[HN Gopher] An extreme ice-age climate 700M years ago
___________________________________________________________________
An extreme ice-age climate 700M years ago
Author : belter
Score : 79 points
Date : 2024-02-09 14:54 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (astrobiology.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (astrobiology.com)
| dangrossman wrote:
| (Of course) there's a startup trying to commercialize this
| process. Lithos pays farmers to spread crushed volcanic rock on
| their farm fields to absorb atmospheric CO2, and then sells
| carbon capture credits to companies like Stripe, Alphabet,
| Shopify and Meta.
|
| https://www.lithoscarbon.com/
| lumost wrote:
| In my semi-informed opinion, this approach is the most likely
| to yield substantial CO2 reductions in the first half of the
| century. While industry is greening, the process is slow on the
| timescales required to arrest climate change. Industrial
| acceleration of existing carbon capture processes seem much
| more likely to yield results, in the latter portion of the
| century - carbon capture will still be useful to _lower_
| atmospheric CO2.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Electricity decarbonization is the single most impactful
| thing anyone can do right now. But a large margin.
|
| Transportation decarbonization is the second most impactful
| thing. And anything else comes far behind those two.
|
| That said, just because some action isn't on the top 2, it
| isn't reason to stop doing it. And besides, yes, we will need
| to reduce the atmospheric CO2 at the second half of the
| century, and this is probably what will yield results
| fastest. It's all the better if we just start right now.
| staplers wrote:
| Always refreshing to see someone with their facts straight.
| lumost wrote:
| Electricity decarbonization won't occur in the amount
| required prior to 2060. We're still building net-new coal
| plants, and existing coal plants will be allowed to
| continue operating. The baseline load/peak load problem of
| renewables has yet to be solved (but progress is being
| made).
|
| I can see a world where _globally_ the typical transit is a
| BEV for heavy equipment, transit, and _some_ shipping all
| charged by renewables sometime in 2070-2080. However the
| lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and power plants
| being built _today_ range from 20-50 years. We are unlikely
| to force early retirement of that infrastructure at a
| global scale within the next 20 years.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > We're still building net-new coal plants
|
| I wonder about that. Will they be subsidized? At the same
| time are also closing down functional coal plants because
| their operational cost can't be recouped now that they
| compete with renewables.
|
| (Yeah, in all likelihood, everybody involved is actively
| refusing to think and talk about that on the hopes that
| they will have left this job by then. And the people
| putting money there are probably trying to sell their
| shares away to another loser before it.)
|
| Any way you cut it, those new coal plants will only get
| operational at all if people decide to constantly burn
| some money in them.
|
| > However the lifetimes on gas cars, heavy equipment, and
| power plants being built today range from 20-50 years.
|
| Yes, and that means we can replace up to 5% of our
| transportation emissions by year without increasing our
| capital depreciation. That is in stark contrast to the
| norm in that you are supposed to do some net investment
| to adapt to any random change.
|
| If you decide (by regulation, morality, or whatever) to
| actually sink money on the change, you can get there much
| faster.
| vondur wrote:
| I'm thinking the Coal plants will be built in newly
| industrializing economies, as it's the cheapest way to
| provide constant cheap power. China is still building
| Coal Power plants and so is India. The US hasn't built
| one in a decade and is closing existing ones.
| bamboozled wrote:
| Renewables are cheaper than coal ?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's complicated. But Coal can not survive in a market
| where both renewables and natural gas exist. The same
| applies to nuclear.
|
| When they are producing energy, renewables are about an
| order of magnitude cheaper than coal (and falling).
| elbasti wrote:
| Unfortunately, you're both right.
|
| Decarbonization _is_ the best thing to do by a large
| margin, both in a cost-benefit sense and in a net impact
| sense. It 's stupid to burn coal to produce $X worth of
| electricity and then spend many multiples of $X just to
| remove a tiny fraction of the carbon.
|
| But you're also right that decarbonization won't occur in
| the amount required by 2060.
|
| Which, quite frankly and plainly, just means we're
| fucked. Not even going into positive feedback loops of
| natural methane emissions due to warming arctic and
| tropics.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yeah when Obama said we're the first generation to feel
| the effects and the last one able to do anything about
| it, he was right. One way or another we're locked in now.
