Just looking for ways they can charge us to clean up the mess they created.
Rich companies have the best SEO?
Hey, look at us, we are planting 2 bn trees that are ALL THE SAME.
None of the methods they present as solutions are even close to being viable. The ones that do look promising, however, are where they bind the CO2 to tailings.
Any capturing strategy is useless at scale. We need strategies to transform co2. Trees are more effective and scalable long term solutions than any carbon capture. And much cheaper
The problem is stuff like concrete… the way to make new concrete emits a shitload of CO2, whether or not you use electricity or fossil fuels. So we either need to find an alternative to cement or we need to capture all that CO2.
It is useless to capture it. It will diffuse back to the atmosphere at some point in the future. It must be transformed. Or we should stop producing it
Cheaper and scalable, yes, but what I’m getting at is the monoculture approach that most proponents take.
Also, it requires quite a bit of land mass to do, whereas with other options, you could potentially get similar benefits on smaller footprints.
I don’t know enough about C offset dynamics to speak intelligently, but these are some of the things we need to consider.
I know enough of “C offset” to tell you that the problem is not C offset. You cannot and don’t want to “offset” carbon. Carbon is literally the most important element for nature. Carbon is not a problem at all. Excess of CO2 is the problem. By excess I mean all CO2 that the system “earth” cannot transform in biological compounds. Transformation is primary done by plants, algae and bacteria. Unless we find a ecological, economically viable way to perform artificial transformation, the only solution is to increase number of natural “transformers” and decrease excess of CO2. Any other solution is thermodynamically useless, i.e. marketing. Carbon offset as a concept is pure marketing
Search results are dependant on who is searching. But still:
When you use DuckDuckGo the first result is wikipedia.
When you use Google the first results are corporations.
When you use Bing the first result is a corporation, then Wikipedia.
Brave search gives an AI summary of carbon capture, an investment page, one of the corp pages, and then a breakdown on why ‘carbon capture’ is a misleading tactic.
Edit: All this to say, maybe stop using Google.
You’re confusing the browser and ths search engine, I think. I use various combinations of Firefox and Brave browsers with Qwant, Brave Search and Google Search on different machines and AFAIK, I’ve only seen the crypto stuff in the Brave browser when I initially installed it. Quickly went through settings to disable that stuff and never seen it since. Still the best Chromium browser, and good to have next to Firefox in case of compatibility issues. Privacyguides.org is clear about that.
The search engine seems decent too, I haven’t noticed a big difference between Brave Search and Qwant so far, they are both fine, and less heavily manipulated than Google
Okay? And how are we supposed to deal with the emissions currently in the atmosphere? Even if we abandon all technologies that generate greenhouse gases overnight, we still have shit in the atmosphere warming the planet.
The most compelling strategy I’ve heard is biochar. You immolate organic matter in a medium like nitrogen so you don’t get carbon dioxide, and then you bury the char or use it as fertilizer. The char is relatively stable so shouldn’t create much in the way of carbon dioxide once it’s formed, and because you make it in an oxygen-less atmosphere you don’t get more greenhouse gases from making it.
Forests, algae… There is no need for carbon capture. It doesn’t do anything on scale. There is need of transformation co2, which can be done by plants and algae
Humans burnt 100’s of millions of years of plant growth within 100 years. There is no way we can significantly reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere with plants alone in a timeframe that is necessary for humanity to see a difference. There is just not enough land to plant that many trees and plants. We need all the solutions and that includes human tech.
But it is not a solution. Carbon capture is the perfect thermodynamic example of sweeping the dirt under the rug. Best case scenario it would alleviate the problem now to make the problem worse in the mid term. Most realistic scenario it will do nothing at all.
We currently do not have a human tech to support the process. The only thermodynamically meaningful process is transformation of CO2 in safe and useful organic compounds. But all our technology is too expansive, and requires a lot of energy, production of which is currently one of the main responsible for emission of CO2
Think of biochar like humans helping plants keep the carbon out of the atmosphere. Plants are good at capturing carbon, but what happens when they die? Hell, what about all the leaves they shed? When something rots, it releases a mix of CO2 and methane (which decomposes into CO2). The idea of biochar is that it’s a way of sequestering the carbon that plants captured. For an example, you make an algae pond, harvest the algae, dry it, char it, bury it. That’s carbon that’s not going back into the atmosphere anytime soon, whereas if it was left to rot, it’d eventually wind back up in the atmosphere. You’re taking the carbon the plants captured, and processing it in a way that makes it easier to sequester.
The problem is purely thermodynamic. Plants transform co2 in useful compounds that do not contribute to greenhouse effect.
Any capture system is a temporary storage of co2 that has anyway to be transformed, because co2 is loosely trapped. Scientifically is literally sweeping dirt under the rug. There is no long term benefit (as at some point in the future you’ll have too transform more co2 than what in the atmosphere), it costs a lot, and gives a fake sense of “trying to solve the problem”, while it’s doing nothing
Absolutely, I also think Biochar is very promising as one way to recapture atmospheric CO2 and to compensate further emissions.
While I understood the production process to be a little different, the benefits of Biochar can’t be ignored.
- low in energy consumption
- low in recourse cost
- very good scalable
- no hidden science or process
- the stored carbon can be used as a soil amendment
The process may be a bit more complex than I understood, but my understanding is that the gist of it is to “burn” plant stuff in a way that doesn’t create carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases. One way of doing that is to use a chamber flooded with nitrogen or similar inert gas. No oxygen means carbon can’t bind to two oxygen atoms to create carbon dioxide.
I’m confused, how can you ‘burn’ anything without oxygen? Burn literally means to oxidize
I don’t understand. Biomass already isnt CO2. Why do we take an extra step?
Because when biomass rots, it creates CO2. By charring it you’re making the carbon more stable and less likely to become CO2 in the future. It also won’t rot when charred.
So how do we produce biomass? Plant more trees? Which we already do. Then in how many year we cut it down and biochar it instead of using it reporposing it for something else? I’m kind of failing to see the benefit. Just seems like an alternative that isn’t really any better than some of the other good alternatives.
