The World's Largest Vaccuum to Suck Climate Pollution From the Air Just Began Operating (cnn.com) 134
An anonymous reader shared this report from CNN:
The "world's largest" plant designed to suck planet-heating pollution out of the atmosphere like a giant vacuum began operating in Iceland on Wednesday. "Mammoth" is the second commercial direct air capture plant opened by Swiss company Climeworks in the country, and is 10 times bigger than its predecessor, Orca, which started running in 2021... Climeworks plans to transport the carbon underground where it will be naturally transformed into stone, locking up the carbon permanently... The whole operation will be powered by Iceland's abundant, clean geothermal energy....
Climeworks started building Mammoth in June 2022, and the company says it is the world's largest such plant. It has a modular design with space for 72 "collector containers" — the vacuum parts of the machine that capture carbon from the air — which can be stacked on top of each other and moved around easily. There are currently 12 of these in place with more due to be added over the next few months. Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That's equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year...
All the carbon removal equipment in the world is only capable of removing around 0.01 million metric tons of carbon a year, a far cry from the 70 million tons a year needed by 2030 to meet global climate goals, according to the International Energy Agency [7,000x more]... Jan Wurzbacher, the company's co-founder and co-CEO, said Mammoth is just the latest stage in Climeworks' plan to scale up to 1 million tons of carbon removal a year by 2030 and 1 billion tons by 2050. Plans include potential DAC plants in Kenya and the United States.
Climeworks started building Mammoth in June 2022, and the company says it is the world's largest such plant. It has a modular design with space for 72 "collector containers" — the vacuum parts of the machine that capture carbon from the air — which can be stacked on top of each other and moved around easily. There are currently 12 of these in place with more due to be added over the next few months. Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That's equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year...
All the carbon removal equipment in the world is only capable of removing around 0.01 million metric tons of carbon a year, a far cry from the 70 million tons a year needed by 2030 to meet global climate goals, according to the International Energy Agency [7,000x more]... Jan Wurzbacher, the company's co-founder and co-CEO, said Mammoth is just the latest stage in Climeworks' plan to scale up to 1 million tons of carbon removal a year by 2030 and 1 billion tons by 2050. Plans include potential DAC plants in Kenya and the United States.
But can it suck a monkey thru 30 ft of garden hose (Score:1)
?
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Stimpy, you eeediot!
Re: But can it suck a monkey thru 30 ft of garden (Score:1)
that is a Mythbusters episode I would watch.
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Try pornhub.
It's MegaMaid! (Score:5, Funny)
She's gone from suck to blow!
Good experiment, too early to implement (Score:5, Informative)
We do need to test the tech, but we shouldn't be implementing it at scale yet.
We release carbon to extract stored chemical energy. That energy must be returned to sequester carbon. For either direction, some energy is 'lost', not used for the purpose we intend it for.
The math is irrefutable - it would reduce atmospheric carbon more if this green energy was used to power whatever we want to power than to let those uses burn fossil fuels while this machine tries to clean up after them.
We're still releasing more CO2 every year despite increasing our green energy production. That must stop, and reverse. When essentially all our energy production is 'green' and there's some left over, THAT is when it is time for sequestration to start.
Re:Good experiment, too early to implement (Score:4, Informative)
This /is/ the testing the tech part, taking 7800 cars worth of carbon out of the atmosphere is nowhere near implementing it on scale. By the numbers in TFA, we would need 2000 of such plants to hit 2030 climate targets. I cannot even start to imagine how many we would need to stop global warming...
Also, you know Iceland is 100% renewable energy, right? While you are correct that this is not the most efficient way to go about the problem, it's at least some sort of a step in the right direction. Not every place has renewables available, but Iceland has basically endless geothermal. We could pay them to clean up after us, assuming the dip they create will not stay localized.
But the time to implement /anything/ on scale was decades ago. We are by now long into the runaway feedback loop part of the warming. Greenland is basically melted. Svalbard glaciers are gone, and without the cold meltwater from them, the Gulf Stream warm water is hitting the North Pole. The permafrost is melting everywhere, releasing amounts of carbon and methane that will end up dwarfing everything we have put out there. I'ts time to brace for impact.
