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MIT engineers make converting CO2 into useful products more practical

(news.mit.edu)
173 points rbanffy | 4 comments | 13 Nov 24 15:42 UTC | HN request time: 0.86s | source
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rhelz ◴[13 Nov 24 17:11 UTC] No.42127904[source]▶
To remove the co2 we put into the atmosphere will always take way more energy than we got out of putting it into the atmosphere in the first place. That is just thermodynamics.

To remove all the co2 we put into the atmosphere would take more energy than we extracted from fossil fuels since the industrial revolution. And all that energy would, of course, have to be produced in an absolutely carbon-free manner.

So this is and will remain an entirely impractical method of combatting global warming. MIT engineers know this. The people who funded this research know this. Why are they doing this?

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1. HappMacDonald ◴[13 Nov 24 17:44 UTC] No.42128231[source]▶
Think of carbon in the atmosphere as a debt.

Obviously you cannot effectively pay off debt using the money that you borrowed: that just leaves you with a net loss of the interest/friction/inefficiency.

But if you can earn enough money to pay down the debt (which naturally also requires weaning off of the deficit spending in the first place) via other means such as renewable energy sources in great excess to the quantity of fossil fuel energy we have produced thus far, then figuring out how to pay down the debt as efficiently as possible as soon as possible absolutely makes sense.

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2. bluGill ◴[13 Nov 24 18:33 UTC] No.42128644[source]▶
The problem is how fast we are adding "debt". The earth is naturally slightly CO2 negative without human intervention. However currently there are thousands of years to make up for every year of CO2 we are adding. I say thousands, but I haven't been able to figure out a true number, so thousands is conservative, it could be in the hundreds of thousands.
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3. stevenwoo ◴[14 Nov 24 02:00 UTC] No.42132395[source]▶
We are kind of relying on the oceans to soak up excess atmospheric co2 at the risk of acidifying the oceans too much. It’s one of those things where it’s such a huge problem and for which we have no solution.
4. rhelz ◴[15 Nov 24 02:39 UTC] No.42143497[source]▶
// If you can earn enough money to pay down the debt //

If we could divert enough energy to do that, we could have not put it into the air in the first place!!

We are talking about an absolutely ginormous amount of energy. It would take more energy than the human race has used since the industrial revolution to "pay down the debt" (to use your metaphor).