If only there was a way to solve climate change with carbon capture that was low tech, easy to do, simple to understand, didn't pose any long term side effects and pretty cheap to do.
Oh, and it can solve all the CO2 emissions you could ever want, so you know, you don't even have to make significant changes to your industry or way of life, because your emissions are pretty much flat out neutralized by this one simple thing.
Sounds perfect right?
Sounds like a silver bullet.
...but, silver bullets don't exist.
So, I can guarantee it's not that simple. Maybe it's another useful tool to help tackle climate change, probably with more research as to how to actually works. ...but, I think anyone who's excited by this needs to calllllmmm the F down, because this idea has been around for quite a while, and no one is using it; so I suspect there are some things that still need to be figured out like:
- do the benefits scale linearly, or is it a logarithmic curve (like most things)?
- can you actually measure the amount of carbon captured to prove its working?
- does it have any side effects on the ecosystem?
- does it have any impact on, you know, the farms you're putting it on?
- does their model (which is all they did, create a Matlab model) actually work in the real world?
- how often do you have to do it for it to stay effective?
It's complicated right.
I mean, sounds promising... but this:
> The simple act of sprinkling rock dust—an abundant byproduct of mining—on farmland could capture 45% percent of the carbon dioxide required to help the UK meet its 2050 net-zero targets.
Is just idle wishing the problem away. It might. It might not. There's a model that suggests it might.
I'm not convinced we should be sprinkling rock dust over the entire country quite yet.
Even poorly educated, dirt poor people in underdeveloped countries can do it. (And are. See for example Pakistan, where they are planting 10 billion of them.)
- does it have any impact on, you know, the farms you're putting it on?
These two questions probably already have an answer: we already grow plants, vegetables, fruit trees on basaltic soils (soils formed by the erosion of basaltic rocks). Some European countries have almost only them, like Iceland, Albania, Montenegro. Usually the crops are excellent, and benefits directly from this natural fertilizer e.g. some Italian wines. These rocks also help to capture water in arid regions, btw.
We are also plenty of real world experiments of adding these substances to other ecosystems: every basaltic volcanic eruption distribute a dust cloud around the vent, usually in an area of hundreds km^2, influencing the environment.
> Sounds like a silver bullet.
...but, silver bullets don't exist.
There are many, many examples of miracle technologies that have huge effects for the resources expended on them: antibiotics, vaccines, printing, writing, mathematics, the transistor.
When people didn't understand soil and biology very well, fields needed long fallow periods to recover from growing wheat and other crops.
As part of the British Agricultural Revolution, they figured out that they could plant turnips and clover instead:
> One important change in farming methods was the move in crop rotation to turnips and clover in place of fallow. Turnips can be grown in winter and are deep-rooted, allowing them to gather minerals unavailable to shallow-rooted crops. Clover fixes nitrogen from the atmosphere into a form of fertiliser. This permitted the intensive arable cultivation of light soils on enclosed farms and provided fodder to support increased livestock numbers whose manure added further to soil fertility.
Putting the right kind of extra dirt is in the same class. Fertilizer can increase yields by 20% or more. That’s a magic bullet. Technology is nothing but the quest for magic bullets.
Every action has consequences; as you see from the effects of using fertilisers and pesticides.
“Perfect fixes” with technology don't happen. Perfect fixes have no side effects. That’s incredibly difficult to achieve in complex systems.
Whether you want to believe it or not, doesn’t change the facts.
Breakthrough transformative technologies do exist, but those simply change things they don’t magically fix them.
What you’re espousing is not “truth”; it’s simply a philosophy, considered by many to be a short sighted trivialisation of a complex problem. See -> https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_fix
If only there was a way to solve climate change with carbon capture that was low tech, easy to do, simple to understand, didn't pose any long term side effects and pretty cheap to do.
Oh, and it can solve all the CO2 emissions you could ever want, so you know, you don't even have to make significant changes to your industry or way of life, because your emissions are pretty much flat out neutralized by this one simple thing.
Sounds perfect right?
Sounds like a silver bullet.
...but, silver bullets don't exist.
So, I can guarantee it's not that simple. Maybe it's another useful tool to help tackle climate change, probably with more research as to how to actually works. ...but, I think anyone who's excited by this needs to calllllmmm the F down, because this idea has been around for quite a while, and no one is using it; so I suspect there are some things that still need to be figured out like:
- do the benefits scale linearly, or is it a logarithmic curve (like most things)?
- can you actually measure the amount of carbon captured to prove its working?
- does it have any side effects on the ecosystem?
- does it have any impact on, you know, the farms you're putting it on?
- does their model (which is all they did, create a Matlab model) actually work in the real world?
- how often do you have to do it for it to stay effective?
It's complicated right.
I mean, sounds promising... but this:
> The simple act of sprinkling rock dust—an abundant byproduct of mining—on farmland could capture 45% percent of the carbon dioxide required to help the UK meet its 2050 net-zero targets.
Is just idle wishing the problem away. It might. It might not. There's a model that suggests it might.
I'm not convinced we should be sprinkling rock dust over the entire country quite yet.