What's the cheapest Carbon Capture system we can imagine - $100 per tonne? Most are running at about $500/tonne right now.

At just $15/tonne of Carbon Tax, we halve CO2 output, mainly by destroying the economics of coal:

https://www.pgpf.org/budget-basics/what-is-a-carbon-tax-how-...

All the effort and funding currently spent on carbon capture should instead go towards lobbying for carbon taxes. The impact will be significantly greater.

The best use of Carbon Capture technology would be in building ventilation systems. If we can capture and exhaust CO2 from inside air, we can reduce ventilation requirements, and potentially reach lower-than-atmospheric CO2 levels (which could have extraordinary benefits for cognition and sleep quality).

> At just $15/tonne of Carbon Tax, we halve CO2 output, mainly by destroying the economics of coal

Here is page 122 of NextEra’s investor deck. They are closing all coal plants by 2028 as they are no longer profitable to run. Even without a carbon adder per MWh, coal is dead (“near firm” solar and wind are renewables with battery backing to make them dispatchable when called on by the grid operator). Even existing combined cycle natural gas is under pressure! And their note: “We expect further technology improvements and cost declines will extend the competitiveness of onshore renewables and storage.”

https://cleantechnica.com/files/2022/06/lcoe-small.jpg?mrf-s...

Japan is opting out of financing coal plants further in Indonesia and Bangladesh, cancelling ~3GW worth of coal plant projects.

https://news.mongabay.com/2022/06/planned-coal-plants-fizzle...

So we’re seeing some progress in avoiding electrical thermal emissions, which is the cheapest emissions offset.

(Oahu, Hawaii’s last coal fired plant turns down in September after the Tesla Megapacks replacing their frequency response capability are installed, another 200MW of coal taken offline)

> They are closing all coal plants by 2028

Also, despite the coal subsidies from congress, even families in coal country don’t want their kids becoming miners. They just want some other way to make a living.

You say that but the big coal areas of america giddily voted for the guy promising to bring coal and coal mining back

Did we really expect "big coal areas" to vote for the other candidate?

As the parent said: >even families in coal country don’t want their kids becoming miners.

But that doesn't seem to be the case, as those same families voted heavily for the politicians who claimed they could bring back coal jobs and the industry. So they obviously want someone to be digging coal, and who else but the next generation?

That's not obvious at all. People in coal-producing areas voted for Trump for the same reasons that people in wheat-producing areas did: they're rural Republicans who watch a lot of TV and the Democrat candidate never even visited their congressional district. Most of the people in those areas don't actually mine coal, and they knew they would get poorer on average under Trump just as they had gotten poorer on average under Obama, Bush, and Clinton before him. They just appreciated a moment of lip service. We can't vote in USA without pretending at some level that voting matters, so why wouldn't they also pretend that one of the candidates cared about their interests?

They should probably do what everyone else did. Move away and find something else to do. Coal mines employ a fraction of the miners they employed 100 years ago and produce more coal. Maybe have them look up what they did.

We could’ve just put federal gov satellite offices there. Train these folks for white collar jobs the federal gov will always need (IRS, SSA, VA, etc). It’s not that many people, there are more people who work at Arbys than in the coal industry.

$More/ton could produce direct capital to pay for building out renewables. The more renewables that are built out, the less competitive the various fossils get.

We also need laws to require plugging abandoned, venting wells, and stiff fines for venting to help pay for that.

I find $/ton to be confusing. $100 / ton is $1 / gallon of gasoline equivalent, and is probably feasible with some current technologies, assuming economies of scale.

A $1/gallon tax on gasoline is rounding error compared to all the other disasters hitting these days.

Are you kidding me? Gas goes up a few cents and suddenly most of the country thinks the free market is a total failure and wants Biden to singlehandedly be pumping out that crude.

Gas is many dollars more expensive now. And Biden is doing a pretty good job at ignoring all the people crying

We need CO2 capture because China and India will never go along with western efforts to tamp down on fossil fuel use before those countries fully industrialize. Beating that dead horse will only distract from efforts that could actually be useful.

