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Comment by dataflow | Hacker News Reader

> If it works and it's economical there's no reason to think that you couldn't build 30,000 of them.

That would just leave us where we're at right now, right? Even with emissions not increasing (unlikely...), we'd still need 60k just to decrease CO2 levels at the same rate... meaning it'd take several decades to bring them to acceptable levels. We'd probably need a few times that many facilities to be able to do this at the pace we need...

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Today is not a bad place to be, especially compared to many of the other potential outcomes.

1 facility for every ~100k people isn't unreasonable. It's like building an air treatment plant for every water treatment plant there is. Anyway, while these plants are busy reprocessing the entire planet's atmosphere they can do other useful things besides removing CO2.

Interested to know what those "other things" might be.

Any activity with carbon that doesn't involve aerobic activity. Creating soil (worms or bokashi vs compost), creating plastic, creating pencil lead.

That gives an interesting sense of scale to the problem. Dealing with C02 emissions is similar to water waste treatment, both in concept and in scale of infrastructure required.

If you held emissions constant, yes, but realistically you'd also be reducing emissions at the same time.

We'll have to build an assembly line for them.

It beats the alternative that's likely to happen, which is "oops, nobody told me it was going to break!"

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