Comment on Entropy? Never heard of it.
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 8 months agoThe argument is that there exist some use cases where we do not have a viable low carbon energy source yet (things like heavy farming equipment or aircraft), and one can effectively counteract the emissions of these things until we do develop one. Or alternatively, by the time that we eliminate all the high carbon energy, the heating effect already present may be well beyond what we desire the climate to be like, and returning it to a prior state would require not just not emitting carbon, but removing some of what is already there.
viable low carbon energy source yet
Not limited to energy sources either: steel production requires carbon as part of the alloy.
In the production of cement, calciumcarbonate gets heated and emits co2.
Both of these products can not be made without the emission of co2
I just literally can’t imagine a machine that is both cheaper and easier to deploy than the green goo we call life. Plant a tree. It’ll even spread itself.
Unfortunately, this is one area human imagination and intuition fail. Trees are great, but the math shows they simply aren’t remotely viable as a means of bulk carbon sequestration.
I think you have to cut them down and bury them (or at least don’t burn them) for the carbon to “go away”.
That’s how it got underground to begin with.
yes, you are correct, it makes more sense to focus on electrifying our big consumers first.
however, cleaning up could happen eventually. maybe some politician in the future will sell it as some “jobs program” or sth.
They were for several hundred million years. What changed?
The evolution of micro organisms capable of eating dead trees and emitting CO2 as a metabolic byproduct.
Nothing. You’re just asking trees to do something they’re not meant to do. Absorbing a single year of carbon emissions would require half the planet’s land area of trees. And that’s just while the trees are growing and absorbing a lot of carbon. Trees just aren’t efficient enough on a per acre basis to make a dent in carbon emissions, let alone capturing the carbon already in the atmosphere.
Trees never evolved for the purposes of mass capturing carbon from the air as efficiently as possible. Yes, they convert CO2 to O2 as part of their life cycle, but algae and other organisms have a much bigger role in capturing CO2 and turning it into O2.
Furthermore, so much of the CO2 that we emit is CO2 that was sequestered in the past over those very same 100s of millions of years. Meaning that going the natural route will take that amount of time.
What about sea weed? And sink it to the ocean floor?
Trees aren’t actually that great. Algee is what is really effective. Codyslab has some great videos and some wild ideas on application for it.
I was under the impression that’s just because of the relative surface area of the ocean vs arable land
not only that. algae are effectively plants without all the structural (wood) parts. that means, they consume less energy constructing bulky dead material, and put all of their energy towards the growth of the functional parts. that is why they can spread more rapidly and achieve a higher efficiency than plants.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 8 months ago
It does also get pushed by organisations that profit from fossil fuels as an excuse to never need to decarbonise as they can hypothetically just capture it all again later, which is dumb and impractical for a variety of reasons, including the one alluded to above. Some kind of Carbon sink will need to be part of the long-term solution, but the groups pushing most strongly want it to be the whole solution and have someone else pay for it so they can keep doing the same things as caused the problem in the first place.