This can be fixed with carbon tariffs. Calculate theoretical carbon tax impacts on their exports, and then levy tariffs of the same value.

I didn’t say we don’t need to get rid of past CO2, I just don’t believe air-sucking machines are a viable way to do so.

And it seems only Northern Europe and China even give a shit about the climate. Yes, China is expanding coal plants but they are also worrying more about the climate than others.

I assume you mean "out of countries that are actually in a position to do something about it". Plenty of countries that are immediately threatened by rising seas levels and increasingly erratic rainfall affecting agriculture etc. are pretty worried about it. But they're all tiny emitters...

OTOH I'm not that convinced northern Europe gives a shit about it, given how much oil/gas Norway is drilling and how reluctant Germany has been to reduce its fossil fuel dependence (and now geo-politics has forced its hand on oil, it's ramping up coal usage again!).

The evidence is pretty hard to ignore though - nobody who can really do anything about it is going to give a shit until it's all too late.

> I assume you mean "out of countries that are actually in a position to do something about it"...The evidence is pretty hard to ignore though - nobody who can really do anything about it is going to give a shit until it's all too late.

Yes, one of our founders is an anthropologist and she has been doing field work in underrepresented communities. Rich countries (think they) can afford to pretend there's no such thing as climate change but nobody outside these wealthy enclaves has any doubt.

The reason we spend effort on this is that the atmosphere touches everyone, so we should try to figure out the interests and concerns of as many people as possible to make sure we do our best to do things that help everyone.

It's interesting that the biggest opponents of climate repair seem to come from Germany, USA, UK, and Canada.

> OTOH I'm not that convinced northern Europe gives a shit about it, given how much oil/gas Norway is drilling and how reluctant Germany has been to reduce its fossil fuel dependence (and now geo-politics has forced its hand on oil, it's ramping up coal usage again!).

Yes, it's frustrating that in the face of a war the convo switches immediately back to "drill" rather than "windmill". A big part of that is that corporations speak in terms of benefits, and tailor their messages to specific customer groups (this topic is probably 15% of HN posts and comments) while the conversations of governments and NGOs focus on features and risks.

But I do think it's a top of mind issue in europe, and the continued expansion of the scope of the ETS is a good example. See a long reply I wrote to "tito" to see why there's a complex combination of repairs and continued damage that is unavoidable (point 1 in my comment)

But one way or another it's the OECD who'll have to pay for the cleanup.

China has many hands. They will end up closing the coal plants as they turn out uncompetitive. China doesn't mind building things and leaving them unused; they have millions of hi-rise apartments that will never be occupied, and indeed have no plumbing or wiring because that was known up front.

That is definitely a different thing though - it's well known China was playing games to artificially manipulate their GDP and currency. The coal plants are actually being used because they have demand for the produced power.

Yes, but operating them costs a lot more than the renewables being built out. Similarly, for the nukes under construction. So, as the renewables come online, more expensive generation will go offline. That stuff will all be mothballed because continuing to operate it costs a lot more than shutting it down.

China has the advantage that they do not need to continue operating expensive equipment just because it was expensive.

Never is such a big word. Any country will relinquish fossil fuel use when it is economically feasible.

You mean any country will relinquish fossil fuel use when it's economically profitable. Only some countries will choose to do it when it's simply feasible.

I think an algae system could be in the pennies per tonne. Russ George has an algae scheme that could even be profitable, though possibly scaling only into the hundreds of Gt.

"What's the cheapest Carbon Capture system we can imagine - $100 per tonne?" Considering that I pay around a dollar a pound for bottled CO2 for horticultural use and commercial CO2 is produced from methane. Someone could get fairly wealthy getting paid for removing CO2 from the atmosphere and selling the "undesirable" product for a profit.

Even if we got emissions to zero tomorrow we’d still be in serious trouble. We need carbon capture. Emission reduction just reduces our rate of acceleration towards destruction. We need to hit the brakes.

