sided perspective of technology as bloodless hard work &
ingenuity. Perhaps true for the colonizer, but not the colonized.

~~~
TeMPOraL
So in the end, we need both.

We need technological solutions to undo the damage we've done to the climate.
Trees won't sequeseter CO₂ fast enough by themselves. We need ideological
solutions, so that people don't cancel the gains of technological solutions
with increased growth and waste. And then we need political/economic solutions
like carbon tax to redirect money towards technological solutions, and minds
towards ideological and lifestyle ones.

Really, we shouldn't be fighting over which kind of solution we need, because
neither is sufficient in isolation. We need them all. Let's focus instead on
fighting opposition to any and all effective solutions for saving people.

~~~
schiffern
Thank you, well said.

------
lchengify
For anyone who is interested in the Energy Industry in general, including
Carbon Capture (CCS), I would recommend "The Energy Gang" podcast as well as
"The Interchange".

The guys who run the podcast are not long on CCS as a savior for 1.5 degrees
C, but they are incredibly knowledgable about the space and dive into a lot of
technical, policy, and economic minutiae that you wouldn't think would exist.

I never exactly knew how much mitigating something like peaker plant
composition and more sophisticated demand response can affect existing CO2
emissions. Even things like the opinions of energy executives in the (very
silo'd) regional utilities (Dominion Energy, Green Mountain Power, etc) can
have a wide-reaching effect on the timeline of policy.

I've listened to the whole run of each of the podcast and it's definitely got
me more excited about the space. I'm glad YC is getting more aggressive.

~~~
gustaf
I love those podcasts. You should all listen to them.

They are right that we have all the technologies we need to reach 1.5 degrees
C. However we need massive acceleration of implementation of those
technologies. Like a 10x improvement. We're not on track right now.

The reason we need Carbon removal is because most IPCC forecast still assume a
large % carbon removal. And it's going to be important for us to get back to
300ppm in atmosphere. The consequences to society of 1.5 degrees or 2 degrees
are so massive and costly that we should anything that have a shot at avoiding
it.

~~~
lchengify
Right, and thank you for calling out that CCS is only going to be part of the
solution.

Taking a wider lens, my honest opinion is I think it's going to have to be a
combination of a "Cuban Missile Crisis" moment for our society, and some sort
of Moore's law effect on PV or battery storage.

Taking the analogy that Climate Change is the "Nuclear Arms Race" crisis of
our generation, we haven't really had an event that has resonated with the
populous to take an aggressive stance that blunts economics. It's shocking but
true that the events of Super Storm Sandy (285 deaths), Katerina (1,833
deaths), and Puerto Rico/Maria (2,975 deaths) haven't been enough to really
move the needle in the collective consciousness. It may a true disaster, on
the order of Miami being rendered uninhabitable, in order for some entity
above the state level to really instantiate something like a Carbon Tax.

But once we get there, I think the bottom falling out of solar pricing between
now and 2025 has enough of an economic incentive to get us to 10% renewables,
whereas it gets de-risked enough for the "big money" (think: Fed-backed
Capital Markets ala infrastructure spending) to come in and take over. It is
true that PV manufacturing doesn't exactly map onto chip manufacturing (it's
not about nano scape per se, it's more about layering absorbing levels in a
way that allows full capture), but ultimately I am hopeful we can get there.

Lastly ... solar is ultimately a empowering technology, in that anyone with
land can use it. It's a perfect fit for a country where the laws were
originally meant for a farming population (which is essentially what solar
is). I think once a tipping point gets hit where gas prices stay between where
they are now (maximum shale extraction cost) and ~$30 (when the Saudis start
pumping), and solar goes below that, the discussion will be more around how
many DC lines do we need to get electricity from the southwest to the rust
belt, than whether renewables are what will save us from our energy troubles.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hurricane_Sandy)
[2] [https://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/07/double-sided-solar-
cell...](https://cleantechnica.com/2012/07/07/double-sided-solar-cells-from-
bsolar-produce-up-to-50-more-energy/) [3]
[https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/29/us/puerto-rico-growing-
death-...](https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/29/us/puerto-rico-growing-death-
toll/index.html)

~~~
kpennell
Agreed. We still need a massive holy shit moment (millions displaced?) vs.
bigger CA fires or more heatwaves (which Europe mostly enjoyed this summer) or
a few strong hurricanes.

------
super-serial
I'm glad someone mentioned it above, because my favorite solution is still
"advanced weathering" of rocks:
[http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/oli...](http://www.innovationconcepts.eu/res/literatuurSchuiling/olivineagainstclimatechange23.pdf)

Just US $250 billion per year to offset ALL of humanity's carbon emissions.
Yes I said ALL. It would cost less than the ongoing 'war on terror.' If I was
rich I would be building autonomous mining robots so I could do it myself
because I'm not confident governments will take action until it's too late.

~~~
throwaway5752
Don't you think that there's perhaps something wrong with a perfect solution
presented with no drawbacks? Something like that screams, "incomplete
knowledge of implementation or externalities"

~~~
super-serial
I just think it's the best out of all the options. Since it's a natural
process I think it has less chance of unintended consequences compared to
something like putting aerosols in the sky to block sunlight. Just like Elon
Musk's plan to put humans on Mars there's going to be tons of problems, but it
makes sense to start working on it now so we can come up with solutions.

------
NeedMoreTea
The only viable carbon removal technology yet identified is _leaving it in the
ground._

This isn't a smart-arse answer given every additional gallon of oil dug or gas
fracked makes the problem worse, the oil industry hasn't yet accepted defeat,
and politics still promotes and subsidises fossil.

How then to take that problem out of the realm of political corruption
(lobbying) even faster?

We know what to do. Slightly facetiously, simply copy Orkney, we know how, and
the cost. Save a little oil for chemicals and plastics that cannot be
replaced. Yet we don't. Lobbying and politics is the problem.

~~~
Triesault
> The only viable carbon removal technology yet identified is leaving it in
> the ground.

The article discusses this point in the second paragraph.

> We're now in "Phase 2" and stopping climate change requires both emission
> reduction and removing CO2 from the atmosphere. "Phase 2" is occurring
> faster and hotter than we thought. If we don't act soon, we'll end up in
> "Phase 3" and be too late for both of these strategies to work.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
That is _far_ from discussing.

Do you think the political part of the problem will magically go away if there
is a viable phase 3 technology that does not contribute more carbon than it
captures?

Do you think the politicians will permit it to be used at scale when they have
done all possible to slow renewables?

------
csense
The ocean phytoplankton technology sounds like it has the potential to screw
the planet up worse than the climate change issues it's trying to solve.

