Tom Chi: How to Address our Carbon Debt to Heal the Planet on HackerTube: recommended by 2 Hacker News commenters across 1 month, 2019–2022.
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Tom Chi gives the opening talk of a Foresight Institute competition on clean energy and clean air, framing excess CO2 as a carbon debt to repay and discussing large-scale tree planting, including by drone.
HN commenters call it a fantastic talk and cite it in climate threads for the carbon debt framing and tree-planting cost estimates.
“gave a fantastic talk on carbon debt”
6 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
Related: GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi gave a fantastic talk on carbon debt (with a rather depressing 238 views at the moment; I hope more people watch...): ▶ this video
in “The toll climate change is taking on oceans” · View on HN
Agreed, this is an excellent talk. Main takeaway is to view the problem as debt which has to be paid off. Simply stopping new purchases will not pay off the debt. Above point summarized here, timestamp 22:15 - ▶ this video We currently have a one trillion ton carbon debt. As a though experiment, for a starting solution to iterate upon, this can be "paid off" with 20 billion trees / year, for 50 years. It would take 9000 drones, 450 staff, $80 mil/year. And a total land area half the size of Brazil. Using current technology. Compare this with alternative approaches being thrown around with price tags of 1 trillion+.
in “The toll climate change is taking on oceans” · View on HN
Related, for comparison: apparently planting 20B trees/year requires only $80M/year (!) and would pull down a trillion tons of carbon over 50 years (!): ▶ this video
in “Direct conversion of CO2 to solid carbon by Gallium-based liquid metals” · View on HN
Yes, even if we completely eliminate carbon emissions, our current carbon debt is around 1 trillion tons [1]. We'll need to remove that much carbon from the atmosphere within 50 years or so, given we stop all of our emissions today. [1]: ▶ this video
in “Earth may temporarily pass dangerous 1.5 C warming limit by 2024” · View on HN
Related: see GoogleX co-founder Tom Chi's video on climate change, sustainable agriculture, etc.: ▶ this video
in “We should discuss soil as much as coal (2019)” · View on HN
It looks like that article is 10 years old. Has anyone done this at scale? A more recent (this year) talk advocating for similar, but using drones ▶ this video
in “Reforestation effort could capture 205 gigatons of CO2 in 40-100 years” · View on HN