> should instead go towards lobbying for carbon taxes

Yes, but then you see, existing business will become unprofitable. And these business are currently profitable, and using those profits to pay bribes.

This is the fundamental issues behind all proposed solutions to climate change -- fossil fuel based companies are here now to pay the required corruption fees to keep themselves going. Renewable energy companies might be able to pay the same bribes in the future, but... not now. In the future. Now is now, and politicians want to retire to a cushy consulting job when they lose reelection election, which could be any year now, not decades in the future.

If you want to understand why corruption is inherently bad and can never be tolerated, just think back to this scenario and thousands like this. Our very future -- our survival as a species -- is being undermined by a handful of people in exchange for bribes as low as a few thousand dollars.

Rather than a broad tax that hurts the poor, maybe your effort could go toward taxing specific indoor growers who burn gas to generate CO2 to get more growth from their MJ plants.

It would be simpler to write broad legislation to (a) tax all CO2 sources and then (b) give the tax revenue back to the people, similar to the child tax credit.

Call it the "American Carbon Dividend" or the "Advancing America Dividend".

Done quickly enough, it might be enough to keep Congress from falling back under control of the insurrectionists, come mid-terms.

Use the tax to offset the other taxes at lower income levels. It should be profit neutral for the government.

The tax will probably need to go to carbon capture at this point.

"Carbon dividend" makes Carbon Tax progressive.

Poor people are exactly who will be hurt by a move away from fossil fuels. The problem isn't that someone is burning fossil fuels, it's that everyone is.

Or instead of going after pot growers, maybe your effort could go towards making my neighbor stop BBQing every weekend?

Your neighbor has the right to BBQ, there’s a point where we need to live our lives and stop advocating for denial of comfort.

I mean, a $15/tonne carbon(dioxide) tax would raise the cost of a 20lb bag of charcoal by $0.50, or about 3% based on a quick search. So the BBQing itself is probably not prohibitively expensive.

The price of the beef burgers would go up by 7% according to Beef Magazine, 150% according to vegnews.com, and 40% according to NY Times.

Charcoal is carbon neutral, it's simply releasing the CO2 absorbed from the atmosphere by the trees that made the charcoal. So there shouldn't be a carbon tax on charcoal.

The production of charcoal itself emits a lot of CO2

Source? Isn't it basically the same process as biochar, which has been proposed as a carbon capture technology (the idea being that you bury the resulting charcoal instead of burning it)?

Yes, as far as I can tell the footprint of pyrolysis portion is basically the same (various wild seeming claims notwithstanding) though I haven't dug into this deeply, and specifically haven't looked into it in over a decade.

However on a full cycle basis the difference is biochar is typically made from local material (mostly the leftover waste from the prior year's harvest) which is right there (zero transport) and would otherwise rot and release methane and CO2 on its own, even if plowed into the field.

Charcoal is made from trees, typically cut down and transported to a factory and then transported to the customer.

In general I am not in favor of burning trees, enjoyable as it is on a cold night out in the forest.

For context, here's a news article from March of this year:

"The biggest food price hikes are in meats, with pork and beef up 14% to 20% compared with a year ago."

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/meat-prices-pandemic-inflation-...

This is an interesting point but I can't see any way that we create a sustainable system that works like this. Carbon dioxide is an unaccounted part of the system. Inevitably, whether it's now or in 1,000 years, a functional society will need to account for these kinds of externalities.

"The bill for magical thinking arrives with unpredictable timing but thunderous force." -pmarca

> Your neighbor has the right to BBQ

Not constitutionally. I demand that people stop advocating for general solutions and instead focus their action on my petty personal grievances for a marginal return.

Well, yes, the federal constitution provides no rights including to bbq. It is a negative document which details restrictions on government.

That's a big woosh right there. The parent was making a an arbitrary comparison to another arbitrary and trolling comment regarding indoor plant cultivation.

Any tips for getting into the "climate industry"? What are the most promising technologies that aren't just greenwashing?

