I am more of a fan of solar geoengineering, particularly building a chemical factory on a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid, blowing big plastic sheets, coating them with metal or carbon, then sailing them to Earth-Moon L1.
That project might have $800B left over if you gave me $1T to start. Big questions are: do you send humans (maybe 50 of them) or do you make the system autonomous enough that a 20 minute time lag to communicate with the factory factory doesn't slow down development?
The proposed solution is buying us time for other measures. It does not solve carbon emissions or prevent accumulation in the atmosphere or oceans. It might be a bit too complex for a stopgap measure though.
Marine cloud brightening has the same issues minus the complexity. It might be easier to pull off.
The reason I asked is because the post asked about carbon sequestration, which would likely include preventing or reversing ocean acidification. Since the commenter was not addressing this part, I wanted to find out whether they had a solution for that - thus providing a complete substitute. It sounds like that's a no.
I was thinking about doing a kickstarter to rent a boat and spread iron sulfate somewhere in the ocean. This causes a phytoplankton boom that captures some carbon.
This is against the UN law of the sea but the United States is not a party to that treaty. You might have trouble if you tried to dock your boat at any countries that are not in red on this map
It is a little harder to do right than it sounds. The first time it was attempted there was a current that sucked the iron down into deeper ocean layers where it wasn't effective. You need a whole flotilla to do oceanographic observations to know that the iron is dispersed properly and that it really works.
For the record I talked with an expert in the field (somebody who goes to those IPCC meetings) and was told NOT to do it. One argument against it is that if you promote production in one place by adding nutrients you are subtracting other nutrients and there will be less production in the future. Another is that you could create blooms of harmful organisms.
The "standard" method of disposing of CO2 now is to purify it, compress it to 1500 psi and inject it into a saline aquifer or an old oil reservoir.
You could get that CO2 from pyrolysis or combustion of fossil fuels or from biofuels. That last option is
which is a mature technology on paper but for many reasons it is not being done on any scale. The best case for it now is to capture the pure CO2 which is produced from fermentation at an alcohol plant.
Whether you use fossil fuels or biofuels you have the problem that the CO2 has to be very pure to handle in the pipeline, specifically the 78% nitrogen composition of the atmosphere is problematic and you need to either separate the CO2 from the flue gases with
targets ocean acidification more directly but it's the #2 example of a scheme I don't want to pay for because there is no way to measure it. (#1 is planting trees... trees might have grown there anyway, you might cut them down, they might burn up, etc.)
Didn't someone start a big competition about this recently? Musk maybe.
The biggest issue is scale. I think it would require multiple approaches to scale efficiently. And really source reduction will need to be a big part to make this effective too.
I would starve the very construct of sequestration to start with. It's appeasement. It's “The garbage will keep coming, so let's build more landfills” pragmatism. That won't work with greenyhaasgas. We don't need sequestration, we need stoppage.
Capitalismus. What is this stop you speak of so amorously?
But if you have 1T to throw around, simple: Buy every top polluter and then shut them down. Buy their customers too, because they'll be the first to bitch loudest. Government obstruction could be non-trivial. Buy them too. Fuck it. Increase to $10 T and just buy everyone and shut it all down. If that doesn't work, nuke 'em. See why promotions defy me? (j/k)
Congratulations, you just created 1T market for starting polluting companies :-). Assassinations is where its at. Cheap and effective. You go CEO, second CEO and then board of directors. Company collapses within a month.
On TED talks, Allan Savory promotes intensive rotational grazing as a proven means of reversing desertification. He observes that grass and herbivores and predators co-evolved. If you remove the predators, the herbivores thrive until the grass is gone. He shows a photo of adjacent parcels of land. One photo is of bare ground, dry stream bed, and leafless trees; The other photo is of running water, tall grass, brush and trees. The difference between parcels is attributed to managing grazing as if the predators were still there.
