Biotech people: How much time, expertise, and money would it take to genetically modify an organism capable of growing significantly faster and/or requiring less trace micronutrients to grow in robotic ocean farms for purposes of maximum, permanent carbon capture and sequestration?
We're not going to remediate climate change effectively through planting trees, fractional distillation of air, waiting for industry, small-scale projects, solar shades, SO2, or ignoring it.
> We're not going to remediate climate change effectively through planting trees, fractional distillation of air, waiting for industry, small-scale projects, solar shades, SO2, or ignoring it.
We're not going to remediate climate change, full stop. If there was a time to do anything for climate change to change course it was probably 40 years ago.
Climate change is here and the cascade of events has been in motion for a while. The next couple of decades will see an exponential acceleration of ice melting, marine ecosystems going bust, and of course a slew of effects on land, from wild fires to floods.
It's here, it's happening and we have to adapt. Hopefully we'll be able to keep a certain way of life of abundance similar to what we're used to. But we might be forced to change some things or do without others. Time will tell.
This is an open scientific question, not an engineering problem, so there isn't a knowable answer right now on how long and what resources this might take. I have a feeling that time would be the bottleneck.
We also have several other routes for capturing and storing carbon from the atmosphere or ocean, other than by life forms, and it's likely that we would prefer those methods for all sorts of reasons.
Ultimately, any sequestration is going to be far more expensive than just not emitting the carbon in the first place. And today, we have the technology to interchange 95% of our economy to be carbon free, without any reduction in standard of living, and in fact we would have a better standard of living because energy would be cheaper and we would have less disease from pollution.
It's politics that is now the rate limiting step, not the tech. By the time we get that 95% of known solutions implemented, we will have lots of options for the remaining 5%
And sequestration of carbon will certainly be required, starting around the 2050 era (according to an IPCC special report), but we should let that tech bake for 30 years before we start massive deployment so we can get the best options without too much lock in. Hopefully in 2030s there will be a robust carbon trading network which will cause larger scale deployment of carbon capture and sequestration, then we deploy gigaton scale in the 2050s
Biotech people: How much time, expertise, and money would it take to genetically modify an organism capable of growing significantly faster and/or requiring less trace micronutrients to grow in robotic ocean farms for purposes of maximum, permanent carbon capture and sequestration?
We're not going to remediate climate change effectively through planting trees, fractional distillation of air, waiting for industry, small-scale projects, solar shades, SO2, or ignoring it.