Two Companies are Now Selling Diamonds Made From Airborne CO2 (scientificamerican.com) 125
"Two companies are selling diamonds made in a laboratory from CO2 that once circled the Earth," reports Scientific American:
The sales pitch can be stunning. As Ryan Shearman, the founder and CEO of a New York-based company called Aether, recently explained to a reporter for Vogue magazine: Each carat of a diamond removes 20 tons of CO2. That, he said, is more invisible gas than the average person produces in a year.
With the purchase of a 2-carat diamond, Shearman pointed out, "you're essentially offsetting 2 and a half years of your life."
It can take Mother Nature as long as a billion years to make diamonds, which are formed in rocks. But as Shearman explained in an interview with E&E News, he has developed a patent-pending process that can make a batch of diamonds in a laboratory in four weeks. Unlike other laboratory-made diamonds, his process starts with CO2 removed from the air. The gas undergoes a chemical reaction where it is subjected to high pressure and extremely high temperatures. All of this is created using solar, wind or hydraulic power. Or, as Shearman sometimes puts it, "we're committed to the unprecedented modern alchemy of turning air pollution into precious stones." Aether has been selling its diamonds since the beginning of the year at prices ranging from $7,000 for a ring to around $40,000 for earrings with sparkling stone arrangements.
Aether has a competitor, a British company called Skydiamond...
With the purchase of a 2-carat diamond, Shearman pointed out, "you're essentially offsetting 2 and a half years of your life."
It can take Mother Nature as long as a billion years to make diamonds, which are formed in rocks. But as Shearman explained in an interview with E&E News, he has developed a patent-pending process that can make a batch of diamonds in a laboratory in four weeks. Unlike other laboratory-made diamonds, his process starts with CO2 removed from the air. The gas undergoes a chemical reaction where it is subjected to high pressure and extremely high temperatures. All of this is created using solar, wind or hydraulic power. Or, as Shearman sometimes puts it, "we're committed to the unprecedented modern alchemy of turning air pollution into precious stones." Aether has been selling its diamonds since the beginning of the year at prices ranging from $7,000 for a ring to around $40,000 for earrings with sparkling stone arrangements.
Aether has a competitor, a British company called Skydiamond...
More invisible gas than the average person.... (Score:2)
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I have grave concerns about anyone who produces visible gas.
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If you exhale during a cold winter day you do, technically, produce visible gas.
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I always thought what you saw was condensing water droplets. Whatever you want to call it, steam or water vapor, water in gaseous form is not visible.
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Acktually it's a colloid of condensed water droplets.
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I want my money back. Fart jokes are guaranteed to be funny. Even implicit fart jokes!
Diamonds are great for grinding. (Score:2)
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Agreed, to me all decorative diamonds are blood diamonds, mined by either exploited workers or produced in labs to take advantage of exploited people who fell for sexist marketing campaigns (on top of taking a job away from the miners). There is nothing good about wearing a diamond.
Any diamond not used in a tool should be taxed to worthlessness.
Diamond is a store of wealth (Score:1)
Women in India prefer gold [businesstoday.in], Western women may prefer diamonds. In either case, it is simply a demonstration of the would suitor's wealth and his ability to provide for their future offspring.
It is not any more "sexist" than the two sexes' biological differences — and the roles they play in reproduction. Perhaps, some day, we'll have incubators — and then women will have arrived on the journey, that started, when the civilization developed running wat
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But a diamond isn’t actually a store of wealth, unlike gold.
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Diamonds can burn up in a fire... so much for forever.
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Yep - and the longer you keep them, the less they'll be worth. They'd already be worth little more than gravel if DeBeers emptied their vaults onto the market. And that was before we had a companies making lab-grade synthetic diamond far larger than almost any diamond ever mined, and vastly more perfect.
Natural diamonds are little more a DeBeers marketing ploy. They're sparkly, but not good for much other than jewelry, diamond anvils, and long-lasting tool grit (and I think cheap black diamond is actuall
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Anyone who feels the need to demonstrate their wealth with rocks is an asshole. Show you can provide by future offspring by owning a house, car, and having a stable in-demand job. You can't eat rocks. A diamond ring's value tanks the instant you step away from the jewelers.
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It is driven by the woman's expectations. Maybe, some day, you'll experience it too.
She "proves" her value with long healthy hair, clear skin, and perky breasts. You — with the display of wealth, whatever it might be.
You can sell the rocks — and buy food with the proceeds.
Yep, there is transaction cost to all stores of value...
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My wife's value is in her job and our shared interests and mutual enjoyment of each other's company. If I wanted a woman with long healthy hair, clear skin, and perky breasts above literally everything else I'd hire a high-class whore.
