Direct Capture CO2 Scrubbing

Efforts To Clean Up Earth Won't Cost The Earth

... and no longer have to.

When are we going to get the idea? Solar PV (PhotoVoltaic) energy is one of the least damaging ways to get energy that already falls on Earth, to do some Work on Earth, without Digging Up the Earth. THIS is a very innovative and valuable concept.

To the first person to comment with "but it needs eeeeennnneeeeerrrggyyyyyyy!" I am going to present a large mallet to smack themselves on the head with. I've posted in the past, on various of my blogs, that energy is going to become the one resource we'll have so much of that it may as well become free. And it will also be the least damaging to the environment. Energy is about to become dramatically democratised.

So setting these up at CO2 hotspots and powering them with renewable energy makes sense. As does that the energy companies pay some of their outstanding debt to the planet by supplying free energy to these installations. Without trying to screw their other customers for it. High time they paid their dues, anyway. Front up, you planet-destroying bastards!

Some Other Tech Worth A Mention

Also, this that I wrote about a while back may become the next way to cool the planet - using heat-beaming technology by the acre, powered by solar energy, to beam our heat back out into space. This technology can already be set up, and like solar panels, the technology will improve rapidly. It can then be used to pump heat out of the environment and beam it harmlessly out into space.

And I've been offering a simple method to cool solar panels (because once solar panels get much above room temperature they lose efficiency and produce less energy) which would capture that heat energy and also convert that to electricity, thus making the whole solar panel up to perhaps 30%-40% efficient as compared to only 24% efficient as they are now.

Then too there's been a recent interest in growing food crops under large solar panel arrays such as are used in solar farms. It makes sense, plants do need some sunlight to grow, but too much per day or too hot and their growth suffers and you end up producing less food per acre. Planning carefully just where crops are sited under the "canopy" of solar panels will ensure they get the optimum balance between light, shade, temperature, and evaporation. 

Now combine these ideas. 

Set up large scale solar farm. Get 24% of the energy back in electricity, another 16% back in recovered heat energy. Use some of that energy to bring up groundwater (a water bore) and distil it, use that to grow vegetables. They convert a tiny amount of CO2 back into O2 and food.

(I have been trying to develop this as a concept and making it available Open Source to anyone - or any company - to put in place.) 

Use the electricity to run CO2 scrubbers like the above-pictured, and take even more CO2 out of the air. Use the rest to power the farm and also to power a heat exchanger that will take more heat out of the air, and beam all that up into space. 

One installation that generates its own energy and microclimate, grows food, cleans CO2 out of the air, and provides some electricity and some fresh clean water to the respective grids would be a great start. Ten thousand of them would alleviate the climate issue over a few years.

Now imagine also that these installations can make H2 fuel and the batteries run an EV charger. You can set these up along routes everywhere, set them up as IoT/cellular connected nodes. You now have a resource that grows food which can be picked up in driverless trucks and distributed, and provide water, hydrogen, and a recharge point for drivers along that route. You can use low pricing to keep other EV chargers honest and drive prices down, supply any remaining energy to the grid. 

Parting thoughts.

In order to survive the coming years we're going to have to make radical changes in a whole range of our behaviours. I believe that changing our economic system to remove the profit motive and replace it with pure equity will be a necessity because as long as one person profits someone or something else loses, and for too long it's been the planet, and we can't afford to milk it for our greed any more.

Each, every, and any move that can be made to create self-sustaining operations such as the above combined system above will serve to refocus the economy away from profit at any cost to repair and restitution of the planet. After all, when there's no pressure to profit, all such operations are in effect costless, and the sooner we start this particular ball rolling, the sooner we can make reparations.

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Gripping (The Rails) Stuff

What Happens In The Albert Stays In The Albert

Imagine this is a TV antenna mast.

I like Tom Scott's Youtube channel. He's a natural, finds interesting stuff to report on, and has also produced a few game and chat shows that are brilliant. A few days ago he posted this video and it ticked a lot of boxes for me. 

It was about old stuff, and I'm old... 

It was about stage and entertaining rigging - I've done that, roadie-ing and front-of-room sound for a band, and also built some of the gear they used. 

It was about heights, and that really struck a chord with me. I worked for a radio/TV shop on country farmhouse TV antennas, usually up 20 - 40m on those skinny triangular section masts, and my last time to go up was 30 years ago. 

On that climb I had to shift my safety belt up over the last guy wire at the top so I undid it, went to pass it over, and the unthinkable happened, a freak gust of wind, the tower gave a tiny shimmy - and I was hanging by nothing except my chin over the antenna beam and a toehold with one foot. 

My glasses fell down and shattered, I recovered, did the job, climbed down and went back to the van, said to my boss it was good that insurance would cover the breakage - and he told me he didn't have any insurance whatsoever. 

I quit at that shop that afternoon. I found out later that he'd gone bankrupt hence no insurance, and he also hadn't paid my income tax to the taxation department so I was liable for it. 

That was my last climb for anyone, couldn't do it any more, I never really recovered from either event. And the guy literally went mad, ended up in care, and passed away within two years of that day. 

What Tom did in this presentation was impressive. Pure visceral fear is a bitch. When I finished repairing that antenna and climbed back down, I realised I'd also peed myself a little bit, and when I thought about it and tried to climb back on that mast I never experienced such utter paralysis before and after that. Tom kept going, showing us all around the roof. Kudos. 

The End.

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This Is The End

... of this article. But it's nowhere near the end for me. It takes several days to find a topic to write about, properly research it, and then write and schedule it. I don't have any assistance and I don't have the kind of income that allows me to use a scheduling service like established writers can. I also spend some of my limited pension on keeping servers and domain names going, more on parts for the R&D I do making the machines for recycling waste. You can help me by sharing this article or the link to the newsletter I put out, or more directly by making a Paypal donation here. Failing that you can also go to my Ko-Fi page and set up a monthly donation. (It's like Patreon without all the bullsh*t.) Everything you can do, will help me keep going.