Beyond Labels

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Some links on cooling the planet

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.


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