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The argument is not about your unfortunate person. Whether or not you, LenKagetsu, can have children, is irrelevant. Children are, what marriage is primarily about, for most. Without children marriage is just friendship — nothing to sneeze at, but not quite the same thing.
The woman's main contribution is healthy body — pregnancy is hard and, despite astounding advances, dangerous. Spartans buried most of their dead in unmarked graves except for a) men, who died in battle; b)
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Spartans buried most of their dead in unmarked graves except for a) men, who died in battle; b) women, who died giving birth.
That is nonsense. Spartans, just like any other greek: burned their dead And is true for everyone one who was rich enough, regardless if he died old age or in battle.
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Now this really is nonsense [wikipedia.org]. Not only were the dead not burned, normally, there was an elaborate ritual of washing the corpse and, most famously, placing a coin â" the "Charon's obol" â" into its mouth, so that the dead could pay the boater [wikipedia.org] for the one-way journey over Styx (something you'd expect taxpayers to pay for, I'm sure). ...
Yes, and then they were burned. Perhaps the ashes were entombed. More common was putting a coin on each eye instead into the mouth
Regar
Ancient Greek burial practices (Score:2)
I don't think so, but I'm happy to review your source — which you aren't providing despite me already requesting it once...
None of this really matters to the point I was making: that giving birth is hard and dangerous, which danger was recognized and respected by the people as hardy and ancient as Spartans.
Or, at least, by Plutarch, who lived two thousand years ago...
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Why do you not just google: "did the ancient greek burn their dead"?
Regarding Spartans, my assumption is that many things are just random writings which we for some reason still have. In my opinion (and I'm not alone) MOST Spartans had no special tombstone. Because they considered it fine not to be remembered or being remembered in history.
So, yes, as special honour all women dying in child birth got a NAMED tomb stone. But not necessarily everyone who died in battle. Basically only those who were buried on
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Re:Diamonds are great for grinding. (Score:4, Insightful)
How the fuck do you get 20 tons of carbon into a carat of diamond, what a massive crock of shit lie. What they are claiming is the amount of fossil fuels that would be burned to generate carbon dioxide to make those diamond. Instead they are utterly wasting all that renewable energy that could have reduced the burning of carbon dioxide in other areas of society that need energy.
Each and every carat of diamond they produce release 20 tons of carbon into the atmosphere, if instead the renewable energy they used, went to reducing fossil fuel use, elsewhere in the energy market. It is all part of one thing, waste renewables on rubbish like this.
The myopic greed of these animals, they count to their credit not generating 20 tons of carbon dioxide by using renewable energy instead. NO FUCKERS 20 tons of carbon did not go into a carat of diamond 0.2 grams of carbon went into that diamond. Your idiotic greed meant that 20 tons of carbon were produced elsewhere in the economy instead of using that renewable energy. YOU SAVED FUCK ALL, you just did not do it directly.
This is a PR=B$ thing, the whole bullshit stunt, the rag that printed it as fact, UNscientific American for profit. They want to hide the continued production of diamonds behind crap like this. So fucking slimey. BAN DIAMOND JEWELLERY
Re:Diamonds are great for grinding. (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't know - how efficient is the diamond-growing process? If it were bad enough you might require a few tons of CO2 to produce a gram of diamond.
Lets see - 1 caret of diamond contains a whopping 0.2g of carbon, while 20 tonnes of CO2 only contains about 5.5 tonnes of carbon. So you'd only have to waste about 99.999 9963% of the carbon for their numbers to work out. Seems a little high, but if you used a terribly inefficient process that produced mountains of coal for every caret of diamond, and then buried the coal as a soil additive rather than disposing of it where it would oxidize back into CO2, their bald-faced lying numbers would work out. /sarcasm
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Biochar is charcoal, not coal. To be more precise, it is a form of charcoal with a huge surface area: if unfolded, one gram of biochar could cover a tennis court with a very thin membrane.
It is biochar's large surface area folded in a way that provides a vast amount of room for complex microbiomes that makes biochar such a great soil amendment.
Probably the best form of carbon sequestration is granular biochar tilled into the topsoil of farm land. The carbon is removed from circulation for a thousand years
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No, it would still only take (I'm not doing the math) a smell amount of CO2. You don't get to include waste in your results.
It takes a small amount of aluminum to make a soda can. If your machining is so crappy that a pound per can is sluffed off, you don't get to count that as what the can took.