|
| Of course there are still options to avoid the worst but
| they'd require such an immediate turnaround and
| international collaboration at a time when geopolitical
| polarization and tensions are ultra high. I just don't
| see it happening.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| We're about to enter a world where wind solar EV have the
| clear economic advantage over coal gas ice. Production is
| semi scaled. And yet it is slow as molasses.
|
| Yet the carbon capture people think a cost line item no
| advantage except regulatory requirement will scale out
| faster? Yeah, ok.
|
| Carbon capture and hydrogen cats, science and engineering
| aside,Val ways trace back to oil and gas media and
| lobbying. Its just fud at the policy level.
| gwright wrote:
| > We're about to enter a world where wind solar EV have
| the clear economic advantage over coal gas ice.
|
| I don't think this is true unless you assume some
| imminent improvement on grid scale power storage.
|
| News reports about how cheap wind and solar are with
| supporting data based on levelized cost of energy (LCOE)
| completely miss the fact that intermittent power sources
| are not substitutes for base load generation. To approach
| true substitution you have to include overbuilding the
| intermittent sources or spending money on very expensive
| storage systems (that may not even exist yet). In either
| case the cost goes up considerably.
|
| IMHO: * don't turn off nuclear plants
| * invest in more cost effective nuclear power *
| invest in more effective energy storage * invest
| in more effective solar/wind * don't pretend that
| energy infrastructure can be legislated into existence
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| * don't turn off nuclear plants
|
| --- I agree
|
| * invest in more cost effective nuclear power
|
| --- I could diatribe about this a long time, but
| basically I think solid fuel is a dead end in nuclear
| plant economics, but the entire industry is focused on
| solid fuel rod huge pressurized dome. I think truly
| effective nuclear will take a lot of government
| investment and novel thinking. Or materials breakthroughs
| that make LFTR/MSRs cheap.
|
| * invest in more effective energy storage
|
| -- EVs will take care of this, probably sulfur batteries
|
| * don't pretend that energy infrastructure can be
| legislated into existence
|
| -- it can be subsidized effectively though. See: china.
| adolph wrote:
| > just because some action isn't on the top 2, it isn't
| reason to stop doing it
|
| Since you don't quantify a cost-benefit of any action, how
| have you arrived to this effort ordinality?
|
| Given a ranking, would any efforts in combination have
| higher impact than a higher ranked effort alone?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, I meant it by cost.
|
| The marginal costs for those top 2 are quite public. For
| electricity it's negative, electric cars cost some 30%
| more than normal ones.
|
| They are reasonably easy to estimate for things like
| spreading carbon-capturing rocks around (or you can use
| the price of phosphate-rich rocks, it should be similar).
| It's not a very expensive thing to do, but way more
| expensive than those 2.
|
| Marginally, there isn't a lot of synergy between those
| different options. But if you push them to levels much
| higher than the ones we have now it becomes clear that
| decarbonizing electricity will become a bottleneck to
| almost everything.
| bluGill wrote:
| > just because some action isn't on the top 2, it isn't
| reason to stop doing it.
|
| This this isn't wrong, be careful. Many of those proposing
| action outside of the top two are really trying to distract
| you from fixing the real problem. Many things outside of
| the top two need a ton of research before we can fix them -
| by getting you to spend your time and effort on that
| research you don't do anything about the top 2 which we can
| solve today. Thus the entrenched interests (mostly big oil)
| are pushing you to look at things outside of the top two
| knowing you can't solve them today, and while you are
| looking there they can sell more [oil or whatever].
| jjk166 wrote:
| Conversely, hyper focusing on the top two can also be a
| distraction. There isn't a single pool of resources and
| labor that is being managed by a single entity. The
| people spreading rocks on fields are not the same people
| building solar panels or producing electric vehicles.
| Reducing funding spent on carbon capture does not
| inherently increase the funding for renewables.
| Researching cleaner concrete manufacturing does not
| inherently decelerate coal plant phase out. While
| reducing CO2 emmissions from the two biggest sources
| would be a huge win, people have been trying to achieve
| that for decades, and even in the most optimistic
| scenario it's a battle that will continue for another few
| decades. In the meantime there is a lot of other stuff
| that can be worked on in parallel. Waiting around for a
| silver bullet to solve everything is a great way to get
| nothing done, and so those who want nothing to get done
| point out the limitations of various proposals without
| putting forward options that put those specific resources
| to better use. Further, when you tell people that
| everything is insignificant compared to this one great
| challenge, and that challenge is something that people
| don't see much rapid progress on, it leads to defeatism -
| why should I buy an energy efficient heat pump when
| people on the other side of the world are currently
| building hundreds of coal plants? Again this is taken
| advantage of by malicious actors who turn that defeatism
| into resentment of even trying to make things better.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, not on this one case.