A third of Earth's land is desert. Alfalfa produces roughly ten tons per acre or 6400 tons per square mile. There are about 65 million square miles of desert. If 20 million square miles could be "greened" that would represent 128 billion tons of carbon per year removed from the atmosphere. Side effects would be healthier animals, higher quality food, and increased land area suitable for habitation.
In 2019 about 43 billion tons of CO2 were released into the atmosphere. Planting a third of the deserts to alfalfa would remove three times that annually.
Posit: We know how to cleanse the atmosphere.
Question: How do we make it happen?
Proposed: Revive the Homestead Act. Give people 160 acres of trash-land if they will make it grow. (A flaw in the original Homestead Act was the requirement that people live on their homestead. We should not require that, but I imagine people will want to settle on their homesteads once greened.)
Water is a necessary part of this plan.
Airwells are cold spots that condense water from air absent the conditions for rain or fog – if you’ve got dew spots on your windshield, you’ve got an airwell. Grass that condenses dew, is an air well. Basements that are moldy might be an airwell.
History and archaeology tell us that man-made airwells have been around for a long time. They come in many styles and have many names. Byzantine Rockpile, Crusader Siege Pond, Dew Pond, Ship Pond, Cloud Pond, Russell Dew Reservoir, Gravel Mulch, Herodotus’ Persian Palace Spring, WaterSeer…
I’m not interested in any version of an airwell that uses fuel. The ones I’ve named are all passive with the exception of the Siege Pond which benefits from a little muscle twice a day.
With $20k I’d build a Neolithic air well because I’m pretty confident it will work. With $200k I’d build them all to compare how well they work. Give me $2M and I’d build of each style in every state, because we need to know how each style performs in different environments.
Given water and free land as an economic incentive to grow grass, we can cleanse the atmosphere.
I am confident I can make a Neolithic Dew Pond the old way, with grass and clay and rocks. Would it work the same if built of foam-board and concrete? To be determined.
We know that low mass air wells work because we can see them work and we can buy the book “Dew Harvest.” Low mass devices do work but their production is not agriculturally and economically significant; Production is about five liters per day and seasonal.
According to the literature an eight hundred square-food Neolithic Dew Pond produces 660 gallons per day. That is a little less than three-quarters of an acre-foot per year.
Three-quarter acre-foot of water is agriculturally significant.
Economic significance depends on capital cost and productivity in diverse climates. Give me the $2M and I’ll find out if they can be made economically significant.
PS: States and companies which have bet on “scarce water” would be hurt by a thriving airwell industry.
PSS: If airwells become as common as they once were, manufacturers of home water-purification equipment will prosper.
17 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 44.9 ms ] threadThat project might have $800B left over if you gave me $1T to start. Big questions are: do you send humans (maybe 50 of them) or do you make the system autonomous enough that a 20 minute time lag to communicate with the factory factory doesn't slow down development?
Marine cloud brightening has the same issues minus the complexity. It might be easier to pull off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marine_cloud_brightening
This is against the UN law of the sea but the United States is not a party to that treaty. You might have trouble if you tried to dock your boat at any countries that are not in red on this map
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Nations_Convention_on_t...
It is a little harder to do right than it sounds. The first time it was attempted there was a current that sucked the iron down into deeper ocean layers where it wasn't effective. You need a whole flotilla to do oceanographic observations to know that the iron is dispersed properly and that it really works.
For the record I talked with an expert in the field (somebody who goes to those IPCC meetings) and was told NOT to do it. One argument against it is that if you promote production in one place by adding nutrients you are subtracting other nutrients and there will be less production in the future. Another is that you could create blooms of harmful organisms.
The "standard" method of disposing of CO2 now is to purify it, compress it to 1500 psi and inject it into a saline aquifer or an old oil reservoir.
You could get that CO2 from pyrolysis or combustion of fossil fuels or from biofuels. That last option is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergy_with_carbon_capture_...
which is a mature technology on paper but for many reasons it is not being done on any scale. The best case for it now is to capture the pure CO2 which is produced from fermentation at an alcohol plant.
