Comment by ben_w
3 days ago
They said "If electricity is sufficiently cheap", which is less a claim and more a tautology.
Will it be that cheap? I think so, given that trees and grass etc. exist and get their carbon from the air.
3 days ago
They said "If electricity is sufficiently cheap", which is less a claim and more a tautology.
Will it be that cheap? I think so, given that trees and grass etc. exist and get their carbon from the air.
Even with free electricity, the capital (and maintenance, consumables etc) costs of the process could easily be too high.
Consider a chemical synthesis that needs carbon. Right now it uses oil. But is has to be extracted and transported. With carbon capture from the air that no longer required. And maintaining the extra facility at the chemical factory can be cheaper than maintaining the extraction and supply chain for oil or coal.
Yes. But it still has to compete with all the various types of biomass, for example.
I suppose that in principle that is indeed possible; in practice, trees exist and self-seed, so the limit is our own ignorance.
We are also limited the incentives to that make us cut tree for money, and not develop technologies if they are not profitable within a short time-window. We have the technology to plant more trees right now, but we aren't.
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You could make the same argument about AGI. Just because nature does it doesn't mean it's easy for us to replicate in an industrial setting.
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