Monthly Archives July 2015

Here’s an article I mentioned (From The Guardian)

Startups have figured out how to remove carbon from the air. Will anyone pay them to do it?

Don’t know anything about the companies mentioned.

I have been following CoolPlanet though. Here’s what they say they do:

“The process allows us to create green gasoline from non-food sources that capture carbon from the air, and a biocarbon product that sequesters the carbon left over – unlocking the capability for a carbon negative lifecycle”

Google is an investor, as are BP, Conoco, GE and others.

I’ve been following them since 2012 when I saw the  “Solve for X” talk sponsored by Google, here.  They seem real.

And here’s a TED talk by David Keith in 2007(!) about a different way to cool the planet. Keith is now at Harvard, and (I just discovered) he’s behind one of the companies mentioned in the Guardian article.

My favorite line from a transcript of his talk: “It’s conceivable that, say, using the sulfates method or this method I’ve come up with, you could create an ice age at a cost of .001 percent of GDP. It’s very cheap. We have a lot of leverage. It’s not a good idea, but it’s just important. (Laughter)I’ll tell you how big the lever is: the lever is that big. And that calculation isn’t much in dispute. You might argue about the sanity of it, but the leverage is real. “

A few odd bits that I found during our discussion.

Who works harder? The industrious, prosperous Germans, or the lazy, indebted Greeks.  According to this article in the Economist, the Greeks (at least those with jobs) worked nearly 50% more hours than their German counterparts in 2012. Similar results here, in the Washington Post. Source data here

And this article excerpts a longer interview with Thomas Pikkety in which he points out the hypocrisy of Germany’s insistence that Greece pay its debts.

When I hear the Germans say that they maintain a very moral stance about debt and strongly believe that debts must be repaid, then I think: what a huge joke! Germany is the country that has never repaid its debts.

As we know, Germany solved its post-WWI debt problem by starting World War II. Post-war Germany was burdened with debts of about 200% of GDP. Under the London Debt Agreement of 1953

…the repayable amount was reduced by 50% to about 15 billion marks and stretched out over 30 years, and compared to the fast-growing German economy were of minor impact.^[2]

An important term of the agreement was that repayments were only due while West Germany ran a trade surplus, and that repayments were limited to 3% of export earnings. This gave Germany’s creditors a powerful incentive to import German goods, assisting reconstruction

Ironically, Greece was among the nations that entered into the agreement forgiving German debts.