Yes, The Architects books were pretty great but they had very classic soap opera kind of vibe than hardcore science fiction. I did enjoy them nonetheless.
Been following this movie's development for over 20 years. I give props to Morgan Freeman for trying so hard all this time to get it made. Denis Villeneuve would be a great director for this, and he could make it work.
Economics rules everything. How much does this cost vs simply planting trees, when the value of harvesting the trees is included? Since tree farms are generally profitable, and wood is expensive, it seems this method is likely to be economically less efficient.
The problem is you cannot plant enough trees around the globe to offset our CO2 emissions.
Also, a forest only absorbs CO2 while alive. Once it dies, it emits CO2 too.
You would need to permanently store the wood somewhere (submerging in water, etc).
Planting trees solves both the carbon capture and the emissions issue from different angles. Some examples are:
- With more wood available it’s more economical to use it as a building/manufacturing material over other emissive sources (concrete, steel, plastic)
- We can replant the same area multiple times
- Even if we plant crops for biofuels, it’s closer to carbon neutral than burning fossil anyway
Every move we can make towards planting (and managing) more of the surface of the Earth is an improvement, without waiting for miraculous new technology.
You don’t need to convert it to coal. Use it to build houses, furniture, and other things.
I am currently building a wooden house this way. Wooden frame, wooden exterior, wooden floors, even wood-based insulation (https://huntonfiber.co.uk/). The isolation has the shortest life span and it is expected to last at least 60 years.
If these forests are planted by humans, why do we think the dead trees would just be left to rot like you suggest vs being harvested for wood? The logic does not compute other than trying to make a ridiculous point.
I think this loses the forest for the trees. That is, a single tree rotting isn't what matters its how long the ecosystem the tree is part of lasts. Consider a square kilometer of denuded land turned back into a forest. You can think of the forest as a temporary storage for carbon, its stored in the trees, soil, animals, insects, etc in that square kilometer. Individual trees may die but on average if the forest remains in good health there will be a number of tons of carbon kept out of the atmosphere.
using the wood for heating also releases the CO2. I do think planting trees is a good idea, but it's worth pointing out they can be a carbon source even after harvesting, depending on the usage.
On the other hand if the wood is used for construction or furniture it will not emit.
No, but when built right, log cabins have lasted 100+ years easily. Furniture has lasted that long as well. If you keep it dry, it will last longer than you, your children, and your grandkids. Easily. At that point it is more forever than you
One little appreciated fact is that trees also respirate CO2 when they are cracking their stored sugars produced via photosynthesis. So they don’t sequester all of the CO2 that they consume.
I suppose I’m pointing it out to highlight the trade offs with any of these solutions.
What is unsaid is that we need to sequester CO2 for hundreds of years—often far beyond the lifespan of the trees. Trees are short term storage, and sometimes the storage is a lot shorter than popular imagination purports.
Individual trees are short term storage which is why its important to create healthy ecosystems for them to live in. Turning denuded farmland back into a forest buffers carbon from the atmosphere for as long as the forest stands. It could stay there for centuries or return to the atmosphere if it gets bulldozed for a subdivision.
It's a hugely underappreciated option. I'm not sure how accurate it is (or how legitimate the companies doing biochar carbon removal are), but cdr.fyi shows biochar as the top carbon sequestration method that's actually happening.
Physics rules everything, once you start trying to run at scale.
The density of carbon per unit volume in solid materials of interest doesn't vary that much, whether you sink it in trees or in exotic materials like diamonds. That means you can calculate the volume of material required so sink a desired amount of atmospheric carbon.
If you want to have a measurable impact on the atmosphere, say dialing it back to 1980 CO2 levels, you're talking not about making a pile of stuff but about making a mountain range that's a mile high and hundreds of miles long.
Now figure out how many trucks you're going to need to move that much material from where your sequestering machine is to where your pile of stuff is.
Or if you want to dump that material in the ocean (which someone else will certainly object to), extend your calculation to figure out how many container trucks worth of material you need to dump into the ocean every hour to accomplish your atmospheric cleanup in whatever amount of time you choose (a decade? If it takes a century, that's not fast enough).
And finally think about surface to volume ratios. You're trying to sink it into a volume, but you can only get the gas into the volume through its surface, so the speed of your process is limited by surface area.
