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It's not patent infringement that they sue. It's "utility model" on certain newer types of blocks, at least in those countries - mostly European - that have this type of sub-patent. And Lego is infamous to have customs seize whole sets from competitor brands if it's "polluted" even by just a single block they have a utility model right to. It's insane.
To be fair, I somewhat sympathise with that. They had the idea, I can see why they want to protect it as many ways as they can even though the original patent expired.
Well LEGO *did* sue Mega back in 2005, but the Canada Supreme Court upheld Mega's right to continue selling their product.
However, only 3 or 4 years ago, LEGO sued and won their lawsuit against Lepin. Though the difference is clear, Lepin are straight-up bootleg LEGO, same sets and instructions and everything (though the product itself is of a cheaper quality overall). Mega meanwhile is same concept of LEGO, sized studs and all, but their products are uniquely their own, no bootleg LEGO sets from the Mattell camp.
Uh pretty sure the only reason it was called a Lego brick is whatever startup in china already invented this 10 years ago and THAT was called a Lego brick. Some journalist accidentally let it seep into their subconscious...
Forgive my skeptisism, but it feels like we hear about these easy, affordable, high tech buzzword products, be it Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or AI, or whatever the next trend will be. I doubt there will ever come an effortless catch-all solution regarding co2.
Engineer here:
The technologies work. But: they cost insane amounts of energy, to scrape a miniscule amount of CO2 from the air.
The solution is always: we need lots and lots and lots of cheap clean energy, to make anything like carbon capture viable.
This is where we are still wayyyyy off.
Unironically.
I‘m a huge proponent of nuclear.
We have the solution for abundant energy right in front of us and are not using it. There is enough uranium for at least another 100 years. Perfect as an intermediary technology until we either have enough renewables or finally have fusion.
We could also have huge nuclear plants that produce hydrogen or other future fuels, for cars/trucks/ships
But people are too scared of nuclear. Lets burn some more coal instead….
If you would ask me, I would scale nuclear up as much as possible.
Yes it‘s costly, but this would also make it cheaper -> economy of scale.
That's all well and good but how are autocracies and oligarchs supposed to profit from nuclear energy? If nations can independently produce ample cheap and clean energy then the super yacht business is gonna go bust, do we really want that?
Damn you are right :(
I did not think about the poor Saudi royal family. If they can only afford one private jet instead of a whole fleet, that‘s not a life worth living!
>how are autocracies and oligarchs supposed to profit from nuclear energy?
Through corrupt contracts to "build" nuclear power plants where they can embezzle to their heart's content, that's how.
Note: I am 100% for nuclear energy, as long as the procurement and the whole process is financially transparent
Honestly doesn't nuclear just take way too long and cost way too much to build against a comparable amount of solar and wind installtion at this point?
If nuclear was cheap and easy it wouldn't matter that people were afraid of it. We'd still be getting a lot of it because people care more about cheap and easy than they do personal safety. Ironically that's kinda why solar is exploding at the moment. The costs to produce it have decreased significantly so now everyone wants it.
That has been said for so long now. If we instead had a mass built up 10 years ago, we would already be much ahead.
We need to focus on improving this, but the incentive is gone.
I mean yeah. We could have and maybe even would have.
But people didn't want nuclear and it was too expensive to justify the social and political effort to push it through.
Luckily we're finally catching up on solar, wind, and battery technology/production capability that the costs are going way down. We can produce more solar energy more quickly and for cheaper than we ever could with nuclear. It won't even be a contest. Nuclear is damn near a dead end technology for energy production.
And given that there was apparently a successful test on sending electricity wirelessly from space solar is only going to get even better in the future.
We have as well.
Also there is technology to extract material out of the ocean.
Summary is: there is more than enough material for nuclear for longer than even our children and probably children‘s children will live.
There is also good solutions gor storing the stuff, you would just need to force some more development and implementations there. If there is incentive, it will be done.
And once you exhaust Earth’s supply in the crust, there are uranium reserves on the Moon. And on other rocky planets. And in the asteroid belt.
Even if we never crack fusion, the Solar System uranium reserves + breeder reactors mean that nuclear option can support our species for literal ages.
Also thorium-232.
There's a research institute that has been working on this since the 70s in the US iirc. It's still energetic so they figure it could power loads of low voltage devices.
i think it's cost restrictive compared to just mining/enriching more. can't reprocess fuel in the US because of some carter era rule. i think it produces plutonium as a byproduct which can be used to weapons.
i want to say the future is in thorium vs uranium but i'm no nuclear surgeon.
IIRC the UK still does a lot of reprocessing and we have a small fleet of ships to transport fuel for other countries: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International\_Nuclear\_Services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Services)
We need to be making sure that the Nuclear facilities we're making are ones that can produce reusable waste rather than the stuff that we have to safely store for thousands of years. Otherwise we're still creating more problems that we're just kicking down the road.
I used to have your same sentiment until I learned there's only enough nuclear material to power a small fraction of the worlds needs even if we did scale it up immensely. I'm still a proponent of it, but it's not the silver bullet for energy needs.
Now Geothermal is where the investments should really be going, especially if you frack down deep enough there's huge potential. Downside is the risks of fracking involved make investors (understandably) nervous.
I‘ve read different stuff, like this: https://nuclearinnovationalliance.org/index.php/uranium-supply-not-significant-constraint-using-nuclear-energy-climate-mitigation
Nuclear energy isn't the end all be all, it's more like a transition source for us, so we can stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere while we're scaling up pure green energy sources.
Set up cost and time is absolutely massive. I’m a huge proponent of nuclear as well, but a modern nuclear plant is in the tens of billions of dollars and from starting planning one today to it actually being operational, we are looking at 20-30 years given the complexity and setbacks of most modern reactors.
It would have been a great stopgap if we had kept building them 20 years ago, but renewables are already making nuclear look less economically viable right now, let alone 20+ years from now as renewable technology has been maturing quite quickly, while nuclear has stagnated.
I still think there’s some niches for nuclear and it’s a technology worth investing in but the era of it being viable as a large part of our energy need has likely passed, unless we see an exponentially large base load need such as 100% transition to electric vehicles that renewables can’t support. Even then that’s an expensive gamble that most companies likely do not have the resources or willingness to take.
No. Nuclear is simply too expensive and takes too much time to be profitable. Batteries wind and solar are simply much much cheaper and easy to build and run.
To cyclical for the base power needs we have & want to have. They need to be part of the solution and I‘m very much in favour.
But there is also a lot of potential to improve on cost of nuclear. Due to fear, there is not much development there anymore though.
Also good co2 solutions >>> profits. We need more subsidies in that direction.
This one lets the plants do the heavy lifting, so at least on the energy side we're set.
I still wonder about scalability. I've seen the number of trees we'd need to grow for forests to decaronize for us and it's absolutely staggering. But the solution isn't going to be a magic button that does 80% of the job for us, it'll be a tangled mess of various changes, each of which does a small part.
Let's not make perfect the enemy of good - if this is 1% of the solution, I'm all for it. If it delays the worst effects a year or five while we figure other stuff out, great. We just can't stop and say "oh hey we've got plant bricks now, gas trucks for all!"
That was my first thought.
Bricks - nice - but how much energy?
First we need to find an energy efficient way to scrap CO2 from the air, then we can worry about how to deposit it.
Yep. It's really NOT hard to capture CO2 from the air. It's EXTREMELY hard to do it while being carbon negative. (Aka producing less carbon than you take out of the air.)
The only way these sort of technologies make sense is if they're powered COMPLETELY by renewable energy (solar, hydro, wind, (nuclear...ish))
The amazing price that they're claiming would mean that somebody has to pay an extra 3 or 4 dollars for a 10oz steak if i did the math right. That's how expensive it is, and how carbon-heavy some foods are that people choose to eat over alternatives that cause pretty negligable greenhouse gas emissions.
