I’m back from Globe Forum 2010, a meeting that brings together leaders of innovative businesses focused on sustainability. A major theme at the meeting was, of course, greenhouse gases and climate change. My talk emphasized that high CO2 levels will persist for decades (even with heroically deep cuts in CO2 emissions) unless we implement large-scale atmospheric CO2 capture.
Thermodynamics says that collecting and storing the anthropogenic excess CO2 will require work of compression amounting to about 3 TW-decades of energy (preferably not from coal). Since 3 TW is more than the total time-average electric power production of the human race today, this highlights the importance of new modes of production that can make solar arrays and carbon-capture apparatus economically, sustainably, and at low cost. This is one of many motivations for developing high-throughput APM.
Here are a few Metamodern posts relevant to climate change:
Greenhouse Gases and Advanced Nanotechnology discusses the under-appreciated stubbornness of the problem and how it can be solved when the human race achieves a basic competence in fabricating physical objects.
Ocean Acidification: The Other CO2 Problem discusses the chemical side of changing the composition of the atmosphere. Planetary sunscreen wouldn’t address this problem.
To improve US fuel economy, stop talking about MPG! suggests that switching to a more direct description of fuel consumption would dispel a costly illusion about automobile performance and help to correct crazy R&D priorities. (Miles per gallon describes inverse fuel consumption, a strange and confusing metric, and 2,000 mpg car would be a surprisingly low-value miracle.)
One Watt, One year, One dollar (pass it on) tells how bloggers (or anyone else able to communicate) can help reduce energy waste, immediately and with little effort, by helping to popularize a simple, memorable fact about the retail cost of electric power. (In other words: please link to this post and be pleased that you’ve done something to save the planet.)
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Check spelling in your headline…
Eric, you do not mention nuclear power (fission) often and I am not sure what is your opinion about nuclear as main energy source for humanity that could also be used for reversing some of the damage done to the environment. I specifically recommend reading about the Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor (LFTR) design that is deeply discussed on http://energyfromthorium.com.
“Thermodynamics says that removing the anthropogenic excess CO2 will require work of compression amounting to about 3 TW-decades of energy”
What are the assumptions that produce this figure? Surely there are more economical ways of doing it. Carbonation of weathered rock surfaces is exothermic though very very slow. Plants are a lot faster (though still too slow) and so far as I can see there’s no work of compression involved.
@ mitchell porter — Yes, there are other ways of removing the CO2, though not necessarily more economical. Regarding the thermodynamics, confining the dilute gas (or a material made from it) to a small volume involves a reduction in entropy, and this requires the expenditure of an equivalent amount of free energy, regardless of the source. As you note, though, chemical and biological methods don’t involve a literal compression process.
I’ve reworded the post to say “collecting and storing” in place of “removing”.
@ Chris Phoenix — Thanks, fixed.
I apologize high-jacking this thread.
Anyone interested of transferring article “A proximity-based programmable DNA nanoscale assembly line” in Nature to human language?
I’m trying to judge the implications of this, but fail to see what is programmed and what does these kinds of “programs” output?
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