Massive, self-replicating system of genetically engineered bacteria? I'm
certainly no marine biologist, but I'm pretty sure phytoplankton are a super
important part of the world's ecosystem. Suddenly massively increasing the
number of them that exist in the open ocean seems like it would wreak havoc on
the world's ecological balance.

~~~
akie
Yes, thank you for pointing this out. Biological systems are huge &
interconnected, and changing one component will invariably affect the others —
probably in unforeseen ways.

------
mark_element
I'm quite impressed by this presentation. There is a tremendous amount of
content here to excite some different audiences about opportunities for planet
scale changes.

I'm super concerned about externalities for any sort of geo-engineering, but
we are going to get some externalities of the present course anyway.

------
jasaloo
I'm encouraged by the full-scope approach this report takes, though I get very
worried about technological fundamentalism, the idea that we might possibly
engineer our way out of the worst effects of climate change. Don't get me
wrong, we might, but do we really want the reality it gives us on the other
side?

Charles Eisenstein, a prescient thinker on this topic (and others), has
advocated for our reconnection and renewed stewardship to/of the earth. That
might sound a bit new-agey to some, but after reading his recent book, he made
some compelling points:

\- mainstream environmentalism has taken a reductionist approach by almost
solely dedicating itself to emissions reduction (it has also made the movement
vulnerable to climate-change deniers, who are (at least partially) correct in
that emissions cannot account for ALL of our environmental issues... e.g. bees
dying off has likely nothing to do with carbon emissions, yet the culprit is
often vaguely referred to by many activists as "climate change" which has
become synonymous with "carbon emissions")

\- while reducing our emissions is unquestionably critical, we need to widen
our focus to include the following, which are equally if not more important:
restoring water cycles, considerate reforestation/halting deforestation,
ending pesticide use (which is likely a primary driver of insect die-off,
causing catastrophic disruptions in global food chains and biodiversity, both
of which are critical to nature's ability to heal itself), and last but not
least:

\- regenerative, no-till agriculture (versus till-intensive, soil-eroding
industrialized agriculture) is an effective tool for restoring these systems,
and it also acts a stunningly powerful carbon-sink (by some estimates, if my
memory serves me correctly, we could reduce current emissions enormously by
converting only 10% of our global industrialized, mono-crop farmland to
regenerative, no-till farmland, which IMO is a small endeavor when compared to
the tech-intensive and potentially world-altering prospects of massive carbon-
sucking machines or injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to induce
artificial cooling)

For anyone interested, his recent book is "Climate: A new story." It was the
most meditative and thought-provoking collection of ideas that I've read on
the state of the environment and climate. It's also incredibly hopeful without
being blindly optimistic. In fact, it's rooted in a deep sense of awareness,
not just of the many existential ecological crises we face, but of the new
mindset we must adopt if we are to truly heal our planet.

------
singularity2001
Iron fertilization!

1 kg of iron can fix 83000 kg of carbon dioxide and turn it into biomass.

The idea is that you give algae the one ingredient to growth which is very
sparse in the oceans yet over-abundant on land.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization)

"Give me a half a tanker of iron and I will give you another ice age"

~~~
aiCeivi9
It is also great tool to turn oceans into oxygen-free death zones.

------
akshatrathi
I wrote a series on carbon capture technologies: [https://qz.com/re/the-race-
to-zero-emissions/](https://qz.com/re/the-race-to-zero-emissions/)

What I took away most was that carbon removal is now firmly a part of
mitigating climate change. It's part of "Plan A" but also there is so much
from the previous "Plan A" that will still need to work on. There are a number
of carbon-capture technologies on current emissions that need to be deployed
from power plants to cement factories.

~~~
aoner
Yes according to the latest IPCC report (
[http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/](http://www.ipcc.ch/report/sr15/) ) in the
1.5 degree scenario we need to deploy bio-energy combined with carbon capture
storage on large scale. Carbon removal tech will become indispensable and is
definitely part of "Plan A".

Some scenerios rely more on bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, while
others rely more on afforestation, which are the two carbon-removal methods
most often included in the IPCC reports. Trade-offs with other sustainability
objectives occur mostly through increased land, energy, water and investment
demand.

There is another scenario were we might not need a lot of bioenergy with
carbon capture storage and that would be if we would decorbonise at an
incredible fast rate (starting now) and planted a lot of trees. I'm not seeing
that happening anytime soon though.

------
Jun8
This is awesome! Some people don't like having a Plan B along these lines
because they think it distracts with the standard approach of emission
reduction. In reality, for something this important (i.e. Keter level
destruction event) we should pursue _all_ threads simultaneously.

"If we don't act soon, we'll end up in "Phase 3" and be too late for both of
these strategies to work." In fact, let's at least start brainstorming about
plans to deal with Phase 3, too.

The topic of desert flooding has been thought about quite a bit, e.g. see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea)
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qattara_Depression_Project).

~~~
ergothus
It's been interesting to watch my own thinking evolve:

20 years ago: "I'm sure technology will figure out how to reduce emissions.
Sequestering tech is neat, but will only take off if the end product is itself
useful in bulk"

10 years ago: "Sequestering tech will take too long and has too many potential
complications to rely on, we need to get serious about reduction."

Now: "We're screwed and it's only a matter of how much people end up
suffering. I'm very skeptical of sequestering tech, but we need anything that
works"

------
rb808
I really think CO2 should be scrubbed from the air, however how would you
store them then? Ideally something like solid carbon - a black solid which you
could then bury. Its a lot like using energy to make coal out of air and
putting it back in the mine.

But surely it makes sense to stop digging up coal in the first place.

------
guelo
An elephant in the room not being discussed here are the propaganda networks
that are persuading voters and preventing any kind of government action on
climate. Disrupting these propaganda businesses is another necessary angle of
attack for preventing climate change catastrophe.

~~~
recusancy
Unfortunately there's no profit motive for this.

~~~
dv_dt
Of course there is, for companies with technology to reduce or reverse the
carbon in our atmosphere there's a giant profit potential.

This of course balanced by the interests of those protecting their current
cash flows in established carbon releasing industries.

~~~
PeterisP
There's no _innate_ profit potential for this technology. If the governments
decide to pay lots and lots and lots of money to sequester carbon, then
there's a giant profit potential for anyone who can do it. But note the "if"
\- as of now, there's no indication that they're going to do so; and if/when
it comes to such an emergency that they will, they might as well nationalize
(or 'globalize') that tech and implement the solutions at-cost without any
meaningful profit for the owners of these technologies; if push comes to shove
enough so that the major powers of the world will be willing to invest a
nontrivial share of their GDP in fighting climate change, honoring
international intelectual property agreements will be the least of their
concerns.

~~~
dv_dt
> There's no innate profit potential for this technology.

I don't know if that's true or not in the long term - not even first order.
Wind turbines weren't innately profitable until at one point they became a low
cost leader in power generation by some measures. Humanity may find a fairly
low-power input catalyst that give us cheaper fuels than digging it up from
miles underground, shipping it thousands more miles, refining it and shipping
it hundreds of more miles. Right now, in this instant of technology, I'd agree
on first order profitability.

Second order systemically it's almost certainly a profit vs needing to rebuild
so much civil infrastructure for hurricane resistance, new and expanding flood
plains, fire resistance, farm droughts, etc.. or incurring all sorts of other
health costs for fossil fuels infrastructure. The cost of acting to curb
climate change is still cheaper than letting it all go chaotic.

------
caf
On the Electro-Geo-Chemistry page, there is an error here:

 _A 500 MW renewable energy power plant dedicated to negative-emissions H2
could therefore consume and store nearly 8 million tonnes of CO2 per day while
generating a little more than 2 million kWh in the form of H2_

As both the math and later text makes clear, such a plant would store ~21,600
tonnes of CO₂ per day - or 8 million tonnes _per year_. The 2 million kWh
generated looks more like a daily figure but doesn't match up with the daily
figure elsewhere in the article (it has 6 million kWh / day equivalent of H₂
generated for a similar sized plant) - it was probably supposed to be 2
billion kWh / year?

------
brrt
Regarding the wonderfully sci-fi idea of flooding deserts, I raise you the
seawater greenhouse company:
[https://seawatergreenhouse.com/](https://seawatergreenhouse.com/) \- which
have been at this game for a couple of years now.

I've always been thinking - someone should give these guys money, and lots of
it.

------
philwelch
I wonder why we can’t just extract CO2 and H2O from the atmosphere and
recombine them back into hydrocarbons. Not only would this give us a closed-
loop supply of hydrocarbons (meaning you could have things like airplanes) but
you could just sequester the carbon by storing the hydrocarbons. The only
problem is that it takes a lot of energy (more energy than we got from burning
those hydrocarbons in the first place) but it would be great to solve the
energy storage and carbon sequestration problems at once.

------
cwkoss
I'm curious about pickled compost of fast-growing grass to avoid CO2 release
by keeping it anarobic so it produces lactic acid instead during fermentation.

An acre of lawn grass can sequester several tons of CO2 each year. I bet
properly managed, you could achieve 10x that by optimizing growth cycle. If we
could harvest and store it without releasing it, might turn into a useful
agricultural product: bokashi.