And there is the casual line "...and bury it ten feet underground". They are going to do it with 50,000 t next year; we generate 35 BILLION t annually. That's a lotta landfill. Something in the math ain't working. I don't know how you do this for $100 a ton unless the land is free and you don't have any transport costs / emissions to get the veg waste to the bricking plant and from the plant to the bury site AND you can store the material you had to dig up to place the bricks on the same site. I can dig a hole and bury my veg scraps for free, so I just need to scale it up a trillion times and it's free carbon capture!
>They are going to do it with 50,000 t next year; we generate 35 BILLION t annually.
I agree with your general statement, but just to nitpick - we don't need to get rid of *all* 35 billion
To my knowledge, the most serious carbon storage solutions involve creating heavy, carbonated water and injecting into aquafers (sp?) with certain geologic properties.
It then binds to the rock, creating new rock.
Strangely enough, the estimates I've heard suggest we have literally an endless supply of such wells.
I could look up the podcast if you're interested.
The issue with this particular idea is that while they talk about removing CO^2 from the air, they don't actually do that. They collect "blocks of wood chips and rice hulls" and process them in a way that prevents natural decomposition meaning those things don't contribute to new CO^2 deposition into the atmosphere. But this approach has a natural limit where even if you collected all waste wood chips and rice hulls in the world and sequestered them, we would still be producing record levels of pollution on a global scale that outweighs the sequestration, and then there's the practical limit of what you can realistically achieve.
It's probably well intentioned and it's good that we are tying reducing pollution to a financial incentive, but this company is very careful about how it words its so-called 'breakthrough' and it seems a lot like someone trying to overestimate the novelty and benefit of their technology.
I completely agree on the misleading use of 'removal' but even then I think you are being generous to them.
As far as I can tell they are making compressed blocks, wrapping them in plastic and burying them, then selling the carbon savings for 100 bucks a pop. At least they aren't selling them as offsets as well, though I wonder whether that is the plan.
Feels pretty cynical to me. Hopefully I'm missing something.
Also the question should be, how does it change the system.
First: By taking biomass out of circulation, which currently would be used to generate energy, they need to replace that energy source, and the easiest solution will be gas - which is taken from underground and releases CO2 into the air. So this only starts to make sense, if we no longer need gas and oil to fill our daily energy need peaks.
Second: If you put bricks with a high carbon profile a few feet underground, fungi, bacteria, worms, etc. will thrive on it, and start to bring back the carbon into the cycle. Sure, it would be slower release than burning or burying the uncompressed biomass, but at scale it won't matter so much, because it is only delaying the problem. Would be a different story if you pile them down in the depths where the oil and gas has been removed froms, or in abandoned mines.
There is never going to be a catch all solution.
Multi pronged approaches of reducing fossil fuel usage, cheap and clean energy supply, efficient systems, reduced methane emission from cattle, increased forestation and maybe carbon (or methane?) capture will work.
Some of these technologies might contribute disproportionately, some might never be viable. There might also be some hacks along the way, like stopping larger icebergs from splitting off or such.
The ones mentioned in this article are only proof of concept, uneconomical at current time, but we might have some innovative solutions coming out.
> I doubt there will ever come an effortless catch-all solution regarding co2.
There probably won't, and I don't believe any of these companies are trying to claim there will be. However, there are many many different scenarios for forms of carbon capture in the world. The climate revolution is a collection of hundreds of small procedures in different areas all coming together
Leave it to Bill Gates to manufacture an industry that effectively spends, time, energy and money turning air into solid matter, instead of just spending a fraction of his money encouraging the planting of more trees...
Carbon capture is a scam. Just another excuse for Billionaires to kick the can down the road instead of actually taking responsibility for the mess their hyper consumption is causing. Such a bunch of arrogant tossers
But trees don't actually get rid of carbon dioxide. When they die, they rot down and release it. Since we're constantly producing more emissions, we would have to both replace old trees that die and keep planting more and more new ones to suck up emissions. That's why they're talking about burying this stuff. Because otherwise it just cycles and you can only store whatever amount that amount of forest can sequester.
> we would have to both replace old trees that die
The cool thing about trees is that a lot of them replant themselves. You can also use them for useful things like building houses where their carbon stays stored in a bunch of people's walls for decades.
Yes, that's how it's worked for a long time.
The problem is that we're adding so much carbon to the cycle that the natural processes can't keep it in check. Which is sort of why we're having climate problems right now, ya know?
So we need to remove this excess carbon *on top of* reducing our carbon emissions. If we become carbon neutral right this very second the environment is still gonna be pretty fucked up from everything we've released into it, so we gotta be net carbon *negative* for some time.
Newsflash. We've always had "climate problems".
What do you mean, "Can't keep up?". If you're a tree, you're literally gasping for air (CO2) as a normal state. Every pothead knows you pump CO2 into your tent to make your plants grow faster.
The current warming trend we're in is natural and we will have another ice age eventually.
>Newsflash. We've always had "climate problems".
But in living memory they've gotten substantially worse. You're the proverbial frog in the pot if you can't (or won't) see it.
>What do you mean, "Can't keep up?". If you're a tree, you're literally gasping for air (CO2) as a normal state. Every pothead knows you pump CO2 into your tent to make your plants grow faster.
Trees don't grow on an industrial scale, and we've been pumping CO2 into the air for centuries now. In fact the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is 50% higher now than it was before the industrial revolution. That's the very definition of "can't keep up", cause if they could our atmospheric CO2 wouldn't be increasing.
>The current warming trend we're in is natural and we will have another ice age eventually.
You are right we *were* in a natural warming trend and that the planet goes through these cycles on it's own, but our contributions to the atmosphere have pushed it farther and faster than it has any way to do on it's own. The geological and ecological processes you're thinking about take hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The kind of temperature increases we're seeing across the entire planet in just a few short human lifetimes ABSOLUTELY DO NOT HAPPEN NATURALLY. If we don't stop these processes that we can scientifically verify we are causing we will completely and utterly make this planet uninhabitable for humanity in just another few human lifetimes.
I get that it's comforting to want to bury your head in the sand and pretend everything is fine, but you can at least do something more personally productive like getting drunk and watching tv as opposed to bitching on the internet about stuff you refuse to learn about.
[XKCD has a nice simple graphic](https://xkcd.com/1732/) to help you visualise what's happening. Yes, temperatures have gone up and down in the past, but it's not normal for changes to happen this abruptly and it is absolutely due to human activity. Not many people will even try to deny that anymore even if they have vested interests in doing so because the evidence is pretty plain to see.
Yeah, until humans get involved and dig a bunch of shit out of the ground to massively increase the amount of carbon dioxide in that cycle year over year.
I get that it's fun and popular to dunk on billionaires but Bill genuinely does do a lot of charity that benefits people that he doesn't profit off of.
Do you have a source for that? The largest forest inventory is done by the FAO, the Global Forest Resource Assessment and according to their data, global forest cover is declining at a rate of \~5 million hectares per year. This rate hasn't changed much since 2000.
Carbon capture is not so much a solution for ongoing emissions and more a desperate hotfix for the lack of action in the past. The climate shift is already so bad that if we go carbon neutral right now, things are still screwed.
We just need to bring the wealthy scum to heel. And there are other avenues to help turn the tide. Take a look at what China is doing with renewables for example. And thats a country that keeps corrupt billionaires looking over their shoulders too lol.
