>Moving vast quantities of water - 9 trillion m3 per year - is the main energy requirement of the project. Desalination, at this scale and its current rate of energy efficiency, would itself require 10.8 tw of additional solar capacity, compared to 6.4 tw of total global power capacity in 2016. While this energy requirement dwarfs the energy of constructing and maintaining the system of reservoirs, the millions of drones necessary to do this will add significant additional energy requirements.
Comparison for the water - an Olympic size pool is 2,500 m3. That's 3.6 billion Olympic size pools, annually, for that proposed solution to the problem and would require more energy than we current produce just to pump the water and handle the necessary desalination.
And like I told Sam last summer when disagreeing about this as even a remotely plausible idea - this solution is almost certainly going to cause drastic global weather pattern changes and it is worth noting the Sahara actually fertilizes the rain forests of South America so this project could have potentially devastating consequences on its own.
This is arguably the simplest solution that we currently have on paper and likely the 'easiest' to do. However simply producing the materials needed would add a staggering amount of CO2, the concrete you'd need to pour for the thousands of power plants to power it would, you'd have to do something with all of the brine from the desalination process and dumping it back into the ocean would absolutely destroy any local habitats, you're going to change weather patterns and likely start dumping a lot more rain somewhere, you're going to stop fertilizing the rain forests of South America, and you're going to have to do something with the insane amount of algae you are growing to actually sequester the carbon (plus you'll have to be introducing enough minerals into the water to allow the algae to grow, something that would require massive strip mining).
Unless a fleet of alien trade ships show up in orbit soon and go "hey we have these machines, they'll process the carbon out of the air and make solid carbon cubes, don't worry they have power cells that will last centuries. But, in exchange, we'd like extrasolar rights to your greatest sitcoms and 3/4 of the carbon cubes" then, we probably aren't going to fix the problem.
To even retard the problem, we need to immediately stop using all fossil fuels. Instead China is still getting 70%~ of its power from coal, is still building hundreds of coal power plants, is putting millions of new drivers on the roads each year and is building an insane number of new roads and bridges that are using insane amounts of concrete and asphalt. Not to mention all of the other countries. It's just not realistic to cease all greenhouse gas emissions short of perhaps a CME forcing us to by frying most of the world's electronics.
It is a gloomy situation and it is going to likely require tens of revolutionary inventions in the very near future if we want to get back to even how it was 10 years ago.
It’s because if people were actually serious, they’d either stop using 90% of the power they use or be investing heavily in nuclear power, both making it cheaper and safer. There’s no short or mid term solutions for large scale batteries that will make renewables a viable alternative. But if we’d started moving from coal to nuclear when this crisis first was understood, it’d already be over.
The world has billions of people that don't know the first thing about climate change or the dangers of global warming. There are billions of people that simply do not know how much greenhouse gasses are produced as a byproduct of their daily choices in life, or what the consequences are.
Even talking to some incredibly wealthy people that want to try and solve this, you quickly realize they just do not understand.
Take YC, YC came out with the page I linked in my previous comment last year yet they continue to fly founders out for in-person 10-minute interviews when they could do it via skype. One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or to San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person, a 10-minute skype chat would be insanely less as 1GB of data transfer is roughly 1kg of CO2. YC knows carbon is an issue but then prefers in-person interviews for 'finalist' startups as they've stated it works better than video for their needs and this goes for many other companies, individuals, agencies, governments etc.
People are like 'yeah, I drink free trade coffee, I recycle, I ride share to save the environment' then you pull up their dating profile and/or social media accounts and here they are in one photo with penguins, three photos later they are in a jungle with an elephant, 2 photos later they're on a ski slope with a caption "3rd country this year, 17 total!"...
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The problem is, people aren't going to care until it is already too late (which is in the next 5-10 years if we don't drastically change). When multiple seasons of crop failures drive up food prices, when heat waves kill millions, when droughts and water shortages start affecting millions, when flooding seriously hurts crops...
Wait, Australia was about 20% light on grains last year. Most of the midwest has had insane rains this year which is directly impacting crop planting. Cities in India are literally running out of water. Heat waves in France are threatening to shut down a nuclear reactor as cooling water runs out.
Oh.
It's already happening. Most people don't know and don't care.
I know and I care but short of looking at myself and my family and implementing better life style practices that we may or not be able to afford what do I do?
I vote and I know the biggest impact has to come from world governments but even voting seems like a small, hollow step that does nothing in the short run to help the situation.
There's a lot an individual can do to minimize their own impact (but sadly, unless we get a significant percentage of the population to change, it isn't going to matter much). Here are a few off the top of my head:
- Give up meat. If you don't want to give up meat, chicken = far less greenhouse gasses than beef per measure of meat (Beef requires "around 28 times more land than the other options, 11 times more water and resulted in 5 times more greenhouse gas emissions" https://www.iflscience.com/environment/new-study-says-beef-1... ).
- Try and buy local
- Try and buy with minimal packaging, buying bulk can help a lot with this. 50lb bag of rice instead of 1lb, 10lb bag of beans instead of 1lb, etc.