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I disagree - if you're advertising that "buying this diamond pulls 20 tons of CO2 from the air" - you're not necessarily implying that the CO2 ended up in the final product - just that, for some reason, buying the diamond will result in them puling 20 tons of CO2 from the air. If that happens because they run a completely unrelated CO2 sequestration system that's pulling the 20 tons of CO2 out of the air for every caret of diamond sold as a sales gimmick, that's still delivering exactly what they promised.
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I was thinking the remaining 5.5 tonnes perhaps end up as micro diamonds used in the industry and only 1 or two nice diamonds get created during that process.
I read the article, I did not find anything explaining that discrepancy.
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Wearing synthetic diamonds to defy the monopoly abuse and apartheid abuse of South African natives by the Debeers family for centuries of South African history could be a political act, even a moral one.
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Diamonds are great for grinding
All sorts of cutting jobs. I mean I now everyone says diamonds are hard and all but they are really astonishingly good. I've got one of those diamond abrasive oscillating cutting tools, which I've used to cut channels in brick and cement (themselves horribly abrasive materials), and it's not showing the slightest signs of wear after some pretty solid use.
Also heatsinks. Fun fact the most expensive diamonds make the best heatsinks: if you make a diamond out of depleted carbon (
SkyDiamonds: BUSTED! (Score:1)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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Stay away from Thunderf00t. He used to be quite entertaining and rational (going after quite obvious kickstarter scams e.g. the solar roadway thing) but then he just went all clickbaity and seems to be on a personal crusade against Elon Musk.
Now there are a lot of reasonable area in which you can attack Elon's positions (um, basically every Tesla autonomy day), but thunderf00t's last video on spacex was just weird. He claimed that spacex is lying about falcon 9 reusability saving money because they still ch
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I can't say I agree with his videos on SpaceX either but this one is less bad I guess.
These CO2 diamonds are basically a novelty or luxury product and not a cost effective way to offset carbon in any way by any measure.
I agree his point that solar roadways and hyperloop are total scams though.
Where does the other 20 tons of CO2 go? (Score:2)
Even if you make a gem-grade diamond from atmospheric CO2, a one carat stone is considered pretty big -- anything bigger and we are into Karen Hill in Goodfellas wondering where he got the money.
So where are most of the 20 tons of CO2 ending up? Is this a deal where you purchase a diamond and they send you a certificate for 20 tons of carbon offsets by planting trees or replacing diesel generators with solar panels in another country or some such thing?
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It seems that the energy demand of the process is so high that it would produce 20 tons of CO2 with conventional energy carriers. Depending on your assumptions, that would equate to an energy demand of 50 000 kWh, or an energy cost of maybe $5000. And the company is "saving" this CO2 emission by using green energy.
It is really just a big lie.
Re: Where does the other 20 tons of CO2 go? (Score:2)
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Actually a good idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Obviously most of the posts on here will be about the thermodynamic insanity of doing this from a net CO2 emissions point of view, but I actually think it's still a good idea.
The reason is that the whole diamond industry is stupid. Even my generally quite enviro-conscious girlfriend still wanted a diamond when we got engaged, despite knowing how destructive and pointless the industry was. It's just ~100 years of incredibly successful marketing that has grafted itself into the deepest parts of our culture. Everyone is doing it - even those who think they are being responsible by using recycled or heirloom rings are still helping to perpetuating the industry's cultural narrative.
We have had industrial diamonds for a while now, but the gem industry has just been too good at selling the mystique around those stupid 'natural' rocks. In that respect, I think the only way to beat the diamond industry is with this sort of rubbish about it 'saving the planet' as well. If that is what it takes then good on them.
If at the end of this we have all the newly engaged going around thinking the shiny factory produced rock on their finger is 'saving the planet from climate change' instead of buying a rock dug out of the ground by an African child, then that is progress.
Missed Opportunity (Score:3)
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I think you have it wrong.
Women, being generally in a lower position of power, want a sacrifice from Men to show their commitment to the relationship. Flowers are a great example of this. In fact it even matters where you buy them. Florist flowers carry more significance than supermarket flowers, because of the what it cost the man in time and cost to procure them. Same with Diamonds. They are are just another marker saying, this relationship is worth making a sacrifice for so thing that is essentially symb
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It has nothing to do with position of power. Women in aggregate are genetically hardwired to want a partner that supplies more resources than them. Amusingly, as they have gained employment parity this had led to them being unhappy that men "aren't making enough money' and that 'there are no good men anymore'. It's all a bunch of bullshit of course.
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Ah, /., the place to go for accurate and unbiased information about "how women work."
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He's right and you know it.
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Women in aggregate are genetically hardwired to want a partner that supplies more resources than them.
You've never interacted with women in aggregate, have you. Your collection of body pillow waifus aren't women.
Also, can you wash your hands before posting next time? You got cheeto dust all over the post.