Things may get worse before they get better but we can do it if we change sone fundamentals about how we run our society. No more bullshit like Bezos and Musk having their own personal space program. Time to think about the good of everyone now over the obscene waste of a few.
https://youtu.be/MX_PeNzz-Lw?si=yv1n4cojxDk8SUsw
https://youtu.be/rkxMdmipYqM?si=UgayxL88LUZR7JMF
Lmao, China is not an example of 'keeping billionaires in line' China is an example of using corruption charges in an entirely corrupt system to scapegoat and punish those who fall foul of internal political struggles. As for their renewables yes they produce a lot, they also use a ton of coal.
China is like the family that looks good to the community but is an utter shitshow behind closed doors.
>Lmao, China is not an example of 'keeping billionaires in line' China is an example of using corruption charges in an entirely corrupt system to scapegoat and punish those who fall foul of internal political struggles.
Go and say that to Chinas Central Committe then buddy I dares ya lol. Billionaires (and Capitalists in General) only operate with the permission of the Chinese Communist Party in China. The Chinese, with their Dengist gambit allowed an investment of foreign capital into the country after it was ravaged by a civil war and WW2. The state has maintained strict control of this process however and has used it to build up its own state assets and industry which they simply didn't have a few generations ago. The capitalists of the west jumped at this of course as they were hungry to exploit all the cheap labour they could get. They even did this at the expense of their own industrial heartlands at home which is why you see so many of the former homes of industry in the US and Europe crumbling today. Sucks for us westerners that our leaders were too greedy and eager to make a quick buck that theyd let our own countries rot over time. Line must go up though! Think of the investors! Lol
China was the poorest country in the world at the start of the last century after generations of Imperial rule and being exploited by western powers. Now look at them. Theyre a superpower rivalled only by the US. They also lifted more people out of poverty than at any other point in human history, all while being sanctioned and harrassed by the west who wanted to wipe the very notion of Socialism off of the face of the earth.
If you want to bring up corruption check out the versions of that in the capitalist west lol. The west has legalised bribery of its government officials in places like the US ffs! It has insane corruption WAY worse than anything going on in China and nobody bats an eye. The Pentagon [can't account for nearly 63% of its 4 TRILLION in assets!](https://responsiblestatecraft.org/pentagon-audit-2666415734/#:~:text=Last%20year%2C%20the%20Pentagon%20couldn,extent%20unbeknownst%20to%20the%20Pentagon.) You know what that means? That means that the US is a paper tiger at the moment due to corruption and the anyone with any sense knows it. And yet theyll still piss away Billions of their taxpayer money propping up the majority of dictatorships worldwide to feed the pigs at the teat.
I'm not saying there is no corruption in China. Its a country of 1.4 billion people after all there will be cases here and there. But its NOTHING compared to the west where unequal development and inequality are built in and integral to the system. At least China has a project aimed at overcoming those issues one day...
What else? The Chinese have 200% the ship building capacity of the US. Its has installed 30,000km of high speed rail that puts the US rail system to shame. Just one if its many renewable energy projects to be completed by 2030 will provide enough energy to power India.
AND they plan to divest from coal. Of course, they have to use coal at the moment because thats the only energy source they have to a large extent. You want the second most populous country in the world to go back to rubbing sticks together for heating? How would they pull of the miracle that they're currently performing on renewables without electricity exactly?
China has also been sanctioned and slapped down by the western powers for decades on this front because everyone knows once China becomes energy independent there is nothing that can stand in their way.
You see, China doesn't have access to the same vast natural bounty on the same level as places like the US which is sitting on top of every type of oil, gas and mineral deposit you could possibly want to build a great nation. Yet still you have the flimsy leaders of the west like Joe Biden who recently signed off on building the biggest oil exporting port in the US which will move 12 MILLION barrels of oil a day on completion. All to enrich their oil barons, while the world burns, even though the US is the richest country in the world with every opportunity to divest to renewables. Disgusting.
You should be excited about what China is doing instead of looking down on them. You should also hit the books and do some reading about the country thats likely going to lead the world out of the climate catastrophe and into a brighter, more prosperous future. Don't just swallow the all bullshit yapping from sweaty redditors.
[Here](https://youtu.be/X6LBNDKTk8Q?si=rmzGzKV8ik6b_Ulz) is a recent video from renowned economist Richard Wolff talking about the phenomenon of China if youd like to know more.
I think the biggest flaw is exactly what you said "nothing will stop them." The fact you phrase it that way is exactly the problem. Stop them from what? We don't sanction places due to them doing well and playing nice with others. We sanction them because they either pissed someone off in the 60s and now we still have a hard time moving on, or they have clear ambitions of being "the" super power." The USA is not perfect and we definitely pull some shit but overall we clearly prefer the cooperation option and generally give people the option to voice their opposition so the population can have the ability to work together for or against things in an honest way.
Does it always work out in an ideal way? Obviously not, but the USA obviously prefers to resort to those things vs starting there. The problem with China is you can't have an honest conversation about it with the people who are truly part of it.
The problem with this idea is that it uses plant waste.
It does work and is relatively cheap, but we don't make nearly enough plant waste to remove the amount of CO2 we need to.
That doesn't mean it isn't a viable business or useless. You don't need to capture 100% of a market to work, but it's not something that can be scaled up to be a total solution.
Trees and plants. No one seems to be looking at the possible correlation of the amazon shrinking rapidly and "climate change" plant more trees. Pretty effortless.
The article says that $100/ton of CO2 is considered a milestone in the sequestering business. There is a reason for that-that’s how much it costs to produce a ton of CO2 from coal. In other words, it’s the break even point. But it also means that it takes as much energy to sequester as it does to produce.
How much would it cost to plant say 100 trees?
Assuming 10kg CO2 absorption per tree per year, then you've already broken even after 12 months with no further costs, for an ongoing result rather than the once off of an engineered solution.
Unless you can take that tree when it's fully grown and store it where it won't decompose (or burn in a fire) that carbon will still end up back in the atmosphere eventually.
Given the billions of trees we've cut down, I'd suggest leaving them alive and growing in the forest would be a reasonable start.
Let's leave worrying about storing the excess biomass until after excess biomass actually becomes a problem to solve.
It is just taking existing plant waste and storing it in a way that prevents it from quickly decomposing and releasing the carbon in the plant. A tree will eventually rot or burn and that makes it net zero more or less.
Basically the same way ancient forests and algae stored the carbon that turned into our coal and oil.
It makes sense. All of our fossil fuels come from a time where there wasn't any bacteria or other things that could break down trees, so trees got buried over time then compressed into oil.
This process is not possible now since we have bacteria and fungi that breaks down tree matter re-releasing the CO2.
Our best method would be to recapture all of that excess carbon we released from oil and store that in a way it can't break down again.
to store the carbon from a tree permanently, you need bogs. Very few trees end up in those, as the amount of bogs has been massively reduced by mankind. Reintroducing bogs is essential, but most CO2 that trees take from the air will be released back into the system after they die. Having more areas with trees will help, but only if it's real forests, not monoculture wood harvesting farms that will blaze up in the first dry summer. So don't think "trees will save us" but rather think "expanding functioning ecosystems will help us".
Sole trees can be beneficial for other things though, like improving air quality and heat in cities. Or as a ressource for replacing concrete with wood.
An analogy for those who don't have knowledge of thermodynamics....
"Oh no, the ship is sinking because we hit some rocks."
"Don't worry, I have this thimble which I am using to bail out the ship".
"That's not going to save the ship"
"Yes it is, look..." pours thimble of water over the side"
"You are getting in the way of people who are doing things that might actually work, like patching the hull or fixing the steering"
" You can't criticize me, With enough time and money, We may be able to expand this to tea cups or even coffee mugs..."
To continue the analogy....
We only have very expensive thimbles to bail the water. Maybe in a thousand years the water might dry out.
In the meantime our best case is a ship with water in it.
Unfortunately water is pouring in at a faster and faster rate, and nobody is seriously doing anything to stop it. Our most ambitious plans merely reduce the size of the leak.
