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Comment by gdudeman | Hacker News Reader

I like this back-of-the-envelope estimate, but it's even worse than that.

The carbon in oil is lightweight relative to the two oxygens it combines with (atomic weights 12 and 16 respectively) from the air, so 1kg of oil emits about 3kg of CO2!

Punchline: we emit around 34 gigatons of CO2 per year.

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My argument is that we're probably going to kill the Gulf of Mexico, anyways, with global warming; so, let's go ahead and dump 34 gigatons/year of serpentine in it. That'll 0-out the CO2 we're releasing, at the cost of dramatically changing the Gulf's ecosystem. At this point, I really do think we (humanity) are going to have to make some pretty hard trade-offs.

What changes do you anticipate?

I don't know — I'd just assume that if we began dumping, say, 35 billion tons of serpentine into the Gulf per year, it might changes things?

This is the part that car drivers don't get cos neither they nor any journalist does the math. Maybe visualisation would help.

Consider: One gallon of gas. [rest of world: liter]

1) How much CO2 does its combustion generate ?

2) How much does that CO2 weigh ?

3) At 100% concentration and sea level atmospheric pressure, how many Olympic-sized swimming pools (or football stadiums) would that CO2 fill ?

4) At current ambient concentrations (CO2 ppm), what volume does it fill ?

But wouldn't it be a carbon chain again in the seaweed without oxygen? So, we can ignore the weight of the oxygen? Still, the numbers are huge. But I think at this point we have try everything at once.

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