this post was submitted on 11 Nov 2023
350 points (96.3% liked)
Technology
59374 readers
3767 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No. Carbon neutral isn’t enough. We are going to have to go carbon negative.
We can’t just take hundreds of millions of years worth of sequestered carbon and dump it into the atmosphere and leave it there to re-sequester itself. That’s going to take a long time to reverse enough to even buck the current trend of global warming, if we were able to just go carbon neutral today.
Trees also don’t really sequester carbon for long. They die, and the carbon gets eaten by organisms and the cycle continues. Or it burns and most of the carbon is released instantly and only ash remain.
Coal only got there specifically because there was nothing evolved to eat lignin for a long time and dead trees piled up so high that dead trees on top ended up compressing their ancestors into it.
Crude only got there because plants and algae in shallow water died, mixed into sediment, rinse, repeat times a few million years, get compressed by the weight of all the layers above, and turn to crude.
The sequestration of ancient carbon wasn’t just by virtue of being plants, but what happened after those plants died.
not only do we need to be carbon negative but we need to move and store more volume than any industry in history ... or is it all industry in history. the idea is absurd either way.
Yeah, this is like the inventor that wanted to use floating booms to clean up the ocean... Totally impossible
Picking up trash with a net is a a little easier than collecting 1 trillion tonnes of CO~2~ from 5.1 quadrillion tonnes of atmosphere, then somehow storing it directly or converting it back into into stable solid or liquid for storage.
It's not impossible, but in terms of difficulty and expense the two are orders of magnitudes apart from each other. Like "inventing the wheel" vs "landing on the moon."