|
| Spreading CO2 capturing material is a very viable way to
| help. And we must research capture anyway, because we
| surely will need it.
|
| This kind of action is the carbon credit system working
| like it was supposed to work, and a really good example
| to use to turn it into a tax that gets negative to
| whoever is capturing.
|
| But I do agree, one has to always be careful not to fall
| for polluter's propaganda.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| I think your top two are somewhere in the top three.
|
| We also need to get to a place, culturally, where we can
| have calm rational conversations about how many people we
| can reasonably ask this planet to support. At middling
| timescales, fewer people is better than greener tech. Some
| will see that as opting out of progress but there's really
| a lot of opportunity to offset it by doing a better job of
| investing in the people we already have.
| proee wrote:
| Why is this being downvoted? What is the argument for
| unregulated populations?
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| It's hard to get elected on a "tell people they're not
| allowed to have kids" platform.
|
| I think there are less heavy handed ways to get us from a
| place where it's assumed that you'll have kids to a place
| where it's respected but not encouraged, but when people
| hear you talking about population growth as a problem to
| be solved, they immediately assume that you're about to
| propose something awful.
| bamboozled wrote:
| It's more likely hard to get get elected by impacting
| the. Economic growth story? People already having less
| kids.
| Borg3 wrote:
| Thats right. Unfortunately, most people have they mindset
| fixed on never ending growth. We need more people, more
| cars, more everything. Yet, those people seems to barelly
| understand basic math and physics. Numbers do NOT lie.
| All that cool stuff that happened post WWII was because
| if cheap energy, very cheap. But its going to end. You
| can either have 10B ppl living in poor conditions or 200M
| people living in good conditions.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > We also need to get to a place, culturally, where we
| can have calm rational conversations about how many
| people we can reasonably ask this planet to support.
|
| I disagree, that's a dangerous trap. Oh, sure, it seems
| reasonable and sagacious at first glance, but that's what
| makes the eventual misdirection/procrastination so
| insidious! _Long-term planning is not automatically wise
| planning._
|
| ________
|
| To illustrate, imagine that:
|
| 1. There's a local park with houses around it.
|
| 2. Some people periodically dump their trash in it.
|
| 3. The trash-piles are getting kind of big and stinky
| now.
|
| 4. A well-meaning neighbor says: "What we _really_ need
| is to get a place, as a community, where we can have calm
| rational conversations bout _how many_ people can live
| near this park. "
|
| 5. (Bonus) Many of the biggest trash dumpers agree:
| "Exactly, _literally everybody here_ is to blame, and
| especially people moving in and /or having too many kids!
| The only way forward is a very thorough and lengthy
| symposium with multiple committees to develop
| recommendations to stop that kind of thing."
|
| ________
|
| In that analogy, it's easier to see that your neighbor's
| proposal is--er--less than practical, because (A) the
| immediate problem isn't actually _total_ visitor
| count,(B) we 'll never reach full consensus, and (C) any
| consensus number would still meaninglessly unenforceable.
|
| So it can't really help, but it can harm by creating
| unnecessary discord and will prevent/delay practical
| changes like "Anything you bring must be taken back out",
| or "Littering: $X fine."
| marcosdumay wrote:
| It's punishing the innocent on behalf of the guilty. For
| some reason people really like to do that, in lots and
| lots of contexts.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| I'm not so convinced about the efficacy of transportation
| decarbonization, at least at the personal EV cars level. It
| kind of feels the same as when governments in California
| harp on personal water use and restaurants giving you a
| glass of water with your meal when the largest consumer of
| water use by a large margin is industry and farming.
|
| Looking at [1], COVID when probably the most number of
| people stopped driving and individual energy needs
| plummeted, our CO2 emissions and fossil fuel energy use
| dipped marginally. I think the reason is that shipping,
| airline, and commercial transportation (ie trucks) consume
| the most and those aren't getting off fossil fuels any time
| soon. [2] indicates that cars and buses together contribute
| ~7% to global emissions. Aviation and shipping individually
| are bigger CO2 emitters than the total amount used by
| personal vehicles.