My napkin math puts it as needing within orders of magnitude of acres used for
US corn production for the 40 Gt/yr target, but does not account for energy
use.

Also, more wood construction? Wood is 50% carbon, but because CO2 is only ~1/3
carbon by weight, every pound of wood represents ~1.5 pounds of carbon out of
the atmosphere. If can grow, harvest and use ~13 billion tons of wood a year,
that wood satisfy yearly 40gt target. Seems like forests can grow roughly a
ton of wood per acre.

If we can redirect wood waste (sawdust/chips) to livestock operations
efficiently, the material could be used as bedding to absorb waste and then be
buried/composted for agricultural use. Less CO2 release and counteract soil
depletion, so subsequent generations of plants will grow yet more vigorously.

Mixture of factors is likely best solution. I think Joel Salatin could
probably save the planet if we let him.

------
jf-
Here’s my crazy idea: nuclear powered high pressure differential
centrifugation.

Under centrifugal force fluids separate into bands based on mass. The same
principle as oil and water separating under gravity. Use giant centrifuges to
spin compressed air until it separates into bands, then extract the bands
corresponding to greenhouse gasses.

I don’t know the energy requirements for this or if there is a better way of
doing it. But if you’re looking for blue sky thinking, that’s what I’ve got.

~~~
idoh
What do you do with the CO2 once you've isolated it?

~~~
jf-
Put it through a process to solidify it. You may be able to extract other
useful gasses from the air to help with this. If the end result were stable,
either put it in landfill or use it as fuel, so it becomes an energy
reservoir. Then it’s closed loop, the energy is generated by nuclear and
expressed via the expenditure of the manufactured fuel and subsequent
recapture.

------
danielharan
I'd like to propose a different scale removal, for anyone that may have the
means to do it: home and office CO2 scrubbers.

CO2 concentrations are higher indoors, and they're affecting our cognitive
ability. Atmospheric concentrations are going to be high for human cognition,
especially in dense urban areas.

Better indoor ventilation will help, but if outdoor air already has higher
than optimal CO2 concentrations, scrubbing that air is the only option left.
Given the number of air changes needed (assuming 10X), a home unit would need
to scrub CO2 from around 100,000 liters of air a day per person.

Small-scale removal is likely much more expensive than industrial BECCS or
other carbon capture technology - but the value proposition would be fresher
air for healthier, smarter workplaces and homes. Sell me cartridges of
enzymes, and take spent ones with bicarbonate for reconditioning, and I can
feel like I'm helping the planet a bit while making my life nicer.

[https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-
dire...](https://thinkprogress.org/exclusive-elevated-co2-levels-directly-
affect-human-cognition-new-harvard-study-shows-2748e7378941/)

~~~
steve19
C02 in the atmosphere is going to need to increase by 2x-4x before cognition
becomes a problem. Meanwhile indoors co2 jumps to these levels within hours of
poor ventalation.

I minuter the co2 in my office and vent when required.

~~~
danielharan
We're passed 400 ppm globally, and urban areas are much higher. Indoor air is
often 1000 ppm - how many air changes do you need to get that down to a
reasonable amount if your intake is around 450? 500?

And do we know for sure that 500-1000 is fine for cognition?

------
giarc
Is anyone aware of measures of public acceptance of carbon removal vs carbon
reduction (emit less)?

My thoughts are that people may be more willing to invest in carbon removal as
it allows them to continue to live their same life. They see it as "I can
continue to pollute since we can just remove the CO2." Similar to how some
people may view eating and dieting... "I can eat bad now, I'll just go on a
diet later."

~~~
marcell
I think all the carbon removal solutions assume some sort of carbon tax for
them to be viable. Otherwise carbon removal is a process with some cost and
zero benefit for the individual.

So to answer your question, the popularity of carbon removal will probably be
about the same as the popularity of a carbon tax.

------
nanomonkey
All Power Labs, a company that makes biomass gasifiers, has estimates for the
amount of carbon their technology can sequester
([http://www.allpowerlabs.com/carbon](http://www.allpowerlabs.com/carbon)).
This appears to be the most viable process forward, as not only can one create
a ton of electricity, hot water and air, but also biochar which sequesters
carbon in the soil in a beneficial way for an estimated 10k years. (full
disclosure, I'm an ex employee).

Equally exciting are the biomass gasifiers that utilize Stirling engines, such
as those made by Microgen ([http://www.microgen-
engine.com/](http://www.microgen-engine.com/)) as they are external combustion
engines which are quieter and have better runtimes and maintenance cycles.

~~~
jasonlaramburu
Isn't the challenge that biomass gasification systems require fairly pure
feedstock (ie cubes of hardwood)? Has anyone succeeded in developing a
feedstock-agnostic gasification system?

~~~
aoner
Yes I think this is one of the bigger problems of these systems. So for
example, let's say you've created a device that only accepts rice husk and
your device pays itself off in 10 years. Now suddenly your neighboring country
is subsidizing the gasification of rice husk. This means that the prices of
rice husk increase and you're expected ROI is suddenly changed. This makes
investing in these types of devices difficult and unattractive.

------
eaenki
That was an amazing read. The fun thing, is that I started the draft of a
quite similar post a couple of weeks ago. That's a great example of definite
optimism. The fact that the post mentions but doesn't expand on outer-space
solutions it's a bummer.

------
ArtWomb
Artificial photosynthesis.

Basic idea is a nanoscale metal-organic "hack" of common bacteria systems to
develop efficient pathways for the conversion of sunlight and CO2 into useful
fuels. Massive search and simulation required to find ideal candidates. Which
could then be incorporated directly into carbon emission sources such as
factories and power plants.

One recent example is hybridizing M. thermoacetica with "magic" Au22
nanoclusters

[https://chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/harvesting-solar-
fuels-t...](https://chemistry.berkeley.edu/news/harvesting-solar-fuels-
through-bacterium%E2%80%99s-unusual-appetite-gold)

------
orliesaurus
If anyone's reading this. I'm really passionate about this crossing of tech
and environmental issues & awareness. I have a tiny carbon footprint myself, I
am super conscious about everything: no car/no emissions/ tiny electricity and
water bills compared to everyone else in the city/food&waste minimization etc

If anyone needs a developer and/or marketing engineer with a passion for
automation (think very advanced Zapier) hit me up because I'd rather work with
you than working for the next "Crypto currency company". Look at my profile
for how to contact me!

------
intended
Goddamit no

>About 10% of the world's surface is desert, which is cheap, uninhabited,
unproductive land that is drenched in some of the most powerful solar
radiation on the planet.

Land doesn’t have to be productive to be protected. Deserts are ecosystems,
and this kind of “changing the wild forest frontier to mans will!” thinking is
how we landed up without forests in the first place!

From desert hare, to toads that come out once a year when it rains, to cactii,
snakes, insects, and many other creatures - deserts are filled with living
creatures.

Is this stewardship of the planet or just ensuring habitability for humans?

------
titojankowski
For an overview of 80+ startups working in carbon removal, check out
AirMiners:
[http://www.airminers.org/explore](http://www.airminers.org/explore)

~~~
aoner
I'd second this. Great list. There's also this map with lots of carbon capture
projects: [https://www.thirdway.org/graphic/carbon-capture-projects-
map](https://www.thirdway.org/graphic/carbon-capture-projects-map)

------
angel_j
Energy is needed to separate CO2 into carbon and oxygen. At the individual
molecular scale, this can't be much. How many can I separate at once with my
hands?

If we invent a device that helps us to physically separate oxygen from carbon,
humans and farm animals could do it. It would be like milling grain, or
washing clothes.

