What would be the plan to control costs? Fe2O3 nano particles aren’t cheap, as you can see. At $3M per tonne and the need for, say, 10 gigatonnes to start off… That would put the cost of this plan at $30 quadrillion. I’m sure that, at that scale, the price would come down, but that’s a pretty high starting point. Toss in the fact that these nanoparticles would naturally settle out over time and the costs would increase further.
No one said terraforming was going to be cheap, but at that price, there has to be a less expensive option.
Same here. I’ve come to the conclusion that, if I was unwilling to accept anyone that wasn’t of the calibre of Carl Sagan to fill his shoes, I was probably going to wait a long time. I think Degrasse Tyson’s advocacy for black scientists is admirable, as is his willingness to promote religious reconciliation. These weren’t areas of focus for Sagan, but that’s ok. They can be different people, even imperfect people, and maybe that’s good.
Yeah, if that’s what Johnny Cash was talking about, then what was Trent Reznor talking about?
It can be challenging to pick it out, but, if you read the article, the problem is “Transmission Capacity”. This does not mean that energy supply is the problem, rather, that the power grid has a finite, limiting ability to transmit the power generated in one place to another place, far away.
It would be nice if this were not the case, as the construction of remote gigawatt-scale power plants would, as you suggest, solve this problem. However, adding more supply won’t change the transmission capacity of the grid serving the utility, especially if the power generation is tens or hundreds of miles away from the demand centers.
One way to relieve the inevitable shortages is to upgrade the power lines and grid infrastructure. The core problems with this are that 1) it’s expensive and 2) there’s no good way to recoup the costs, as there would be with a plant. Accordingly, few people are eager to dump billions dollars into new grid infrastructure.
An alternative way is to provide power is to accelerate residential solar arrays. Residential PV generates large amounts of excess power that can be metered back into the grid immediately adjacent to neighbors who may not have solar power, but might need power for things like air conditioning during hot days. Crucially, the power for these consumers is being generated immediately adjacent to them, without encumbering the “transmission capacity” of the grid that the distant thermal plant needs to get their energy to the consumer.
Also, residential PV is purchased, installed, and insured by a private home owner at their own expense. Liability for loss or damage to the residential PV array is held by the homeowner, not the utility. As a result, the residential PV array is allowing the utility to sell more power to their customers without requiring that same utility to pay for an upgraded grid.
Residential PV should be viewed as a godsend for the thermal plants generating power that their grids can’t transmit.
It’s also a cross-platform portable executable, so you can use it out of the box on almost any machine with an internet connection. Once you get the hotkey bindings down, it gets very easy to build simple designs. Unfortunately, it can choke on modest levels of complexity, but I most of my work is relatively simple, so Solvespace is a godsend.
How did you design the pendant? I’ve been trying to cad out a signet ring, but my current effort-to-quality ratio is terrible.
The first lines from Neuromancer by William Gibson. What a pleasant surprise.
This seems like a pretty clear cut case for air capture and carbon sequestration. At $22 trillion and $100 per tonne, you could amortize it over 40 years to drop the cost down to $500 billion per year, substantially less than the FY 2024 U.S. Department of Defense budget request. Expensive, but not impossibly or exorbitantly so.
In this light, it could be claimed that global warming is merely the cost of war in externalities. Rather, the peace dividend from world peace would easily pay for the remediation of anthropogenic carbon. Conversely, the funds that might be used to pay for mitigation of global warming will likely continue to be used to fund warfare until the countries of the world commit to disarm and cease hostilities.
The most effective way, then, to raise the funds needed to pay for decarbonization is to advocate for world peace and universal disarmament.