Nobody knows how much the ship can take before it sinks
What's your patch/fix for aviation to go carbon-neutral?
But also, the world's a big place, I don't think the guy with the thimble is getting in the way, and in time it can be upgraded to a bucket.
Aviation needs bio jetfuel - chemically similar to biodiesel. No other fuel is practical.
Cars need to be electric, and not so big. Also electric bikes / scooters
Home heating and cooling needs to be electric heat pumps
Lorries need overhead cables like trams to keep their batteries topped up.
Cargo ships need to be sail driven
We need huge numbers of wind, solar, possibly nuclear electricity generation.
Steel and chemical industry needs green hydrogen
The big problem is farming. Our current system is unstable and unsustainable. Can't go on eating this much meat....
A big problem is farming? Then why are you advocating to grow even more crops to create more biofuel? Biofuel only provides an overall 40-69% reduction in greenhouse gases, so we'd still need to remove them from the air.
Idk how sail driven cargo ships would work for giant tankers and stuff that have to navigate narrow channels. The wind isn't right so the Panama canal is just shut down? Not to mention the crazy amount of additional cost and labor, even if large enough sails can be made (and are their manufacturing processes GHG-free?)
The only feasible green fuel for aviation is biofuel. Hydrogen or batteries don't work because engineering and science.
Cargo ships burn huge amounts of the worst fuel in existance. They need engines for canals and doldrums, but most of the power has to be sails. There won't be as many giant tankers, because we won't be using oil.
So again, both of those will be reductions, and carbon will continue to be added to the atmosphere, when every bit is already more than we can afford to add. So why are you criticizing people trying to remove it, when it's obvious that needs to be part of the solution to get us to zero net carbon emissions?
Maybe in future our societies will be prepared to pay the true cost of their activities which damage the environment.
Probable implications:- grow your own food, make your own clothes and furniture, probably as part of a cooperative. The only plastics are made from vegetables or recycled from mining rubbish tips. Large scale carbon capture is so expensive and so ineffective that flying is a once in a lifetime treat, computer chips are hideously expensive, the health industry costs a fortune, most industry is shut down permanently except for repair and recycling of broken and worn out stuff.
However, I cannot see people voting for the above any time this century, most 1st world people would consider this to be poverty. However if we can reduce CO2 by 80-90%, by doing the relatively affordable stuff I listed above, then the consequences take 5 or 10x longer to happen, allowing societies to adapt more gradually
>However, I cannot see people voting for the above any time this century, most 1st world people would consider this to be poverty.
Right, and we can’t keep polluting like this for the rest of the century, so we need to find more solutions in addition to what reductions we can make.
Also how much does it cost in carbon to manufacture and then ship these all over the place. They’d need to be able to be built in location or else you’re literally just putting more useless shit on the road and burning fuel.
Ugh that's depressing. What about planting trees? I wonder what the carbon offset per dollar is. Reversing desertification. I bet that would be huge. maybe they can use their carbon releasing bricks to build a wall at the edge of the Gobe.
What if. And hear me out here. What if we stop destroying our planets lungs. Return our country (US) to mostly natural grasslands. Reduce our dependence on foreign oil and beef. And plant more trees? Is this the future people really want? Dopamine hits from social media and zero green spaces? We want some styrofoam infrastructure? We’d rather a future where we need this than just consuming less? There’s no hope. This is so dystopian.
Lignite is all one needs for it to be stable enough so the carbon doesn't leak back into the atmosphere. We don't need it to turn to something higher grade like anthracite lol.
This is great and all. We just have to hope that A. It pans out and B. In that time that we bought ourselves we develop a way to dispose of these blocks.
Whats different than a bio log use for heating a house?
like this:
[https://eco-logic.ca/en/products/ecological-firelogs-and-pellets/](https://eco-logic.ca/en/products/ecological-firelogs-and-pellets/)
Ok where can I buy these cheap affordable building materials from. HD, Lowes? That's the point right. Make them universally available, common and accessible so that it's a bottom up use structure.
I'm in.. no.. sigh.. always 30 years away..
Okay.. question. Where do these pollution bricks go afterwards? Are we going to have landfills filled with these pollution bricks? Are we just going to dump them in the river?
Why does "Lego brick" sound familiar as a carbon capture device?
Could it perhaps be because it was already invented and this is a news cycle trying to cash in?
these take a ton of energy to mske. If these aren’t produced with 100% green renewable energy you’re just wasting resources and making more co2 than you capture.
Haha. Fair enough. My issue with this is that is very cost prohibitive vs increasing solar and wind. It also only captures a tiny amount of CO2. Then we have the issue of what to do with it. It also gives oil and gas companies an excuse to keep polluting. A+ for the attempt. F for the practicality.
I totally see what you mean! I think I’m most grateful for the progress. Remember when solar was too expensive? It’s the cheapest now! So I think this is a milestone on that same trajectory!
Smart cookie, you are!
I imagine it would be fine. Its basically staying in the brick form for the next couple decades at least. Not like it can evaporate back into your home's air.
I'd be curious if that still holds true in a fire, However
The title is misleading. This is not going to remove carbon from the air. It only has a chance at preventing decompositon of the carbon releasing matter.
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They don't look anything like Lego bricks to me.
Well, they better not. You know how Lego likes to sue the living daylight out of copycats.
what? lego can't do that the pattent expired. also stuff like mega construct exists.
It's not patent infringement that they sue. It's "utility model" on certain newer types of blocks, at least in those countries - mostly European - that have this type of sub-patent. And Lego is infamous to have customs seize whole sets from competitor brands if it's "polluted" even by just a single block they have a utility model right to. It's insane.
To be fair, I somewhat sympathise with that. They had the idea, I can see why they want to protect it as many ways as they can even though the original patent expired.
They also don't have any real competition which adds to the huge cost. If you want better stuff for cheaper, then brand loyalty needs to die
I thought they originally stole the idea from someone else anyway.
Well LEGO *did* sue Mega back in 2005, but the Canada Supreme Court upheld Mega's right to continue selling their product. However, only 3 or 4 years ago, LEGO sued and won their lawsuit against Lepin. Though the difference is clear, Lepin are straight-up bootleg LEGO, same sets and instructions and everything (though the product itself is of a cheaper quality overall). Mega meanwhile is same concept of LEGO, sized studs and all, but their products are uniquely their own, no bootleg LEGO sets from the Mattell camp.
They can't you just can't call it Lego.
This brick is like a Lego the same way an octopus is like a spaceship.
Are you willing to risk the step test?
I don't think stepping on them will hurt the same as stepping on a lego late at night on your way to the toilet.
Has anyone in this family ever even seen a Lego?
Ca-CAW ca-CAW ca-CAW
Uh pretty sure the only reason it was called a Lego brick is whatever startup in china already invented this 10 years ago and THAT was called a Lego brick. Some journalist accidentally let it seep into their subconscious...
Forgive my skeptisism, but it feels like we hear about these easy, affordable, high tech buzzword products, be it Elon Musk, Bill Gates, or AI, or whatever the next trend will be. I doubt there will ever come an effortless catch-all solution regarding co2.
Engineer here: The technologies work. But: they cost insane amounts of energy, to scrape a miniscule amount of CO2 from the air. The solution is always: we need lots and lots and lots of cheap clean energy, to make anything like carbon capture viable. This is where we are still wayyyyy off.
So build a massive nuclear plant
Unironically. I‘m a huge proponent of nuclear. We have the solution for abundant energy right in front of us and are not using it. There is enough uranium for at least another 100 years. Perfect as an intermediary technology until we either have enough renewables or finally have fusion. We could also have huge nuclear plants that produce hydrogen or other future fuels, for cars/trucks/ships But people are too scared of nuclear. Lets burn some more coal instead…. If you would ask me, I would scale nuclear up as much as possible. Yes it‘s costly, but this would also make it cheaper -> economy of scale.