If you want to do it with trees,
my personal spitball estimates are that you probably need to plant somewhere between the entire state of Connecticut and the entire state of Colorado to have the kind of impact one would want (there's more subtlety to tree calculations than one generally likes to admit, so feel free to come in with way higher numbers than I did).
Which brings us back to economics. If you have a well-managed forest of that size and scale, someone is eventually going to come along, maybe in 100 years, maybe in 500 years, and say "hey if we cut this down, we could burn the wood to heat our homes" and all that carbon goes back into the atmosphere, so you actually need to sink it into something that is energetically unfavorable for recovery, which means you also need to expand a huge amount of energy to sink the carbon into that energetically unfavorable state.
If we took all the CO2 out of the atmosphere and converted the C into graphite and spread that uniformly over the top 10 subtropical deserts it would be around 2 cm deep.
This suggests a long term approach of building solar powered carbon capture plants in subtropical deserts, they capture it and convert to graphite, which is then spread out under the solar panels.
I once did the math on this, using the specs for currently available solar powered carbon capture, and it came out to something like if we used 100 years worth of the current production annual production of solar panels for this we could carbon capture at a rate that could drop the atmosphere from current levels of CO2 to pre-industrial levels in a few years even if we do not reduce emission rates.
So...not practical now, but might be feasible as a very long term project that over many decades builds out enough capacity to get things under control as long as we can keep everything from going to hell over that time.
> you're talking not about making a pile of stuff but about making a mountain range that's a mile high and hundreds of miles long.
Just to put it into numbers, wikipedia has the total amount of CO2 on the global warming page, if we assume it's in a 2 kg/l substance it totals to around 180 km^3.
1). Wikipedia does have a citation [1] saying 2,450 gigatonnes of CO2 have been emitted by human activity, of which 42% stayed in the atmosphere and 34% dissolved in the oceans, with the rest already sequestered by plant growth and land use. As we start to pull CO2 out of the atmosphere, it will begin to be emitted from the oceans as well; therefore, let's assume we have to recapture all excess atmospheric and oceanic CO2:
:: 2450x10^9 tonnes CO2 x .66 fraction to sequester ~= 1.6x10^12 tonnes CO2.
2) Let's convert the CO2 to something more stable for long-term storage: HDPE.
- Convert mass of CO2 to mass of carbon:
:: 1.6x10^12 tonnes CO2 x 12/44 mass fraction of C in CO2 ~= 4.4x10^11 tonnes C
- Convert mass C to mass HDPE; assume HDPE is effectively (CH2)n. Then:
:: 4.4x10^11 tonnes C x 14/12 mass fraction CH2 to C ~= 5.2x10^11 tonnes HDPE
3) That's a lot of plastic! How much volume? Wikipedia says HDPE is ~930-970 kg/m3; let's be conservative again and take the low figure:
:: 5.2x10^11 tonnes HDPE x 1.0/0.930 m3 per tonne HDPE ~= 5.5x10^11 m3 HDPE
4) Those are cubic meters; how about cubic kilometers?
:: 5.5x10^11 m3 x 1.0/1.0x10^9 km3 per m3 ~= 5.5x10^2 km3
In other words, if you turned all the [excess potentially climate-change impacting] CO2 that humanity has emitted since 1850 into plastic (a process that would certainly emit a large additional CO2 fraction given the industrial buildout required) then we'd end up with about 550 cubic kilometers of the stuff. Coincidentally, that's about the volume of Mount Everest according to an intermediate calculation in [2].
So, a mountain of carbon: more than a pile but less than a mountain range.
But if you release the O2 and convert it into diamond, then by my highy-suspect back of the envelope calculations, it'd be a diamond that would fit into one square kilometer, 87 meters high. It would make quite the tourist attraction.
1. Even if we do magic and emit nothing, we still need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere or it will cook us over time, just longer.
2. We would need an enormous area for forests (which i great), which would mean a lot of intervention, like resettling people, demolishing and constructing new buildings, a lot of machinery time to move people to and from the new forests, a lot of planting and forest maintenance involved. And add he work to cut and bury resulting wood. If you would sum all the incidental emissions from this process it would rapidly become much less efficient (if at all).
Without either CO2 capture or a sun shade of some sort, the CO2 levels and temperature will only ever increase, just like now.
I agree. Plants are not very efficient (1% or 2%) but they include packaging the CO2 in a stable form. You can store the grain or wood for long periods of times.
In this case, it looks like they get CO2 as a gas. It's cheaper because you don't have to use energy to undo the burning, but it's difficult to store for a long time.