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The fact that small diamonds are sold by weight (and cheaply) is a good indicator that these rocks are essentially worthless. Yes, the marketing and the artifical shortages and the fact that a few players control the entire market - diamonds are a scam. Maybe the 2nd most successful scam in human history (after religion).
I've managed to convince my wife that other gems are better and diamonds are crap. It's not an ideal solution (given under what conditions many of them are mined), but it's a step forward.
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Most other gems are definitely in my eyes more beautiful.
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Synthetic diamonds of "better than natural" quality have been around for awhile, and they can be had for only a few dollars if you can find anyone willing to actually produce and sell them at such a price (DeBeers launched a campaign to prevent their proliferation involving blacklights and other chicanery; now DeBeers actually sells them, albeit at a huge markup). I'm curious as to why Aether needs $7000 for a 2c stone when one can be made in a centrifuge with "normal" feed stock for like, $4? Or so?
Sounds
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Wrongfully downvoted.
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Correct, and they're pretty cheap to make if I recall correctly.
Why this is a stupid idea (Score:3)
Bottom line: Completely irrelevant amounts of CO2 bound at enormous energy cost.
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Thus any argument regarding the cost of mining diamonds is completely off-topic.
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That's a pretty shitty and short-sighted bottom line. Nothing about the tons of CO2 emitted during mining, transport, processing, etc. You can't call that video comprehensive when it doesn't even get two levels deep into the process of sourcing/origin.
It's not the diamond itself, it's the removal of all those carbon-generating sources and using clean energy to make a diamond out of literal thin air.
Try again when you've got an actual comprehensive video that breaks down everything. A thirty-minute video isn
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Bottom line: Completely irrelevant amounts of CO2 bound at enormous energy cost.
More or less energy cost than child slave labour and keeping countries run by militia?
20 tonnes? Are these people bad at maths? (Score:3)
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So where does the 5.453+ tons of carbon go?
That was my question too. "Each carat of a diamond removes 20 tons of CO2." One carat of which, 0.2 grams, goes to the diamond. What happens to the rest?
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Re:20 tonnes? Are these people bad at maths? (Score:5, Interesting)
I think that what they are saying is it avoids the 20 tons of CO2 emitted during the mining of the same sized natural diamond.
They are just saying it in a very misleading way to fool stupid people.
You can save 20 tons of CO2 by buying their product, or you can save the same 20 tons of CO2 buy not buying their product.
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I think that what they are saying is it avoids the 20 tons of CO2 emitted during the mining of the same sized natural diamond.
That is the trick. Sky Diamonds makes it clear on its web site.
Hence for our carbon footprint, it is better to purchase a lab-made diamond than an extracted diamond, but it is even better to not purchase a diamond at all.
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They're diamond merchants. The entire industry revolves around selling cleverly marketed sparkly gravel at rare gemstone prices. These guys are practically saintly honest in context.
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You can save 20 tons of CO2 by buying their product, or you can save the same 20 tons of CO2 buy not buying their product.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other.
A fool and his money is soon parted.
Sounds like a win-win.
Re: 20 tonnes? Are these people bad at maths? (Score:2)
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Each carat removes 20 tons of greenhouse gas from the sky, entrepreneurs say
You would want about 10-15 tons of diamonds to offset 20 tons of CO2,
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2.7 tons: Diamonds are 100% carbon, while CO2 = 12/(12+16*2) = ~27.3% carbon.
Of course there's efficiency to consider - some diamond-producing techniques create small diamonds within large blocks of coal, in which case the coal can be used as a fertility-enhancing soil additive and still remain removed from the atmosphere. Though 2.7 tons of coal to produce 0.2g of diamond sounds grossly worse than anything I've heard of.
I broght tequila... (Score:2)
There was an infamous Ig Nobel prize for turning tequila into diamonds.
https://phys.org/news/2008-11-... [phys.org]
To be fair, for what most guys want... (Score:4, Funny)
...tequila is as effective as diamonds. Cheaper too.
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Oh. Oh, thank you, that's the most fun I've had all day.
News for idiots; Stuff that matters to nobody (Score:1)
A fool and his money ... will buy ten of these.
CO2 from the air..? (Score:2)
TFA makes it sound like they collect the CO2 from donations/industrial sources. Which isn't inherently a bad thing, but substantially different to "from the air"
Despite it being super energy inefficient, I do like the idea. If the diamonds can be sold to meet the initial costs of setting up a renewable source of power, then why not? It doesn't have to be efficient to be effective..
the opportunity cost (Score:4, Insightful)
So this is done with 'green' energy. Lots of it! Each diamond represents some CO2, but also gobs of energy. TFS doesn't make it clear how much energy is used for extracting carbon from the air, and how much is used for compressing it. Seems likely that compression is most energy consuming and least beneficial to anyone. Best to just bury the carbon.
