Do 'mechanical trees' offer the cure for climate change? - Sensationalist Headlines

No that's the whole point of society. Someone makes a crossbow: I make 2cm thick armor. I build a factory to make weapons of war: someone builds a bomber etc. If you're referring to systems collapse theory the only potential danger is the absence of children in first world countries otherwise the galaxy is the limit. Using this quote: SKH expects its two-year pilot, possibly in California, to capture about 36,500 metric tons of CO2 a year, it said - the equivalent of nearly 7,750 vehicles driven for a year. We get a figure of 464.5 kg per car per year. The article specifically states the number of mechanical trees is 1,200 to suck up 36,500,000 kg of carbon over a period of two years so I halved the carbon to 18,250,000 kg to get a one year figure which gives us 15,208 kg of carbon sequestered per mechanical tree per year. The Common oak tree from my googling can absorb 900 kg of carbon over 40 years so about 22kg of carbon per year I'll use that as an average for my estimate. In that case That means it would take 691 oak trees to replicate just 1 of these mechanical trees in carbon capture.

Can't wait to find out how they're going to monetize them.

They'll turn the carbon it into limestone for architecture or gravel for concrete aggregate.

how long until the automotive industry invests in them and says "hey look doesn't matter how much your exhaust spits out, we're cleaning it as you drive!"

Isn't it a good thing that car companies are finally taking responsibility for their mess?

It depends. If Ford donates $1 and then puts in an advertisement "we invest in carbon clean up", they aren't technically lying but are being super disingenuous. And it sidesteps the fact that cars should reduce their carbon emissions regardless of our capabilities to clean it up. The carbon being emitted by cars won't be sucked up a moment after it has left the exhaust pipe. It's going to float out into the air for a while and in that while, continue to heat up the planet. And as it finally reaches one of these trees, some other bit of carbon somewhere else from another car is still being belched out.

I'm not suggesting that this is the proper solution (I'd say planting a metric fuckload of trees would be a better solution overall personally) but this comes across as an implication that we should simply abandon technology altogether. Which isn't actually a viable solution. Not only does our way of life outright depend on technology but simply abandoning technology outright would cause all sorts of issues on top of not fully addressing the problem.

perhaps our way of life is not worth preserving if it leads to annihilation

But renewable energy is also post industrial tech? Unless you're suggesting we stop using electricity altogether

It’s very frustrating to see all these wacky untested experimental ideas get thrown at the wall when the clear, obvious, no bullshit answer is to dismantle the fossil fuel industry and drastically change how we raise and handle livestock and the meat industry.

This would work... if you forced every single car owner to set up one of those themselves

renewable energy is only renewable for as long as it takes for them to break down. digging up the materials necessary for solar panels and batteries is dirty as fuck, we just don't see it because that mostly happens in china and africa.

Ending the use of electricity would also kill almost as many people as climate change itself, so I don't really see how this is a viable solution.

Limiting electricity use isn't going to kill people, though?

https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/165/1daa62e4-4103-4040-9ed6-85f1fe985f3d/image.png I'd love to get to that point ASAP

Yes because calls to moderate ones consumption work so well. Not producing electricity doesn't get the carbon out of the air and nature is painfully slow at removing it. We're talking millenias if you want nature to fix our mess.

I wouldn't. Methane is enormously more dangerous as a GHG than carbon and it's also a hell of a lot harder to get rid of once it's in the atmosphere. That's not to say that our carbon emissions aren't a critical problem we need to address, it's just that at the rate we're losing ice, a pretty enormous increase in methane emissions in the future is probably unavoidable at this point. Carbon capture isn't going to do a whole lot to counteract climate change then.

...And conversely, trying to get carbon out of the air without moderating consumption is about as useless as poking a tiny hole in a massively overflowing bathtub.

More like 'we're fucking terrible at making use of it without fucking ourselves into corners"

There's an awful feedback loop with climate change where the more unpleasant the weather becomes, the more dependent upon (a large source of energy-usage) climate control / AC people will be at large. In many areas we now see high temperatures at extremes previously unimaginable, almost reaching 50C. Even if you can't prove a direct and immediate impact on mortality, there's a substantial body of evidence that suggests that AC reduces the incidence of cardiac events, reduces all cause mortality. e.g. https://www.karger.com/Article/FullText/398787 It's hard to make a compelling case for a technology that relies on synthetic means for the sequestration of carbon when better organic alternatives exist. I'm not saying this as an organic hippie mumbo-jumbo dude, I'm an ecologist. The issue of climate isn't strictly limited to atmospheric carbon. Weather patterns are directly influenced by the "breath" of plants into the atmosphere. Fungi generate nucleation sites for the formation of rain. We need to address our unsustainable growth in a way that allows us to live in harmony with nature. We need to reseed forests, limit pollution of all kinds, prevent invasive species from spreading and disrupting ecosystems, examine how we are manipulating waterways, etc. Mechanical trees are a band-aid on a gunshot wound. Even if the immediate threat of climate change is mitigated, existential threats exist otherwise. Massive expanses of the Earth need to be off-limits for human exploitation. "Mechanical trees" have their place, but they are not the end-all-be-all solution to climate change.

Nevermind the fact these sites do not provide shade, habitats and more for natural wildlife. Its another example of how automated technologies could invariably make the problem worse.

Hard to find a picture of this thing https://cnce.engineering.asu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/scissor-lift-2.jpg Yeah idk how long this would take to become carbon neutral from the effort to even make itself. Will be great in areas you can't just plot trees down. So yeah tech like this + nature please.

I'm not convinced this means that reducing AC consumption will lead to more deaths, though. Countries where AC is commonplace are typically infamous for overusing it, which can lead to health issues as well. So there's quite a lot of room there to reduce energy consumption related to AC while maintaining temperatures tolerable enough to avoid additional cardiac arrests. Furthermore, AC isn't the end-all-be-all of cooling techniques. Ground coupled heat exchangers, for instance, are passive heating/cooling systems which use the thermal inertia of the ground to maintain rooms at an acceptable temperature. There are also good urban planning practices, like favoring vegetation over asphalt exposure to the sun, which can help minimize environment-dependent heat, which is significant in cities. Ultimately, if we're going to be pragmatic about it, the people who live in areas that can already reach up to 50°C will soon need to be relocated to more hospitable areas anyway. Unless we want to spend immense amounts of resources and energy and waste increasingly precious water just so those people can stay in what will practically become a living hell on earth, of course.

Using mechanical means because its 'painfully slow' isn't an answer because it will become a worse crutch. In addition; it won't save aninals going extinct to the animal loss. You want to use an Instrumental Rationality go back to the 1950s end 60s where we thought we could structure the planet to the bee more efficient without a damn and full well knowing the damage since at least the 20s.