In a recent discussion on climate change I mentioned what I call the coming carbon collapse, that point at which human generated carbon emissions go to zero or even negative. If you wondered what I was talking about, here is just one of the technologies roaring down the tracks at us in 2010, brought to you courtesy of the Hero of the Capitalist Revolution who beat the socialist Human Genome Project to completion.
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The coming carbon collapseJanuary 1st, 2010 |
 18 comments to The coming carbon collapse |
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Great. Mad scientist wants to create artificial life to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere.
This is supposed to be good? CO2 is present in such tiny amounts plant growth is stunted by this shortage, that is to say, the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is a rate limiting step right now in plant growth.
Venter just wants to get $$$ from the global warming industry to fund his research. Complete madness.
joel,
My thoughts about all of these schemes are somewhat similar. ‘Great. We have just the solution to world hunger. We’ll lower CO2 and cool the planet.’ It sounds a lot more like a population reduction measure than an environmentally motivated one.
Fascinating and profoundly thought provoking concepts under discussion here.
The aspect joel brings up is just one symptom of the larger issue – how utterly ignorant we are about some of the overall processes we interact with on a daily basis in our biosphere.
Speaking of being ‘carbon neutral’ or ‘carbon negative’ are by far oversimplifications, given our lack of overall understanding of the longer term, greater impact to the balances and tolerances of the overall system to variations in the components within.
Venter hints at parts and pieces of things that niggle at the edge of consciousness, of a puzzle for which we have no box top illustration by which to guide how they fit together, per se.
The answers that we do not have, to a satisfactory degree, to such fundamental questions as ‘where do naturally occurring petrochemicals come from?’ ‘What is the ‘optimal’ partial pressure of CO2 in our atmosphere?’ Until we can come up with plausible explanations of the overall processes involved, we aren’t anywhere near being in a position to make judgement about wether we’ve reached ‘peak oil’ or ‘peak coal’ – nor, without understanding how such things came to be, will we have in our grasp very significant and probably relevant data to assess how much variability the biosphere can or will tolerate, and still be conducive to supporting sustainable conditions for life on the planet (and, as a corollary, at what rate such and sundry variables are cycled throughout the entire system)
Not to mention being able to guage, with any sort of certainty, the actual impact of the introduction of additionals to the mix (energy, materials) via importation from space. Fundamental questions, such as what will happen with the import and expenditure of additional energy which does not naturally fall upon the planet right now? Additional carbon, iron, nickel, or other potentially desirable elements?
It boils down to basic mechanics – trying to tune the car when you’re completely ignorant of how the engine works is not exactly a recipe for guaranteed success. Certainly, we have a glimmer of some of what is involved, and some very learned people can expound in great detail on such details – however in many respects (and this is another example), the result is merely an exposition of what we do NOT know.
This isn’t to say that I am either opposed to Mr. Venter’s efforts, nor that I find his work to be dangerous or ill-advised – quite the opposite. The potential for the knowledge he and his colleagues are developing sends the imagination soaring, in any number of positive directions.
Keeping in mind, of course, that a nice warm fire can keep the feet comfortably toasty – but is also capable of burning down the house.
Additionally, it adds to the utter contempt and frustration arising from the horrendous disservice done to mankind in general by charlatans with vested interests hawking self beneficial schemes in the guise of ‘science’ (yes, that’s a BIG stink-eye looking at Al Gore, Hadley CRU, and the IPCC).
There is an interesting philosophical argument that mankind started off believing we were the center of the universe; science spent centuries dethroning us, relegating humanity to an insignficant planet circling a rather ordinary star on the distant outreaches of an unremarkable galaxy in a vast universe; and recently the anti-scientists have tried to make it all about us again.
One of the many weaknesses in the Gospel According to Al Gore is that fossil fuels are finite. Even if Anthropogenic Global Warming mysticism were real, we are going to run out of carbon sources long before we create any problems in the atmosphere.
So let’s wish Mr. Venter every success. We will need replacements for the 90% of current global energy coming from fossil fuels — and we will need those replacements in the not too distant future.
As Joel, Midwesterner and Wind Rider have already hinted, this kinda ignores the question of “But what if we find out that we *want* the Earth to become warmer?”. Trying to help things along by reducing carbon if the natural course of the planet is towards another Ice Age would be a bit like trying to douse a nasty fire by throwing a bucket of keronsine upon it. ^_^;
That said, it’s worth noting that this may have interesting implications for the terraforming of Venus if the blue-green algae proposed by Carl Sagan aren’t enough to do the job. ^_^
Whoops! For “keronsine” please read “kerosine”. *^_^*
I R a reel gud spelLer. On nest! ^_^;
If I was in control of CO2 levels, like some seem to assume is possible for ‘humanity’, I would arrange for them to be increased to around 1,000ppm. This would be very beneficial for plant growth, and help with the challenge of feeding lots of people and having attractive countryside. All indications are that CO2 has such a minor role in climate that it has been impossible to detect it. Big effects exists only in the computer models of corrupt and/or hysterical ‘scientists’ and believed in by foam-flecked lefties. Even in these models, the effect is not a result, but is rather a built-in artefact.