(I'm not sure if someone tried to make a fake underground bog in abandoned mine. Just fill with wood and water to keep the oxygen low and make the wood decompose slowly.)
Take a look at "wood vault".
'Wood vaulting': A simple climate solution you’ve probably never heard of | Grist https://share.google/lS8xnMGEd1pMzlNg2
Economically not attractive but apparently very efficient in locking up CO2.
The problem with any scheme to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere is the incredible amount of carbon we've blown into the air in the last 150 years. Just look at the size of the machines we use to harvest coal. Essentially you'd need to have machines of similar size working for many decades to re-bury the carbon we extracted and burned. Who's gonna pay for that?
There’s no getting around it. If we reduce CO2 emissions to zero it’s either plants or carbon capture, and one way or another the planet will have to do something with all that carbon.
Last time it took plants millions of years, and that was before things started eating wood. I’m pretty sure that we’ll have to have a hand in the process if we want to reduce CO2 levels in timespans shorter than geological.
I agree that we’ll actively have to do something if we want to reduce carbon levels. I’m not convinced that we’ll want to reduce carbon levels badly enough to spent all that money. It’s very hard to convince voters that they’ll have to spent lots of taxes for a project that sees payoff in two or three generations at the earliest.
The ocean has already absorbed 30% of the CO2 humanity has emitted. It causes issues: ocean acidity rises, which reduces plankton ability to grow. Plankton being the base of the ocean food chain, all ocean life gets impacted.
You'd need to find a way to sequester carbon without it leaching in the water.
Random idea: What if we just sequestered it into elemental carbon pellets and let it sink to the bottom of the ocean? It should not react with the water.
One idea is to charcoal the wood, it makes it harder to decompose and is similar to pure carbon. I'm not sure if it's better to send it to the bottom of the ocean or just to a big hole on land.
Planting trees is not effective since it takes decades to capture the carbon, but the next years are crucial for determining long term climate developments.
There is no carbon capture technology on earth that can be rolled out at a scale over the next few years that can compete with planting trees. Especially not one that has just been invented in one university. Ash grows 90cm per year, that's all carbon. Scale that to millions and billions.
I stopped when he flubbed the first point. No, it’s not correct users have to just hope big miners will mine their transactions.
For two reasons:
1. They pay them. Do you trust “big grocery” will provide you food, or did you start a farm in your yard?
2. If that trust were ever broken, millions of bitcoiners who can easily afford to lose $10 a month can mine them. Despite there being no such censorship happening, these uneconomic miners are already a rapidly growing group. Bitcoiners are acutely aware of the state of the mempool.
Maybe read the rest of the article (where those points are addressed) before commenting.
And if I thought "big grocery" could make more money by not providing me food, I would definitely start growing my own food. It's got nothing to do with trust.
That money will be provided via a loan, from the US Government, at a reasonable interest rate. USG doesn't lose money, TSMC gets to expand into all of Intels fabs (when they raise the money to buy a controlling interest in INTC down the line.)
Or the entire thing can be done by a stock swap, with whoever diluting themselves however amount is necessary, etc.
This isn't corruption or coercion. This is a deal. These are terms being offered. They can say no, or counter. But these terms benefit all parties-- TSMC can eventually buy out intel, get lots of top end fabs, bring their superior processes to those fabs and meet the huge demand in AI chips-- that they currently can't grow fast enough to cover. ASML machines take years to build... a better TSMC process on existing ASML machines in Intel fabs is an easy %30 win for the entire world.
Plus, china kept at bay, peace increased, intel's bad management gets to bail out saving face, TSMC gets rewarded for their hard work, Trump gets a win, Intel's employees get better management, and get rich from their stock options winning hugely....
Capitalism is where everyone wins like this.
Even china, because china loses if it goes to war, but china feels it has to go to war.
It actually wouldn't. The sale price will be pretty close to the current market price, maybe %10 more. If the Government kicks in funds to underwrite the deal (say a loan to TSMC) then the deal would likely happen exactly at market price.
That means investors who sell are getting the current low market price or a little bit higher--- they will still be down the massive amount.
This is really bailing out current management-- letting them be replaced by the more capable TSMC people and getting an attaboy for helping the US government strengthen the alliance with Taiwan, keeping peace in the region.