What if that compression energy was used for a different purpose such as energizing homes, businesses and vehicles?
Which would be the better application of that green energy? Diamonds, which are already hoarded in huge warehouses by De Beers, etc.? Or uses that benefit people and the planet?
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It's complicated and detail-dependent. It makes a difference where you locate your operation, and whether you operate your own on-site renewable power plant or draw power off the grid in some kind of retail supply competition scheme. If you build a local renewable plant -- something that would make sense if you're running an energy intensive process 7x24 year after year, then it has no effect on other users of electricity's choices, so there's no reason to worry about the amount of energy used.
As for it
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CO2 gas a is high entropy configuration involving carbon.
Diamonds are a low entropy configuration of carbon.
You can calculate a lower bound for the energy expended to turn the former into the latter if you remember your physics classes.
Let's not be hypocrite (Score:1)
I've read many replies of people complaining about the energy required to create those BUT... ...that same people is using BitCoin and other digital scam currency which is just wasting energy for the sake of wasting energy.
Re: Let's not be hypocrite (Score:1)
Yes, all of them. Not a single person isn't. And you personally checked each one, making notes of every stance they ever expressed. I your head-reality --.--
I think better uses of the green energy (Score:2)
Fools and their money... (Score:2)
If people are that serious about their carbon footprints, there is a mountain of things they ought to stop doing soon... Never using Bitcoin is probably near the top.
Airborne CO2? (Score:2)
1 carat = 0.2 grams ... NOT 20 tons (Score:2)
WTF does the 20 tons number come from?
A diamond is pure carbon. It's weight is it's carbon content. The corresponding CO2 mass is (44/12)*(0.2) = 0.73 grams. A typical person exhales over 1400 grams of CO2 a day.
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Yeah I was wondering the same thing. This must be some terribly disingenuous way of counting all the energy that went into making it using a renewable source or something -- or just outright wrong? You can kind of disprove this using some basic assumptions as well: if it offsets 2.5 years of energy use as they claim and the average person uses 10,909 kWh / year (google) and we use low cost energy in the rural south of 10 cents / kWh this diamond has an energy cost of ~$2,700 per carat. There's no way a one
diamonds (Score:2)
20 tons? (Score:2)
At those amounts, the diamond creation process is not even a rounding error when it comes to the amounts of captured carbon involved; I suspect that its sole purpose is putting a nice marketing spin with some virtue signaling on on the entire operation.
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Just to nitpick: no it is not 4grams, it is 0.4grams.
Anything that DeBeers doesn't like is a good thing (Score:2)
Cartels are bad. It's a monopoly by any other name.
4g of co2 per carat & 40kwh’s energy (Score:1)
Old scam is old. Suckers still being born. (Score:2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]. You'd store more CO2 in one of those home soda carbonation tanks.
that's a little sus (Score:2)
So what's their explanation for that? Oxygen is 10000000x heavier than carbon or the diamonds actually weight several tons or the diamonds are magic and use anti-gravity?
Doesn't have a good ring to it (Score:2)
Give your loved one the gift of smog!
Rather interesting math they're using (Score:2)
1 carat is 0.2 grams. And 0.2 grams of carbon can be extracted from 0.734 grams of carbon dioxide. So, how in the world are they able to claim that 20 tons of carbon dioxide is being removed from the atmosphere?
How much CO2 does it take .... (Score:2)
... to make one? Has anybody answered that question?
And uh, how much power is used to make these? (Score:2)
Just a guess that the carbon footprint of the plant, the power needed to build the plant and the equipment, the worker's homes, cars and the power needed to create these things wasn't factored in. It never seems to be in these little happy-talk "We've solved the [energy/global warming/other] crisis" stories.
Energy (Score:2)
>"With the purchase of a 2-carat diamond, Shearman pointed out, "you're essentially offsetting 2 and a half years of your life."
Except for all the energy the company uses- the process, the lights, the HVAC, the computer systems, the metals, the marketing, packaging, energy that made the machines, etc, etc. Unless of course, all that was "green" (which I doubt). I mean, if you are going to play the virtue signaling game, better make sure you cover all your bases.
Definitely (Score:1)
Definitely the best way to fight global warming. Yeah, that's the ticket. We'll all be swimming in riches, and the planet will be so healthy.
Diamonds4Fools (TM) and Diamonds4Idiots (TM) (Score:2)
Make money from taking it from idiots who save the environment with this? Why not!