“…such fundamental questions as ‘where do naturally occurring petrochemicals come from?’…”
Might that be a nod to the abiogenic view?
“…such fundamental questions as ‘where do naturally occurring petrochemicals come from?’…”
Might that be a nod to the abiogenic view?
I am surprised that no one has picked up on the simplicity and beauty of this… it is a closed cycle fuel system. The manufacturer of fuels gets one of their major feed stocks for free (CO2); they produce the fuel which is easily distributed and used by our existing capital infrastructure; the purchaser burns the fuel and releases the CO2 to the atmosphere… where it is then available to the producer once again.
This is also of use on Mars I might add and could be a very useful technology if Venter can do it with microbes because then we’ll get an infinite fuel supply for exploration vehicles from day one.
Another possibility for the longer term is that since microbes are nanotech, it might even been worth having your own little box that takes grid power and tops off your tank over night.
The possibilities are endless. Get out of your ideological ruts are start thinking like creative capitalists. Go forth, cash in and get wealthy enough to make socialists wet their trousers in frustration.
DA: “I am surprised that no one has picked up on the simplicity and beauty of this… it is a closed cycle fuel system. ”
It had occurred to me in a sort of ‘Heath Robinson’ idea the exhaust of your internal combustion engine is fed into the biological CO2 digester and out comes Octane which is fed into the engine again.
You could use the ‘currently’ waste heat generated by the ICE to power the biological process.
On the other hand I can’t help remembering from my youth reading a SCI FI story about a company that build gene recombination machines and managed to produce the beast of the apocalypse from one of them.
Can’t now remember the title, but would love to read it again. Anybody?
Intriguing video.
I agree with professional pessimist John Derbyshire of National Review that biology is going to steamroller our civilization as much or more as the industrial revolution or the computer revolution have done so.
It creeps me out though that this guy dismisses so readily the weaponization of this technology.
Mike – (and Dale)
Yes, it is a nod to the (possibility) of the abiogenic viewpoint, which, could possibly be a pre-existent ‘closed cycle’ system – although in a sense, not truly ‘closed’, as energy is being added from the local star to the very local gravity well.
The subject of the energy transaction, and the ability to exploit the processes and activities of designer bio-mechanicals to produce materials immediately useful for the transfer of chemically stored/transmitted energy is only the tip of the iceberg with this technology.
They are an intriguing possibilty vector for the manipulation of material on the nano-tech scale, for a wide range of things.
The idea of a ‘sunlight and dirt machine’ is often bandied about by folks cheerleading for the possibilities of nanotech – well, I submit – we are looking at one possibility for their manufacture. To limit the development of such things to purely metallic creations is a bit stunted, imho, as an amazing natural diversity of ‘dirt and sunlight’ machines of organic construct already exist, in ‘crude’, ‘wild’ forms.
The use of this tech in possible terraforming application has been hinted at – and it’s certainly more promising an idea than the “Aliens” hollywood franchise vision of a large, industrial atmosphere converter/generator.
But to get to the point of the ‘run’ on terraforming, we need to ‘walk’ into the understanding of how a planetary scale system actually works.
And in that respect, uncorking this tech before that tech is maturated may be about as consequential as man’s first energy transactional exploits during the dawn of the industrial age, which did result in quite a bit of localized messiness, to say the least.
I guess my biggest departure with Dale on this subject is that he sees it as a solution to a specific ‘problem’, and I see it as a set of potential solutions with application to ‘problems’ we haven’t even yet begun to ‘solve’
Oh I fully understand the implications. (see the list of names in the front of ‘Engines of Creation)… however, as a writer working in the blog genre I have learned to be as concise as possible. Some times that requires tackling only a tiny corner of a much larger possible discussion which would take many hours of my time to frame in a reasonably intelligent fashion.
There’s some amazing life forms shown here, especially the ones that can withstand radioactivity
Can’t anyone do something with methane? After my teenager and his buddies go to Taco Bell, its almost impossible to be in a closed car with any of them for a couple of days.
Maybe we could run a hose from their butts to my engine. I could drive to the moon for the cost of a couple of crunch wraps.
Maybe not to the engine, but to the exhaust pipe I’d think it possible…
The first two commenters on this thread, Joel and Widwesterner appear to have not been paying attention. It was stated clearly in the video that there was not enough CO2 in the atmosphere to make this work and that CO2 from power stations or motor vehicles would have to be used, thus “Sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere” was never even an issue. In any case the CO2 in question would be put straight back in to the atmosphere when the fuel was burned.
I think that there may be a problem with de-stabalising the Middle East though.