The book Project Drawdown is a good primer, with pictures! [1]

After that, the My Climate Journey [2] and Work on Climate [3] communities are excellent entry points.

Climate is a big buffet full of all sorts of cool problems to help solve. I'm focused on carbon removal as an example, but we need millions of people working across all aspects of the planetary system.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Drawdown-Comprehensive-Proposed-Rever...

[2] https://www.mcjcollective.com

[3] https://workonclimate.org

I agree that we need to do be exploring all options, but we need to make sure not to destroy other parts of our environment in the process.

Massive algal blooms in the ocean gives me nightmares.

Let’s explore all options that generate $$$ so we can avoid real current solutions that lack the profit motive like planting and protecting trees, conserving energy, reducing consumption, etc.

> Massive algal blooms in the ocean gives me nightmares.

Why? How you you think much of the carbon at the bottom of the sea got there? Biological activity, most of small species that died and sank.

The pelagic ocean is pretty nutrient-poor, so anything you grow there is going to need to be farmed. I've been reading that used to be far more fertile before the ecosystem crashed as we decimated the whale population (there are experiments under way for basically adding "artificial whale poo" (as it was jokingly described to me by one of the participants) to try to form little regions of more fertile surface waters.

IMHO you do want to stay away from coastal waters which are a witch's brew of all sorts of things, from runoff to various organic processes. Some algal blooms in coastal regions have been of toxic species (e.g. "red tide" -- those algaes also show up in snow BTW) but most are not that kind at all, and as I note above, in the pelagic (open) ocean you'll have to be seeding it anyway.

You want it to die and sink, but of course it will be attractive to other species some of which will eat it, grow, eventually die and sink, but will probably breath some of that carbon out again. But in the end, you'd want most of it to sink.

Very large, very interconnected, very complex ecosystems, like the ocean, are very difficult to understand and monitor, let alone manage.

Just like my code, I want to make sure I'm able to undo some change before making even seemingly small changes. I don't know how you "undo" a huge cloud of algae.

If its all in some tank and can't escape, then fine, I'm on board.

Massive algal blooms where there are no fish need give no one nightmares.

Once we are electrolysing lots of water for the hydrogen, dissolving the waste oxygen in river outflows could start to save the current dead zones. But restricting over-fertilization would have a bigger effect.

algae blooms in my reef tank give me nightmares, thank you for compounding that.

What's the methane destruction project you're working on? Enjoy those 24x carbon credits, that's good stuff.

Regarding the main part of your comment, what is it you think people should be working on instead?

> Regarding the main part of your comment, what is it you think people should be working on instead?

Well, that's a broad topic! Here's how I look at it:

0 - people are going to continue peopling. Otherwise what's the point? So any argument based on privation ("you need to stop doing everything you like to do because it's sinful") won't work. Some stuff will drop at the margins (I expect meat will become increasingly expensive and other high protein alternatives will displace some of it), but all of that will continue to change gradually, though I hope the derivative will increasing in a non-linear fashion.

1 - concommitent with that: there's an enormous infrastructure of depreciating cap ex. So a power plant built today will be depreciated over the next 40 years. Yes, some economic changes can shorten that but people will try to eke out what they can from them. In fact as renewables increase, the cost of fossil fuels will fall (because of reduced demand) which will make old, polluting plants more viable.

2 - Governments have shown they cannot tackle this problem. I gave a talk at Asilomar a couple of months ago in which I showed a temperature graph and pointed out it's impossible to see the Paris conference on it. This year will be COP 27 and what has changed? Governments have a huge role to play in terms of incentives, but in actual action? Pretty much zip. I think this is an inherent property of some of the good properties of good government so I'm not claiming governments are mendacious, pathetic, controlled by some conspiracy or anything like that. I don't drive a motorcycle underwater, but I would drive one to the beach. Likewise I don't depend on governments to be able to do much directly to improve the global climate, but they can sure help.