Idea: create filters which are big enough for carbon to pass through, but not
oxygen. Then "squeeze" a bunch of air through, and wipe away the carbon on one
side. Like a cheesecloth made of carbon nanotubes...

~~~
tcpekin
Fun idea - very back of the envelope math is if you could convert energy into
strictly breaking CO2 bonds, the amount of energy it takes is 805 kJ/mol (from
Google). WolframAlpha says this is roughly the caloric content of a biscuit,
or 30 min of sports [1]. This would then separate 22.4 L or one mole of pure
CO2.

There are approximately 1E20 moles of CO2 in the atmosphere (very rough
math)[2,3]. This could take a while, especially considering efficiency would
probably be 10% of this idealized system. However, this filtering idea isn't
bad, I don't know of any filter like this for splitting CO2, but something is
almost certainly being worked on for just general sequestration of CO2 from
other atmospheric gasses.

[1]
[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=805+kJ](https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=805+kJ)

[2]
[http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(5.148E18+kg)%2Fmolar+m...](http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=\(5.148E18+kg\)%2Fmolar+mass+of+CO2)

[3] [https://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/math-how-much-
co...](https://micpohling.wordpress.com/2007/03/30/math-how-much-co2-by-
weight-in-the-atmosphere/)

~~~
angel_j
A biscuit! Breakfast 4 carbon credits...

I saw a nanofilter that could remove salt from water.

If you can puncture a material with ultra-violet lasers, the holes might be
the right size to filter carbon; that is my guess, based on these results
[https://phys.org/news/2014-10-oxygen-molecules-carbon-
dioxid...](https://phys.org/news/2014-10-oxygen-molecules-carbon-dioxide.html)

------
monkpit
I feel like this would make a really interesting sim video game. Start with a
certain amount of capital, research and build, and try to save the world from
carbon :)

------
canercandan
What about changing our diets?

> Animal agriculture is responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas
> emissions, more than the combined exhaust from all transportation [1]

Are you will to fund any product ideas that will be willing to encourage a
paradigm shift/or smooth shift with regards to a more eco and animal fríendly
lifestyle?

[1] [http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/](http://www.cowspiracy.com/facts/)

~~~
sydd
Or to lower emissions instead of building stuff that causes emissions? There
are soo many possibilities to do it.

------
narrator
It seems global warming politic's main focus is to implement a global carbon
tax in one form or another. Proceeds from the tax are administered by a supra-
national government. That's how the Paris accord worked and very credible
global warming authorities said was the only solution to global warming. Does
this company have a business model of being the recipients of the global
carbon tax?

~~~
JumpCrisscross
> _that 's how the Paris accord worked_

No, it isn't. The Paris accord was a non-binding document that tried to put in
place a framework for coming up with solutions.

~~~
narrator
Nationally defined contribution is a nice way of saying global carbon tax [1].
I mean sure the UN doesn't have a way to enforce the tax, but it's still a
tax. Presumably this tax would wind up somewhere and someone, not the person
who contributed it would spend it. This money spent would go to someone based
on somebody's decision. Perhaps this company would be the recipient? There is
so much pussyfooting around the whole issue of what the paris agreement was
about due to politics. It's freaking underwear gnomes from South Park levels
of hiding what's actually going on.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#Nationally_det...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paris_Agreement#Nationally_determined_contributions)

------
polymath21
For a great in depth but still understandable look at the race to zero
emissions, including carbon capture technologies, I highly recommend this
series from Quartz: [https://qz.com/on/race-to-zero-
emissions/](https://qz.com/on/race-to-zero-emissions/)

------
kumarski
Some of my notes on why carbon sequestration is a no-go for civilization to
achieve lithospheric homeostasis.....:

5 Billion Cubic Meters of Oil are produced Annually by humanity.

30Bn Tons of CO2 generated.

60% is un-sequesterable because it is small and/or mobile.

40% is sequestrable and large scale/stationary.

12 Billion Cubic Meters of CO2 are thus sequestrable.

You must liquefy CO2 before putting it into the ground.

50% -70% efficiency in converting it to a liquid that we can shove into the
ground.

6 to 8.4 Billion Cubic Meters of Liquefied CO2 are thus Sequestrable.

Shoving 6 to 8.4 billion cubic meters of liquefied CO2 into ground is no small
matter.

Think about it this way, humanity built an entire industry focused on an
annual extraction of 5Bn Cubic Meters of Oil over a time span of 100+ years
with refineries and complex processes spanning multiple countries,
geographies, regulations, wars, and land rights.

Also, who’s going to buy sequestered carbon?

The reality is that something like this will require spinning up an entire
Trillion dollar market.

~~~
biglenny
I don't think anyone in their right minds believes that fighting CC is going
to be a profitable venture at all. The point is it will take co-operation and
investment by governments worldwide.

It's also important to note that the geological formations necessary for
sequestering CO2 are a lot more common than those required to _potentially_ be
stores of crude.

In addition to all this, countries around the world will have to be willing to
take an economic hit, something I'm worried the biggest polluters won't do
(China/India in particular). This makes me wonder if it is futile for
developed nations to be stifling their own economies with carbon taxes because
China, India, and Africa don't keep up. In any case, we probably will be far
off the IPCC recommendations and will have to resort to geoengineering.

~~~
dm3730
> China/India in particular

What data are you basing that on? We and our Arab client states are the
biggest polluters by far, on a per capita basis.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions_per_capita)
CO2 emissions by country name (only fossil fuels and cement manufacture,
metric tons per capita

China 7.6 India 1.6 United States 16.4 Qatar 40.5 Saudi Arabia 19.2

~~~
biglenny
Because most CO2 emissions are from industry, not humans, per capita
statistics mean very little (especially since these industries ship their
products globally). Per capita statistics are championed by industry because
they shift blame to citizens and paint the false picture that citizens are
entirely responsible for the nation's output.

This means it is more effective to use a metric like CO2 emitted per $1000 GDP
because it reflects how polluting industry is in each country. See link
attached and sort. It is also important to remember China and India
(especially) are far from industrializing, and Western nations' emissions are
dropping (they peaked 10-15 yrs ago).

In reality, some combination of CO2/capita and CO2/$1000GDP is the most
effective for determining how polluting a country is.

Environmental policy is dictated at a national level. And this is why I put
pressure on the Chinese state (again, NOT the people). A bigger portion of
their emissions are caused by industry than in most countries). The Chinese
state and only the Chinese state has the ability to reduce industrial
emissions in their country.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_di...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions)

------
rogergr3
Hi, there's a lot of interest comments in this thread, we have found, in our
own experience, is that now we have a much create of push at all levels than
we used to from individuals to governments even though the latest is still
being to slow. We believe that the future looks much better in brighten, that
we are still on time to move from phase 2 back to (the improbable) phase 0 and
we are working to make this happen and will continue until the job is done. :D

We believe though there is still a lot to be done, and not just in CO2
capture, but in air pollution in general.

Here's the website:
[http://http://www.pureairindustries.com/](http://http://www.pureairindustries.com/)

------
clomond
I appreciate the focus here and applaud all progress and work related to any
kind of carbon capture/sequestration technologies. These approaches are
necessary and important.

