How about we stop burning coal first. That’s not unproven and is much effective.
This is just silliness.
This is just silliness.
I'm fairly bearish on direct capture solving much though. It requires so much capital and energy just to replicate the carbon capture that we can already do just by growing plants. I hope that companies like Charm will also get significant funding to pursue using plants for the capture part.
There’s no logic in this.
I agree with you we’ll need to remove co2 eventually. But before we worry about that let’s focus editing on stopping making it worse. The payoff there is much higher!
Fortunately, it's possible for civilization to do more than one thing at a time.
In this case doing "more than one thing at a time" amounts to trying to have one's cake while feeling good about baking it with coal-generated electricity.
And since no technologies exist that can do permanent recapture to undo that at a useful scale (and probably never will because its a conservation of energy problem), its a debt we'll never be able to pay back.
Sure it's all (hard) science fiction but I feel like we're giving up on realistic near term solutions anyway.
But we have this gravitationally contained fusion reactor in the neighbourhood literally radiating energy at us. (I'm talking about the sun, if it is not clear.)
That is the thing which powered the previous capture. How would it be impossible to do it again? (I'm not talking about "practical" or "fast" those are questions after we established that it is possible, which it seems we disagree on.)
Ok, but that means the question is not the energy balance. That is my whole point.
> How much space do you need for plants to capture a gigaton of carbon?
Plants are only one of the possibilities. All I am arguing is that it is not impossible on account of the principle of energy conservation. Not arguing how easy or hard it is.
> Does earth even have that much suitable surface?
Of course. It happened once.
You probably don't.
> human technology is energy intensive, wasteful
I agree.
> and won't save us
In that case we better lay down in the sun and die peacefully. Because human technology is the only thing which can save us. What else there is?
We do technology, and we obviously can't.
> What else there is?
Plants.
And of course when we do want to turn CO2 into hydrocarbons we can use solar and nuclear energy sources, in which case the hydrocarbons play the role of a battery rather than primary energy source. We can also use non-fossil energy to concentrate CO2 from the air; in theory at least that takes quite a bit less energy than hydrocarbons release when burned.
If we want to stay under 3 we’d better get some real effort behind ending coal as soon as possible.
While it is possible to do more than one thing at a time, our politicians are trying to plug a leak while ignoring a giant gaping hole just around the corner. It’s like they’re incompetent morons or something.
I'm still optimistic we can stay below 2 degrees of warming.
Also, there are some applications, like long-haul jets, that will be very difficult to electrify, and DAC gives us a way to make liquid hydrocarbons for them without any net emissions. Biofuel is another way in theory, but not always in practice, and it takes a lot more land area.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/atomic-angst-over-germa...
Of course, if the goal is to profit from moving people around you get perverse rent-seeking and $15 cling wrap turkey sandwiches in a CIBO kiosk. I would argue moving people around easily and efficiently is intrinsically good the same way building a well-utilized library is.
The US has an incredibly successful geography that it has strategically not fully tapped. I'm just spitballing here but sending 70% of domestic freight via trucks is excremental. Having transit routes that run slower today than they did in the 20th century is unacceptable. Complete and utter lack of imagination or political willpower
New York City and Boston are roughly 200 miles apart and it takes four hours by car and four hours by transit. Tokyo and Osaka are 365 miles apart by car and an seven hour drive, but you can get between the two cities in three hours by using transit.
That would be a good step to take.
> It's easy to take away other peoples needs and wants.
I'm not sure what you're saying here, but what we're seeing now is just consequences of 50 years of global inaction. You want to blame someone, blame the people who have been in charge for the past two generations, not people today.