Elon Musk puts up $100M for global carbon reduction competition | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk puts up $100M for global carbon reduction competition

reuters.com

26 pointsorange_tee20 comments

Kind of funny to read this on the same day Tesla has invested in Bitcoin, which wastes an enormous amount of energy.

Is it called "investing" when Tesla buys euros in order to do business in the EU?

yeah, 40% of global electricity is from coal, which is one of the biggest sources of CO2.

Trees lock away carbon (A tree's mass comes from the air, not the soil) and produce a useful building material. If we could produce a way to make "bricks" from the atmosphere, that would be a game changer.

Nice PR for Elon, throwing money at an already-solved problem.

Many plants consume CO2. It seems planting (and NOT 'harvesting) them is too common-sensical, not high-tech enough, or fast enough to sustain all of our bad habits. I've not seen any global assessments of this question (might be a better thing to throw money at).

Instead of incineration of plant 'waste' (exactly the wrong thing) (e.g. India's yearly pollution problem) we can bury much more of it (leaves, branches, crop residue, paper, cardboard) in the ground. And leave it there. Perhaps with enhanced biomes that consume and 'lock-up' CO2. (Low-tech again. Putting incinerators out-of- business as a by-product.)

We can require all fossil-fuel producers to invest a large share of their profits (otherwise wasted on shareholders - they have no plans) on mitigation. That would incent them to find optimal solutions. With severe penalties including jailtime for an added incentive (far more effective than carbon taxes).

It's impossible to plant enough trees to consume all the CO2 we've dug out of the ground and still have human civilization not starve. That would require going back to forestation levels even greater than that of a pre-industrial era.

More so trees aren't a permanent carbon sink. They get knocked over, get burned in forest fires, and their leaf litter decomposes, all releasing the CO2 back into the atmosphere.

The details of the competition aren't available yet (what's the scoring criteria?) but one would presume that planting trees is a viable candidate.

"To win the competition, teams must demonstrate a rigorous, validated scale model of their carbon removal solution, and further must demonstrate to a team of judges the ability of their solution to economically scale to gigaton levels. The objective of this XPRIZE is to inspire and help scale efficient solutions to collectively achieve the 10 gigaton per year carbon removal target by 2050, to help fight climate change and restore the Earth’s carbon balance.

Teams can submit entries across natural, engineer and hybrid solutions. Judges in the competition will evaluate the teams based upon four basic criteria:

- A working carbon removal prototype that can be rigorously validated and capable of removing at least 1 ton per day.

- The team’s ability to demonstrate to the judges that their solution can economically scale to the gigaton level.

- The main metric for this competition is fully considered cost per ton, inclusive of whatever considerations are necessary for environmental benefit, permanence, any value-added products; and

- The final criteria is the length of time that the removed carbon is locked up for. A minimum goal of 100 years is desired. "

Just providing the criteria for those interested. This is from the Xprize website. https://www.xprize.org/prizes/elonmusk

Seems like something that $100M would be better spent to research, rather than held back to reward.

When there's a prize other people invest in technologies for you and it acts as a multiplicative effect much more than a straight $100M investment would do.

I believe your comment changes the perspective on the role of $100M from addressing climate change to making Musk richer.

I amazed this XPrize hadn't happened sooner. Good of Musk to put up the cash.

How about some sort of internet blocker where you can just nix the users from your life who bring up whatever random negative crud they have read on Vox every discussion?

Flag on Jevons paradox, or Bitcoin, or random environmental issue they just assume is global warming related, or the thing they don't like so no one should have it.

It's a bit meta I guess, but it should work, get productive discussions going and get at least part of the population supporting real change.

Worst case it'd solve the biggest global warming detriment, annoying people.

PSA for everyone going "trees!!!111":

1- Trees take time, and are picky about location, not all planted trees survive

2- Trees don't grow on Mars :D (iirc he needs to capture Martian CO2 for his rockets, and any incidental improvement on the Sabatier might be useful for him)

3- Elon already gave like a million bucks to team trees, how long will it take for that money to absorb a relevant amount of CO2 compared to whatever this process this prize might entail?

If we actually want to prevent global warming, we will need a way to remove co2 already up there.

To be clear, I'm agreeing that this is an important and neglected area of climate research.

I'm not sure if you're just reinforcing the message of the article, but that is exactly what the article is stating this competition is for

  to create and demonstrate a solution that can pull carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere or oceans and lock it away permanently in an environmentally benign way,

Yes, sorry, I'm agreeing with musk. This is an important area that doesn't get much attention.

I want to be enthused, but Tesla getting invovled with one the stupidest wastes of energy on the planet Bitcoin on the same day makes me non-plussed/kind of miffed.

I don't see why these challenges are attempting to find a solution that captures greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. The concentration is so low, that to process large amounts of CO2, the amounts of energy required to blow the air through a system would be insane. Why can't we just plant more trees and focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions (transportation and energy production).

its like trying to bail water out of the sinking ship using a cup instead of fixing a breach

Restoring forests and topsoil through economic incentives that change farming practices is what actually might make a difference here. But that's obviously not the techno-fix Musk is looking for. Sigh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com