3 - We need multiple kinds of improvement:

A - yes, we need emissions reductions and replacements for emitting activity (e.g. "alternative energy"). Though there are many sources of GHG emissons, and I don't see a way to replace most of them (e.g. we can't simply stop growing rice -- see point 0). This is "stop making things worse"

B - Because of point 1, some people need to work on adaptation. The climate isn't going to go back to the status quo ante right away (actually never -- see point 4) so the next 50-100 years will have to presume that the weather is going to get worse (hotter/colder, wetter/dryer depending on where you are). I am uninterested in this problem BTW.

C - Climate repair (sometimes called restoration) is the longest term and most important. We do need ways to change the chemistry of the air and oceans back to 1775.* Reducing insolation, removing GHGs, etc. Like I said, I really only believe in a variety of solar-powered chemistry, both biological and not. Look at some natural processes that can be sped up, like synthetic limestone which has been discussed on HN. (Maybe let's not consider the gold standard of setting off 50 massive volcanic eruptions.) Most of these are only feasible at certain concentrations of a GHG, which is one reason I'm more in favour of biologics which are more adaptable and generally easier to power. I talk with a variety of people about these topics every week, but all my efforts right now are on methane, because there's a small amount of it and it's been responsible for about 1/3 of the temperature rise to date.

There's a subgoal here, which is zapping emissions at the point of generation (so called "point source remediation"). Catalytic converters on cars work for some GHGs (though you can't stick one on a swamp); some efforts to zap methane in barns or mines are under way, etc. We could paint the insides of building ventilation with TiO2 and install UV lamps; if they could be cleaned would they work? Who knows. But stopping the emission when the concentration is highest is generally the easiest place to do it.

4 - in terms of climate repair, we aren't really going to ever "go back". We have no idea what the critical points are (where the path of the hysteresis curve changes) and will be curating the climate indefinitely. That's not terrible; we have been curating the forests of Europe for a thousand years or more (is there any original forest on that continent) and there's little "wild" forest in new england either. So it's quite doable from a social standpoint. We'll just find a point were we find the climate on earth adequate.

5 - Carbon credit can be used to cover a lot of sins (see point 1) and offset credits (don't cut down a tree) are tough to justify. But can be a pretty good way to fund repair and remediation, and could be a good way to shift the cost onto the people who create majority of the problem.

* I used to think that "1775" automatically made everybody think of James Watt's first significant patent, but it seems in the US it makes people think of political events around that time. Apparently not everybody is a steam nerd -- who knew?

There are nascent efforts to get Sacramento River delta farmers to trade in farming in their (thousands of acres of!) sub-sea-level fields for collecting carbon credits by flooding them and letting swamp vegetation settle. Presumably they could also float solar and collect revenue and carbon credits from that, and grow freshwater shrimp, besides.

There is a serious worry that in the next big Cal earthquake, dikes will collapse, pulling sea water into the delta. It has happened before.

Generally, restoring wetland that had been converted to farmland can be done in many places to similar effect. Floating solar is a big win, producing much more power than the same panel in the desert, and lasting much longer, without interfering with anything else.

> What's the methane destruction project you're working on?

search for another comment that mentions bluedotchange

Everything is going to be okay.

I agree. I just wish I could be around 50M years from now when the cockroach-descendent paleontologists marvel at the weird biped fossils and wonder if they could ever have been sophisticated enough to have had a civilisation.

We are not ruining the earth in any way. We are merely making it inhospitable to vertebrates and some other life forms.

Honestly I can't see how it will be. I think we will get incredible technologies that cut resource usage. But we have already done this several times now and every time we make something more efficient we just consume more. We have made car engines massively more efficient but the gains were entirely lost to bigger cars and driving longer distances.

There are billions of people living almost primitive lives just waiting to consume as much as we do driving everywhere and buying new iphones every year. We are about to make things cheaper and more efficient and give them access to this consumption.

Despite all of this advancement, resource usage and emissions has never once gone backwards or even slowed down its increase.

The planet is heading toward peak human population (people are voluntarily having fewer kids), so there's that, at least.

That will I think have some impact. But I feel like even the current population can not be sustained. Let alone when undeveloped countries become developed and start consuming more.