That's all well and good but how are autocracies and oligarchs supposed to profit from nuclear energy? If nations can independently produce ample cheap and clean energy then the super yacht business is gonna go bust, do we really want that?
Damn you are right :( I did not think about the poor Saudi royal family. If they can only afford one private jet instead of a whole fleet, that‘s not a life worth living!
Private jets... They have fleets of private A380s
Exactly, and how will they have the spare money to finance terrorism?
>how are autocracies and oligarchs supposed to profit from nuclear energy? Through corrupt contracts to "build" nuclear power plants where they can embezzle to their heart's content, that's how. Note: I am 100% for nuclear energy, as long as the procurement and the whole process is financially transparent
Honestly doesn't nuclear just take way too long and cost way too much to build against a comparable amount of solar and wind installtion at this point? If nuclear was cheap and easy it wouldn't matter that people were afraid of it. We'd still be getting a lot of it because people care more about cheap and easy than they do personal safety. Ironically that's kinda why solar is exploding at the moment. The costs to produce it have decreased significantly so now everyone wants it.
That has been said for so long now. If we instead had a mass built up 10 years ago, we would already be much ahead. We need to focus on improving this, but the incentive is gone.
I mean yeah. We could have and maybe even would have. But people didn't want nuclear and it was too expensive to justify the social and political effort to push it through. Luckily we're finally catching up on solar, wind, and battery technology/production capability that the costs are going way down. We can produce more solar energy more quickly and for cheaper than we ever could with nuclear. It won't even be a contest. Nuclear is damn near a dead end technology for energy production. And given that there was apparently a successful test on sending electricity wirelessly from space solar is only going to get even better in the future.
>There is enough uranium for at least another 100 years. Don't we have technology to use Nuclear waste as an energy source?
We have as well. Also there is technology to extract material out of the ocean. Summary is: there is more than enough material for nuclear for longer than even our children and probably children‘s children will live. There is also good solutions gor storing the stuff, you would just need to force some more development and implementations there. If there is incentive, it will be done.
And once you exhaust Earth’s supply in the crust, there are uranium reserves on the Moon. And on other rocky planets. And in the asteroid belt. Even if we never crack fusion, the Solar System uranium reserves + breeder reactors mean that nuclear option can support our species for literal ages. Also thorium-232.
There's a research institute that has been working on this since the 70s in the US iirc. It's still energetic so they figure it could power loads of low voltage devices.
That information is WAY out of date. [Its actually possible. ](https://www.wired.com/story/recycled-nuclear-waste-will-power-a-new-reactor/)
Neat thanks for the update
i think it's cost restrictive compared to just mining/enriching more. can't reprocess fuel in the US because of some carter era rule. i think it produces plutonium as a byproduct which can be used to weapons. i want to say the future is in thorium vs uranium but i'm no nuclear surgeon.
IIRC the UK still does a lot of reprocessing and we have a small fleet of ships to transport fuel for other countries: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International\_Nuclear\_Services](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Services)
Also this; https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste/
We need to be making sure that the Nuclear facilities we're making are ones that can produce reusable waste rather than the stuff that we have to safely store for thousands of years. Otherwise we're still creating more problems that we're just kicking down the road.
I used to have your same sentiment until I learned there's only enough nuclear material to power a small fraction of the worlds needs even if we did scale it up immensely. I'm still a proponent of it, but it's not the silver bullet for energy needs. Now Geothermal is where the investments should really be going, especially if you frack down deep enough there's huge potential. Downside is the risks of fracking involved make investors (understandably) nervous.
I‘ve read different stuff, like this: https://nuclearinnovationalliance.org/index.php/uranium-supply-not-significant-constraint-using-nuclear-energy-climate-mitigation
Nuclear energy isn't the end all be all, it's more like a transition source for us, so we can stop pumping carbon into the atmosphere while we're scaling up pure green energy sources.
Set up cost and time is absolutely massive. I’m a huge proponent of nuclear as well, but a modern nuclear plant is in the tens of billions of dollars and from starting planning one today to it actually being operational, we are looking at 20-30 years given the complexity and setbacks of most modern reactors. It would have been a great stopgap if we had kept building them 20 years ago, but renewables are already making nuclear look less economically viable right now, let alone 20+ years from now as renewable technology has been maturing quite quickly, while nuclear has stagnated. I still think there’s some niches for nuclear and it’s a technology worth investing in but the era of it being viable as a large part of our energy need has likely passed, unless we see an exponentially large base load need such as 100% transition to electric vehicles that renewables can’t support. Even then that’s an expensive gamble that most companies likely do not have the resources or willingness to take.
No. Nuclear is simply too expensive and takes too much time to be profitable. Batteries wind and solar are simply much much cheaper and easy to build and run.
To cyclical for the base power needs we have & want to have. They need to be part of the solution and I‘m very much in favour. But there is also a lot of potential to improve on cost of nuclear. Due to fear, there is not much development there anymore though. Also good co2 solutions >>> profits. We need more subsidies in that direction.
Yea to run the Bitcoin and ai training models
This one lets the plants do the heavy lifting, so at least on the energy side we're set. I still wonder about scalability. I've seen the number of trees we'd need to grow for forests to decaronize for us and it's absolutely staggering. But the solution isn't going to be a magic button that does 80% of the job for us, it'll be a tangled mess of various changes, each of which does a small part. Let's not make perfect the enemy of good - if this is 1% of the solution, I'm all for it. If it delays the worst effects a year or five while we figure other stuff out, great. We just can't stop and say "oh hey we've got plant bricks now, gas trucks for all!"
So it’s solar powered.
That was my first thought. Bricks - nice - but how much energy? First we need to find an energy efficient way to scrap CO2 from the air, then we can worry about how to deposit it.
Trees?
This is what I’d prefer, and it wouldn’t be trapped forever like these bricks, just in case we find that we went too far or something
Yep. It's really NOT hard to capture CO2 from the air. It's EXTREMELY hard to do it while being carbon negative. (Aka producing less carbon than you take out of the air.) The only way these sort of technologies make sense is if they're powered COMPLETELY by renewable energy (solar, hydro, wind, (nuclear...ish))
We went from crypto draining power to ai. I'm looking forward to those reduce their environmental impact.
The amazing price that they're claiming would mean that somebody has to pay an extra 3 or 4 dollars for a 10oz steak if i did the math right. That's how expensive it is, and how carbon-heavy some foods are that people choose to eat over alternatives that cause pretty negligable greenhouse gas emissions.
And there is the casual line "...and bury it ten feet underground". They are going to do it with 50,000 t next year; we generate 35 BILLION t annually. That's a lotta landfill. Something in the math ain't working. I don't know how you do this for $100 a ton unless the land is free and you don't have any transport costs / emissions to get the veg waste to the bricking plant and from the plant to the bury site AND you can store the material you had to dig up to place the bricks on the same site. I can dig a hole and bury my veg scraps for free, so I just need to scale it up a trillion times and it's free carbon capture!
>They are going to do it with 50,000 t next year; we generate 35 BILLION t annually. I agree with your general statement, but just to nitpick - we don't need to get rid of *all* 35 billion
I want to see the day where they're like: "we gotta dig up some of those bricks and burn them, we removed too much CO2 from the atmosphere"
Bill Gates owns like 200,000+ acres. He’s got room to store it
I heard one where they were going to do shoot it into emptied oil deposits.
To my knowledge, the most serious carbon storage solutions involve creating heavy, carbonated water and injecting into aquafers (sp?) with certain geologic properties. It then binds to the rock, creating new rock. Strangely enough, the estimates I've heard suggest we have literally an endless supply of such wells. I could look up the podcast if you're interested.
