More speculative questions (my own personal uninformed thoughts):
Regarding the tree planting option, can we breed trees which are less vulnerable to wildfires?
Regarding the marine cloud brightening option—could you make it doubly useful by going to areas which experience periodic flooding and spraying floodwaters up into the air? Maybe you could even get municipalities to pay you and make a business out of it.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith wrote a book called Soonish which says (among other interesting things) that robots which automatically build buildings are on the horizon. To what extent could easy, cheap construction of new buildings and cities help mitigate sealevel rises and other global warming effects?
My brother has a physics degree and finds this to be a bit implausible: http://superchimney.org But it does make me wonder if there’s a way to make money by buying land, terraforming it in a way that’s good from a climate perspective, and selling the land after it’s increased in value.
Clean meat could also have a huge impact on CO2 levels. According to Vinod Khosla (source):
about 30-50% of all land area is used for animal husbandry
clean meat and plant-based alternatives could allow us to take back most of it
restoring this land would solve the carbon emissions problem by carbon capture (~100 out of 110 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scenarios for carbon reductions on the planet involve freeing millions of acres of land for reforestation)
In terms of plant-based alternatives, I think nutrition research could be high-impact and neglected. It seems like people are focused on trying to replicate the taste of meat, but when I experimented with veganism, I found myself wanting meat more the longer I’d gone without it, and experiencing it to be unusually satisfying if I hadn’t had it in a long while, which seems more compatible with a nutritional issue—the same pattern doesn’t seem to manifest for other foods I find tasty.
I’m imagining a study which feeds participants a vegan diet along with some randomly chosen nutritional supplements to see which are correlated with reduced desire to eat meat or something like that. Or maybe just better publicizing already known nutrition research / integrating it into plant based meat substitutes—for example, I just found this article which says iron from red meat is absorbed much more easily—I do think I was craving red meat specifically relative to other animal products. (Come to think of it, I was also experiencing more fatigue than normal, which seems compatible with mild anemia?)
Some related links:
https://lets-fund.org/clean-energy/
https://techcrunch.com/2019/02/15/how-to-decarbonize-america-and-the-world/
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2nrx8GdtobScoAZF8/extinguishing-or-preventing-coal-seam-fires-is-a-potential
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkNdrTZ7CG4
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/8ac9cBK22o9rh2NwS/will-team-trees-be-effective
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XRTiojqqJ3wrFFZAf/can-we-really-prevent-all-warming-for-less-than-10busd-with
(I couldn’t quickly find a good link for clean meat, but it could reduce methane emissions from cattle)
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3poYR8mXfcr9YM34Z/new-research-on-effective-climate-charities
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EAii5kf65cvywb2cF/why-we-think-the-founders-pledge-report-overrates-cfrn
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-the-fern-that-cooled-the-planet-do-it-again/
More speculative questions (my own personal uninformed thoughts):
Regarding the tree planting option, can we breed trees which are less vulnerable to wildfires?
Regarding the marine cloud brightening option—could you make it doubly useful by going to areas which experience periodic flooding and spraying floodwaters up into the air? Maybe you could even get municipalities to pay you and make a business out of it.
Kelly and Zach Weinersmith wrote a book called Soonish which says (among other interesting things) that robots which automatically build buildings are on the horizon. To what extent could easy, cheap construction of new buildings and cities help mitigate sealevel rises and other global warming effects?
My brother has a physics degree and finds this to be a bit implausible: http://superchimney.org But it does make me wonder if there’s a way to make money by buying land, terraforming it in a way that’s good from a climate perspective, and selling the land after it’s increased in value.
I’ll add:
the Founder’s Pledge report being responded to https://founderspledge.com/stories/climate-change-executive-summary
ID Insight’s recommendations https://www.idinsight.org/givinggreen
Vox’s recommendations https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/12/2/20976180/climate-change-best-charities-effective-philanthropy
Clean meat could also have a huge impact on CO2 levels. According to Vinod Khosla (source):
about 30-50% of all land area is used for animal husbandry
clean meat and plant-based alternatives could allow us to take back most of it
restoring this land would solve the carbon emissions problem by carbon capture (~100 out of 110 of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s scenarios for carbon reductions on the planet involve freeing millions of acres of land for reforestation)
In terms of plant-based alternatives, I think nutrition research could be high-impact and neglected. It seems like people are focused on trying to replicate the taste of meat, but when I experimented with veganism, I found myself wanting meat more the longer I’d gone without it, and experiencing it to be unusually satisfying if I hadn’t had it in a long while, which seems more compatible with a nutritional issue—the same pattern doesn’t seem to manifest for other foods I find tasty.
I’m imagining a study which feeds participants a vegan diet along with some randomly chosen nutritional supplements to see which are correlated with reduced desire to eat meat or something like that. Or maybe just better publicizing already known nutrition research / integrating it into plant based meat substitutes—for example, I just found this article which says iron from red meat is absorbed much more easily—I do think I was craving red meat specifically relative to other animal products. (Come to think of it, I was also experiencing more fatigue than normal, which seems compatible with mild anemia?)
There might be something in soil, perhaps from a research or policy angle? https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/We-should-discuss-soil-as-much-as-coal