Are you kidding me? One large mountain? That can’t be true. Why are we collectively losing our shit over climate change when we should just blow up some coastal mountains?
This seems eminently doable and a lot cheaper than just moving every city away from the coast, among other things.
1) You can't just blow them up. You have to crush the rocks into something resembling sand to get the alkalinity released in human time scales.
2) Large means quite large. I ran a back-of-the-envelope estimate some years ago and found that the Hawaiian island [1] of Kauai could reduce atmospheric CO2 roughly back to pre-industrial levels if it were completely pulverized and weathered away down to the seafloor. That's trillions of tons of rock.
3) The benefits of curbing CO2 are shared globally, but the costs are concentrated locally. It's the same kind of prisoner's dilemma that results in e.g. people still burning billions of tons of coal each year.
I think that accelerated silicate weathering is the best geoengineering option and one that's likely to be deployed at scale later this century, but it's not really going to be easy.
[1] AKA "underwater mountain, with the top poking above water"
For #3, I wonder if the way out of the prisoner’s dilemma would be to use this method specifically for local ocean acidity reduction. Over time it helps globally but it doesn’t do so quickly enough that other countries become disincentivized from doing the same.
I don’t know the details of this concept but even if it’s true we have to decarbonize our economy or we’ll just have to keep blowing up mountains. Also I presume the parent meant “one mountains worth of lime” and I presume most mountains aren’t pure lime.
We will decarbonize. The only fossil fuel we have in massive abundance is coal, and it’s already not economical for electricity generation. Natural market forces could get us there alone. The problem has always been that it doesn’t get us there fast enough.
If we can just mine a mountain worth of lime and dump it in the ocean, that seems simpler and cheaper than trying to move all our coastal cities. Even if we decarbonize at the maximum possible speed, we’ll still have to do that.
some are a lot earlier than others. New Orleans and Most of Florida are already having problems (especially when a hurricane creates a big storm surge).
This seems eminently doable and a lot cheaper than just moving every city away from the coast, among other things.
I feel like there’s some fineprint I’m missing.