BUT

I think it is too often overlooked that a fundamental prerequisite for making
any meaningful progress in this area predicates on cheap, affordable, abundant
"clean" energy. Anytime you talk about hydrolysis, desalination, or increasing
concentrations of CO2 in a gas or a solution - each of those processes require
non-trivial amounts of energy to do at scale and the limitations are often in
the realm of physics. Ultimately, energy from somewhere is needed to break the
bonds of the CO2 so it can bond to new inert compounds and that requires lots
of energy.

~~~
sradu
Each proposed idea has a section related to energy requirements.

------
lifeisstillgood
I do understand the direction of travel here (and notwithstanding the idea
that most geo-engineering and other "solutions" seem to carry James Bond
Villan levels of unintended consequences) what I feel is missing is tackling
the elephant in the room.

The article says it clearly "It's a collective action problem the world has
been unable to solve"

Well, can we place a call out for investment in innovative solutions to
collective action.

Can we fix democracy - both where it lives but could do better and where it
does not live at all?

I don't accept that "Social Media" already does this. We need more

In short - Let's have investment and innovation in the democracy and freedom
space (as well as) in the carbon sequestration space.

------
chimprich
Just because you like them, should that trump significant threats to the
environment or or civilisation?

I rather like spending money, but I know I only have a certain budget.
Consequently I only spend what money is available rather than only depending
on how much I want things.

I feel we should look at the environment in the same way; decide our carbon
budget, and work within what's possible according to that, rather than start
with what is palatable to the individual and working backwards.

Keeping our environment habitable seems like something we have to do rather
than a nice-to-have.

------
dv_dt
The most impactful technology would be some sort of financial instrument to
fund known and future carbon reduction techniques which could be implemented
independently (or with the help) of governments.

------
devy
Besides CO2, Caron removal should also target other greenhouse gas with much
higher potency like Methane/CH4 [1], which is the central point of why
livestock is a big cause of global warming in Gate's Note about Climate Change
Quiz.

[1]:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane)

[2]: [https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Climate-change-
quiz](https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Climate-change-quiz)

------
ilove_banh_mi
Any plan to massively capture CO2 should take into account that removing too
much CO2 from the atmosphere would cause a mass extinction of land-based plant
life if CO2 levels fall below 150 ppm.

------
all_usernames
Anyone thinking about or considering working on these technologies owes it to
themselves to read Charles Mann's The Wizard and the Prophet. Whatever you may
think of the author's various statements on Peak Oil etc., the book is a
worthwhile meditation on two very different approaches to our current crises.

[https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-
and-...](https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/34959327-the-wizard-and-the-
prophet)

~~~
aoner
Thanks for the recommendation. Could you explain a bit more in detail why you
recommend reading it? I've read a lot of online resources (IPCC, wikipedia,
different lectures on advanced weathering, pyrolysis/biochar etc) and have
been looking to read a book related to the carbon dioxide problem.

~~~
kpennell
It's not about CO2. It explains where two major environmentalism schools of
thought came from and how they approach the same problems differently.

------
dsalzman
Would like to see YC address the economic incentive problem with carbon
sequestering. How do you incentivize companies and individuals to capture C02?
What lessons from the failed cap and trade systems can be adapted to a new
"sequester and trade system"?

Solving this problem would open up resources to this field. Right now we
suffer from global bystander/freeloader syndrome. The cost of global warming
is spread to thin/gradual across the global population.

------
markvdb
According to the World Bank[0], the US produces 75% more CO² per $1000 of
economic output than the EU.

The US should be able to reduce that inefficiency delta to just over 5% by
cutting CO² emissions by 40% without any impact on luxury whatsoever. This
alone would cut worldwide CO² emissions by about 5.73%.

[0]
[https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KD.GD](https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.ATM.CO2E.KD.GD)

------
aidenn0
I'm worried that it's too late for carbon removal to prevent some of the worst
effects (since no large scale carbon removal plan can be implemented
overnight) and we need to look into more short-term ways of reducing warming
such as albedo modification.

Or in the terms on this page, we need a Plan C.

[edit]

They actually do list this, I didn't notice at first since it's not a carbon
removal technology.

~~~
aoner
I think the IPCC does have some scenerio's where there is an overshoot but
that can be 'recovered' using carbon removal tech. You can find some graphs on
these projections here:
[https://chemconnections.org/Global%20Warming/After%20Paris-S...](https://chemconnections.org/Global%20Warming/After%20Paris-
Science-1018.2016.full.pdf) (second page)

------
timka
According to 1st Geochange report (2010), anthropogenic factors don't play
significant role in climate change

[http://geochange-
report.org/index.php?option=com_content&vie...](http://geochange-
report.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=83:summary&catid=35:1st-
report&Itemid=113)

------
jasonlaramburu
The post mentions the significant logistical challenges associated with moving
large quantities of biomass and biochar. What about a mobile biochar
production system? ie a device that could be delivered to a farm and towed
through the field to convert waste biomass in-situ into biochar and till it
directly into soil?

~~~
nanomonkey
Tilling the soil actually releases quite a bit of CO2, some of the best
practices are "no till" methods. But to your point, biochar retorts can and
should be used at the source of the biomass, instead of burning fossil fuels
to transport the biomass to a dedicated facility.

Many small scale gasifier generators are designed to do just that. The problem
with all solid fuels is that material handling is difficult (you need to chip
wood to the correct size and shape to have it feed through a machine
effectively, this gets more complicated when you're trying to process corn
cobs, sugar cane bagasse, and fruit pits also), not to mention that the fuel
needs to be the proper dryness to burn without producing excessive tar.

Then there is the problem with the PAH (Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons) that are
produced, and their carcinogenic on any of your workers...not to mention any
other toxic chemicals that may be produced out of your smoke stack when using
mixed fuels.

All this boils down to details that have to be worked out in a mobile unit.

~~~
jasonlaramburu
How can you get biochar into the soil without tilling?

~~~
nanomonkey
Layering biochar mixed with compost on top of existing soil, and/or putting
other biomass on top of that (Lasagne gardening, or no-till farming). The bugs
and worms in the soil will move it around.

You can also drop it in when you plant (digging or double digging).

------
hughes
Getting really good at carbon capture (specifically direct air capture) could
also have the side benefit of proving technologies that drive in-situ
propellant production within the carbon dioxide atmosphere of Mars.

Similarly, this could drive a net carbon-neutral source of natural gas on
Earth.

------
hantusk
Cheap energy is the enabler for several of the solutions proposed among the
comments.

I really see nuclear energy as the solution. The nuclear reactions are
emission free, and the emissions in the supply chain to drive the reactions
have very low emissions compared to other sources of energy.

------
theuttick
I am a structural engineer of moderate capability. I have developed an
engineering platform as a startup. If anyone is serous about doing one of
these projects, I would love to speak with you about helping and about using
my platform to design anything you need.

------
drewmassey
I work at a startup that is using AI to reduce emissions in industrial and
data center contexts. I like the big sky approach of this post but so much
savings / reduction is an execution question.

We are hiring so DM me if you would like to learn more!

------
adamrezich
Anyone else find it weird when people talk about "carbon removal" instead of
"CO2 removal?" Maybe it's just me but "carbon removal" evokes "eradication of
life" in a sci-fi way

~~~
p1mrx
The significant atmospheric carbon is in the form of CO₂ and CH₄, which are
both greenhouse gases. If we "just" removed the carbon, we'd be left with O₂
and H₂, which are mostly harmless.

------
crispinb
For anyone who still clings to the weird, blinkered, narcissistic technofix
superstition:
[https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity...](https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/30/humanity-
wiped-out-animals-since-1970-major-report-finds)

Climate breakdown is not a problem worth tackling in isolation, because it is
merely one prominent symptom of a general catastrophe. Capitalism will not
allow evolved complex systems to continue to exist, because they can either be
extracted directly for short-term profit, or destroyed in side-effects
(appearing costless to the brutish actuarial mind) of other profit-making
activities. Our home (the so-called 'environment', a term we really should
abandon) cannot survive our way of life. We have no other home (Mars fantasies
aside). Ergo, our way of life must change.

------
samstave
For flooding of the deserts, id like to determine the size and power
requirements for a renewably powered valve-pumping section that will work in
series to pump water along the required route.

------
jwr
I'm very happy to see this new interest in saving our planet among the tech
elites (this includes the recent post from Bill Gates). Maybe we are not all
too stupid to save our planet...

------
hamilyon2
We need a video game where all global planetary effects are simulated. Like
civilization or alpha centauri but with plot twist regarding global warming.
Our children will finally get it.

------
starpilot
Do carbon offset projects like Terrapass have any merit? I know it's not as
good as selling my car and decking my life to planting trees, but is there any
benefit at all?

------
ghosthamlet
I think discard/reduce most of the non life-essential technology is more
important than inventing new technologies, than opening countless startups.