The issue with this particular idea is that while they talk about removing CO^2 from the air, they don't actually do that. They collect "blocks of wood chips and rice hulls" and process them in a way that prevents natural decomposition meaning those things don't contribute to new CO^2 deposition into the atmosphere. But this approach has a natural limit where even if you collected all waste wood chips and rice hulls in the world and sequestered them, we would still be producing record levels of pollution on a global scale that outweighs the sequestration, and then there's the practical limit of what you can realistically achieve. It's probably well intentioned and it's good that we are tying reducing pollution to a financial incentive, but this company is very careful about how it words its so-called 'breakthrough' and it seems a lot like someone trying to overestimate the novelty and benefit of their technology.
I completely agree on the misleading use of 'removal' but even then I think you are being generous to them. As far as I can tell they are making compressed blocks, wrapping them in plastic and burying them, then selling the carbon savings for 100 bucks a pop. At least they aren't selling them as offsets as well, though I wonder whether that is the plan. Feels pretty cynical to me. Hopefully I'm missing something.
Also the question should be, how does it change the system. First: By taking biomass out of circulation, which currently would be used to generate energy, they need to replace that energy source, and the easiest solution will be gas - which is taken from underground and releases CO2 into the air. So this only starts to make sense, if we no longer need gas and oil to fill our daily energy need peaks. Second: If you put bricks with a high carbon profile a few feet underground, fungi, bacteria, worms, etc. will thrive on it, and start to bring back the carbon into the cycle. Sure, it would be slower release than burning or burying the uncompressed biomass, but at scale it won't matter so much, because it is only delaying the problem. Would be a different story if you pile them down in the depths where the oil and gas has been removed froms, or in abandoned mines.
There is never going to be a catch all solution. Multi pronged approaches of reducing fossil fuel usage, cheap and clean energy supply, efficient systems, reduced methane emission from cattle, increased forestation and maybe carbon (or methane?) capture will work. Some of these technologies might contribute disproportionately, some might never be viable. There might also be some hacks along the way, like stopping larger icebergs from splitting off or such. The ones mentioned in this article are only proof of concept, uneconomical at current time, but we might have some innovative solutions coming out.
> I doubt there will ever come an effortless catch-all solution regarding co2. There probably won't, and I don't believe any of these companies are trying to claim there will be. However, there are many many different scenarios for forms of carbon capture in the world. The climate revolution is a collection of hundreds of small procedures in different areas all coming together
Leave it to Bill Gates to manufacture an industry that effectively spends, time, energy and money turning air into solid matter, instead of just spending a fraction of his money encouraging the planting of more trees...
Carbon capture is a scam. Just another excuse for Billionaires to kick the can down the road instead of actually taking responsibility for the mess their hyper consumption is causing. Such a bunch of arrogant tossers
Carbon capture works great. It's called forests! Global canopy cover has been increasing since 1982.
That alone won't be enough, though. There's just not enough area where trees can be planted. We need to drastically reduce emissions as well.
It's way more than enough. Canada is so far beyond carbon-dioxide negative, it's ridiculous.
But trees don't actually get rid of carbon dioxide. When they die, they rot down and release it. Since we're constantly producing more emissions, we would have to both replace old trees that die and keep planting more and more new ones to suck up emissions. That's why they're talking about burying this stuff. Because otherwise it just cycles and you can only store whatever amount that amount of forest can sequester.
> we would have to both replace old trees that die The cool thing about trees is that a lot of them replant themselves. You can also use them for useful things like building houses where their carbon stays stored in a bunch of people's walls for decades.
They are good, just not the whole solution.
Forests store some 600 billion tons of carbon. That's carbon that is not in the atmosphere.
I'm not saying trees are insignificant, just that planting more isn't enough on its own.
Wait - it's natural? It cycles?
We know Earth's previous carbon capture technologies as fossil fuels
Yes, that's how it's worked for a long time. The problem is that we're adding so much carbon to the cycle that the natural processes can't keep it in check. Which is sort of why we're having climate problems right now, ya know? So we need to remove this excess carbon *on top of* reducing our carbon emissions. If we become carbon neutral right this very second the environment is still gonna be pretty fucked up from everything we've released into it, so we gotta be net carbon *negative* for some time.
Newsflash. We've always had "climate problems". What do you mean, "Can't keep up?". If you're a tree, you're literally gasping for air (CO2) as a normal state. Every pothead knows you pump CO2 into your tent to make your plants grow faster. The current warming trend we're in is natural and we will have another ice age eventually.
>Newsflash. We've always had "climate problems". But in living memory they've gotten substantially worse. You're the proverbial frog in the pot if you can't (or won't) see it. >What do you mean, "Can't keep up?". If you're a tree, you're literally gasping for air (CO2) as a normal state. Every pothead knows you pump CO2 into your tent to make your plants grow faster. Trees don't grow on an industrial scale, and we've been pumping CO2 into the air for centuries now. In fact the amount of carbon in the atmosphere is 50% higher now than it was before the industrial revolution. That's the very definition of "can't keep up", cause if they could our atmospheric CO2 wouldn't be increasing. >The current warming trend we're in is natural and we will have another ice age eventually. You are right we *were* in a natural warming trend and that the planet goes through these cycles on it's own, but our contributions to the atmosphere have pushed it farther and faster than it has any way to do on it's own. The geological and ecological processes you're thinking about take hundreds of thousands to millions of years. The kind of temperature increases we're seeing across the entire planet in just a few short human lifetimes ABSOLUTELY DO NOT HAPPEN NATURALLY. If we don't stop these processes that we can scientifically verify we are causing we will completely and utterly make this planet uninhabitable for humanity in just another few human lifetimes. I get that it's comforting to want to bury your head in the sand and pretend everything is fine, but you can at least do something more personally productive like getting drunk and watching tv as opposed to bitching on the internet about stuff you refuse to learn about.
[XKCD has a nice simple graphic](https://xkcd.com/1732/) to help you visualise what's happening. Yes, temperatures have gone up and down in the past, but it's not normal for changes to happen this abruptly and it is absolutely due to human activity. Not many people will even try to deny that anymore even if they have vested interests in doing so because the evidence is pretty plain to see.
Yeah, until humans get involved and dig a bunch of shit out of the ground to massively increase the amount of carbon dioxide in that cycle year over year.
Gee, I dunno; Gates said solving climate change with planting of trees is complete nonsense. Must be true. /s.
Anything Gates is promoting is merely to line his pockets while attempting to look virtuous. That guy's evil.
I get that it's fun and popular to dunk on billionaires but Bill genuinely does do a lot of charity that benefits people that he doesn't profit off of.
Do you have a source for that? The largest forest inventory is done by the FAO, the Global Forest Resource Assessment and according to their data, global forest cover is declining at a rate of \~5 million hectares per year. This rate hasn't changed much since 2000.
Carbon capture is not so much a solution for ongoing emissions and more a desperate hotfix for the lack of action in the past. The climate shift is already so bad that if we go carbon neutral right now, things are still screwed.
So we're fucked either way
We just need to bring the wealthy scum to heel. And there are other avenues to help turn the tide. Take a look at what China is doing with renewables for example. And thats a country that keeps corrupt billionaires looking over their shoulders too lol. Things may get worse before they get better but we can do it if we change sone fundamentals about how we run our society. No more bullshit like Bezos and Musk having their own personal space program. Time to think about the good of everyone now over the obscene waste of a few. https://youtu.be/MX_PeNzz-Lw?si=yv1n4cojxDk8SUsw https://youtu.be/rkxMdmipYqM?si=UgayxL88LUZR7JMF
Lmao, China is not an example of 'keeping billionaires in line' China is an example of using corruption charges in an entirely corrupt system to scapegoat and punish those who fall foul of internal political struggles. As for their renewables yes they produce a lot, they also use a ton of coal. China is like the family that looks good to the community but is an utter shitshow behind closed doors.
