this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2024
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Science Memes

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Drift!! (mander.xyz)
submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 38 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (5 children)

The key to motivating a capitalist nation to participate in carbon capture is to first discover a way to profit off of the captured carbon.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

That's simple enough, create a process where CO2 is removed from the air and turned into oil. The chemistry of the individual steps is already known and achievable, the hard part is the energy input required to make it work.

Edit: Okay so I typed the reply and then went and read the paper. Turns out that what I described is kinda-sorta what they've done, although it's certainly not a finished or industrially viable process at this point.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago

Exactly. There are already several prototypes for products ranging from plastics to construction materials to butter (yes, really) made from captured carbon.

It needs to be profitable, desirable, and competitively priced (when applicable) for VCs to put their chips in the pot. That, we have yet to see.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

This is a bit of an issue when what they want out of the oil is the energy. If you have enough energy to make oil, why not just use the energy directly?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

the one vaguely sensible use case is as portable fuel, but then it raises questions such as "why do we still have combustion cars" and "don't cars actually kinda suck? shouldn't we be running more trains instead?"

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Yeah, hydrocarbons are probably going to be really good energy storage for airplanes and gas turbine generators. Outside of that, I don't see much use for a rare, dirty, hot, energy source. Rockets I guess.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

What if we started a cryptocurrency that can only be mined by capturing carbon /s

[–] [email protected] 6 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Holy shit that might work lol

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

until someone sets up a continous loop where it spews carbon into a sealed chamber which is captured, and then emitted again.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago

Yeah, one of the most infuriating things, that we have to find ways for the people who caused the problem to profit from fixing it to get anything accomplished.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 weeks ago

Exactly. Paper straws are undoubtedly better for the environment but if they aren't cheaper to make I will eat my own ass

[–] [email protected] 32 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

where source

edit: here source

https://api.repository.cam.ac.uk/server/api/core/bitstreams/8b204a37-1b52-4dde-9002-91bcf508a909/content

edit edit: am too dumb to grasp the significance, but sound pretty dope

[–] [email protected] 10 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

This is encouraging if they're onto something! I've been obsessing over it lately, finding some way to actually recycle or at least destroy plastic. Sadly I don't have that kind of background.

There isn't gonna be "profit" in this. But man, people are voluntarily putting subdermal chips in themselves to become diet-cyborgs, and gene-hacking plants together in their garages.

Ironically, look at 3D printing and how that exploded! (As well as the very niche research into spooling plastic bottles and stuff into filament!)

Plastics up-cycling or elimination has to be headed by hobbyist hacker types more than anything. It won't get the grants, it won't get the government sign-offs, and in sheer mind-blowing stupidity, waste production is projected to increase exponentially in the next coming years.

There's plenty of people with hard science degrees getting ignored for jobs, getting radicalized just by looking out their window. I know it's a complicated subject, but coordinating efforts like distributed protein folding and I dunno, limited use of LLM to scientifically predict things...

People way smarter than me gotta be on this already right? We gotta figure this out and open-source it to anybody and everybody who wants to deploy it, before the world's big players has a chance to do anything to stop us.

We need a "de-maker" movement as much as we needed the maker movement.