------
xchaotic
Like any sane person, I totally accept the global warming is real and most
likely mostly man made. But rather than fighting that change which is already
underway, can we not adapt to the higher temperatures and entropy? I
appreciate that there's lots of side effects that we see as disastrous, but
generally warmer = better for life in many parts of the earth. Most likely the
positive outcomes of global warming do not outweight the negatives, but it
looks like relatively very little attention is paid to what is most natural
course of action - adaptation.

~~~
Boxxed
We can't adapt to an ecological collapse. It's not the few degrees of extra
warmth we worry about, it's how major extinction events will threaten nearly
everything.

------
intended
Desert flooding is out - long time back an article on solar energy in the
desert pointed out that the desert isn’t dead.

It’s an ecosystem in its own right with specialised creatures that live there.
Plus it’s not like the people in the Sahara are going to be happy that a bunch
of people decide that their nation should be flooded.

Remember we can’t convince Brazillians to stop ranchers from decimating the
rainforest.

Also that added water, if it is stable, will result in ,ore growth and human
presence, adding to the heat engine. (Assuming people in the region don’t
drain it for irrigation almost immediately )

------
ilove_banh_mi
Note that phytoplankton accounts for 50% of photosynthesis on the planet,
already capturing 50 GtC/year.

------
EGreg
Finally! I want to invest in YC batches just for this. Didn’t care to invest
before.

------
Diggity
Are there any crowd funding efforts out there for carbon removal?

------
marauder016
I'm surprised by the hype around for-profit direct-air capture (DAC) companies
because, unlike afforestation or biochar, which produce useful products, there
is a very small market for CO2. Somewhat ironically, the biggest market for
CO2 is for enhanced oil recovery (EOR), which is exactly what it sounds like:
it allows for more oil to be extracted from oil wells.

There is in fact no market for CO2 separated using DAC because it costs an
order of magnitude more to separate CO2 (>$100/T) than its value on the market
(max $15/T). So, the real question is, who is going to pay for it?

The companies currently operating in this space (e.g. Climeworks, Carbon
Engineering) are doing so at a massive loss. In the case of Climeworks, they
are pumping the CO2 to a greenhouse.[0]

I don’t think DAC alone can ever make sense, there has to be a second step in
the process where the CO2 is converted into a marketable product, so that
product displaces emissions. This means something like converting CO2 to
plastic or fuel that would otherwise be produced using petrochemicals. Carbon
Engineering recently announced that they are pursuing this. Of course, in
addition to two technical breakthroughs that need to occur (cheap CO2
separation from air and cheap CO2 conversion to fuel), they will somehow have
to get those fuels to be cost-competitive with current fossil fuels.

The thing to keep in mind is that CO2 emissions from man-made sources total 60
GT per year (pa). And eventually all 60 GT must be removed every year. To put
this into perspective, the amount of oil produced globally by weight is about
5 GT p.a. The amount of CO2 produced is truly enormous.

The market for CO2 for EOR is about 80 Mtpa (around 1000x less than CO2
emissions)[1]. EOR actually makes some sense as we will be using oil for some
time, the carbon footprint of EOR-extracted oil is lower than conventional
oil.

At the end of the day, CO2 capture, especially DAC, seems more like something
that is run at a loss for public benefit, like public transit, not as a for-
profit enterprise.

[0] On the face of it, this seems great because the CO2 is being used, but the
problem is that the plants would remove the same amount of CO2 from the
atmosphere whether they were grown with captured CO2 or not (they might just
grow a bit faster in the greenhouse). In fact, the energy required for the
carbon capture process means that the carbon footprint of the plants grown in
the greenhouse using captured CO2 is likely higher than if they were grown
outdoors!

[1] [https://hub.globalccsinstitute.com/publications/global-
statu...](https://hub.globalccsinstitute.com/publications/global-status-
ccs-2012/market-and-price-co2)

------
dereke
I've been watching waay too many youtube videos about reforestation,
agriculture and land management recently and I think I've learned a little
from it (links at the end).

We no longer have the number of massive herds of animals that used to roam the
plains/savannahs grazing, pooing and to a lesser extent escaping from
predators.

This has meant that the grasslands are no longer trampled on and "fertilised".
This has caused the grasses to die back, the soil to degrade, to not hold
water and to turn to desert. (see the sahara, the outback, parts of china and
the usa).

Subsequently we've tried to be really careful with the land and not over graze
it etc. which tends to have the opposite effect than what is desired.

Now I also looked into reforestation because I thought trees were the answer.
Grow trees sequester carbon etc. But it turns out the cost of doing this £/$
and water (desalination) would actually be outweighed by both the albido
effect (green trees absorb more sunlight than deserts that reflect it back)
and that trees don't really grow fast enough to have the impact required.

Getting back to the grasslands, it turns out that when you intensively drive a
herd over grasslands the grass initially dies back but the root system
expands, the plant grows quickly and sequesters carbon into the ground. It
actually builds soil and traps carbon and it does it faster than previously
thought. The ground is also more permeable to water so when big storms come it
actually soaks up the water for later use rather than it running off and
causing floods, erosion etc. Also grass is lighter (colour) than trees so the
albido effect is not so bad.

This is just my understanding of one part of the problem. This is what I think
may be a solution to that:

We need to change the way we manage livestock. Probably change legislation so
they can't be kept indoors or feed grains (I think that is a big methane
contributor as well). We should have grazing plans for entire countries that
manage existing land well and restore broken land. We should stop eating them
because we need a big herd to restore the land and we probably need to employ
a lot of people to drive the herds (yeeha).

Grazing plans are simple, illiterate people seem to cope fine with them. We've
got the technology to scale this and in the west we probably have the
maps/surveys etc. to make this relative straight forward.

Whatever ends up being the solution to these problems we need to make
government act. Historically the best way to do that has been non violent
direct action. As we are at crisis point now (5yrs until the arctic has melted
based on current melt) it is really our final option. You may be interested in
joining the Extinction Rebellion to make this happen.

My interest grew from this:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI)
But this video has a lot more detail:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7pI7IYaJLI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7pI7IYaJLI)
Why growing trees in the sahara won't work:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfo8XHGFAIQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfo8XHGFAIQ)
And this is long but has a lot of detail about holistically managing livestock
and the effect on soil structure etc.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HmoAIykljk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HmoAIykljk)
Finally the Extinction Rebellion -
[https://extinctionrebellion.org](https://extinctionrebellion.org)

~~~
strainer
I came across those videos before and noticed the main speaker has been giving
talks for many years claiming he has transformed the fertility and
productivity of multiple cattle farms in the course of research, by simply
increasing cattle density and intensity. Alas if there were truth to the idea,
Allan Savory would not need to promote it - he could own or have franchised
thousands of farms by now.

The purported enhanced stocking strategy would catch like wildfire if it were
real and could at least be well documented after years of research, but there
are no studies of any substance for it. There is no difficulty in implementing
it - just keep more cattle than before, allow it to herd, move the herd around
and presto your output increases and costs reduce - climate and environment
get fixed and we all eat steak. This is not an exaggeration of the case made
in the videos.

I think the theme detracts from the image of practical sustainable farming
techniques, which are very real, continue to develop and have to compete in
the current economy.

[https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/plant-rich-
diet](https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/plant-rich-diet)

[https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/regenerative-
agricul...](https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/regenerative-agriculture)

[https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/conservation-
agricul...](https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/conservation-agriculture)

[https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/silvopasture](https://www.drawdown.org/solutions/food/silvopasture)

~~~
Eddh
The doubts about the technique seems warranted. On the other hand there is a
simple reason why it might be true : if large herds destroyed the herbs on
which these herds depend on, they would die off. So from an evolutionary point
of view, it makes a lot of sense for large herds to fertilize soil. They NEED
grass to thrive.

~~~
strainer
There are few simple rules to count on. The stability of grasslands depends on
circumstances, usually including a range of herbivores to prevent forestation.
Mega-fauna, like mammoths used to contribute to grove and prairie creation by
eating trees, before humans dominated.