> This is really bailing out current management-- letting them be replaced by the more capable TSMC people
The trouble with a competent organization buying a decadent organization is that leadership at the decadent organization is often much better at winning political infighting (they have a lot of practice).
So it’s very easy to end up in a situation where the disfunction metastases up into the parent.
At the very least, executive attention is finite and splitting attention like this is distracting to the parent executives, which harms the parent organization.
But the buyer can just unconditionally lay off all the top brass, exactly for that reason. The layoff can be more of a golden parachute kind, to prevent any sabotage.
The fab part is not a good deal since Intel struggles a lot with it and they are not even on par with what TSMC was producing a few years back using older processes.
I would guess in this deal, TSMC would produce the chips and fire all the Intel foundry people.
Would they buy existing shares from investors? Would they really find enough investors willing to sell shares at market price? I doubt it. There would be a lot of investors that would rather hold than sell at market price. Market price is the current minimum price an investor is willing to accept. Not the price that all investors are willing to accept.
Would they buy new shares issued by Intel? That seems more likely to me. That would be a bailout to Intel.
This is like an old fashioned Civilization game trade. Taiwan gets a significant ownership in a blue chip US company, TSMC should then take %51 control over intel, and turn it around. The US gets a stronger position with China such that china attacking Taiwan would be like bombing Apple or Google. The USA will go to war over that.
Only the willingness to go to war, stops aggressors. War is terrible and economic competition is the path to peace, but if you can't defend yourself you will get destroyed.
Only the willingness to go to war, stops aggressors.
I'm pretty sure that's why China is saber-rattling so openly. I don't endorse the CCP's arguments for Taiwan being part of China (which rest on a very flimsy historical foundation and are mostly tied to the ROC government fleeing there), but I fully understand their dislike of being militarily encircled by the US. Other Asian nations appreciate the status quo under a Pax Americana, but have made it clear that they are less than enthusiastic about participation alongside the US in any military conflict centered on Taiwan.
having the tech doesn't build the actual fabs, and a two or three year halt in production or a transfer of that production from Taiwan to China while the US builds up its own production would be devastating for the US.
The US has been defending Taiwan since before integrated circuits were invented. Supporting an ally and a democracy in a critical location is the only reason that matters.
That doesn’t matter much to this administration, but it’s not like they’re going to care about TSMC either.
You are so naive to think that US actually cares about democracy. Do you ever wonder why they invaded Iraq two times, but never really bothered to invade Cuba, which is in their backyard? Because Cuba has nothing of value, no natural resources, no valuable technologies. So the US tolerates communist regime in Cuba, because there's no money in invading it.
I will disregard "Bay of Pigs Invasion", since that wasn't really US military operation, but some small scale, CIA orchestrated coup.
These cuts are absolutely not the ones I would make, but the reality is not as it is being portrayed.
The claim that SpaceX does not do science is false. Not only do they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts, they also do independent science, including the Polaris Dawn and FRAM 2. Along with Axiom, they put science missions on the ISS, and all the NASA science done on ISS is facilitated by SpaceX putting humans there. Finally, literally everything that SpaceX has done or built is a result of science that SpaceX has had to do, including colder than ever propellants, and life support systems, etc. The Polaris Dawn spacewalk was not a replication of the 1960s spacewalks, as it was based on new suit science, etc.
Somehow, people like to pretend that probes landing on other planets is the only form of science that is done.
And the reality is that new entrants from RKLB, SpaceX, Firefly, and a lot of smaller companies are doing exactly this kind of science as well--- but at vastly lower cost.
The inescapable reality-- and this will always be the case with political organizations like NASA-- is no matter how well meaning they cannot do science as effectively as private organizations. NASA slows science down in large part because they are hamstrung by congress.
Yes, it looks like some way too expensive projects are getting cancelled and that means some waste of money. It's not the choice I would make.
But in the next 10 years, nearly %100 of all science will be done outside of NASA.... because the NASA overhead is too much, makes things too expensive, and less reliable.
For example, it's better to blow up 1 falcon one, and 2 falcon 9s, to get 500 successful falcon 9 launches at 1/100th the cost per kilogram of mass to orbit than to have a completely successful SLS system that launches only 2-3 times a decade.
The former accelerates science, lowers the cost of all science and more science gets done per dollar than the latter.
That transition is happening whether government, the senate and congress is aboard.... or not.
