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Comment by immmmmm | Hacker News Reader

Removing carbon from the atmosphere is a fight against the second law of thermodynamic. To win a fight against Entropy one needs energy, and typically a lot of.

My question is simple: where do we find enough energy to capture the carbon that was emitted during the 200 last years? Because we consume already too much energy i fear..

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Wind, solar, tidal energy. Your question is like number zero on the list of carbon sequestration questions, obviously they have thought about that problem.

They have thought about it but not solved it. We haven’t solved our current energy needs, or anywhere even close to that with renewable, clean energy. We don’t know how to scale it so that > 50% of grid power can be from intermittent renewables.

So power large scale carbon sequestration is still an unsolved problem.

And until we're fully transitioned to carbon neutral energy, isn't that energy better spent replacing CO2 emitting energy sources?

Who do I give 1% of my profits to to replace a nearby coal plant?

There isn't that much entropy on CO2 dispersal through the air. At least not when compared to the original burning of the fuel.

There is only one of those 4 projects that try to reverse the burning reaction, and it uses solar energy (gathered by algae). The others won't see this problem.

The crazy thing about it, I think, is that removing CO2 from the atmosphere rather than where it's readily concentrated like power and cement plants, is picking the worse amount of entropy to fight.

Uranium?

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