Re:Good experiment, too early to implement (Score:4, Insightful)
> Also, you know Iceland is 100% renewable energy, right?
85% to be exact if you include transport, but I understand your point: https://www.government.is/topi... [government.is]
- $1,000 is cost of one one ton of CO2 they clean, and they aim to drop it to around $500 per ton.
- Coal plants produce 1 ton of CO2 with each MWh of electricity and that electricity costs about 60 dollars.
So, we pay 60 dollars from the electricity and then we pay 500-1000 dollars to clean up the CO2 from it. Lets think this the other way. Let's put additional cost to the CO2 plant, so that the electricity from it costs 560 dollars per MWh, 10 times more expensive.
So if we want to solve this problem by paying more, we just need to increase the price of producing CO2 and we don't need these cleaners as batteries, wind, solar, hydrogen production etc. becomes so much cheaper in comparison that everyone will instantly switch to those. And even if they don't, with that kind of cost, it would be trivial to take the CO2 our of the coal plant directly.
This seems so stupid idea that I don't understand why someone would put millions of dollars into this. Or did I make some mistake in my math?
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Your math does not include the cost of replacing 1.5 billion cars and 350 million commercial vehicles and building charging infrastructure around the globe for those vehicles.
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They expect to hit $300 by 2030, not $500 [cbsnews.com]. And comparing it to the cost of coal without CO2 capture makes no sense; you need to compare to the cost of alternatives to coal that don't have CO2 emissions but can still serve the same baseload role.
But yes, it does seem like too expensive of a solution. They'll need to do much better than $300.
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Yah I goofed up saying 100% renewable energy, while thinking 100% renewable electricity.
In any case, the math right now does not necessarily need to make sense. If someone is willing to pay for this plant, that's good enough for starts. What is more interesting here is that the plant should hopefully hint at how much the cost per ton would be if we built 1000 or 10000 of them. If the economy of scale works out, there should be a significant price decrease.
The good news is the cost of renewables as compared
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The numbers for doing anything sounds large when you apply it to the whole planet. But the planet has 8 billion people. Exactly how many man-hours of their labour, for how long do you think was needed building this plant and producing the raw materials that it was built from? The answer is going to be a tiny number relative to the total man-hours of the global labour pool.
Everything we do on a global scale involves mind-b
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You have misread my post. Nowhere did I say anything about 2000 being a lot. In fact I hinted that 2000 could probably be achieved in Iceland alone... In the paragraph that you quote from, I bring up the number to show that /one/ plant is nowhere near a scale deployment. That's it.
Now whether cost-effectiveness has anything to do with building them or not, I would say not. Global warming is going to be a major cost-ineffective way to go about our affairs, to make it an understatement, yet we have allowed it
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I may have misunderstood your intent :)
Re:Good experiment, too early to implement (Score:4, Informative)
We do need to test the tech, but we shouldn't be implementing it at scale yet. We release carbon to extract stored chemical energy. That energy must be returned to sequester carbon.
In this case, no. The carbon dioxide isn't reduced (CO2 --> C + O2). Instead the carbon dioxide is converted into carbonate rocks (e.g., CO2+CaO --> CaCO3).
Re: Good experiment, too early to implement (Score:2)
The good thing about mankind is that there is about 7 billions of us
So we can do two things at once. We can work on reducing our emissions of CO2, while working on prototyping new kinds of carbon capture systems.
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Your understanding of what's happening is not.
Deep buried rocks are not in some minimum energy state with respect to the atmosphere. As you can readily see from the rapid chemical changes that happen to lava flows when exposed to the atmosphere - most visibly, the oxidation of FeO to Fe2O3. Not only is deep buried rock not exposed to the atmosphere, but the thermodynamic equlibria are also different under their different temperatures and pressures. In said rocks, calcium and magne
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You're neglecting the cost to transport the energy.
You can suck carbon from anywhere on earth and the atmosphere will move the remaining CO2 around efficiently. Thus, when you have massive green energy (like Iceland's CO2, or the Sahara's solar), you can take advantage of that energy *where it is*.
The energy in Iceland is simply not useful to move vehicles around in North America or Europe.