|
| Also these reports are hilarious (is that the right word?)
| to read. They use phase out to mean "no co2 emissions from
| this sector" while politicians say phase out to mean "no
| new sales/construction of co2 emitters in this sector".
| Completely phasing it out will take much much longer.
|
| It's good for us to do the work and cars are a meaningful
| contributor, but the biggest impact would actually be
| shipping + aviation + trucking. Unfortunately those are
| also the hardest problems and the ones EVs won't touch any
| time soon (maybe trucking but even then I think we're stuck
| with diesel for quite a while). Shipping probably needs
| nuclear power and aviation needs some kind of zero emission
| fuel (hydrogen probably won't cut it). Heck we haven't even
| removed lead from aviation fuel and that doesn't even
| require an engine change.
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
|
| [2] https://ourworldindata.org/co2-emissions-from-transport
| mnw21cam wrote:
| > ...restaurants giving you a glass of water with your
| meal...
|
| Seriously?
|
| The average person in the westernised world probably uses
| something between 100 to 400 litres of water for washing
| and flushing per day, _personal use actually in their
| house_. And drinks around 2 litres in the same amount of
| time. External water use on behalf of that person for
| example for growing food and manufacturing things is even
| more. Having a glass of water wasted at a restaurant is a
| complete negligible non-issue. How ridiculous.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Well the generous argument is that the average person
| isn't eating out so much, but yeah welcome to Californian
| water culture. It's brain dead because of entrenched
| farming and industry interests.
|
| They also tell you to cut back on personal usage. But
| that amounts to 10% compared with agriculture's 40% (used
| to grow economic crops like alfalfa which we send to
| China, not food crops) and 50% is lost to the
| environment.
|
| > Initial water savings came mainly from more efficient
| indoor plumbing and fixtures; more recent efforts have
| also focused on reducing outdoor use, which accounts for
| nearly half of all urban use.
|
| https://www.ppic.org/publication/water-use-in-california/
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > It kind of feels the same as when governments in
| California harp on personal water use and restaurants
| giving you a glass of water with your meal when the
| largest consumer of water use by a large margin is
| industry and farming.
|
| Except that it isn't:
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/1185535/transport-
| carbon...
|
| > when probably the most number of people stopped driving
| and individual energy needs plummeted, our CO2 emissions
| and fossil fuel energy use dipped marginally.
|
| Because the reduction was a percent of half of less than
| a third of CO2 emissions. People stopped commuting to
| work but they still went to the store, or had more things
| delivered from the internet in a giant UPS truck.
|
| > I think the reason is that shipping, airline, and
| commercial transportation (ie trucks) consume the most
| and those aren't getting off fossil fuels any time soon.
|
| Why not? Trucks can do in the same way as cars. Rail is
| the _easiest_ to electrify -- a "diesel locomotive" is
| actually an electric locomotive with a diesel generator
| on it. Add a third rail or electric gantry and you don't
| need the generator, and put some batteries in the
| locomotive and you can get by partial coverage. Container
| ships are predominantly cargo by weight and have some
| significant leeway in terms of generation methods with a
| poor energy density -- or you can go the opposite way and
| use a nuclear reactor as you say.
|
| The hard one is aviation, but it's only ~2% of total CO2
| emissions and the worst case scenario is biofuels, which
| would be more expensive but is a known working technology
| in the absence of any lower cost alternative.
|
| The really hard one is heating in the winter, because
| it's a large proportion of CO2 emissions but is inversely
| aligned with solar generation and can't be significantly
| scaled back on a cold day to account for intermittent
| generation from wind. That's the thing where nuclear
| seems like the best option.
|
| But you don't have to solve the hard problems before
| adopting the known solutions to the easy problems.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Eh, not sure about those top two. Depends on the
| circumstances, but in many countries there's _huge_
| potential to reduce energy use via insulation improvement
| and that sort of thing.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Can it really be that simple? I'll remain skeptical until I
| see some numbers.
|
| But it would be cool if I could travel to a quarry and crush
| rocks for a while, and it would actually meaningfully help
| with the climate.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Carbon capture may be useful, even necessary, but the amounts
| needed to make any difference means that massive industrial
| processes are needed.
