Background: I’m Chinese by origin but grew up in the west. He’s English. He’s kind of a 
but in a lefty way and has been with me to China multiple times, we’ve been together for years. He has had misconceptions before but is always learning. He does go on Reddit still, mostly to talk about land value tax which is his big political obsession right now.
Anyway last night we were at dinner and talking about an idea for a project that’s like quora but with only expert/academic researchers as responders. Part of it would need a reputation rating for the researchers. We were then talking about the use cases/audience for the project and I said “this might be better suited to Asia” (because of how highly education is valued and the pressure on kids to study/achieve grades). And he immediately responded “because they’re used to social credit scores?” Like. Without missing a beat. Maybe I’m overthinking it but it really pissed me off that his first association when I mentioned Asia was… this.
We talked about it and he explained that the concept was already in his mind when he was thinking about the reputation system so it wasn’t just a reaction to Asia specifically. But he insisted that he knew social credit scores were a real thing. I think he did listen when I said these types of jokes were what made Reddit such a hostile environment to be in, though.
I’m not sure what I’m asking but I just wanted to get it off my chest. Does anyone maybe have resources on internet Sinophobia / explanation of where the social credit stuff came from I can share with him?
Thanks crew. Sorry that was so long x
Yep, that was my fun experience during thanksgiving this year, just explaining the fundamental limitations of carbon capture technology. (I’m an actual research chemist)
Don’t worry if you’re busy, but I’d be interested in hearing about those limits (or a link if you’ve explained them before).
Disclaimer: I am a materials chemist and am not intimately familiar with carbon capture technology. Therefore my argument is hopefully not dependent on the specifics of the field and more so on basic chemical concepts. No guarenties are provided on the accuracy and correctness of content, but I did try to make it correct.
Basically it’s just limits of thermodynamics. You need energy to sequester carbon, especially if you are affixing it via a reaction. Ie, if you want to turn carbon dioxide in to something more useful or dealable, you fundamentally have to add a minimum amount of energy. The current reactions require much more energy than the theoretical limit, and most research (in this area) seems to be on catalyzing reactions to lower the reaction barrier closer to the thermodynamic limit. Afaik (I could be wrong) carbon capture only really makes sense at sources, as that’s when the concentration is high enough to easily suck up as much as possible with minimal amounts of materials. That is if you want to use an adsorbant which co2 preferentially stays inside, the higher the concentration of co2 the (generally) more effective that adsorbant will be. If the adsorbant is a naturally existing mineral, then it requires energy to mine it. If the adsorbant is a man-made material, then you need to put in much more energy to make it.
My point in this being, you still need to have a source of renewable energy to do carbon capture, on any scale. Generally, this consumes more energy than the energy released by the fossil fuels you burned. You cannot sequester more carbon than you emit if you are using carbon based energy sources.
Finally I’d like to draw an analogy with water cleanliness. While we do have materials and systems that can filter contaiminents out of water, they cost money, some times quite a bit. The least expensive and most effective way of lower water contaiminents is to decrease their usage, and use the contaiminents in such a way that they are less likely to enter the water supply. Example would be surface spraying or spot spraying instead of aerial spraying.