Yeah, but you can't sell 'use less' for a profit. (Score:2)
At least not easily. This way they can sell us the mistake AND the cure!
I like that you're viewing it as an energy storage medium though. That's one thing most environmentalists don't seem to acknowledge. That there is a purpose and an energy gradient/transfer happening.
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That is what they are doing. This is the 2nd small-scale prototype, nothing else. The idea is that the human race _will_ put too much CO2 into the atmosphere (due to sheer incapability of preventing that) and hence, if human civilization wants to survive, it has to be removed again. Yes, not putting that CO2 out there would be a far better approach. But do you see that working? I do not and these people do not either. So they are trying to create a solution that may make the problem less severe later down t
8700 cars ? (Score:5, Insightful)
paying someone to stop driving would be cheaper.
Re: 8700 cars ? (Score:2)
Tax everyone by the kilometer of driving. And some people will stop driving and you'll make money. Use this money for carbon capture.
It's a scam (Score:5, Informative)
It's all a scam, just like how the plastic industry created recycling so we wouldn't demand less plastic the oil industry is doing this crap to slow the move off their product.
Please for the love of all that's holy can we not fall for these scams?
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Not a scam, just inefficient.
Also these are just commercially run pilot scale plants to see if they work. The whole point of such operations is to determine whether they are in any way viable. If you dismiss all projects like this. ... Well actually climate change would be solved since we wouldn't have oil refineries or power plants either. Hazzar!
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They are also one way to net zero. The net part means we don't stop emitting CO2 entirely, but when we do emit we capture the same amount somewhere else.
If some process really needs to emit CO2, and the same amount can be captured this way, it's an option for them. It won't fix climate change, but it may allow some industries to reach net zero.
No still a scam (Score:2)
But these are ultimately a scam because they're not meant to solve the problem they are meant to make you feel good about continuing to use fossil fuels instead of changing to better a
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These end up putting out more than they take in because of the effort to build and maintain them.
Something you can quantify only after you build pilot plants. The world runs on engineering, not just Fox News opinions.
1-2-3-4 (Score:2)
OMG that's the same combination as my suitcase!
Just FYI (Score:2)
Just the beginning. (Score:2)
"36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year" is basically nothing. I actually wonder how much carbon this entire operation took.
I wonder how much carbon was coming out of the blowhole selling this bullshit solution to investors. That was the first carbon that needed capturing.
If we thought the multi-trillion dollar EV venture was a scam, just wait until “solution” providers hear how much governments are giving away in a desperate bid to look the politically correct shade of green.
Trees (Score:4, Insightful)
We have had this technology for several years now. The devices are in widespread use. You've probably seen one.
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Trees aren't new sexy tech and no one ever got billions of tax payer dollars to build trees.
Furthermore, "OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) reports that on average, there are over 100 landscape and tree fall fatalities every year", so trees are bad. They kill people. We must eliminate trees to save children.
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Indeed. They do have problems though. Their CO2 uptake over life is minimal. A single one of these crappy little pilot units will easily outclass an entire forest.
Trees are good for many reasons, soil quality, nature habitats, errosion prevention, shade just to name a few. But they will do fuck all to capture CO2 in any meaningful capacity. It's just one of the reasons that forest based carbon credits were such a huge scam.
Yeah, why not force/promote more biomass? (Score:2)
I'd be curious to compare or estimate how much CO2 is being dealt with by some size of plants growing on the surface. Maybe comparing typical urban versions like sparse trees, shrubs, and grass versus a rainforest or jungle (I assume highest activity).
Seems nobody wants to regulate or promote that method of carbon capture. "No, you can't just burn stuff and assume it doesn't matter." "Yes, we should be paying people to keep plants alive on their property to use up some of the CO2 being released, and use
Why in such a low-production location? (Score:2)
That area doesn't really generate a whole lot of pollution. A better place to run this would be China, India, or any major US population center. They have plenty of locations for underground storage, some areas of geothermal energy alongside those areas for storage, and they have far more land area than Iceland for storage.
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Not emitting CO2 in the first place is a much better strategy in all aspects, so these kinds of plants should only be put where renewable energy is abundant.