|
| As a species we emit 35 billion tons of CO2 _per year_. So I
| would think we 're talking capture in at least the hundreds
| of millions tons a year range.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| And also massive amounts of energy and materials required
| to build all the equipment to do it at that scale, and the
| land to place it.
|
| I don't see this being viable at a scale that matters until
| we've solved a lot of other problems first.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| The material already is somewhere. Why would it need to
| move?
| lumost wrote:
| Rocks are very dense. We are extremely good at mining and
| moving rocks. We produce 30 billion tons of concrete per
| year.
|
| Naively, you would expect that producing and distributing
| crushed rocks sufficient to capture carbon would be
| equivalent to at most 10x the concrete industry. In
| practice, it's likely closer to 1x.
| GeoAtreides wrote:
| > Rocks are very dense
|
| Slighty off-topic, but I'm curious: what do you think
| requires more energy to move, 35 billion tons of steel or
| 35 billion tons of feathers?[*]
|
| [*] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fC2oke5MFg
| lumost wrote:
| heh - I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it
| takes more vehicle volume to move 35 billion tons of
| feathers. As Vehicle volume is correlated to vehicle
| weight, moving feathers will be more expensive :P
|
| but in all seriousness, the correspondence to rocks is
| beneficial as it's not obvious just how much mass
| industry moves in 2023. If you add in waste rock at
| quarries the numbers rise precipitously. A single shovel
| bucket can move 20 tons.
| _Algernon_ wrote:
| My just as semi-informed opinion is just the opposite. All
| the evidence I have seen suggest that carbon credits amount
| to little more than greenwashing.
|
| There was a discussion just a couple of weeks ago here on HN
| about a project which gave more efficient cooking stoves and
| sold the estimated savings in terms of carbon as credits.
| Only problem was that it massively underestimated the actual
| carbon saved.
|
| A couple of years ago the Guardian did some investigating
| where forests which was under no threat of deforestation
| being sold as carbon credits _as if they had saved the entire
| forest from deforestation_.
|
| Probably in part confirmation bias, but also I don't think
| that a fix to a market that has externalities is to ductape
| it with a new market that has new externalities. That just
| provides _more_ loopholes for evasion.
|
| Estimating carbon emissions avoided by a project is a messy
| and subjective process in the best of cases. Even more so
| when large amounts of capital is at risk.
|
| Currently it looks like companies get the PR benefits of
| being "net emissions neutral" while the carbon credits they
| purchased to become so will be shown to be little more than
| fraud a couple of years later.
| rcxdude wrote:
| For sure not all carbon credits are created equal, and a
| lot (especially the cheaper ones) are bunk. For any project
| which claims to be carbon neutral through purchasing
| credits, you need to look at what those credits are
| actually doing and assess whether it is actually removing
| carbon from the atmosphere or not. Basically don't throw
| the baby out with the bathwater: most carbon credits are
| bunk, but don't assume that any given project is bunk just
| because they are selling carbon credits.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| Except that this makes the entire concept bunk, because
| what the company cares about is the ability to claim
| carbon neutrality in their PR, which they'll do by
| choosing the credits that are the cheapest, which will be
| the ones that are a fraud.
|
| The actual way to fix this is to price carbon. You don't
| get money for not burning down a forest, you pay money if
| you burn down a forest, or burn coal. Then you refund all
| of that money to the public so it isn't a net tax, it's
| just an incentive to not emit carbon, because only the
| people who emit carbon pay the tax but everybody gets the
| refund.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Something everyone seems to ignore is thermodynamics when it
| comes to recapture. Capturing co2 will require at least
| roughly the same amount of energy as we got releasing it. In
| practice quite a bit more. I don't care how cheap solar
| panels get, recapture is insanely expensive.
|
| There's a reason none of the carbon recapture companies talk
| about how much energy they use per ton of co2 captured.
|
| For a sense of scale, last year we emitted 40Gigatons of co2
| in the air. If I'm reading [1] correctly this corresponds to
| over 120k TWh of energy that we generated from just that co2.
| That's an insane amount of energy capacity we need to
| overbuild past net 0 (and it's cute when people think solar
| will get us there by 2050).
|
| And these numbers are still growing each year and at best we
| maybe have put a dent in the second order derivative but we
| haven't started the downward trend.
