Comments by "Kevin Street" (@Kevin_Street) on "DW Planet A" channel.

  1. Thank you for this excellent video! You're so right about natural gas. It has to be phased out as soon as possible.
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  2. I was skeptical when I saw your title, but those are all good ideas! Restoring coastal ecosystems like mangrove forests and sea grass is something we should be doing anyway, so that makes sense. I'm not sure that carbon sequestration is even the best reason for replanting, since the carbon is only sequestered while the ecosystem is there. If someone decides to build a resort and wipes out a mangrove swamp, the carbon that was in it will go right back into the atmosphere. The real reason for restoring these places is maintaining biological diversity and the greater ecosystem of the oceans as a whole. Real carbon sequestration should lock away the carbon dioxide for hundreds or thousands of years, so we can't unintentionally screw up and release it all again. That's what makes the flow reactor sound like a really good idea. It's a direct solution that sounds more tenable than other carbon capture methods I've heard, like burying dried algae. Unfortunately it shares the scale problem of other direct methods. There's just so much CO2 to remove, it will take a vast army of flow reactors running constantly to make even a dent in the problem. Could such a thing be financed through carbon credits? The best solution of the three, if it works , is probably the olivine dumping. It directly removes the carbon by turning it into minerals, and it uses natural forces like the waves and sea creatures to magnify its effect for less cost than something like the flow reactor. It sounds like dumping a relatively small amount of olivine could have a large effect. Repeat that year after year and it might actually make a difference. And while it isn't innately profitable, if they keep combining it with beach restoration like they're doing now it should be possible to get people to pay for it. But all three of these are good ideas, and like they said in the video, everything helps. The problem is too large for any one solution, so we need to do everything that makes any kind of sense.
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  3. It's an interesting technology worth exploring, but it's still very early days for thorium reactors. They aren't a current solution for the climate crisis. We need to make the shift away from fossil fuels with the tools we already have.
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  4. Can we build an underwater curtain to hold the ice back? I don't know. Pranab Deb made some very good points about potential undercurrents and the sheer hostility of the Antarctic environment. It would be hugely challenging at the very least. Should we do it? ABSOLUTELY. If the curtains can be built, and if they don't increase warming on other nearby glaciers, then by all means build them. They could save hundreds of millions of lives, and possibly save entire nations from irreparable ruin. Calling something like this "a sticking plaster" or treating the symptoms and not the disease, ignores the enormous harm those symptoms will cause. Of course the main problem is greenhouse gas emissions. We need to de-carbonize our economy, that's inevitable and should be done as fast as possible. But this shouldn't be framed as an either-or situation. It's something we need to do in addition to stopping the root cause. Nations spend trillions of dollars on useless wars. Wouldn't it be better to spend that money on enormous engineering projects that save lives instead?
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  5. Yes, I think we should. And is it really "tampering" with nature when we're trying to stop the changes we caused in the first place?
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