The UK emits about 450 million tons of CO2. They are off by a factor of 6.75
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas_emissions_by_...
> A new study estimates that the low-tech method could capture almost half the carbon the UK needs to meet its climate goals
> [...]could capture 45% percent of the carbon dioxide required to help the UK meet its 2050 net-zero targets
Looks legit?
Edit: I hadn't read the article. That indeed seems to be the goal. On that basis, yes the math appears wrong.
But the (very high) costs also must be considered.
In the end, I'm sure Earth's CO₂ levels will be engineered, and reverting to the preindustrial levels is not at all certain to be considered optimal.
Every country that extracts fossil fuels is deciding to turn up the global thermostat, but rather than calling it out as a decision, we treat it as a default or an irrelevant consequence.
The goal is to find a different reality than that one.
I didn’t say it would stop climate change, i just said it would stop us from adding more carbon to the atmosphere. I don’t think it’s a good thing.
Consider as a thought experiment a world where we suddenly have limitless but “clean” power (ie. fusion comes sooner and better than even the most optimistic expectations) and we start doing carbon capture that also produces burnable hydrocarbons as a byproduct. Running an ICE off that fuel doesn’t put any new carbon into the air, it just recycles what was already there. Obviously this isn’t likely, but it illustrates the premise in an exaggerated way.
More practically, in theory wood from farmed, new growth trees fits this mold, but in practice it’s not a terribly efficient or clean fuel once you take all the externalities out. And obviously you’re not gonna power a car on it.
But fundamentally, the main thing we need to do to get to zero is stop breaking the planet’s own sequestration of all the carbon that was in the atmosphere before it was hospitable to modern life. At this point doing that is very much a political problem, we probably have the tech to replace the energy we’d lose from that, we just aren’t willing to build it out fast enough.
If this works then doing it more is clearly possible. Maybe not politically or economically viable in the current circumstances but certainly possible. If weathering fine gravel/dust is the mechanism there’s an awful lot of coastal land with relatively active currents in the UK and elsewhere to dump it.