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Re:Ask HN: Companies/non profits working against climate change by randomgoose on Sunday September 20, 2020 @11:27PM (#24539496)
That's a very different model I was not even aware of. Do you have any others' in mind as well?
Re:Ask HN: Companies/non profits working against climate change by PaulHoule on Monday September 21, 2020 @09:18AM (#24542982)
I was thinking about doing a kickstarter to rent a boat and seed the oceans with iron:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_fertilization

This is illegal under the U.N. law of the Sea but thanks to Don Rumsfeld the U.S. is not a party to that law so if you only use ports in the U.S., Chile and a handful of other countries, nobody will stop you.

I wound up talking to some experts in the field and was told with no uncertainty not to try it, although I think the scientific arguments weren't entirely convincing.

---

The gist of it is this. If you want to make people pay money to solve the global warming problems you run straight into

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem

if you build some system for shuffling money (e.g. "Carbon Credits") around you now have a new problem that people are going to steal it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enron

If you can create a fully economically competitive energy source or carbon removal system people will use it and our great-grandchildren will remember that we solved this problem.

If we screw around with other things, the "way out" is that the 8 billion population ends up under 2 billion. CO2 emissions will not be a problem then, but our great-grandchildren will assign a death count that is roughly Hitler plus Stalin squared to our current political order.

I don't know what political/economic system they'll end up with but the Roman experience would lead us to think that they'll reject everything our civilization believes in.

Re:Ask HN: Companies/non profits working against climate change by maxbond on Tuesday September 22, 2020 @08:31PM (#24561628)
> I was thinking about doing a kickstarter to rent a boat and seed the oceans with iron

Maybe don't though.

- Phytoplankton blooms are often environmentally and economically harmful

- There's no actual guarantee you'll sequester carbon.

    - Consider that the biomass may end up in an anaerobic environment and digested into methane. Now you've converted carbon dioxide into a greenhouse gas 23x more powerful.

    - Iron may well not be the limiting factor in that part of the ocean & you'll just release carbon from your exhaust

    - How much carbon did it take to create this iron?
Edit: That being said, I do think that we should look to the Azolla Event as a model for how significant drawdown can be accomplished in a short timescale - but in controlled environments, not the ocean.