I wrote this to dereke in another comment, I think it is relevant to
understanding the present situation: > Two hundred years ago about 60% of the
earth surface was covered in mature and native forest. The figure is less than
30% today. Most of the worlds fertile crops are grown on deforested land, on
the soil which native forests developed through ecological diversity and lack
of erosion. Most of the grasslands which are used for grazing, don't have the
soil quality to support demanding crops.

[https://www.britannica.com/science/deforestation](https://www.britannica.com/science/deforestation)

------
astrodust
At the rate we're setting up for a future where the entire ocean blooms, dies,
and we're left with nothing.

Already jellyfish are taking over. We're killing off so many life forms we're
essentially going back in time to the precambrian era.

Instead of looking for "quick fixes" like iron seeding, which has just as much
a chance of going awry as Australia importing cane toads to deal with their
crop insects, let's just _curtail CO2 emissions_.

~~~
nostromo
> let's just curtail CO2 emissions

We are though. Most people I talk to don't know that the US peaked CO2
emissions ten years ago and it's been falling every since - in per capita, per
GDP, and absolute terms.

~~~
astrodust
The United States fully intends to reverse course on that and fire up coal
plants in order to something something jobs.

The reason it was falling was because of strict emissions standards and a
strong EPA, both of which are basically gone.

~~~
jbattle
I was under the impression that we've "done well" because natural gas
generation has come online like crazy and proves more economical than coal and
INCIDENTALLY cleaner to burn.

I'm not sure how long (absent intelligent policy) til we hit peak natural gas
and the balance naturally shifts back towards dirty energy sources.

I.e. policy helps, but economics had as much to do with it

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Fracked gas is about as bad as or dirtier than coal.

~~~
biglenny
Yeah - no.

Coal CO2 emissions are almost double natgas' [1]. While it is true that natgas
is mainly CH4, a highly potent GG, its atmospheric lifetime is about 8 yrs.
Further, the only way the methane would be getting into the air is via leaks
in upstream/midstream processes. Today, hardly any of this leaks (EPA
estimates leak rate of 1.4%).

Now addressing fracking, the drilling and fracturing process are the cause of
little to no environmental impact/damage. The culprit is wastewater injection.
This is the unknown, and while the EPA found no evidence of widespread or
systemic pollution of water resources due to the fracking process (which
includes WWI before the well is capped), it did highlight the potential in
several stages of production for contamination to occur.

Now that said, the damage natgas causes, from E&P (especially) to burn, pales
in comparison to coal's at any stage.

I think it would be beneficial for HN users to spend some time in the energy
industry before making baseless claims.

[1]
[https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=73&t=11)

~~~
NeedMoreTea
Baseless? [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-
environment-13053040](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13053040)