Climate catastrophy arguments needs more scrutiny. The error bars are huge.

https://twitter.com/birdhillcap/status/1541812452760776705

https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1541768533004148738

https://twitter.com/luisbaram/status/1523671791062843393

https://twitter.com/AlexEpstein/status/1529809797582815244

There is a bigger problem. Those who scrutinize climate change are punished by the society even though we need legit scientists and people that debunk overarching claims. You could accept CC arguments but still be a critic of some of the insane claims going on today.

It's like the early COVID days. Can't criticize. Can't speak against the mob. Can't do science without scrutiny.

> Climate catastrophy arguments needs more scrutiny.

Right, so your sources for this is a few Twitter posts. Let's take a look.

The first one is a supposed quote from Al Gore, but he never said that. Even if he did, Al Gore getting something wrong would hardly disprove anything about climate science.

> Those who scrutinize climate change are punished by the society

You're parroting untrue claims. How about some self-awareness?

I didn’t spend more time looking for more and I’m not interested in defending myself.

The main general point still stands. All I’m asking for is some scrutiny. By the time information reaches from scientists to reporters and policy makers, there is a lot of malaise and omission of inconvenient truths.

We need more checks and balances. Climate alarmicism is getting out of control. It's become a religion. Scientists that want to report inconvenient results are terrified.

Edit: I found some more: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/50-years-of-failed-doomsday-e...

> I didn’t spend more time looking for more and I’m not interested in defending myself.

You just want to throw out accusations without evidence and you're complaining about "climate alarmicism" not getting enough scrutiny?

> Scientists that want to report inconvenient results are terrified.

This is an oft-repeated claim by people engaged in climate denialism, but it's a lie. A conspiracy theory without evidence. Where are all these terrified scientists? Who has been sanctioned for presenting contrary views?

A friend of mine was a climate sceptic. He started a PhD looking at glaciers and ice cores. He was expecting to experience some friction pushing back against the climate orthodoxy, but after looking through the data he changed his mind. He realised our models of the climate were consistent with the evidence.

Consider: if your "terrified scientists" theory was incorrect, and actually scientists did believe that the standard models are correct, wouldn't that state of affairs look identical to what is actually occurring today?

I think CC movement is 70% legit and 30% bullshit. The public is mostly deluded on either side, those that support it and those who oppose it.

I am also not a climate skeptic. I just think that we need more scrutiny. The push back I get from people is insane like the strawman you've conjured up.

No, climate alarmism is not out of control. It is barely loud enough to hear. Did it even get mentioned at G7?

The inconvenient truth is that far too little is happening, and doing enough would be overwhelmingly cheaper. Quibbling has outsize impact interfering with action.

I feel like it is the opposite. I just bought Levi's jeans. There is so much sustainable/green washing on the labels, it is insane.

I've heard from friends who believe that we should depopulate the planet by 100x. Anti-human arguments all over the media.

You are in a bubble.

I second systemvoltage's lived experience. I've seen the same across two continents.

Sure, it could be a bubble, just big enough of a bubble to envelope the entire West.

Greenwashing is not evidence of anything happening. It is by definition something trotted out in place of something happening.

The big issue is that counter arguments to climate change typically tend to be used as a justification for inaction, as flawed as that reasoning is. We're already at well over three decades of climate inaction.

and in the case it doesn't: no worries, the end was always the same, the heat death of the universe :)

so try your best and if it doesn't play out: memento mori!

No momento mori beyond the heat death of the universe I'm afraid.

Malthus was wrong, hopefully Gretha as well

Malthus was wrong because of innovation, and if Gretha is wrong, it will also be because of innovation.

How do you innovate out of basic thermodynamics? We could stop emitting every single atom of CO2 right now and still suffer from some significant consequences. There is no solution that doesn't involve "wasting" energy (and since we live in a capitalist world, money) on capturing CO2

Bill Gates's books has a great account of what it will take to get us out of this mess - and I agree, it is a huge mess - and Carbon capture is likely to be a small part of the solution.

