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Comment by godelski | Hacker News Reader

All I'm saying is that this technology is still in its infancy. It sounded to me like you suggest we defund them and use the money for other things. I disagree with this on a number of points. 1) We need sequestration to solve climate change. 2) technologies need money to develop and get off the ground. To go from demonstration to something really useful.

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We have the technology. It's called planting forests and then sinking then in the deep ocean. It works. Every other technology is much much much worse. Including this one.

Hi, do you have some source or paper on this approach? I don’t mean to dispute this but have never heard of it before and a quick query didn’t turn up any results, rather the opposite (decay processes happening on the sea floor, not sure whether / or in what amounts those release co2 again).

I don't have a source, just some napkin math. I don't know what the timescale is for plant decay in the deep ocean. Perhaps my 'it works' is optimistic.

Optimistic perhaps, but maybe not impossible ;)

I've done some further googling and found some studies on the topic, though on-land: https://cbmjournal.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/1750-0... and some more from a presentation https://www.feem.it/m/events_pages/20167111127315Zeng_presen...

Though the question still remains how securely the CO2 would be stored under the ocean. Maybe with a large enough layer of rock on top it would suffice.. I suppose it's high time we started field trials on all these approaches.

My own back-of-napkin calc says that we'd need to cut about .1 to .2 % of tropical rainforests per year and remove them from the carbon cycle, not sure if that's right.

Oops, my calculation was way off (missed a kilo-prefix somewhere), we'd need to cut and store about the entire rainforest per year. So, this is obviously not possible as an all-around solution but might help with some Gigatonnes..

Just because current tech sucks doesn't mean we shouldn't keep developing it. I'm not sure why this is such a controversial idea, especially among tech savvy people.

It's controversial because we already have a decent solution and the competing ones suck for a lot of reasons that can't be developed away.

It would be as if someone started doing research on vacuum tube transistor technology today if we were having a global compute crisis and we also had limited amount of sand with which to make glass and sand was an essential resource in all sorts of other things like the food supply chain.

But that's not the situation we're in. We can't plant enough trees without destroying a lot of cities. There are in fact better places to place trees than other places, besides the fact that we can't plant enough and they don't do enough fast enough. The issue is that we currently don't have a full solution. We're close, but not all the way there.

If sinking trees is not a good enough solution, developing and improving a solution that is currently immeasurably worse and might someday be a hundred times worse is lunacy.

What impact on cities? Cities take up almost no space and are irrelevant when talking about planting forests and then sinking them in the ocean. At worst there will be more freight train noise.

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