> they launch most of NASA's science missions, which counts
Exactly. Like if I am an uber driver and I bring a surgeon to a hospital, it counts as me doing surgery since the most important part of surgery is the process of driving to the place where it happens
> but the reality is not as it is being portrayed.
This is exactly how anyone would describe your reply. Your claim is so bizzare and its logic so convoluted that the only reason I can imagine for it is political motivation. But I could be wrong and don't want to get into a flamewar. So let's ignore the reasons and reassess the logic instead. Most of the counter I can come up with are variations of what the other commenter replied, so I will leave that to them. Instead, let's look at why your argument never pans out.
Private companies always look for short to medium term profits, since it affects their balance sheets and ultimately their survival. That constraint isn't favorable for scientific research and science missions, because there is a long lead time for the research results to be converted into a commercially viable products. Some companies with a large product portfolio and steady profits still do some research, as long as it isn't too costly or time consuming. An example is the pharma industry.
But science involving the biosphere, atmosphere, astronomy/astrophysics, space, interplanetary missions etc are on the other end of that spectrum - extremely costly and no commercialization for the foreseeable future. The only way private industries are going to do it is if the government funds them with short term profits - in which case, it's the government's program, not the industry's. Even Musk's Mars dream is dependent on government funding in that manner, though his intent isn't science either. What makes you think the private industry will take it upon themselves to fund and conduct research that makes no economic sense?
The traditional finance system is that a single central bank, owned by a cartel of rich banks- chase, jpm, etc-- issue the currency, charge us to use it and get first dibs on the benefits of monetary inflation -- google "cantillon effect".
The now much more diverse mining space is much better than completely centralized in one entity current system.
And bitcoin community has a way of working to fix weaknesses wherever they find it... there is active campaigns to diversify mining, as you pointed out those are pools-- and pools are being made obsolete. behind those pools are thousands or tens of thousands of mining operators, of all sizes, as it's viable at industrial as well as individual scale-- many use it to heat their house for less than the alternative, the earnings don't have to cover the full cost to be beneficial to people.
Googling "Cantillon Effect" gives suprisingly few results. Out of the top five results, two are Bitcoin-related, one is Reddit, and one is the Wikipedia page of Richard Cantillon himself.
The top comment on /r/AskEconomics is:
"The cantillon effect doesn't really exist in any significant capacity. Central banks nowadays announce their actions well ahead of time, that means before the actual expansion of the money supply, people know this expansion will happen, and markets price in that expansion. So there really isn't much benefiting from being "early".
Beyond that there really isn't much empirical evidence on the cantillon effect to exist in any significant capacity."
Since I know little about this topic I'd appreciate HN's view.
Cantillon's essay is not terribly difficult of a read and the "Cantillon Effect" has to be the least interesting part of it. It and Smiths Wealth of Nations are both free on the web and well worth the read.
OP mixed the "central bank" as an unique one (it doesn’t exists, although MFI could be representative for the west) and the multiple national ones (FED for the US). They arguments doesn’t hold as the national ones creates money and the are much more numerous and diverse in interest around the world than the ~5 bitcoin pools mentioned ahead.
The FED is quite powerful and US strongly influence many other banks but that’s by situation, not by design.
evem tho unique starts with a vowel, we say a unique, not an unique, I guess because it's pronounced like "younique", long u. Short u would still be an tho. As in, "An understanding"
the "does" in "doesn't" absorbs subject-verb the conjugation, does is now the verb that needs to agree with the subject, it. Exists returns to it's infinitive (unconjugated) form, exist.
"They arguments doesn’t hold" typo they ought to be the, those or their, not sure what you meant. Since arguments is plural you want don't, not doesn't, alternately "the argument [singular] doesn't hold"
'national ones creates money' subject verb agreement again, either one creates or ones create
"and the are" s/the/they
"bitcoin pools mentioned ahead": ahead doesn't quite apply to comment threads, like on a road you have cars in front (ahead) and in back (behind), but with comments it's above and below, because you scroll up and down, not forward and backward. You could also say aforementioned referring to something mentioned earlier.
Nonsense. While thousands of commercial banks are formally shareholders of the 12 (not one) Federal Reserve Banks,
> the "ownership" of the Reserve Banks by the commercial banks is symbolic; they do not exercise the proprietary control associated with the concept of ownership nor share, beyond the statutory dividend, in Reserve Bank "profits." … Bank ownership and election at the base are therefore devoid of substantive significance, despite the superficial appearance of private bank control that the formal arrangement creates.