Not emitting CO2 in the first place is a better strategy, so the money spent on projects like this should be spent on renewables instead and the places where there's an excess of it already should be using the power to make something that would otherwise be made with CO2-emitting energy sources elsewhere.
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That area doesn't really generate a whole lot of pollution.
Don't worry, this gadget won't keep up with anywhere near what the area does produce. Iceland has about a third of a million cars and I bet that at least 7800 of them are gas powered.
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The finally managed to utilize.. (Score:1)
Meanwhile (Score:2)
Meanwhile, some waste of precious oxygen puts a datacenter on top of a natural gas source, sending massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere in order to produce absolutely nothing of value. The second law of Thermodynamics, paraphrased: it is way harder to get whatever was in Pandora's box back inside, than not opening the box in the first place. Carbon capture reduces entropy, thus it is complicated and takes energy. It is interesting how society can only manage to invest in a few such large industrial en
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If we're going to spends billions or trillions on removing excess gas from the atmosphere, we can't know how much to spend if we don't know how much excess gas there is.
What's the correct amount of CO2?
Without a target this is nothing but greenwashing.
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"Need more research" is a classic climate change denial [wikipedia.org] tactic. The research community is in complete agreement on what are reasonable targets. Climate accords have set targets globally, which countries would not have committed serious investments and efforts towards if it was a bunch of nothing.
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I never said more research. You're putting words in my mouth.
There are accords, yay. Nice.
Now answer the simple question: what's the number?
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I doubt there are many places where you can produce CO2 "for free".
Germany has a CO2 tax.
If you produce large scale CO2, you need CO2 certificates.
Mineral oil/gasoline is something like 95% taxes: mineral oil tax, CO2 tax, VAT.
Suck & blows at the same time (Score:2)
snow CO2 in antarctica (Score:2)
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that would be temperature at a certain pressure but alas Antarctica has elevation at those coldest places.
I do want to hear how you're going to air condition all of the south pole, where would the heat be pumped to?
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Like all air conditioners, the heat has to be moved somewhere, just like a refrigerator dumps heat out the coils in the back, or window AC blows hot air outside.
So for your idea one possibility would be powering a laser that shoots energy into sky at wavelength not absorbed by air, lasers are a non-thermodynamic source of energy which is why they can make a target much hotter than the lasing medium.
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to be clear I meant "thermodynamic source" in the 19th century heat source and heat flow definition, lasers do of course obey thermodynamics in the modern expanded sense of energy. But they don't move energy as heat engines.
Hopeless endeavor (Score:2)
It's so much harder to remove CO2 from the atmosphere -- where the concentration is a mere 0.04% -- than it is to remove it from
Suitable for Iceland (Score:2)
Tons? (Score:2)
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Gotta start somewhere (Score:2)
All the carbon removal equipment in the world is only capable of removing around 0.01 million metric tons of carbon a year, a far cry from the 70 million tons a year needed by 2030 to meet global climate goals, according to the International Energy Agency [7,000x more]...
Well, we gotta start somewhere. The journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step, and all that.
By contrast, the only thing that preening, emoting, and accusing has accomplished is to release more CO2, from certain mouths ...
A bit of perspective (Score:4, Insightful)
Rounding to the nearest integer: to meet 2030 global climate goals we need 70,000,000 tons / 36,000 = 1,944 Mammoth units. So if ~2K Mammoths can be built in 5.5 years we can meet the goals. Each Mammoth removes the equivalent of 7,800 ICE vehicles' worth of CO2 - that's 15,163,200 cars. Would it be cheaper and easier to - worldwide - transition 15M ICE cars to electric?
To be clear, I'm not slamming what Climeworks is doing. I've said before that we need climate action on all fronts. That includes sequestration - if we hit zero GhG emissions tomorrow we'd still need to be looking for ways to 'turn back the clock'.
But I find many such stories to be a bit obfuscatory. I'd like to see simple, quick analyses like the one I just did as part of every such news story. News media need to educate people about these issues, keeping in mind that the majority of readers won't do the arithmetic shown above.
