More seriously I'll refrain from judgment until I've read it all. But it's interesting thus far.
Instead of making adding biochar to farm land an agricultural subsidy. A simple, extremely low risk policy, that is a local subsidy and does create international trade conflicts like other subsidies can.
And it does not affect any wilderness.
And in hot humid climates is proven to increase fertility.
Or a bit risky we could fertilize the open ocean, very significantly increase ocean life. And it has been proven that a significant percentage of fish poop sequesters carbon in the deep ocean.
Instead efforts seem to be focused on shading the sun. And new ideas using nukes....
Puro methodology: https://biochar.groups.io/g/main/attachment/32853/2/Puro.ear...
The nice thing is biochar is relatively inert. It just sits there in soil, holding onto water, making space for organisms to grow, but isn't "food", so it doesn't get eaten up and turned back into carbon dioxide. So it's a win for farmers and carbon removal.
Yeah, it's 'simple' until confronted with the sheer scale of it
Iron fertilization, shading the sun, and more nukey-stuff, all worth exploring at this point.
IMO, this idea is very poorly thought out.
edit: It doesn't even make much sense. It asserts, without any engineering rationale, that a large fusion bomb will efficiently pulverize 4 trillions tons of basaltic rock—the volume of a sphere of basalt 20 km (!!) in diameter—into a fine silt.
So many strange assumptions going into that.
They were also planning to use nukes for that. Thankfully it never happened
The deepest mine (a gold mine in South Africa) reaches a depth of 4 kilometers.
The only other way is to curb the carbon emission by stopping the burning of hydrocarbons.
It’s always been the solution, and will always be
But then you’re still relying on the world at large connecting the cause and effect correctly.
Except the highest producing people are the ones who will lose food security the last
Of course it doesn't work as the only fix, and there is the danger that it could be used as an excuse to slow down necessary changes. But the situation we currently find ourselves in is one that moves in the right direction (per-capita CO2 emissions peaked in the late 80s in the EU-27 and the 00s in the US, and many lower-emission solutions now have better economics than their established counterparts) but inertia an an ill-timed increase in the standard of living of China and India mean we are not moving nearly fast enough. More time is one of the most valuable things we can get in this situation
1) Universal basic income funded by taxes at the point of extraction or emission. See: Alaska (Permanent Fund)
2) Use the taxes to pay down the debt, give UBI since you’ll have to print money anyway.
3) Also raise taxes on non biodegradeable plastics and forever chemicals.
UBI can shift the Overton window from people protesting raising taxes on fossil fuels (eg Yellow Vest protests) to actually embracing them.
Rather than telling individuals they cant have a bag or a straw, the government should put the pressure on bottling companies and clothing companies which continue to use plastics and PFAS everywhere… “recycling” is just another scam to keep individuals distracted. It turns out they were just shipping it all to China for decades.
Second adding CO2 will stop. Fossil fuels are finite and will stop this century. All regulation can hope to do is stop it a bit faster. A few decades at best. Which just doesn't matter. Plus oil producing countries, the only ones that have any hope of doing this will never cooperate.
Even nuclear winter will pause global warming, but it won't work to prevent it's consequences, because of water. So will any other mechanism that lowers temperatures.
I'm not saying there aren't other advantages to ecological policy, but stopping global warming just isn't one of them.
Global warming cannot be stopped by regulation. It cannot be stopped by humans at all. That's what the IPCC models say. We need to adapt to it. That means moving billions of people, frankly, out of the way. At an extremely high level what needs to happen is that billions of people need to be moved a LOT closer to a coastline.
Everyone needs water. Directly, and for food production. The most populous regions in the world run on meltwater. The Indus Valley. Pakistan. Bangladesh. Indonesia. California. Central China. There are thousands such locations as well, by the way, just smaller. Meltwater that only comes if not only the planet is hot, but is hotter this year than last. If not, ZERO meltwater comes. Not a little bit. Zero. If you stop global warming 2 billion people need to be relocated.
To make matters worse, one of the "points of no return" which is coming global warming will switch from pumping water INTO the atmosphere to pumping water OUT of the atmosphere. This will turn the "inside" (any location sufficiently far from a coast) of countries like India, Africa and China back into the deserts they were 500 years ago. Except, it will do so rapidly. We don't know, of course, but certainly less than 100 years. Potentially much less.
If you calculate energy required, you will conclude that lifting water is a nonstarter. With current energy generation we cannot bring water to these locations. Never mind that most don't even have railway connections, never mind electrical power to the trains. We cannot realistically use desalinated water at elevations above maybe 300 meters. It's just not happening.
To make matters worse, both things are tipping-points. There is very, very little change while you get closer to the tipping point, then all the builtup change happens VERY suddenly. And this will happen twice, a two-punch situation, maybe a decade or two apart. First meltwater will stop, entirely, in one or two years, and it will not come back for tens of thousands of years and then a decade or so later rains will stop.
Walkable cities and isolated buildings do exactly nothing to stop any of this.
For the sake of the calculation: $10^10 for 10^12 tons is an implied cost of one cent per ton. So three orders of magnitude cheaperish than current approaches around $100 per ton.
The long term value of this paper may twofold - 1. to spark other ideas. This illustrates that carbon removal might be able to be done for orders of magnitude cheaper, even if just on the back of a napkin (most napkins today point to $100/ton). 2. to demonstrate the scale and seriousness of the carbon removal issue. yes, we need to do this, and yes, maybe there are better/safer ways.
For folks pointing out "we need to decarbonize": yes, we do. However, carbon removal is also needed at this point alongside decarbonization. We have to reduce emissions and clean out what's already in the air. Without decarbonization and carbon removal together, there's no pathway to stay below 2˚C of warming. (and given that both decarbonization and removal aren't growing quickly enough, we also need to cool the planet too, which is another whole topic)
also: http://airminers.com/connect - we have a Slack channel of 3,000 people focused about removal solutions. come join!
At gigaton scales, thermonuclear devices become easier to build in a sense, because the assembly has more time to react as it expands. More stages are needed to compress that very large final stage, though.
The argument reminds me of Freeman Dyson's H bomb propelled interstellar concept, which exploited the fact that per unit of energy output, deuterium was (at the time of publication, in 1968) thousands of times cheaper than fossil fuels.
schobi•6mo ago
There is no silver bullet - you can't just build a 10bn$ nuclear bomb programm and call it a day. All the other means are still needed to transition away from fossil fuel.
The earlier we start the better.
fredski42•6mo ago
tito•6mo ago
burnt-resistor•6mo ago