From http://www.booktalk.org/carbon-mining-t26490.html

[quote="LanDroid"]It is Day One in the Trump Presidency that you are supporting. He has already deleted (in the first hour?) a White House web page concerning fighting climate change and added "something" called [url=https://www.whitehouse.gov/america-first-energy]An America First Energy Plan[/url]. A quick perusal finds nothing about reducing CO2. The plan appears to lean towards increasing CO2 emissions by increasing coal, shale oil, natural gas, and other fossil fuels. There is zero mention of carbon mining.
[/quote]’Carbon Mining’ as a concept is my own way of describing what is more widely known as negative emission technology, or Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR). See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_dioxide_removal for a broader view than my specific silver bullet proposal.

So far there are no commercially viable CDR methods, and nobody has shown that carbon mining could be profitable. CDR is only profitable as a way to extract more oil and gas by pumping CO2 into wells.

Carbon mining is a wild idea which I am throwing into the mix as a possible silver bullet solution to climate change. It is too preliminary to expect the Trump Administration to advocate it, and the nature of a new paradigm has not been discussed properly.

I prefer the concept of Carbon Mining over CDR because Carbon Mining embeds the ideas that we need to separate the profitable carbon from CO2. Just removing and sequestering CO2 is useless since it cannot turn a dime except from government subsidy. Profit is the source of sustainability at scale. [quote="LanDroid"]
Q's:
1. If Trump does nothing regarding carbon mining (and reverses U.S. efforts at CO2 reduction?) are international efforts to reduce emissions still useless?
[/quote]Yes, still useless, due to the crowding out problem.

Emission reduction is only a stopgap until CDR is established. In my view CDR can only happen when the fossil fuel industry works out how to mine carbon from the air in order to save their business model and avoid the fate of Kodak. International climate efforts should switch entirely away from emission reduction since it is useless for stabilising the climate. The emission reduction emperor has no clothes.

Far better that companies define a method that will fix the climate and then deal with Trump to get his support for it. Present solutions not problems. Bashing your head against a brick wall by promoting emission reduction is worse than useless. It will get Trump’s back up and do nothing to save the world from the looming fiery apocalypse. [quote="LanDroid"]
2. You have stated there are no active large scale efforts at carbon mining. A thought experiment: if algae / carbon mining turns out to be ineffective or less economical than emission reduction and no large scale mining develops, are international efforts to reduce emissions still useless? [/quote]Emission reduction is not “economical”. Yes, wind and solar lack the bad externalities of coal, so will prove anyway to be highly competitive against fossil fuels fully costed, but the practical reality is that these externalities lack adequate enforcement mechanism in prospect so are not economic drivers of the real market, apart from relatively marginal factors such as China’s need to reduce urban smog. The question of whether carbon mining is profitable requires an extensive research and development program which has barely begun, such as with NASA’s OMEGA project which they dropped. I think that is because no one has presented a compelling vision for how carbon mining can transform the world in a way that Republicans will like. [quote="LanDroid"] Is the choice really either carbon mining or planetary doom?
Disclaimer: just asking, not attacking....[/quote] The planet will survive, with the post-historic trees. Humanity will go extinct, or at least civilization will collapse due to massive conflict, unless we work out how to rapidly reduce the amount of CO2 in the air. Intelligence may prove to be an evolutionarily unstable adaptation. But I think we are smart enough to adapt to set the base for a planetary civilization lasting millions of years. That means regulating the global atmosphere.

Reducing emissions means reducing the amount of carbon we add to the air and sea. Emission reduction alone means the CO2 level will continue to increase. High CO2 means the physical forcing embedded in the system will over the next generations return the sea level to the height it was when there was last 400 ppm of CO2 in the air, ie 20-40 yards higher than now. That quantity of ice melt means everyone living at elevation below 40 yards above sea level may have to move in the next few centuries. This tipping point could happen suddenly with the collapse of the Antarctic ice sheet. We are fools walking on the edge of a precipice.