- Find fun things to do locally instead of deciding you just HAVE to fly to Antarctica to see the penguins because your buddy Greg and his girlfriend did.
- Turn off lights when you aren't in a room, unplug stuff with phantom loads when you aren't using it, when appliances die replace with energy efficient models
- Make fewer trips to the store, don't order something on Amazon every day or multiple times a day as it is going to increase the chances you'll be getting multiple packages from multiple delivers and try and limit yourself to once a week or better - never.
- Instead of going to see the 376th Avengers film in the cavernous air conditioned theater with Dolby THX Rumble Bumble Ultra Eardrum-rupture Super Sound TM, watch it at home. ("figure out the energy costs, let's reference a 2011 Slate article that compares the energy costs of watching a DVD at home versus going to the theater.6 The technology at commercial cinemas eats up lots more energy than your puny flat screen. The precise amount can vary by projection bulb and by how brightly the cinema chooses to screen the film. Usually, it falls between 3.1 and 10.5 kilowatts. A typical machine projecting at a medium brightness for the running time of Green Lantern would consume about 9.6 kWh." https://business.directenergy.com/blog/2018/february/how-muc... then of course factor in driving all of those speakers, the air conditioning/heating for that cavernous room etc)
- Waste less, "food loss at the retail and consumer levels, corresponded to approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010" https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs.
Well I won't respond to every item on your list but I do most of them or am close to being better in terms of how we as a family follow these guidelines. Some examples - I'm vegan, have been since before I worried about meat's impact on climate change. The rest of my family is not but they are pretty health conscious and eat less meat than the average I believe and do prefer chicken over red meat generally.
I am obsessive about turning off things we aren't using, more for the money saved but I recently keep harping on everyone about how it helps the planet too (a little). I could be a lot better at what you called "stuff with phantom loads" though!
I do try to buy bulk, we do a lot of shopping at Costco and this also helps keep the number of round trips down.
As for having fun, lucky for the planet I can't really afford plane trips or even long car rides for vacations so we mostly do stay-cations... :-)
Last one I'll address is the movie bit; again, lucky for the planet, I've come to loathe the theater experience as I get older and prefer waiting until I can watch at home. Even my younger children have come to see this is as a good thing as it means family time and, usually, some snacks.
Anyway, thanks for the response. It helps knowing that my efforts to follow these basic rules is something others think about too. Sadly I agree that we are too few at the moment to make much difference.
I think his main point was that even those who claim to know and have more than the resources and the knowledge necessary to enact change (even just at an individual scale) still have problematic behaviours. Behaviours in a day more impactful than what someone earning a dollar a day can make in a year.
Exactly. Besides, the people living in poverty are largely living as carbon neutral lives as possible (with the exception of using fossil fuels or wood for cooking and heating) by necessity as they can't afford cars/travel/air conditioning/beef/etc.
Want to make a difference on climate change as a technologist?
Feel free to join these communities actively looking for support and with ongoing projects (that are alive):
12 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 41.6 ms ] threadBecause fixing it would be the greatest engineering project mankind has ever attempted.
Y Combinator even admits that it is a daunting task via their http://carbon.ycombinator.com/
If we look at the desert flooding idea http://carbon.ycombinator.com/desert-flooding/
>Moving vast quantities of water - 9 trillion m3 per year - is the main energy requirement of the project. Desalination, at this scale and its current rate of energy efficiency, would itself require 10.8 tw of additional solar capacity, compared to 6.4 tw of total global power capacity in 2016. While this energy requirement dwarfs the energy of constructing and maintaining the system of reservoirs, the millions of drones necessary to do this will add significant additional energy requirements.
Comparison for the water - an Olympic size pool is 2,500 m3. That's 3.6 billion Olympic size pools, annually, for that proposed solution to the problem and would require more energy than we current produce just to pump the water and handle the necessary desalination.
And like I told Sam last summer when disagreeing about this as even a remotely plausible idea - this solution is almost certainly going to cause drastic global weather pattern changes and it is worth noting the Sahara actually fertilizes the rain forests of South America so this project could have potentially devastating consequences on its own.
This is arguably the simplest solution that we currently have on paper and likely the 'easiest' to do. However simply producing the materials needed would add a staggering amount of CO2, the concrete you'd need to pour for the thousands of power plants to power it would, you'd have to do something with all of the brine from the desalination process and dumping it back into the ocean would absolutely destroy any local habitats, you're going to change weather patterns and likely start dumping a lot more rain somewhere, you're going to stop fertilizing the rain forests of South America, and you're going to have to do something with the insane amount of algae you are growing to actually sequester the carbon (plus you'll have to be introducing enough minerals into the water to allow the algae to grow, something that would require massive strip mining).
Unless a fleet of alien trade ships show up in orbit soon and go "hey we have these machines, they'll process the carbon out of the air and make solid carbon cubes, don't worry they have power cells that will last centuries. But, in exchange, we'd like extrasolar rights to your greatest sitcoms and 3/4 of the carbon cubes" then, we probably aren't going to fix the problem.
