Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

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Regarding Carbon Removal Technologies, the RFS states

> Other approaches to geoengineering to counteract the effects of climate change could have potential as well.

What safeguards does YC have in place to help a company do this without starting unintended consequences and maybe accidentally making the problem worse? A large body of evidence suggests that humans and businesses, overall, do not get a good grasp on how their actions will cascade 20-30-100 years into the future.

Does YC have a plan or opinion at least on how to reduce the likelihood of your startups wreaking uncertain havoc on the other side of the world while engaging in geoengineering?

Edit: I'm not allowed to reply on HN any more I guess, but here is my response to the comment below.

My comment was specifically not about carbon removal, but the "Other approaches to geoengineering to counteract the effects of climate change could have potential as well", specifically not talking about carbon removal.

There is a really great article from New Yorker last year that I'd recommend: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dio...

Carbon removal technologies are not going to bring us another ice-age. We need to remove hundreds of billions of tons of Carbon from the atmosphere in order to avoid catastrophic global warming. That is the major risk today and it's very apparent. Problem is that carbon removal technologies aren't good enough or cheap enough to do that.

> We need to remove hundreds of billions of tons of Carbon from the atmosphere in order to avoid catastrophic global warming.

Only if you believe the predictions of the models used by the IPCC, which have already been falsified by the data. CO2 has been rising according to the most pessimistic "business as usual" model scenario, but actual warming has been less than that predicted by the most optimistic "massive reductions in CO2 have already happened" scenario. This is the huge elephant in the room that is never mentioned by climate change alarmists.

There is massive consensus around IPCC's conclusions within the scientific community. The topic of the discussion here is not if climate change is real or not. You should find another site to discuss that.

> There is massive consensus around IPCC's conclusions within the scientific community.

So what? Science doesn't work by consensus, it works by making predictions that match reality. If the predictions don't match reality, all the consensus in the world doesn't make good science.

> The topic of the discussion here is not if climate change is real or not.

I'll leave that to the moderators to decide. One of the items in the RFS was asking for research on taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. It seems appropriate to ask whether doing that is really worth spending time and energy on when we have so many other pressing issues that need attention.

Something most people don't realize is that creating something like a solar panel adds carbon to the atmosphere.

Manufacturing a solar panel does have carbon impact, but the amount of that impact, relative to the total amount of energy it produces over its lifetime, is an order of magnitude smaller than that of coal, and several times smaller than even natural gas.

Ref.: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/post/postpn268.pdf

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