|
| And COVID showed how much of an impact a mass scale reduction
| in personal co2 caused when basically most people stopped
| driving - it was a blip in [1]. This shows us roughly the
| impact that EVs attached to renewables will have - most of
| the CO2 is from industry, shipping, airline transit,
| concrete, etc. Those things are decarbonizing very very
| slowly and it's not a "slow and then all at once" kind of
| thing. The only way to overbuild enough capacity is to build
| an insane amount of fission power plants, but I suspect we're
| rapidly crossing the point where even that would work since
| the ecological damage caused by global warming isn't going to
| be reversed (eg the ice caps won't reform, the extinct
| species won't come back, etc).
|
| [1] https://ourworldindata.org/fossil-fuels
|
| Edit: for those downvoting me, I would appreciate if you
| explained where I'm factually incorrect. Unless the downvote
| is just an emotional response to uncomfortable data, which I
| understand.
| jjk166 wrote:
| That would only be true if you were trying to change carbon
| back into energy dense hydrocarbons. Accelerated weathering
| exposes rock that reacts with CO2 without any external
| energy input. The reaction actually produces energy, though
| not enough to be used as a practical power source. You need
| to do work to expose the rock, but this can be orders of
| magnitude less than the energy released when the CO2 was
| produced.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| OK point taken, but that's actually a very small point
| when you run the numbers.
|
| Industrial scale direct air capture technology right is
| ~1200KWh per ton of CO2. And this energy cost is non
| linear - as we scale up, the lower CO2 concentration in
| the air will result in higher energy costs being needed
| to extract the remaining. I don't think exposing the rock
| will be cheaper or can even scale as a process but harder
| to say. But that energy used is largely waste - sure
| we'll maybe find a use for some of the co2 but then
| that's also not sequestration and will release some of
| the captured co2 back into the air.
|
| Using those numbers means we'd need to be spending 48TWh
| to capture the carbon we emit each year, which is almost
| half of our current global energy production. Those are
| massive numbers. Of course you could overbuild less and
| slowly extract the co2, but then climate change gets even
| more baked in.
| lumost wrote:
| The technology being discussed is not direct air capture.
| However even in the context of 1200 KWh/ ton, that works
| out to .04*1200 = $48 per ton. Wind generally runs 4
| cents per kwh rate, and there is limited need to
| distribute electricity to high intensity areas.
|
| In total, that means we could sequester all global CO2
| emissions for ~1.68 Trillion dollars per year - or 1.9%
| of global GDP. This is a small fraction of the estimated
| costs of economic disruption of climate change, why
| wouldn't we spend money on this?
| wiz21c wrote:
| website: "With 3 tons of basalt application you can capture up
| to 1 ton of CO2. Our software optimizes both for crop yield and
| carbon capture -- making your land as productive as possible
| while you earn revenue from carbon removal."
|
| Should I read: 1 CO2 ton effectively captured after discounting
| CO2 emitted for basalt extraction and dispersion ?
| dylan604 wrote:
| no, it sounds to me that it requires 3 tons of basalt to
| capture 1 ton of CO2. it does not read like it is making any
| claims beyond that. it reads to me as if you're putting words
| into it on your own.
| dj_gitmo wrote:
| I am also curious how much carbon is released to extract and
| spread that 3 tons. I'm guessing it's still a net carbon-
| negative, but that's still a lot of material to be moving
| around.
| renewiltord wrote:
| It's gross not net. The way they minimize is that they use
| basalt waste (so they don't dig for it, it's been dug for)
| and they deliver as local as they can so there's hopefully
| low transport costs. I don't know if moving basalt waste is
| something mines already do and if they specifically count
| that.
|
| I suppose one could argue that by reducing the cost of
| getting that waste away, they're effectively incentivizing
| mining. You'd need a more sophisticated model to see if this
| will work.
| barbazoo wrote:
| This probably makes more sense in a context where mining
| and transport was done carbon neutrally. Similar to how
| switching to an EV doesn't automatically lower your CO2
| bill if the electricity you use is dirty but it allows for
| decentralized improvements (i.e. renewable energy) that
| roll out without the individual having to do anything.