Better than the algae system described is capturing the carbon in plants that are later used in such ways as to keep the carbon sequestered.

Trees whose wood is used as a building material, animal feed where the manure is then used as fertilizer, are 2 very accessible examples.

No need to make this more complicated than it has to be.

> We need to remove something like 3.5 Tt of CO2

In order to what and at what rate? Break even? Each year?

As of right now that's roughly the amount of excess in the atmosphere. So if we remove that (and a bunch of other GHGs) and stop emitting we'd roughly be done.

It's not as simple as I state above, but that gives you an idea of the size of the problem.

so, in the article it says "they’re aiming to remove millions of tons of CO2 per year by 2030 and a billion per year by 2050."

So, this is just a step on the path....but, those numbers do seem pretty aspirational at this stage.

I'd worry they make things worse and suffocate plant life near them.

What plant life? We're talking about the pelagic ocean, which was more fertile before we broke the back of the ecosystem,* but even then didn't have the wild growth of coastal waters.

* when you hate on the fossil fuel industry, don't forget that it saved the whales.

35 Kt... per year... but yeah it's daunting and we need more scale.

Carbon capture feels a lot like having a public pool which has raw sewerage pumping in to it and the proposals all focus on installing more powerful filters which can clean up some of the sewerage rather than focusing on stopping the sewerage from dumping in to the pool which is a much cheaper and more realistic solution.

Reducing emissions simply delays the endpoint (death). As a friend of mine quips, "the Paris agreement is a suicide pact".

Even if emissions went magically to zero today we have the accumulated emissions CO2 since 1775 lingering around and trapping all the heat we want to radiate away. We have to get rid of that as well

Definitely we need to stop the dumping, but we've already dumped a lot of sewage in the pool so we also need to clean it up.

We need most to avoid confusing work to clean it up with progress on not dumping overwhelmingly more in.

As someone working in the industry, it can definitely feel like that at times. Using your analogy, ultimately a functional public pool depends on both not dumping in sewage, and also having filters for whatever gunk does get in the pool anyway. So on a long time horizon both are necessary.

Agreed. In case you or others you connect with are looking to help create more scale for carbon removal solutions, here's an online educational course I helped develop called AirMiners Boot Up -- https://bootup.airminers.org/

How do you destroy methane straight in the atmosphere?

Turns out about 15-20% of the methane is destroyed by the atmosphere at the ocean surface (the bulk is destroyed by hydroxyl reactions over the land). There are some other natural processes that catalyze those reactions. So we are working on augmenting the supply of catalyst over the deep ocean (far away from land). The reason for the open ocean is that it is remarkably free of topographic features :-) and much more uniform. Close to shore there are all sorts of other things going on, from runoff to life activity and it makes predicting anything quite hard. Doing it on the other 75% of the earth's surface is a lot easier.

If you go to our crappy web site (www.bluedotchange.com) and click on the science you can read some refereed papers on the subject.

We are looking for some MEs and ChemEs and a couple of EEs and software people if you're interested.

Thank you for the thoughtful explanation....reading...

combustion typically, but I'm also curious what GP actually means

Probably by pulverizing some catalyzer.

Water on the high atmosphere looks like a good choice. But it needs some simulation to know if the water won't stay there long enough to create a greenhouse problem of the same size.

Vapourizing it, but yeah. I replied to the GP post with some brief discussion.

We're working in the lower troposphere (like 0-50 m). The stratosphere frightens me (and the folks who want to spray sulphur compounds up there are terrifying.

Water in the upper troposphere (AKA Marine Cloud Brightening) like Silver Lining is trying to do feels like a pretty good cooling approach. I wrote a jokey paper in the 80s about giant volcano-powered teakettles spewing steam into the upper atmosphere but the much simpler approach of simply spraying seawater into the air is clever.

Indeed, using existing ships as platform to vaporize salty water on the low atmosphere in the open ocean (I got it correctly?) is very clever.

Congratulations on the project.