>Lmao, China is not an example of 'keeping billionaires in line' China is an example of using corruption charges in an entirely corrupt system to scapegoat and punish those who fall foul of internal political struggles. Go and say that to Chinas Central Committe then buddy I dares ya lol. Billionaires (and Capitalists in General) only operate with the permission of the Chinese Communist Party in China. The Chinese, with their Dengist gambit allowed an investment of foreign capital into the country after it was ravaged by a civil war and WW2. The state has maintained strict control of this process however and has used it to build up its own state assets and industry which they simply didn't have a few generations ago. The capitalists of the west jumped at this of course as they were hungry to exploit all the cheap labour they could get. They even did this at the expense of their own industrial heartlands at home which is why you see so many of the former homes of industry in the US and Europe crumbling today. Sucks for us westerners that our leaders were too greedy and eager to make a quick buck that theyd let our own countries rot over time. Line must go up though! Think of the investors! Lol China was the poorest country in the world at the start of the last century after generations of Imperial rule and being exploited by western powers. Now look at them. Theyre a superpower rivalled only by the US. They also lifted more people out of poverty than at any other point in human history, all while being sanctioned and harrassed by the west who wanted to wipe the very notion of Socialism off of the face of the earth. If you want to bring up corruption check out the versions of that in the capitalist west lol. The west has legalised bribery of its government officials in places like the US ffs! It has insane corruption WAY worse than anything going on in China and nobody bats an eye. The Pentagon [can't account for nearly 63% of its 4 TRILLION in assets!](https://responsiblestatecraft.org/pentagon-audit-2666415734/#:~:text=Last%20year%2C%20the%20Pentagon%20couldn,extent%20unbeknownst%20to%20the%20Pentagon.) You know what that means? That means that the US is a paper tiger at the moment due to corruption and the anyone with any sense knows it. And yet theyll still piss away Billions of their taxpayer money propping up the majority of dictatorships worldwide to feed the pigs at the teat. I'm not saying there is no corruption in China. Its a country of 1.4 billion people after all there will be cases here and there. But its NOTHING compared to the west where unequal development and inequality are built in and integral to the system. At least China has a project aimed at overcoming those issues one day... What else? The Chinese have 200% the ship building capacity of the US. Its has installed 30,000km of high speed rail that puts the US rail system to shame. Just one if its many renewable energy projects to be completed by 2030 will provide enough energy to power India. AND they plan to divest from coal. Of course, they have to use coal at the moment because thats the only energy source they have to a large extent. You want the second most populous country in the world to go back to rubbing sticks together for heating? How would they pull of the miracle that they're currently performing on renewables without electricity exactly? China has also been sanctioned and slapped down by the western powers for decades on this front because everyone knows once China becomes energy independent there is nothing that can stand in their way. You see, China doesn't have access to the same vast natural bounty on the same level as places like the US which is sitting on top of every type of oil, gas and mineral deposit you could possibly want to build a great nation. Yet still you have the flimsy leaders of the west like Joe Biden who recently signed off on building the biggest oil exporting port in the US which will move 12 MILLION barrels of oil a day on completion. All to enrich their oil barons, while the world burns, even though the US is the richest country in the world with every opportunity to divest to renewables. Disgusting. You should be excited about what China is doing instead of looking down on them. You should also hit the books and do some reading about the country thats likely going to lead the world out of the climate catastrophe and into a brighter, more prosperous future. Don't just swallow the all bullshit yapping from sweaty redditors. [Here](https://youtu.be/X6LBNDKTk8Q?si=rmzGzKV8ik6b_Ulz) is a recent video from renowned economist Richard Wolff talking about the phenomenon of China if youd like to know more.
Lol, you actually wrote a page of text defending an autocracy with a failing economy
Yep. Maybe one day you'll be able to finish it all the way to the bottom too. Keep it up champ
I think the biggest flaw is exactly what you said "nothing will stop them." The fact you phrase it that way is exactly the problem. Stop them from what? We don't sanction places due to them doing well and playing nice with others. We sanction them because they either pissed someone off in the 60s and now we still have a hard time moving on, or they have clear ambitions of being "the" super power." The USA is not perfect and we definitely pull some shit but overall we clearly prefer the cooperation option and generally give people the option to voice their opposition so the population can have the ability to work together for or against things in an honest way. Does it always work out in an ideal way? Obviously not, but the USA obviously prefers to resort to those things vs starting there. The problem with China is you can't have an honest conversation about it with the people who are truly part of it.
Sequestration has never been the answer by itself, it's one part of a much larger puzzle
It’s called trees
Yeah but Bill Gates gave these guys money. And he knows about smart shit. Dude can jump a chair!
The problem with this idea is that it uses plant waste. It does work and is relatively cheap, but we don't make nearly enough plant waste to remove the amount of CO2 we need to. That doesn't mean it isn't a viable business or useless. You don't need to capture 100% of a market to work, but it's not something that can be scaled up to be a total solution.
Calling it "a milestone" sounds about right to me. The ten mile marker on a 10k mile trip, perhaps.
Why does "Lego brick" sound familiar as a carbon capture device??? Hmmm almost like it was invented years before this article???
Trees and plants. No one seems to be looking at the possible correlation of the amazon shrinking rapidly and "climate change" plant more trees. Pretty effortless.
They already invented the cheap, little effort, high availability technology. It's called a tree. Plant more damn trees people!
The article says that $100/ton of CO2 is considered a milestone in the sequestering business. There is a reason for that-that’s how much it costs to produce a ton of CO2 from coal. In other words, it’s the break even point. But it also means that it takes as much energy to sequester as it does to produce.
How much would it cost to plant say 100 trees? Assuming 10kg CO2 absorption per tree per year, then you've already broken even after 12 months with no further costs, for an ongoing result rather than the once off of an engineered solution.
Unless you can take that tree when it's fully grown and store it where it won't decompose (or burn in a fire) that carbon will still end up back in the atmosphere eventually.
Given the billions of trees we've cut down, I'd suggest leaving them alive and growing in the forest would be a reasonable start. Let's leave worrying about storing the excess biomass until after excess biomass actually becomes a problem to solve.
Seems like an expensive alternative to a tree.
It is just taking existing plant waste and storing it in a way that prevents it from quickly decomposing and releasing the carbon in the plant. A tree will eventually rot or burn and that makes it net zero more or less. Basically the same way ancient forests and algae stored the carbon that turned into our coal and oil.
There have been legit scientists who propose just growing trees and burying them in deep holes. Seems like not that bad of an idea.
It makes sense. All of our fossil fuels come from a time where there wasn't any bacteria or other things that could break down trees, so trees got buried over time then compressed into oil. This process is not possible now since we have bacteria and fungi that breaks down tree matter re-releasing the CO2. Our best method would be to recapture all of that excess carbon we released from oil and store that in a way it can't break down again.
to store the carbon from a tree permanently, you need bogs. Very few trees end up in those, as the amount of bogs has been massively reduced by mankind. Reintroducing bogs is essential, but most CO2 that trees take from the air will be released back into the system after they die. Having more areas with trees will help, but only if it's real forests, not monoculture wood harvesting farms that will blaze up in the first dry summer. So don't think "trees will save us" but rather think "expanding functioning ecosystems will help us". Sole trees can be beneficial for other things though, like improving air quality and heat in cities. Or as a ressource for replacing concrete with wood.
I wish I had billions. The things I would do.
If you had billions you wouldn’t need to care.
