Re: [DIYbio] Climate change solutions?

• Too slow: I heard a story that at some point duckweed covered the Atlantic, caused a 2000 ppm drop in CO2, and triggered a cooling. In the sense of evolution, I just found this page that CO2 levels are "now changing about 25,000 times faster than in known geologic history." Link also has a nice chart of CO2 levels up to 600 million years ago.
• Nuclear + Diamonoids: This does seem highly efficient from an energy standpoint. Why make more complex molecules (more energy) when pure carbon will do? The thing that's missing for me is economics, who pays to make gigatons of diamonoids? Maybe the extra energy is necessary to create value.

On Fri, Sep 21, 2018 at 11:49 AM Tito <titoja...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hi everybody,
> Anyone here interested in direct air capture for carbon removal? https://www.fastcompany.com/40510680/can-we-suck-enough-co2-from-the-air-to-save-the-climate
>
> The current generation of tech is chemical engineering. I'm curious what solutions biology might offer. Figured some people on this list might be thinking about it already.
>
> Thoughts?

Seems like to meet the desired CO2 target levels in reasonable time
period, biology is going to be too slow.

Something I don't know is how long the past (pre-human) era of
high-CO2 lasted in time... was it sufficient to enable evolutionary
selection/optimization of fast CO2 consumers?

It seems fast CO2 capture has already been on scientists' and
engineers' minds for some time, for example in the forestry and
agriculture fields. I remember an internship I almost accepted years
ago at ORNL, where they were looking at the microbiome (among other
things) of Poplar because it grows quite fast, and that would be a
boon to people wanting wood for product manufacturing.

It seems to me the best solution would be hooking up a clean/green
nuclear plant to an industrial-scale CO2 chemical capture system. If
we could figure out a way to produce something more-dense than water,
then we could just start dumping diamonoids into a pile at the bottom
of the ocean, etc.