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>And those places are a long ways away from electric cars and solar power plants. (Also, where would you put them in say India or Bangladesh?)

Huh? What does that mean? You mean there is so space in India or Bangladesh to put solar power plants?

>It won't change the CO2 emissions created by home and commercial heating, agriculture, and industrial uses, which add up to another 3.5 or so gigatons.

So address each one in turn, or in parallel. You give no reason not to.

Lot of people use the 'golden hammer or nothing argument'

Meaning if a proposed solution is partial then we shouldn't do anything. It flies in the face of the reality that most solutions to complex problems involve chipping away at them.

Currently there is a host of technologies which emit to much CO2. Personal transportation is just one of them.

> The current cost of carbon capture is about $120 per ton. If it follows the same trend as improvements on solar panel cost, that could be $40 per ton in a decade.

This sounds reasonable to me. Do you believe this will be the way forward most likely?

We can only hope. It's super early in the development of carbon capture, so hopefully there's still a couple 50% cost reductions ahead

>The current cost of carbon capture is about $120 per ton

I don't know where you got this from (citation?), but I am sure this is not the cost of capturing CO2 from the atmosphere via "technology" (trees - arguably yes).

Carbon Engineering claims it will be between US$94 and $232.

https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/06/calgary-company-can-ca...

I have reviewed the original paper which from which the "$94-$232" estimate is obtained. You can find it here: https://www.cell.com/joule/fulltext/S2542-4351(18)30225-3

My comments are as follows:

1. Obviously, this is not the current cost, but an estimate for a hypothetical future plant.

2. You can get wildly differing estimates through a series of small discrepancies in the assumptions. Comparing the provided estimate (Table 2 in above link) to the estimates for other CO2 capture projects the following things stand out immediately: a) 7.5% CRF calculation should be ignored as unrealistic, 12.5% CRF is okay; b) O&M costs are low, for complex plant with caustic chemicals and high temperatures a fair assumption may be 6% of CAPEX per year rather than approx 3% c) 20% contingencies at the conceptual stage are too low, 40% would be perhaps defensible. Also, I don't see a basis for including Row D in the table, the commercial assumption is not justified.

Considering the above, if all goes well, plant number 100 might be able to capture CO2 for $200-300/tonne, better than the current claimed $600/tonne for a plant actually in operation, but nowhere near as good as other options.

Don't forget that there are also low temperature DAC routes that can use waste heat (climeworks, global thermostat, antecy, skytree). If you get the heat for free you only need energy for your fans. This drastically reduces the price. There are some good papers that do proper cost analysis on DAC. 100$ or lower is within range in a decade. I'm not in front of my computer now but if your interested I'll send the papers

That would be great, my "anon" email is in my profile.

You should read about process heat from nuclear. There's several companies aiming to do this: https://usnc.com/MMR.html

How do you switch to 100% renewables and then still have CO2 emissions from heating?

Is the first statement just about transport?

A plurality of home and commercial heating in the US involves direct burning of fossil fuels. So even if the grid is 100% renewables, you’re talking about spending thousands of dollars per house to replace oil and gas furnaces with heat pumps.

Okay, so 100% renewable grid.

A rapid transition would be hellishly expensive, but new installations can certainly be looking at heat pumps.

I wonder if there is a way to structure penalties/incentives so that home builders and landlords end up installing systems with lower lifetime costs (and lower environmental impact), rather than whatever is cheapest upfront.

>wouldn't offset the growth in India, China, and Africa. And those places are a long ways away from electric cars

On the contrary, China is going crazy for electric cars. And the U.S. and EU are starting to turn as well. I wonder where you are getting your ideas.

China put 28 million cars on the road in 2018. 95% were ICE. China put over 1 million heavy trucks on the road in 2018. Almost all were ICE. By 2025, the government aims to get it down to 80% ICE. That’s at least another 100 million new ICE vehicles on the road in the next half decade, plus the 300 million existing vehicles (which in developing nations are retired very slowly). Compared to maybe 20 million EVs if the government meets its target. China is currently building new coal fired capacity equal to the total amount of US coal generation capacity—and many times the renewables capacity it has added in the last year. Power plants are long term investments. These plants will be in service for decades to come.

Again, we need to cut 19 gigatons in the next decade. If “going crazy for electric cars” means that 80% of new cars—forget existing cars, and new trucks, etc.—will still be ICE half a decade from now, emissions reduction is not going to work.

> Carbon recapture can do a very important thing renweables cannot--allow the developed world to suck out the developing world's CO2.

What would that look like? Pipes on top of smoke stacks in China? Big mesh blanket clouds in the sky?