[Terrapreta] BASF's CO2 Scrubbing ZIF

[David Hirst .com]

Lou and all,

I have no doubt that nature, Gaia, has a variety of mechanisms to regulate
the planet, and that these have "evolved" from some sort of differential
survival on the part (mostly) of organisms that have tried out the
mechanisms, and survived when they found them to be helpful, both to
themselves, and to the earth system. Gaia is a biological system.

The biology does make use of the physics and chemistry of the world it lives
in. So the freeing up of calcium from rocks which causes C to be captured as
CaCO3 (chalk) is a life moderated system from the speed or erosion of the
rocks from roots and other life forms. (as well as the organisms that form
skeletons).

There will, I am also sure, be regulatory systems that are being tried that
work the wrong way. It probably takes millennia or longer for these to be
found less than useful, and for them to die out.

It seems to me that all this trial and error happens without any foresight.
When a mechanisms is tried, nothing has "worked it out" as a potential
solution to a problem. It is just tried and some of what emerges turns out
to be useful - indeed, the collection as a whole is wonderful.

And the mechanisms are mostly pretty slow acting. The Ca C rock cycle takes
several tens of millennia to make a difference.

So when it comes to us actively working to regulate the planet by carbon
capture, we have a huge advantage of foresightful intelligence. We can (at
least in part) anticipate what out actions will do, and the impact they will
have. Of course, we have to learn and build a "mental model" that (we hope)
reflects what really will happen. What is special about Gaia is that we are
very restricted in what we can try in order to see how the model behaves. As
E.O WIlson puts it "One Planet, One Experiment".

However, we also have the huge disadvantage of critical urgency. We can be
pretty sure our mental model is accurate enough to accept the prediction
that the world is in pretty deep trouble, and we have, at most, a decade or
two to do something pretty drastic about it. We can be less confident about
our actions, so it is important that we do things that are pretty certain to
do good, and/or do it in a reversible way. If it does not work, we stop
doing it.

This is what makes TP so important and so exciting. It is something that
goes beyond merely stopping making the problem worse (which is what almost
all the politics is about at present), and has the potential to reverse at
least some of the harm, and restore things to a state we (and probably Gaia)
prefer.

This makes me nervous of treating carbon captured by TP as of similar value
to emissions reductions. The capacity to undo harm seems more valuable than
the capacity to stop doing harm. Clearly, one can "offset" harm reduction
against harm, but this seems wasteful.

>From the discussions, it looks as if TP approaches to harm reduction will
have to be highly varied, complex and pretty small scale. A village looks as
if it might well be the scale where TP systems work best. I find this
attractive "Small is Beautiful", and I can see it will be a challenge to
embed this into cities. But perhaps it can reduce the influence that bigness
seems to have on corporate and government thinking.

Best to All

David

From: terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org
[mailto:terrapreta-bounces at bioenergylists.org] On Behalf Of lou gold
Sent: 04 April 2008 11:11
To: Shengar at aol.com
Cc: terrapreta at bioenergylists.org
Subject: Re: [Terrapreta] BASF's CO2 Scrubbing ZIF

 

Erich,

This is sort of an aside.

I just read Dominic Woolf's literature review of biochar as a potential GW
remedy and was really struck by how the macro view seems to be such a poor
representation of how (IMHO) nature really seems to work -- not so much
macro- as micro-level.

Now you are alerting us (me at least) to the possibility of technological
breakthroughs that seem to be micro-adaptive. I suspect that this is what
Nature has done all along. We know that the immature technologies of the
industrial age have upset the planetary equilibrium. Perhaps the emerging
(more mature?) technologies will be able to be micro-adaptive and lead us
back toward equilibrium.

It love to hear your musings about it. 

hugs and blessings,

lou



On Thu, Apr 3, 2008 at 11:00 PM, <Shengar at aol.com> wrote:

I find the potential of "made to order" nano structures to adsorb or screen
specific molecules mind boggling in possible applications, Like so much of
current  Nanotech material discoveries that are pushing the edges of the
envelopes of electro and thermodynamics.  

 

I came to find TP from doing research on Nano-Solar and quantum tunneling
thermoelectric technology.

When I first saw the electron microscope shots of fungal interactions with
bichar, it was like soil nanotechnology.

 

Erich

 

 





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