| mytailorisrich wrote:
| Only basalt absorption judging by the wording, and that
| sounds optimist (unsurprising for marketing material):
|
| " _One tonne of basalt captures 0.153-0.165 tonne CO2,
| depending on infiltration rate (400-1200 mm /a), reactive
| surface area (3.7-15 m2/g) and CO2 partial pressure
| (41.1-3000 Pa). When the infiltration rate is high (1200
| mm/a), the CO2 capture capacity of basalt is exhausted after
| 9.5-11.4 years._" [1]
|
| [1]
| https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12665-022-10320-0
| feoren wrote:
| Yikes, that is a terrible ratio. A single emission source is
| considered an "insignificant" CO2 emitter if it emits less
| than 100,000 metric tons of CO2 per year. People don't
| realize just how much CO2 is being emitted; it's staggering.
| This seems way worse than (albeit not an alternative to)
| planting a tree.
| jjk166 wrote:
| The issue is that trees release that CO2 back into the
| atmosphere when they eventually die and decompose. Only
| expanding the coverage of living forest actually captures
| carbon, and it's a one time thing. As a reference, an acre
| of forest in Maine stores about 400 tons of CO2, putting
| away about 8 tons per year until it reaches maturity. To
| expand forest coverage you're either taking land that was
| previously deforested for some reason (for example
| agriculture), in which case you're competing with that
| alternative land use, or you're planting trees in an area
| that never had forest, almost certainly because the
| location is not naturally conducive to forest, meaning you
| need to expend substantial resources to make it (possibly
| literally) take root. You can get more out of it by burying
| trees after they die such that they can't decompose, but
| this is a substantial labor investment.
|
| With weathering, the carbon is permanently locked away and
| as long as there is more rock to weather you can keep
| capturing more and more carbon. We already produce billions
| of tons of waste rock each year as a byproduct of mining.
| The bottleneck is entirely the extraction of desired
| resources from that rock. If we didn't care about that,
| it's really easy to just blow up massive quantities of rock
| to dramatically increase the exposed surface area.
| light_hue_1 wrote:
| No. There's no way that this is carbon negative.
|
| Lithos is almost certainly one of the many scam CO2 projects.
| barbazoo wrote:
| Thanks for sharing!!!
|
| This is all voluntary right? As far as I can tell [1] the US
| doesn't have a carbon pricing system so this is really
| dependent on companies being interested in the positive PR this
| leads to?
|
| [1] https://carbonpricingdashboard.worldbank.org/map_data
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Why put this on farmland? We need farmland to produce food. And
| it can be used for other plants too which capture CO2.
|
| Better put this absorbing rock in places we don't need for
| other stuff like deserts and salt lakes
| entropicdrifter wrote:
| It doesn't hurt the soil nor the crops and there are already
| people actively managing the soil composition of farmland.
| Logistically it's much easier to ship stuff to farms than the
| middle of nowhere because there are existing supply lines.
| ben_bai wrote:
| It is also a fertilizer, providing Carbon and Minerals to the
| farmland.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| Crushed basalt can be used as a substitute for mined
| fertilizer that would need to be applied anyway, notably
| potassium and phosphorus. It is one of the reasons volcanic
| soils tend to be fertile. The rock leaches significant
| quantities of mineral that are important for plant growth.
| bloopernova wrote:
| In case anyone else is like me and wanted to know more about
| silicate rock erosion absorbing CO2:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbonate%E2%80%93silicate_c...
| duxup wrote:
| A recent PBS documentary did a great job talking about all the
| changes the earth has gone through:
|
| https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/article/the-history-of-earth-i...
| dylan604 wrote:
| "We're sorry, but this video is no longer available."
|
| Why bother posting the link?
| Kerrick wrote:
| For me the "no longer available" message only flashes
| briefly, replaced with a login UI to log into a service
| called OPT Passport so I could (ostensibly) watch it.
| stagger87 wrote:
| Works for me.
| duxup wrote:
| Works for me but I'm in the US, member.
|
| Also handy to know if you might want to find it elsewhere.
| whycome wrote:
| Did it say "no longer" or just "not"?
| dylan604 wrote:
| It said "no longer". I use said now instead of says, as I
| just went back to the page, and now the videos all have
| posters saying it is available with their "passport"
| accounts. I have perused the PBS site before looking for
| older content and have been presented with the no longer
| available message in the past. Which always baffled me.
| Like, you're the producer of the content. Why is it not
| available to _you_ of all people?
| toni wrote:
| Here is an hour long video explaining every stage the earth
| has gone through:
|
| The Whole History of the Earth and Life -
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=SkeNMoDlHUU
|
| It's really mind boggling how many times earth has seen a
| mass extinction, followed by life appearing again.
