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| ▲ | __MatrixMan__ 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | One thing that cheap solar panels can't do is produce feedstock for a 3d printer. The effective wattage of something that prevents the need to ship something from the other side of the planet could be quite high even if it's actual wattage is low. That's not to say that we're there yet. Specialists in other countries still make a much better widget than the robot in my closet and they will for a while. But it's a step. | |
| ▲ | ozim 8 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | From the article: Researchers built a perovskite and copper-based device that converts carbon dioxide into C2 products – precursory chemicals of innumerable products in our everyday lives, from plastic polymers to jet fuel. | | |
| ▲ | 9dev 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Converting CO2 on its own seems like a useful thing, don’t you think? | | |
| ▲ | myrmidon 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not necessarily. The problem is the somewhat low atmospheric CO2 concentration; this is why all the "lets just pollute now and remove the CO2 from the atmosphere with some futuristic tech!" approaches are also kinda doomed, because even if you had some workable process that did not cause excessive costs by itself (like this one possibly), you still need to process millions of cubic meters of air, every year, just to compensate for a single (!!) car. | | |
| ▲ | leereeves 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | That sounds like a lot, but a million cubic meters is only a cube 100 meters on each side. So it's on the order of the air in a football stadium. A 1200 CFM home air conditioning system moves roughly 20 million cubic meters per year. | | |
| ▲ | myrmidon 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Sure. But thats still very much a lower bound, and it makes a bunch of idealizing assumptions that are hopelessly overoptimistic (assuming your intake gets the full 400ppm of CO2, and you manage to extract all of it in one go). Even from those numbers, you already get up to a football stadium of processed air per hour for every small town. For a big city, you need to process that football stadium worth of air every second. Building infrastructure of that magnitude is a major commitment, and if most nations can not be arsed to replace a small number of fossil power plants per country, I honestly don't see us building large air processing plants in every single town in a timely manner (that are extremely likely to be less profitable than replacing the power plants). | | |
| ▲ | themaninthedark 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | What is the size of these process units? Can it be coupled with current air processes? Every house, office building and factory has air handling units. Factories and other industrial sites also use compressors. |
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| ▲ | alnwlsn 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Earth's atmosphere is 5.15×10^18 kg and at atmospheric pressure density is 1.293 kg m−3. The whole thing would be more like 4 billion billion cubic meters. So a billion AC units could have the whole thing cleaned up in just 200 years. Which would suggest that maybe as much as 0.1% to 1% of earth's atmosphere has ever passed through an air conditioner. | | |
| ▲ | nancyminusone 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This just has me picturing a scene where global warming is solved not by cleaning it up, but by leaving tons of window air conditioners everywhere, troll physics style, "to cool down the outside" | | |
| ▲ | the_sleaze_ 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Psh, that's not reasonable. Outer space is like really really cold. What we need is a huge heat pump in outer space that pumps the planets heat out into deep space. All we need is a space-elevator style tube and we're good to go! | | |
| ▲ | lukan 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You would need GIANT radiators. Space is cold but there is also allmost no cold material to transfer heat. So even with a space elevator .. not so easy. |
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| ▲ | azinman2 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Makes me wonder if ACs should have built in scrubbers. If that was the norm everywhere, you’d have some mild effect going on at scale. | | |
| ▲ | myrmidon 2 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | It would not hurt, but this just makes no (economic) sense currently, and that's not gonna change any time soon. Right now we don't have any CO2 scrubbing process without significant maintenance or operating costs, so this would add significant cost to all those ACs. Furthermore, the effect is marginal: With emissions of >6 tons of CO2/year/human, you would have to scrub a lot of air (>10m³/min with cost-free 100% efficiency, which is a pipedream) to compensate (for a single human); running the ACs on full flow all the time might not even be worth it depending on how efficient the scrubbing is and how clean the source of electricity. You might say scrubbing clean 10m³/min of air for every human sounds kinda feasible, but just compare the realistic cost of such a setup to the options that are currently implemented, and how much popular resistance/feet dragging they already meet (renewables, nuclear power, electrification, CO2 taxation). As a general benchmark, I would suggest that before the scrubbing technology in question has not managed to be installed at most major stationary sources of CO2 (coal/gas power plants, etc), it is not even worth discussing it for distributed air scrubbing. | | |
| ▲ | azinman2 2 hours ago | parent [-] | | You have to start somewhere. Even a not great solution can set the president, with goals to gradually increase the efficiency. Mandates can do a lot — just look at the catalytic converter. Put it on all HVAC systems and _something_ will happen even if a small effect given the HVAC itself is contributing way more CO2. We need all across the board solutions, and if you start requiring small scrubbers to function that can start to provide scale effects that can translate for bigger systems. |
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| ▲ | scientator 41 minutes ago | parent | prev [-] | | https://mashable.com/article/ac-units-climate-change-carbon-... |
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