Comment by wolframhempel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wolframhempel | Hacker News Reader

I feel the big takeaway from COP26 and its predecessor events is that realistically, we simply won't do anything on a global scale to reduce CO2 emissions to any sustainable level. Not without China participating, not without nations making any genuine commitments, not with the lax timetables proposed and the various fossil interest lobbies blocking. This is simply not happening.

The upside is, that once we accept that this is not happening we can move on from these attempts and fully focus on technologies that capture/remove carbon from the air. This one to efficiently convert CO2 into starch (https://newatlas.com/science/artificial-synthesis-starch-fro...) comes to mind. I have no insight of my own to contribute, but David Friedberg argued on the all in podcast that a 25 square-mile areal of these would be enough to capture all CO2 currently in the atmosphere. (again, just quoting, not able to verify this myself)

According to wikipedia, China added 71.6 GW of wind power in 2020 and now has a total of 281GW. Note that 71 GW is more than the electrical power usage in Germany as a whole. And they just added that in one year.

Of course, China is a very big country with an industry that is growing at a rapid rate. So they have to add even more coal to keep up with demand.

But it is wrong to think that they are not doing anything.

As for carbon capture. People have been talking about that for a long time. Today it seems that the most effective way of carbon capture is to plant some trees.

Personally, I think it is great that banning sale of ICE vehicles are already on the table.

I always felt that trying to remove co2 out of the atmosphere without decarbonizing energy production is like trying to build a perpetuum mobile.

> David Friedberg argued on the all in podcast that a 25 square-mile areal of these would be enough to capture all CO2 currently in the atmosphere.

I felt like napkin mathing it, and even a cursory check completely obliterates that claim. Adding 1 ppm (volumetrically) of CO2 to the atmosphere is about 2 Gt of CO2, and we're at about 400 ppm. Carbon is 27% by mass. Monocrystalline diamond is 3.5 g/cm3. This makes a prism with the specified base 1km high. Talk about a ring.

The linked article seems to indicate that the researchers are also much more conservative with their claims than Freidberg, and state their technology is about 8x more efficient at capture than corn. Very cool, but nowhere near that sort of magnitude, as 8x that area would be only a fraction of the farmland in the continental US alone (by a factor of 1000).

* Edited for math

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