To even retard the problem, we need to immediately stop using all fossil fuels. Instead China is still getting 70%~ of its power from coal, is still building hundreds of coal power plants, is putting millions of new drivers on the roads each year and is building an insane number of new roads and bridges that are using insane amounts of concrete and asphalt. Not to mention all of the other countries. It's just not realistic to cease all greenhouse gas emissions short of perhaps a CME forcing us to by frying most of the world's electronics.
It is a gloomy situation and it is going to likely require tens of revolutionary inventions in the very near future if we want to get back to even how it was 10 years ago.
The world has billions of people that don't know the first thing about climate change or the dangers of global warming. There are billions of people that simply do not know how much greenhouse gasses are produced as a byproduct of their daily choices in life, or what the consequences are.
Even talking to some incredibly wealthy people that want to try and solve this, you quickly realize they just do not understand.
Take YC, YC came out with the page I linked in my previous comment last year yet they continue to fly founders out for in-person 10-minute interviews when they could do it via skype. One round-trip flight from New York to Europe or to San Francisco creates a warming effect equivalent to 2 or 3 tons of carbon dioxide per person, a 10-minute skype chat would be insanely less as 1GB of data transfer is roughly 1kg of CO2. YC knows carbon is an issue but then prefers in-person interviews for 'finalist' startups as they've stated it works better than video for their needs and this goes for many other companies, individuals, agencies, governments etc.
People are like 'yeah, I drink free trade coffee, I recycle, I ride share to save the environment' then you pull up their dating profile and/or social media accounts and here they are in one photo with penguins, three photos later they are in a jungle with an elephant, 2 photos later they're on a ski slope with a caption "3rd country this year, 17 total!"...
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The problem is, people aren't going to care until it is already too late (which is in the next 5-10 years if we don't drastically change). When multiple seasons of crop failures drive up food prices, when heat waves kill millions, when droughts and water shortages start affecting millions, when flooding seriously hurts crops...
Wait, Australia was about 20% light on grains last year. Most of the midwest has had insane rains this year which is directly impacting crop planting. Cities in India are literally running out of water. Heat waves in France are threatening to shut down a nuclear reactor as cooling water runs out.
Oh.
It's already happening. Most people don't know and don't care.
:/
I vote and I know the biggest impact has to come from world governments but even voting seems like a small, hollow step that does nothing in the short run to help the situation.
What else can one person do to make a difference?
- Give up meat. If you don't want to give up meat, chicken = far less greenhouse gasses than beef per measure of meat (Beef requires "around 28 times more land than the other options, 11 times more water and resulted in 5 times more greenhouse gas emissions" https://www.iflscience.com/environment/new-study-says-beef-1... ).
- Try and buy local
- Try and buy with minimal packaging, buying bulk can help a lot with this. 50lb bag of rice instead of 1lb, 10lb bag of beans instead of 1lb, etc.
- Find fun things to do locally instead of deciding you just HAVE to fly to Antarctica to see the penguins because your buddy Greg and his girlfriend did.
- Turn off lights when you aren't in a room, unplug stuff with phantom loads when you aren't using it, when appliances die replace with energy efficient models
- Make fewer trips to the store, don't order something on Amazon every day or multiple times a day as it is going to increase the chances you'll be getting multiple packages from multiple delivers and try and limit yourself to once a week or better - never.
- Instead of going to see the 376th Avengers film in the cavernous air conditioned theater with Dolby THX Rumble Bumble Ultra Eardrum-rupture Super Sound TM, watch it at home. ("figure out the energy costs, let's reference a 2011 Slate article that compares the energy costs of watching a DVD at home versus going to the theater.6 The technology at commercial cinemas eats up lots more energy than your puny flat screen. The precise amount can vary by projection bulb and by how brightly the cinema chooses to screen the film. Usually, it falls between 3.1 and 10.5 kilowatts. A typical machine projecting at a medium brightness for the running time of Green Lantern would consume about 9.6 kWh." https://business.directenergy.com/blog/2018/february/how-muc... then of course factor in driving all of those speakers, the air conditioning/heating for that cavernous room etc)
- Waste less, "food loss at the retail and consumer levels, corresponded to approximately 133 billion pounds and $161 billion worth of food in 2010" https://www.usda.gov/foodwaste/faqs.
I am obsessive about turning off things we aren't using, more for the money saved but I recently keep harping on everyone about how it helps the planet too (a little). I could be a lot better at what you called "stuff with phantom loads" though!
I do try to buy bulk, we do a lot of shopping at Costco and this also helps keep the number of round trips down.
As for having fun, lucky for the planet I can't really afford plane trips or even long car rides for vacations so we mostly do stay-cations... :-)
Last one I'll address is the movie bit; again, lucky for the planet, I've come to loathe the theater experience as I get older and prefer waiting until I can watch at home. Even my younger children have come to see this is as a good thing as it means family time and, usually, some snacks.
Anyway, thanks for the response. It helps knowing that my efforts to follow these basic rules is something others think about too. Sadly I agree that we are too few at the moment to make much difference.
- https://climateaction.tech/
- https://techimpactmakers.com/
- https://www.tmrow.com/