That said, overall the CNN piece seems good and well-balanced. It contains a key piece of info which should probably have been part of the Slashdot summary: "Climeworks did not give an exact cost for each ton of carbon removed, but said it was closer to $1,000 a ton than $100 a ton – the latter of which is widely seen as a key threshold for making the technology affordable and viable".
There's another point I'd like to see pushed in climate stories. If we meet 2030 global climate goals it's not an opportunity to relax, to celebrate, and to call the job done. Rather, at that point we may have bought ourselves a few more years of time in which we might be able to save our asses if we work really hard.
Interesting (Score:2)
Microsoft invests in carbon removal (Score:1)
Microsoft is buying a significant amount of that carbon offset, now if we could just create and incentive structure for the fossil fuel industry to either buy credits or build the same devices.
https://climeworks.com/press-r... [climeworks.com]
Do we have too much CO2? (Score:1)
Carbon Dioxide Level Changes over Earth’s History [locals.com].
Based on what?
“Vaccuum” (Score:2)
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Plans (Score:2)
New project plans to process all of earth's air in just 42 centuries, a new record.
what a waste (Score:1)
Trees do this for free; instead of spending money on carbon capture technologies put the money towards protecting forests and planting more trees!
OR.... (Score:2)
Permanently locked up? (Score:2)
"...locking up the carbon permanently."
So what will we do in three or four or five centuries, or maybe twenty, when for some reason we can't imagine today, the atmosphere has not enough CO2? There's no way to free up that carbon? No way to use it for something useful, to make it into plastics, diamond, nanotubes, or create more bio-matter perhaps to put on the Moon or Mars or something? Today we can't imagine a good use for the carbon we might extract from the air, but who knows what we may need in the futu
What about the ecological damage? (Score:1)
Will no one think of all the bugs and birds this thing will destroy? https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Vaccum? (Score:1)
OOh (Score:2)
> Mammoth will be able to pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere a year at full capacity, according to Climeworks. That's equivalent to taking around 7,800 gas-powered cars off the road for a year...
WOW!
So much!
OMG
Next up: The source of the Thames is the result of one school flushing the loos.
Re:Words mean things (Score:5, Interesting)
It is when there is too much of it in the wrong place.
Plastic bottle on store shelf full of product = not pollution. Same bottle, empty, floating on an otherwise scenic lake = pollution.
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Same thing with fertilizer: Too much will kill plants, not enough will kill plants, just right will help them grow optimally.
Context, as always, is key.
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This. Also when fertilizer washes into rivers and streams causing rampant algae growth.
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I don't like the use of the word, either, but the reasoning, after much discussion and a lawsuit, is that the legal definition of "pollution" is releasing substances into the environment whose nature produces undesirable effects, and that carbon dioxide fits the definition. (Massachusetts v. EPA :: 549 U.S. 497 2007).
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Ozone is also a natural part of the atmosphere but we do call it pollution when it's where it doesn't belong, due to human action. Pollution is about the act, and the harm. You can pollute a freshwater environment by releasing natural salt water into it.
Re: Words mean things (Score:5, Insightful)
Neither is water, can I put 6 feet of water in your living room?
Re:Words mean things (Score:4, Insightful)
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Carbon dioxide is not pollution.
pollution /pl(j)un/
noun
"the presence in or introduction into the environment of a substance which has harmful or poisonous effects."
Now unless you are so mentally handicapped that in 2024 you still believe that climate change isn't directly linked to CO2 emissions, CO2 perfectly meets the dictionary definition of pollution. You're right, words mean things. Read a book.
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That is quite interesting definition. Because
1. Without CO2, plants would die and with the plants, all of the life, so it is essential molecule for life.
2. More CO2 will improve plant life, so it does have also positive effects.
3. Anything is harmful if there is too much of it, and there is too much CO2 (even the plants suffer from the heating effects of it)
So CO2 is considered pollution only because there is so much of it, not because of what it is. So by definition, CO2 as a molecule is not a pollution in
Re: Words mean things (Score:3)
That *is* interesting. How tall are the highest plants? How high is the atmosphere?
Is it possible for something to have more than one effect?
I'm pretty sure grain is duck food, what happens if we force-feed a duck two or three times its normal food portion?