Whether you use fossil fuels or biofuels you have the problem that the CO2 has to be very pure to handle in the pipeline, specifically the 78% nitrogen composition of the atmosphere is problematic and you need to either separate the CO2 from the flue gases with
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amine_gas_treating
or you can separate the N2 from the O2 before combustion.
That kind of scheme is worth paying for in my opinion because you can measure the CO2 as it goes in the ground.
This kind of thing
https://www.fastcompany.com/90510254/ever-been-to-a-green-sa...
targets ocean acidification more directly but it's the #2 example of a scheme I don't want to pay for because there is no way to measure it. (#1 is planting trees... trees might have grown there anyway, you might cut them down, they might burn up, etc.)
The biggest issue is scale. I think it would require multiple approaches to scale efficiently. And really source reduction will need to be a big part to make this effective too.
Capitalismus. What is this stop you speak of so amorously?
But if you have 1T to throw around, simple: Buy every top polluter and then shut them down. Buy their customers too, because they'll be the first to bitch loudest. Government obstruction could be non-trivial. Buy them too. Fuck it. Increase to $10 T and just buy everyone and shut it all down. If that doesn't work, nuke 'em. See why promotions defy me? (j/k)
A third of Earth's land is desert. Alfalfa produces roughly ten tons per acre or 6400 tons per square mile. There are about 65 million square miles of desert. If 20 million square miles could be "greened" that would represent 128 billion tons of carbon per year removed from the atmosphere. Side effects would be healthier animals, higher quality food, and increased land area suitable for habitation.
In 2019 about 43 billion tons of CO2 were released into the atmosphere. Planting a third of the deserts to alfalfa would remove three times that annually.
Posit: We know how to cleanse the atmosphere.
Question: How do we make it happen?
Proposed: Revive the Homestead Act. Give people 160 acres of trash-land if they will make it grow. (A flaw in the original Homestead Act was the requirement that people live on their homestead. We should not require that, but I imagine people will want to settle on their homesteads once greened.)
Water is a necessary part of this plan.
Airwells are cold spots that condense water from air absent the conditions for rain or fog – if you’ve got dew spots on your windshield, you’ve got an airwell. Grass that condenses dew, is an air well. Basements that are moldy might be an airwell.
History and archaeology tell us that man-made airwells have been around for a long time. They come in many styles and have many names. Byzantine Rockpile, Crusader Siege Pond, Dew Pond, Ship Pond, Cloud Pond, Russell Dew Reservoir, Gravel Mulch, Herodotus’ Persian Palace Spring, WaterSeer…
I’m not interested in any version of an airwell that uses fuel. The ones I’ve named are all passive with the exception of the Siege Pond which benefits from a little muscle twice a day.
With $20k I’d build a Neolithic air well because I’m pretty confident it will work. With $200k I’d build them all to compare how well they work. Give me $2M and I’d build of each style in every state, because we need to know how each style performs in different environments.
Given water and free land as an economic incentive to grow grass, we can cleanse the atmosphere.
I am confident I can make a Neolithic Dew Pond the old way, with grass and clay and rocks. Would it work the same if built of foam-board and concrete? To be determined.
We know that low mass air wells work because we can see them work and we can buy the book “Dew Harvest.” Low mass devices do work but their production is not agriculturally and economically significant; Production is about five liters per day and seasonal.
According to the literature an eight hundred square-food Neolithic Dew Pond produces 660 gallons per day. That is a little less than three-quarters of an acre-foot per year.
Three-quarter acre-foot of water is agriculturally significant.
Economic significance depends on capital cost and productivity in diverse climates. Give me the $2M and I’ll find out if they can be made economically significant.
PS: States and companies which have bet on “scarce water” would be hurt by a thriving airwell industry.
PSS: If airwells become as common as they once were, manufacturers of home water-purification equipment will prosper.
I wouldn’t expect serious answers.
I would look at the biggest problem and tackle it first.