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by alnwlsn234 days ago |
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upvoteby nancyminusone234 days ago|
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This just has me picturing a scene where global warming is solved not by cleaning it up, but by leaving tons of window air conditioners everywhere, troll physics style, "to cool down the outside"
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upvoteby filoeleven233 days ago|
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> The Stanford team’s passive cooling system chills water by a few degrees with the help of radiative panels that absorb heat and beam it directly into outerspace. This requires minimal electricity and no water evaporation, saving both energy and water. The researchers want to use these fluid-cooling panels to cool off AC condensers.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/efficient-airconditioning-by-beami...

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upvoteby the_sleaze_234 days ago|
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Psh, that's not reasonable.

Outer space is like really really cold. What we need is a huge heat pump in outer space that pumps the planets heat out into deep space. All we need is a space-elevator style tube and we're good to go!

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upvoteby lukan234 days ago|
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You would need GIANT radiators. Space is cold but there is also allmost no cold material to transfer heat. So even with a space elevator .. not so easy.
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upvoteby the_sleaze_223 days ago|
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You forget the least realistic miracle required - the space elevator itself.
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upvoteby zdragnar233 days ago|
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I was doing to say that surely it's a larger percentage, especially including all the commercial and industrial AC units running non-stop.

Then I remembered that my dad didn't have indoor plumbing in his house for most of his childhood, and that 200 years is a much longer time than my first gut instinct.

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upvoteby azinman2234 days ago|
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Makes me wonder if ACs should have built in scrubbers. If that was the norm everywhere, you’d have some mild effect going on at scale.
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upvoteby myrmidon234 days ago|
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It would not hurt, but this just makes no (economic) sense currently, and that's not gonna change any time soon.

Right now we don't have any CO2 scrubbing process without significant maintenance or operating costs, so this would add significant cost to all those ACs. Furthermore, the effect is marginal: With emissions of >6 tons of CO2/year/human, you would have to scrub a lot of air (>10m³/min with cost-free 100% efficiency, which is a pipedream) to compensate (for a single human); running the ACs on full flow all the time might not even be worth it depending on how efficient the scrubbing is and how clean the source of electricity.

You might say scrubbing clean 10m³/min of air for every human sounds kinda feasible, but just compare the realistic cost of such a setup to the options that are currently implemented, and how much popular resistance/feet dragging they already meet (renewables, nuclear power, electrification, CO2 taxation).

As a general benchmark, I would suggest that before the scrubbing technology in question has not managed to be installed at most major stationary sources of CO2 (coal/gas power plants, etc), it is not even worth discussing it for distributed air scrubbing.

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upvoteby azinman2234 days ago|
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You have to start somewhere. Even a not great solution can set the president, with goals to gradually increase the efficiency. Mandates can do a lot — just look at the catalytic converter. Put it on all HVAC systems and _something_ will happen even if a small effect given the HVAC itself is contributing way more CO2.

We need all across the board solutions, and if you start requiring small scrubbers to function that can start to provide scale effects that can translate for bigger systems.

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upvoteby gus_massa233 days ago|
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Catalytic converters have to convert a tiny part of the output, and they convert them into more stable forms.

The problem with CO2 is that it's the most stable form.

Also, if you want to absorb the CO2, for 1 pound of fuel you get like 3 pounds of CO2. You can absorb it into a solid and the density is like 3 times the density of the fuel. So with a lot of approximations you need container that has the same volume than the fuel tank to store the CO2, or even bigger if you absorb it in a liquid or much much much bigger as a gas. And you must empty/exchange the container when you refuel. And then you realize that it's better to use an electric car.

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upvoteby myrmidon233 days ago|
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If we were serious about CO2 capture, then the place to start would be big producers (like coal plants): Because that way you need much less scrubbing efficiency and can tolerate much greater overhead while still being effective.

If a technology is not good enough for at least serious trials in that (much simpler and more forgiving) usecase, then there is no point in discussing it for small environmental air scrubbing. That is akin to talking about electrifying passenger planes before having a single electric vehicle on roads.

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