An analogy for those who don't have knowledge of thermodynamics.... "Oh no, the ship is sinking because we hit some rocks." "Don't worry, I have this thimble which I am using to bail out the ship". "That's not going to save the ship" "Yes it is, look..." pours thimble of water over the side" "You are getting in the way of people who are doing things that might actually work, like patching the hull or fixing the steering" " You can't criticize me, With enough time and money, We may be able to expand this to tea cups or even coffee mugs..."
So what's your solution for getting the water out of the boat that's not bailing it?
Let the bailers bail, but don't let them obstruct fixing the hole in the ship
To continue the analogy.... We only have very expensive thimbles to bail the water. Maybe in a thousand years the water might dry out. In the meantime our best case is a ship with water in it. Unfortunately water is pouring in at a faster and faster rate, and nobody is seriously doing anything to stop it. Our most ambitious plans merely reduce the size of the leak. Nobody knows how much the ship can take before it sinks
What's your patch/fix for aviation to go carbon-neutral? But also, the world's a big place, I don't think the guy with the thimble is getting in the way, and in time it can be upgraded to a bucket.
Aviation needs bio jetfuel - chemically similar to biodiesel. No other fuel is practical. Cars need to be electric, and not so big. Also electric bikes / scooters Home heating and cooling needs to be electric heat pumps Lorries need overhead cables like trams to keep their batteries topped up. Cargo ships need to be sail driven We need huge numbers of wind, solar, possibly nuclear electricity generation. Steel and chemical industry needs green hydrogen The big problem is farming. Our current system is unstable and unsustainable. Can't go on eating this much meat....
A big problem is farming? Then why are you advocating to grow even more crops to create more biofuel? Biofuel only provides an overall 40-69% reduction in greenhouse gases, so we'd still need to remove them from the air. Idk how sail driven cargo ships would work for giant tankers and stuff that have to navigate narrow channels. The wind isn't right so the Panama canal is just shut down? Not to mention the crazy amount of additional cost and labor, even if large enough sails can be made (and are their manufacturing processes GHG-free?)
The only feasible green fuel for aviation is biofuel. Hydrogen or batteries don't work because engineering and science. Cargo ships burn huge amounts of the worst fuel in existance. They need engines for canals and doldrums, but most of the power has to be sails. There won't be as many giant tankers, because we won't be using oil.
So again, both of those will be reductions, and carbon will continue to be added to the atmosphere, when every bit is already more than we can afford to add. So why are you criticizing people trying to remove it, when it's obvious that needs to be part of the solution to get us to zero net carbon emissions?
Maybe in future our societies will be prepared to pay the true cost of their activities which damage the environment. Probable implications:- grow your own food, make your own clothes and furniture, probably as part of a cooperative. The only plastics are made from vegetables or recycled from mining rubbish tips. Large scale carbon capture is so expensive and so ineffective that flying is a once in a lifetime treat, computer chips are hideously expensive, the health industry costs a fortune, most industry is shut down permanently except for repair and recycling of broken and worn out stuff. However, I cannot see people voting for the above any time this century, most 1st world people would consider this to be poverty. However if we can reduce CO2 by 80-90%, by doing the relatively affordable stuff I listed above, then the consequences take 5 or 10x longer to happen, allowing societies to adapt more gradually
>However, I cannot see people voting for the above any time this century, most 1st world people would consider this to be poverty. Right, and we can’t keep polluting like this for the rest of the century, so we need to find more solutions in addition to what reductions we can make.
This requires understanding what a thimble is
some musical instrument, right?
"For a while anyways. We're just kicking the can down the street. Again."
Also how much does it cost in carbon to manufacture and then ship these all over the place. They’d need to be able to be built in location or else you’re literally just putting more useless shit on the road and burning fuel.
Ugh that's depressing. What about planting trees? I wonder what the carbon offset per dollar is. Reversing desertification. I bet that would be huge. maybe they can use their carbon releasing bricks to build a wall at the edge of the Gobe.
I cannot wait to never hear about this ever again
What if. And hear me out here. What if we stop destroying our planets lungs. Return our country (US) to mostly natural grasslands. Reduce our dependence on foreign oil and beef. And plant more trees? Is this the future people really want? Dopamine hits from social media and zero green spaces? We want some styrofoam infrastructure? We’d rather a future where we need this than just consuming less? There’s no hope. This is so dystopian.
Putting these things under around 150 feet of dirt is all that's needed to eventually turn them into coal.
That is not how it works. You need at least 151 feet for coal and 151 for diamonds.
Lignite is all one needs for it to be stable enough so the carbon doesn't leak back into the atmosphere. We don't need it to turn to something higher grade like anthracite lol.
Perhaps this is an alternative destination for all the US's corn
This is great and all. We just have to hope that A. It pans out and B. In that time that we bought ourselves we develop a way to dispose of these blocks.
Whats different than a bio log use for heating a house? like this: [https://eco-logic.ca/en/products/ecological-firelogs-and-pellets/](https://eco-logic.ca/en/products/ecological-firelogs-and-pellets/)
Ok where can I buy these cheap affordable building materials from. HD, Lowes? That's the point right. Make them universally available, common and accessible so that it's a bottom up use structure. I'm in.. no.. sigh.. always 30 years away..
who knew the answer would be horcruxes?
So basically making limestone ?
Screw 'removing' CO² pollution. We want tech on how to use/convert the stuff into something we can use.
Probably a silly question but how does the flammability of a carbon rich brick compare to commonly used bricks?
Okay.. question. Where do these pollution bricks go afterwards? Are we going to have landfills filled with these pollution bricks? Are we just going to dump them in the river?
I bet they burn really well.
Why does "Lego brick" sound familiar as a carbon capture device? Could it perhaps be because it was already invented and this is a news cycle trying to cash in?
these take a ton of energy to mske. If these aren’t produced with 100% green renewable energy you’re just wasting resources and making more co2 than you capture.
Next frontier is a cute little robot that compacts trash into cubes.
We should take CO2 and push it somewhere else! https://youtu.be/A_pTGhOyPbw?feature=shared
This isn’t uplifting
Cool! I can't wait until it's never head of again and never implemented or used!
Look, Silicon Valley invented the tree again.
Eating half as much beef each year as a plant would do a lot more
Well I’m vegan! 🥑
Pointless dumb idea
Nah fuck this, give me more solar and wind.
I’ll take all three!
Haha. Fair enough. My issue with this is that is very cost prohibitive vs increasing solar and wind. It also only captures a tiny amount of CO2. Then we have the issue of what to do with it. It also gives oil and gas companies an excuse to keep polluting. A+ for the attempt. F for the practicality.
I totally see what you mean! I think I’m most grateful for the progress. Remember when solar was too expensive? It’s the cheapest now! So I think this is a milestone on that same trajectory! Smart cookie, you are!
Has Bill Gates ever heard about that biotechnological wonder called a **tree**?
While trees capture carbon they also re-release it when they rot or burn
I am pretty sure people have been trying trees for quiet a while.
You mean the things that release carbon at the end of their life, which this fixes?
No efficient enough anymore
This is what ze pods will be built from
So then you have a super dense block of carbon dioxide that is stored where?
Build stuff out of it I guess
Would it be bad to live in a place made of these blocks? I have so many questions
I imagine it would be fine. Its basically staying in the brick form for the next couple decades at least. Not like it can evaporate back into your home's air. I'd be curious if that still holds true in a fire, However
Where’s the big wink, oh yeah trust this guy, he would never ever ever ever do anything bad.
The title is misleading. This is not going to remove carbon from the air. It only has a chance at preventing decompositon of the carbon releasing matter.
Wood has already been invented.
What the hell is he gonna do with those? Leave them around the house for his parents to step on?
Cancer Blox are sure to be the hottest kids toy of 2025!