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[Egan_BW]

Well, I guess I could see it happening like that in theory, if sequestering CO2 requires large industrial investment, and the result is profitable enough. Carbon: valuable enough to strip-mine twice.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[wierd]

atmospheric oxygen only, or does that include geological oxygen?

Cause like... the dirt under your feet? It has a buttload of oxygen.

[Trekkin]

atmospheric oxygen only, or does that include geological oxygen?

Cause like... the dirt under your feet? It has a buttload of oxygen.

There's not even enough carbon to bind the atmospheric oxygen.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[wierd]

Cause like... the dirt under your feet? It has a buttload of oxygen.

Are you making assumptions about my living conditions  ?!

 

Oh, that's does it. You want I should make assumptions about your living conditions?! In the CONSPIRACY THEORY thread!?

(pulls up sleeves)

You clearly live on the island of Sodor, and are a part of the dystopian regime that tortures innocent tank engines!
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-repressive-authoritarian-soul-of-thomas-the-tank-engine-and-friends

[Dorsidwarf]

atmospheric oxygen only, or does that include geological oxygen?

Cause like... the dirt under your feet? It has a buttload of oxygen.

There's not even enough carbon to bind the atmospheric oxygen.

i thought this must be wrong, then I looked up how much atmospheric oxygen there is and it's about 2,000,000,000,000,000 tonnes (thats ~two million billion tonnes). meanwhile the total amount of CO2 humanity's produced since 1850 is something like 2,000,000,000,000, or two million million (two thousand billion) tonnes. And thats CO2, which is only 1/3rd carbon, and some of it is the same CO2 absorbed by plants and burned again probbably.

But what about biomass, i thought. Well, the world biomass is actually pretty small compared to the atmosphere. 560 billion tonnes is the wikipedia estimate, which means that if every living creature on Earth were made entirely of carbon, you could combust it to turn something like 0.02% of the world's atmospheric oxygen into CO2.
 

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[MrRoboto75]

Cause like... the dirt under your feet? It has a buttload of oxygen.

Are you making assumptions about my living conditions  ?!

 

You had dirt to stand on?  Luxury!

We had to stand on pointy gravel and the occasional glass shard!

[Il Palazzo]

You had ground? You had gravity?
In my time we had to float in space and we were thankful for it!

[Max™]

You don't breath CO2, silly. (Unless you're actually part garden herb!?)

I wouldn't worry about it. As CO2 concentration decreases, so does the effectiveness of removing it. Plus, you can always just release it back into the air.

Because when I start trying to think "if I was a cartoonish villain like a congresscritter, rather than a megalomaniacal supervillain, how would I go about..." and apply it to the idea that "CO2 is bad, removing it is good" I end up at "people breathe for free, and CO2 comes out of them!" so if a profitable industry involving CO2 removal gets rolling it is going to have inertia, and that seems like it should be alarming.

[Reelya]

You had ground? You had gravity?
In my time we had to float in space and we were thankful for it!

You had space? Back in my day we only had an infinitesimally small point of ultra-dense matter, with no space or time. Aye, and we felt lucky to have even that.

We had to get up in the morning, clean the singularity, then off to school 13 billion years before it even began, then when we got home, our old dad would thrash us to sleep with the event horizon.

[Il Palazzo]

Oh, yeah? We had to inflate our scalar field by hand to get to school. And the potential would (slowly) roll down each time we weren't looking, so then we had to go and clean up all the nucleated universes before they reheated and life started growing on them.
It was a hard and thankless work, and we were only given spacelike intervals to walk on.

[Max™]

You had multiple expanded dimensions to work with? In my day we had nothing but a formless seething chaos of potential!

[Trekkin]

Because when I start trying to think "if I was a cartoonish villain like a congresscritter, rather than a megalomaniacal supervillain, how would I go about..."

What, aside from the former being more self-aware, is the difference?