~~~
biglenny
That study starts with the ridiculous assumption of a 3.6 -7.9% leak rate in
fracked gas. By their own admission, the data they used was spotty for leak
rates during drill completion, and transport. Study is also outdated (2011)
with regards to technological improvements of frack wells.

~~~
NeedMoreTea
A leak rate confirmed by NOAA and Lawrence Berkeley:
[https://cleantechnica.com/2013/12/01/natural-gas-
production-...](https://cleantechnica.com/2013/12/01/natural-gas-production-
destroys-climate-doesnt-save/)

There's also a defence of the original study
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-012-0401-0#...](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10584-012-0401-0#page-1)

------
crispinb
This is just symptom-chasing. Growth ideology in general, and capitalism in
particular, are incompatible with the continued existence of a living planet.
The problem space of replacing complex living systems with crude technological
ones will be explored fully by these crazed systems in all possible directions
even if/when this one symptom (climate breakdown) is countered with a narrow
technofix.

The first crucial question is whether catastrophic damage to Earth's
ecosystems is biologically inevitable given human cognitive capacities. Given
a satisfactory answer to that (which I think unlikely), the next question is:
how can we displace the cancerous ideology of limitless growth? These are
obviously more challenging issues, requiring the recruitment of a far broader
range of human capacities and knowledge than dangerous & blinkered
technological capitalists can offer.

------
makewavesnotwar
So I would love to get some feedback from this group on my takeaway from what
I've learned of global warming.

The general consensus seems to be that gasses like carbon dioxide and methane
heat cause an increase in global warming. I don't dispute that, but out of fun
a few years ago on earth day I started crunching some numbers regarding our
direct thermal pollution.

In the US our current consumption of gasoline alone is as 142.98 billion
gallons per year[0]. At an average of 120,429 BTUs per gallon [1] that puts
the US at ~17.219 quadrillion BTUs a year (in gasoline consumption alone)

Does this matter? Well at that scale we're talking about a Hiroshima Nuclear
Bomb level event (15 Kilotons of TNT or ~60 Billion BTUs) every 0.54 minutes
all day every day in this country when just considering American consumption
of gasoline alone. If volcanoes are your thing, Mt. Saint Helens produced 24
megatons of thermal energy in its 6 years of eruptive activity. The US on the
other hand produces the thermal equivalent of that every ~2.1 days... and
again, that's just gasoline.

Most of our heat comes from gas which is converted directly to thermal energy.
And then we have coal power...

Regardless of how "clean" you make it. We're talking about burning things to
create energy so the basic law of the conservation of energy comes into play.
And as hot air rises, it doesn't just magically become cooler... it dissipates
that energy until it reaches an equilibrium. Thereby transferring energy into
the geosphere.

And then when you explode things like natural gas or coal use, it's sometimes
being used to heat, but even when it's being used to cool, we're not getting
1-to-1 efficiency. Air conditioners output more heat than they dissipate.

And if people use ACs more as atmospheric heat increases, we're talking about
a positive feedback loop without even taking into account the thermal
pollution of creating the energy by burning stuff in the first place. (Even
nuclear plants tend to use ocean water for cooling - thereby directly heating
the oceans)

I'm not saying carbon dioxide and methane aren't potentially catastrophic, but
I don't think it makes sense to discount our direct thermal pollution as a
potential cause. I only based figures in my argument on US gasoline
consumption. That's a minor piece of the global energy pie.

Either way, reducing personal wattage through efficiency and reduced use seem
to be pretty productive in terms of reducing my personal thermal impact so it
seems like a step in the right direction whether thermal pollution is directly
related to global warming or not.

[0]
[https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10](https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10)
[1][https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=about_ene...](https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/index.php?page=about_energy_units)

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memmcgee
I highly doubt capitalism is going to save us from climate change considering
it has largely driven the problem.

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skookumchuck
Or we could just plant trees. Lots of them. Give people a small tax deduction
per acre of forest on their property.

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prolikewh0a
Stop polluting entirely and plant trees? All of these useless ideas above
could be solved by getting rid of the endless growth required by capitalism,
but nobody wants to give up their Alexa to save the entire population.

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rexpop
...are stupid even to contemplate while we're still increasing carbon
emissions. If you actually cared about the impact — and weren't just cynically
cashing in on environmentalism's recapitulated caché — you'd be shorting big
markets. The biggest threat to the world is unbridled capitalism, which VC's
like you are incapable of abandoning. May as well ask a fish to bicycle.

This post is a pitiable joke, whose highest purpose is to stand in a museum,
one day, as a testament to how blindly we charged into the apocalypse. I only
hope that museum's curated by our children, and not whatever species finds our
remains.

For a good, hard look at why I believe this, read Naomi Klein's "This Changes
Everything," and Peter Frase's "Four Futures."

If you're daring enough, you can follow those with Nancy Isenberg's "White
Trash," and Barbara Ehrenreich's "Dancing in the Streets" and "Witches,
Midwives, & Nurses" for a deep look at how and how long we've been going
wrong.

If that all doesn't make you straight up suicidal (let alone quit maintaining
your startup pyramid scheme), I have more reading suggestions for how to turn
this ship around.

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hodgesrm
> I have more reading suggestions for how to turn this ship around.

Meanwhile your post is putting down people who are doing actual work to fix
the problem. I for one am delighted to see people committing resources to
solving real problems instead of developing worthless mobile phone apps. That
gives me hope our species will get through global warming.

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rexpop
More like people who are doing actual work to capitalize on the problem.

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JBReefer
If someone can figure out how to make money to reverse climate change, that
will be the end of climate change. The whole problem is that it's hugely
expensive and only impacts each of us a tiny tiny bit _today_

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godzillabrennus
YC should be investing in Deep Isolation.

[http://deepisolation.com](http://deepisolation.com)

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JumpCrisscross
You're being down voted because this is off topic. One, the threat from
nuclear waste pales in comparison to that from climate change. Two, making
nuclear energy more attractive reduces emissions. This article is about
removing carbon from the atmosphere.

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aezell
This scientism approach to what is a problem of crumbling connections to our
selves will get us nowhere. Instead of having the best minds of our generation
flailing away at marginal gains within a flawed hypothesis, maybe we should
embrace the Earth as the whole biological system that it is. These approaches
are fixing the bruised elbow while the heart is laid bare and shooting spurts
of blood onto the floor.

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microdrum
Ah, the irrelevance of YC has begun.

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vkou
YC should instead focus on solving real problems, like how to democratize
sharing pictures of dog-sitters over a blockchain.

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olvar_
Could this endeavour be detrimental to the environment? (Please read my whole
reasoning before calling me a Climate Change Denier or something like that)

I understand that humans are changing the Earth's environment, but with this
we need to acknowledge that other organisms are doing it too. In particular
plants have been taking CO2 from the atmosphere for ages and continue to do
so. If you look at CO2 concentrations for long periods of time, you'll find
that the levels of today are not very different from what has happened
cyclically for hundreds of thousands of years.

The difference may be on the fact that now we are adding an extra influx of
CO2 to the atmosphere, but in doing so we may be balancing greater
concentrations of water vapour, which is a much more efficient greenhouse gas.
If doubling the concentration of CO2 increases the temperature of the
atmosphere, in say one degree, to gain another degree you'll need to double
the concentration of CO2 again, so the effect of concentration of CO2 on
temperature is logarithmic. Water vapour is much more efficient and by
decreasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere we may increase the amount of
water.

This is because of how photosynthesis (and agriculture) works. A plant
breathes air in through small pores on their leaves called stomata. Doing so
allows water to evaporate through those same pores. If the concentration of
CO2 in the air is low, the plant will need to evaporate more water to absorb
the same amount of CO2. On the other hand, if the plant doesn't have enough
water to evaporate, it will close its stomata and the result will be lower
growth and poor yield, simply because of the lack of carbon. Since nowadays
many agricultural plots are using water from aquifers and other underground
sources, we are actually putting into the environment much more water than
would have been without agriculture. If we decrease the amount of CO2 we may
push even further the plant's need for water and produce more water vapour,
pushing even further the warming, since water is much more effective than CO2
as a greenhouse gas.

We may be fighting against the wrong enemy. And in doing so punishing unfairly
the poorest of the world, who rely on fossil fuel for energy and those who
will be the most affected when crop yields start falling and the water
available becomes insufficient.

I haven't been able to find a global warming model that incorporates this
effect, but if someone made it this far into this comment and knows of any
model that does, I'll be very grateful to hear from it. If someone related to
this project reads this, please discuss it. It may be a mute point because
some reason that I don't know, but it may very well be an important one.

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beatpanda
Just came here to say:

1) Thank you for doing this

2) You should have been doing this 10 years ago because it was exactly as
obvious then that this kind of acceleration of investment was necessary, and
YC sank millions of dollars into social media bullshit in the intervening
period instead.

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gibsonf1
Given that every global warming/climate change prediction has been wrong so
far, why would it make sense to believe the same political entity making
predictions now? If you plug in the data from 10 years ago into any climate
model, the prediction for now is wildly wrong.

A more prudent approach, in terms of believing that a prediction for the
future may happen, would be to plug the data from a decade or more ago into a
model and see if it accurately predicts now. If not, reject that model, try to
do a root source analysis to find out what's actually happening, and try
again.

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chutiyapanti
Hey, let me play the devil's advocate here and say that these are nothing but
knee jerk reactions.

Call me cynical or pessimistic, but the time has already passed. Maybe we
should focus on saving as much as we can.

Funding a few companies may be the right thing to do, but shouldn't it have
been ten years ago. Or were the smartest people on the planet were hoping that
it would all just go away.

It's already too late. Sorry, but you have to invest in saving as many people
as possible.

Unfortunately, the politicians would never understand that.

Its actually funny. After decades of dystopian future being manifested in the
literature and movies, we have come to believe that's it's all just another
science fiction movie or a conspiracy theory.

We are heading towards a earth altering event, and we can't stop it.

Save yourself.

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jf-
What a lovely message. Thanks for that.

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chutiyapanti
You are most welcome

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phyller
> Genetically engineered phytoplankton might be used to photosynthetically
> convert CO2 into an ultra-stable carbon sequestration medium

If you downvote this please leave a note with what is wrong with my logic.

This is so wildly irresponsible. Every time I hear of these mega projects to
remove CO2 I get scared. Let's try to think about this coolly and logically
for a minute.

Our planet is used to change. Our ecosystem is ready to deal with change, and
CO2, and heat. It takes a lot of hyperventilating to even imagine a way in
which global warming destroys life on Earth. Worst case scenario is stronger
weather, higher oceans, and change of ecosystems. Maybe we get forests in
Antarctica again. Maybe North America becomes one big desert. Or a jungle.
Life adapts.

The biggest existential climate threat is a permanent ice age. Our planet has
been slowly sequestering carbon for eons. The ice ages last longer than the
warm periods. All of human history has been in a warm period. You want to
genetically engineer little organisms that we can in no way control, to remove
carbon from our atmosphere? Sounds like a great way to kill everything on the
face of the earth and turn our giant spinning miracle into just a big ice
ball. Just one team needs to do it one time, take that decision into their own
hands.

Think of hurricanes becoming routine in some parts of the world. Then think of
literal miles of ice, flexing the tectonic plates as they crush everything
beneath them, creeping towards the equator.

I'm not going to even address the other ideas right now. We have a small
fraction of the understanding and intelligence to be making these kinds of
decisions. Just my opinion, but the best thing we can do for now is stop
adding carbon to the air, and learn more about this world we live in.

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krick
I hope they will never succeed, but the mere idea that it is technologically
possible for a relatively small group of people to create something
uncontrollable, able to destroy the whole our biome is scary.

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pdonis
I know this is going to get downvoted but I have to say it: the problem is not
CO2, the problem is CO2 alarmism. The models on which the IPCC predictions of
doom are based do not match the data. Even the IPCC admits that in the AR5.
The actual data says that CO2-driven warming is not enough to worry about.
(Not to mention that the prediction of doom also depends on economic models
which are even worse at matching data than the climate ones are.)

We should not be spending the valuable resource of startup founders on this
problem. We should be spending it on creating enough wealth to bring everyone
in the world out of poverty and giving them the tools to adapt to whatever
happens in the future, including changes in climate.

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egd
Sources?

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pdonis
For a start, see the first graph here:

[https://judithcurry.com/2016/04/05/comparing-models-with-
obs...](https://judithcurry.com/2016/04/05/comparing-models-with-
observations/)

Some other relevant posts from the same blog:

[https://judithcurry.com/2017/09/26/are-climate-models-
overst...](https://judithcurry.com/2017/09/26/are-climate-models-overstating-
warming/)

[https://judithcurry.com/2018/09/17/a-test-of-the-
tropical-20...](https://judithcurry.com/2018/09/17/a-test-of-the-
tropical-200-300-mb-warming-rate-in-climate-models/)

~~~
sxcurry
For the curious, here's a website that thoroughly debunks Judith Curry's
"science" :
[https://www.skepticalscience.com/Judith_Curry_arg.htm](https://www.skepticalscience.com/Judith_Curry_arg.htm)