Is the extra dose food or poison?
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If you force feed a duck, you get a big fat delicious duck.
What was your point?
Re: Words mean things (Score:2)
That it's not good for the duck. What's your point?
Re: Words mean things (Score:2)
That's right, and we are not planets either.
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Lol, no. The net has thousands of articles on duck force feeding methods. You're ridiculous. Stay AC.
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No, I'm saying I like duck. How was that not obvious when my last 3 posts in a row were about duck?
You're not very bright.
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. . . what happens if we force-feed a duck two or three times its normal food portion? Is the extra dose food or poison?
It's called Foie Gras, and no it is not poison. You're welcome.
Re:Words mean things (Score:5, Insightful)
1) Alle Dinge sind Gift, und nichts ist ohne Gift; allein die Dosis macht, dass ein Ding kein Gift ist.
2) Increasing CO2 levels does help plants, via reducing photorespiration per unit carbon fixed. Not, however, as much as killing them with worsened weather harms them (in particular; a warming client sees the monsoon belts move poleward, dries out soil faster, makes rivers more seasonal, and increases the intensity of peak rain events - aka, both drought and flood become more common). Plants also have optimal cultivation temperatures, and most are C3 plants, which tend to not like hot weather. Higher temperatures make them less efficient, and again, to a greater degree than CO2 helps them. C4 plants are generally better at dealing with drought and higher temperatures, but they don't benefit as much from increased CO2 availability, as they're already so good at capturing CO2 and could grow in CO2 levels a tiny fraction of that which we have now.
3) This is a bizarre argument. So, say, if I dump tonnes of cobalt in your drinking water, that's not pollution, because the human body needs to consume billionths of a gram per day? Some bacteria produce energy from oxidizing arsenic or using arsenic compounds to conduct photosynthesis - you okay with me contaminating your food supply with it? Some bacteria consume uranium - okay for me to fill your air with uranium dust?
The post you're responding to is literally quoting the dictionary.
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The negatives of having more CO2 in the atmosphere far outweigh the positives [skepticalscience.com].
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Your attempt to change common language based on edge cases and a complete lack of understanding of the the words in the definition is ironic in the context of you trying to define a word. Hint: The ability for a substance to cause harm depends on concentration. Just because a plant breaths CO2 doesn't mean it isn't harmful. I suggest you don't actually sit around trying to breath CO2 yourself to prove a point, it won't end well for you.
The definition is perfectly fine if you bother to understand every word
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bets.
i lost this one.
i was thinking the power source was gasoline
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It should seem stupidly inefficient because it is. It's a boondoggle that will break down and be abandoned.
The purpose of these boondoggles is providing photo ops for politicians. When money for maintenance of the site is needed there won't be any. The money will be sunk into new boondoggles, because maintaining the existing boondoggles provides no photo op, whereas new boondoggles do.
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If only we had a way to create really cheap and small self repairing devices that require no maintenance that we could just deliver everywhere and they would grow in size with solar power by using the CO2 in the air as a fuel, possibly even producing some useful products like fuel, shade and food as a side product.
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Indeed. Like dropping a giant ice cube into the ocean.
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CO2 levels where emissions are high are only very slightly higher than CO2 levels where they aren't. If this weren't so then the negative health effects would be obvious because high CO2 levels cause cognitive impairment and panic.
*looks at cities*
Er, wait...
Re: Why not just put near a power plant? (Score:2)
Why not use the money that would have to go into carbon removal to do it more efficiently, by buying up all the coal you can and dump it in the deep sea?
It's just insane that people are still burning coal for marginally profitable electricity production whist other people are struggling to capture a tiny portion of the CO2 (but not the other pollutants) at great expense.
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Why not use the money that would have to go into carbon removal to do it more efficiently, by buying up all the coal you can and dump it in the deep sea?
Or you could pay me 1/2 that money and I'll leave the coal in the ground where we found it.
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It's not "a random place". It's at Hellisheiði, Iceland's largest geothermal plant, and one of the largest geothermal plants in the world. So that they can inject the CO2 down the wells of the plant, where it binds with the rock to form carbonates.
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