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Comment by eachro | Hacker News Reader

Yishan Wong's startup Terra formation(https://www.terraformation.com/) is trying to tackle climate change with this more or less as the underlying thesis.

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I love forests, any sort, but reforestation the right way, as Terra seems to support, takes more time than some are saying we have. The wrong way becomes the right way when it is all you have time for. Iron fertilization of oceans is promising for albedo already, if we can efficiently synthesize these terpenes in the right ratio to seed clouds perhaps that would buy some time.

"that would buy some time."

Or mess things further up, in a way no one did foresee.

It's probably fine to have some solutions that operate on different time scales than the other proposed solutions that others are trying.

@galangalalgol can you expand on "if we can efficiently synthesize these terpenes in the right ratio to seed clouds"?

It is too early for me to grok, and coffee hasn't kicked in yet

More time than we have for what?

The effects of global warming to have disastrous effects on humans.

Fortunately humans are adaptable and in many parts of the world already living in conditions significantly hotter than predicted in the medium term (50-100 years).

I’m much more concerned about the cure being worse than the disease when it comes to novel methods of affecting climate. Plant trees, replace coal/oil with nuclear and solar, keep up on forest maintenance, etc.

I'm sure you are aware that there's way more going on than just a slight increase in average temperature (otherwise maybe ask the people on maui, greece or canada if they like their slight increase in temperate), but I agree that we should be careful with any radical cures.

I have some bad news,the US, China, and India are not going to turn on a dime like the more optimistic green energy revolution people hope. We have time to plant plenty of trees before we turn the corner. It's just the way of things.

I cannot help but wonder what would happen if we released these chemicals at the norther coast of the Sahara while also planting scrub brush, grass, and trees there.

I think financing and assisting reforestation projects is a worthwhile thing to work on, but selling carbon credits directly enables harmful behavior that more than offsets any potential benefits. I wish it were possible for this company to be funded by government grants or the UN or something like that.

Even if carbon credits do absolutely nothing else, at least they impose a cost on carbon release.

Carbon credits are so incredibly cheap, and in most cases completely voluntary, that I genuinely don't believe they have impacted anyone's behavior. Companies and individuals that buy credits either were already planning on reducing their emissions (so in the best case the credits are useless), or don't want to reduce emissions and are using the credits for PR purposes to delay any actual reduction and call themselves "net zero".

Even when they're legally mandated, most credits are completely unverifiable (what ratings agency will be able to certify that a tree you sponsored will last 100 years). It is actively harmful to allow someone to say that since they paid $10 to plant a tree that may or may not absorb a ton of carbon over the next century, that offsets the literal ton of carbon that they just emitted yesterday (and made a lot more than $10 off of). Just tax the carbon and put the proceeds towards ecological restoration, that accomplishes the same thing without letting anyone falsely claim they have offset their emissions, and allows the government to set the price to something meaningful.

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