AI will develop a reaction to turn atmospheric CO2 into electricity and oxygen and then we’ll have nothing to worry about in our future except for the constant threat of combustion.
this post was submitted on 16 Feb 2025
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That small red bulb counteracts the entropy argument because you bring energy (and quite a lot of I recall) into the system.
Would be a sad day if we no longer could reduce entropy locally under the invest of energy.
Would be a sad day if we no longer could reduce entropy locally under the invest of energy.
I don't think there'd be anyone left alive to be sad in that case...
That's sad
The wider issue is you have to generate that energy, and you have to be able to capture more carbon than that generation released.
As I understand it doesn't at all. This is why it's seen as analagous to a perpetual motion machine, it's an endless chain of power plants capturing each others carbon to no end.
You could use solar of course, but then why generate anything with fossil fuels just to capture the carbon with solar? Just use solar.
Because we still need to bring CO2 levels down even if we stop burning fossil fuel.
And then we'll probably need to burn fossil fuel to keep them at the right level, since we are in a capitalistic society and we're never going to be able to shutdown the CO2 collectors if they are ever built.
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(2 replies)
There are plenty of arguments to be made against direct air capture, but entropy isn't one of them. Nobody ever claimed this is some kind of perpetuum mobile.
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(4 replies)
The point is to use a low carbon power source to power it.
Yes that’s the point but why take the extra steps. Use the low carbon energy directly and stop using the high carbon sources.
I think the intention is that the switch is not going to be immediate, and so there will be a stretch of time where some places use renewable sources of energy and some places still use non-renewables. There's nothing you can do if your neighbor doesn't switch, other than to try to capture their carbon output
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(1 replies)
This guy gets it
Renewable energy has many parts. I have listed the 5 most important here.
As you can see, renewable biomass and hydropower are also part of renewable energy. That is because they have the advantage of being both power-sources and energy-storages. That means people will continue to use biomass and combust it in the long term.
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(17 replies)
That's essentially how many gases are made from mixtures, like notrogen or oxygen. Showing this as something new tells a lot about author's uderstanding. Carbon capture is not about making entirely new tech, it's optimization, and that's where startups suck at everything except for getting and then wasting cash.
I don't question the working principles of DAC, or as you mention separating gasses. It's just that burning fossil fuels for energy would make no sense if you had to use most, if not all of that energy on DAC. And if you want to use low-carbon energy to power carbon capture, why not use it directly to replace fossil fuels? It seems to me that to reduce net emissions it's most efficient not to emit it in the first place.
That's why you power the thing with renewables. We have to switch to green energy; that's a given. But the point of DAC is we've already so thoroughly fucked up the environment that we have to also go further and start cleaning up our mess. Just switching to all solar power generation and electric cars would eventually work, but it would take hundreds of years at least for atmospheric CO2 to go back to normal.
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(2 replies)
Cant you just feed the CO2 from the nearest coal power plant?