World GDP: $105.4 trillion USD
Let’s throw more carbon to the air, what could go wrong. Is not like it will get to our lungs and destroy everything from the inside.
Amazing. Instead of just… fighting climate change by not polluting the planet let’s just fill our entire atmosphere with diamond dust, because that’s the logical decision of course.
The artificially-inflated price of the diamonds should be irrelevant in this calculation.
Sweet! Four more years of Trump presidency, and Elon Musk can just pay for it out of pocket.
Elon musk’s kids should be made an example of when reclamation comes around.
Isn’t this kind of thing the premise for all those “snowball Earth” sci Fi stories where global cooling went too far
No don’t worry about that!
Break into the diamond company vaults and just take it. Bam, free diamonds.
Does it have to be diamonds? Could we maybe use the ashes of billionaires instead?
Human ashes are mostly carbon, so yes, of course. We’ll run out of billionaires pretty quickly, though.
Sounds like a win-win tbh
Let’s give it a trial run with a few thousand then we can measure the impact and reevaluate.
We’ll just have to try and find out.
Isn’t diamond manufactured in labs in 15 minutes now? I think the price is using natural diamonds value
Yes, let’s just have everyone on Earth breathe in diamond dust all day every day. There’s no way that could be bad for our health.
There’s never been a case of something having different behavior or health effects just because of a tiny chemical difference (trans fat) or size difference (micro plastics), what’s the worst that could happen?
There have never been lung issues caused by inhaling very small dust particles, right?
just wear masks for a few decades, potentially respirators, and probably add whole house air filtration if you want to take it off at night.
The silicosis will run rampant
Of all the aerosols they could think about!
No chance at all of a basically indestructible material not being destructed if absorbed by lungs (or gills) and leading to some disease. You don’t need to check. There’s no way this could go wrong.
Or, rather… I believe lead is cheaper… Given how much people like to use it, maybe it’s a better option.
We’re carbon based lifeforms and diamonds, yep, made of carbon. What could possibly go wrong!? /s
Diamond Lung.
Sounds posh.
I was thinking asbestos…
Whatever you do, don’t look up silicosis. Not a problem at all. Not relevant.
They got a headline. Mission achieved.
Someone heard The Beatles (or maybe Rihanna) for their first time and thought “Diamonds in the sky… Huh… What if…”.
So what would it cost to replace all fossil fuel energy with renewable?
You are missing the point, because we need to do that anyway.
The idea is to prevent things from getting worse in the meantime.
Replacing fossil fuels take time no matter how much we invest.ok but you just know corporations are going to use this as an excuse to keep using fossil fuels. like to them this is basically carte blanche to keep the status quo and block green energy from happening even harder. “oh hurdur har har we found a solution to climate change and it’s dumping diamonds in the atmosphere, no need to pay for green energy anymore haha” type shit
corporations are going to use this as an excuse to keep using fossil fuels.
Corporations follow the law, the only way to solove this is to have the laws required.
That amount sounds like total bullshit. Diamonds can be manufactured and once that is done at scale, it won’t be all that expensive. Even at $10000 a ton, five million tonnes would cost just 50 billion.
That number is for doing it anually for 65 years. It lists roughly 18 billion per year for the cost.
But besides that, I think you are greatly underestimating the cost of the diamonds. Synthetic ones are way cheaper than natural ones, yes, but there’s a lot of room between “natural diamond expensive” and “actually cheap”. Going by these prices https://www.diamondtech.com/products/categories/diamond_powder_price_list.html
It’s $2.5 million per tonne. I assume you could get a cheaper price per weight if you’re buying five million tonnes of anything, but it’s still two orders of magnitude more expensive than you are guessing
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These are not good ideas. Remember that global warming is just an overarching effect of pollution which we will still have. What diamond dust pollution effects will be, no one knows, but I doubt we want to find out.
The fossil fuel oligarchy would prefer to give all mammals on Earth emphysema than stop burning fossils, and do it for 10x the price.
I don’t get it, why wouldn’t sapphire dust work? Isn’t that dirt cheap to make? And it’s carbon free!
Seems illogical to add carbon in the form of diamond, to a problem that is mostly caused by carbon?The carbon isn’t the problem, it’s the CO2 molecule. I would be really curious if solid carbon in diamond form is able to react with ozone in the atmosphere to make CO2, or if it would be inert, or if it would do something else.
It’s also Methane and CO, gasses that also contain carbon. I know diamond is pretty stable, but it does burn, and then it creates the gasses we try to avoid.
CO is not a significant greenhouse gas. (And N20 is…)
Are diamond particulates likely to burn if they’re dispersed in the atmosphere?
Are diamond particulates likely to burn if they’re dispersed in the atmosphere?
Actually yes, if they enter the engine of a plane they will burn.
True. That would be a minescule fraction of what’s there though…
It’s not cost effective to save humanity. Stock prices would crash.