| revscat wrote:
| As far as I can tell every mass extinction was caused by
| climate changes.
| dylan604 wrote:
| But learning if those climate changes can/could be
| prevented is valuable lessons. If an asteroid impacted
| caused the changes, preventing an asteroid strike is
| close to possible _now_. Super volcano eruption would be
| much less avoidable. Maybe in a few hundred years someone
| can look back to see if the mechanization of man made a
| preventable difference. It just might not be man that is
| doing the looking.
| Miraltar wrote:
| A good video about carbon and mass extinctions (more than 1h
| long) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxTO2w0fbB4
| lainga wrote:
| There is a positive feedback loop between ice cover and Earth's
| overall albedo. (i.e. more shiny white ice = more sunlight
| reflected = colder Earth = more shiny white ice...)
|
| Model climates seem to require a LOT of added greenhouse gases,
| before they tip back over into a "hothouse Earth" (don't be
| fooled! that means our Earth with glacial and interglacial
| periods), which happens in a very short time.
|
| https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.3269
| codexb wrote:
| There's also a positive feedback loop between ice cover and
| increasing atmospheric CO2, since an Earth covered in ice
| prevents a lot of the natural absorption of CO2, allowing the
| atmospheric CO2 to rise via volcanic outgassing.
|
| There's also a theory that a sudden decrease in solar radiation
| can trigger iceball earths --
| https://news.mit.edu/2020/sunlight-triggered-snowball-earths...
| carapace wrote:
| So now we know why Gaia evolved humans: geological regulation of
| CO2 levels wasn't cutting it. She got sick of 57 million years of
| ice and made multicellular lifeforms to grow a better regulator.
| zikduruqe wrote:
| > So now we know why Gaia evolved humans:
|
| She wanted plastics.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rld0KDcan_w
| photochemsyn wrote:
| There is a major legitimate scientific controversy that the
| article doesn't even get into, and it's about this claim:
|
| > "Dr Dutkiewicz said: "At this time, there were no multicellular
| animals or land plants on Earth. The greenhouse gas concentration
| of the atmosphere was almost entirely dictated by CO2 outgassing
| from volcanoes and by silicate rock weathering processes, which
| consume CO2.""
|
| This is really hard to be sure about - and the biosphere at the
| time was having steady major effects on the atmosphere, in
| particular atmospheric oxygenation via photosynthesis, which
| might have drawn down atmospheric methane - possibly the most
| important greenhouse gas at the time - leading to cooling (this
| is the biogenic origin theory of Snowball Earth). See:
|
| (2019) "Great Oxidation Event and Snowball Earth"
|
| https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2019asbi.book..261T/abstra...
|
| The subject is still open, with no highly convincing evidence for
| one cause or the other.
| adrian_b wrote:
| Yes, that claim is weird.
|
| While there were no multicellular animals and land plants,
| there were abundant green algae (Chlorophyta), red algae
| (Rhodophyta) and blue-green algae (Cyanobacteria), both
| unicellular and multicellular, all of which were producing
| dioxygen, while consuming carbon dioxide.
|
| Because there where abundant algae consuming carbon dioxide,
| but the unicellular eukaryotes and bacteria that could produce
| carbon dioxide might have been less abundant, this should have
| had an important contribution to the decrease of the CO2
| concentration.
|
| These 3 kinds of algae had already been abundant for several
| hundred millions of years, since more than a billion years ago.
|
| It is likely that the concentration of carbon dioxide had been
| decreasing for a long time and when there has been a time
| interval with diminished production of volcanic carbon dioxide,
| also accompanied with extra volcanic rocks able to combine with
| the existing carbon dioxide, all these have tipped the balance
| causing the glaciation, but the contribution of the excess
| algae has probably been greater than that of the CO2-absorbing
| volcanic rocks.
| jtwaleson wrote:
| I believe I understand how snowball earths can arise (more plants
| -> less greenhouse gasses -> colder climate). What I don't get is
| how snowball earths can get out of the cold spiral. Is it
| catastrophic meteoric events? Volcanoes adding more CO2 without
| any plants to consume it?
| Zamicol wrote:
| Yes volcanoes. "The Story of Earth" touches on it. Good book.
| matkoniecz wrote:
| I remember supervolcano eruptions being postulated as way to
| break cycle.
|
| (in addition to longterm heavy volcanism/impacts)
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