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I'm highly sceptical regarding ALL CO2 removal schemes that don't operate directly at a CO2 source, because I see absolutely NO WAY how they could ever be made cost effective:

CO2 concentration in air is less than 1g/m^3, meaning that you would have to pump like 10000 m^3 of air through your apparatus just to remove the CO2 from a single car travelling ~100km.

And this assumes 100% extraction efficiency which is not realistic at all.

So any climate plan that relies on large-scale CO2 removal from atmospheric air is probably a complete SCAM.

Also compare the cost difference between reducing emissions at the source by electrifying a vehicle with the effort required of extracting the CO2 from the air-- it is COMPLETELY obvious to me that even spending a dollar on CO2 removal is absolute LUNACY until all the cheap and easy options of reducing emissions have been exhausted.

Trees don't pump the air through their leaves, they let CO2 diffuse and blow in the wind.

Sure, but the amount of CO2 absorbed by a tree is measured in grams per day, which isn't really enough to even realistically offset the devices own carbon footprint, let alone start tackling other co2 sources.

Look, I think direct air capture (DAC) is as much “not the solution” as the next guy, but this kind of black-and-white thinking has no place in climate change mitigation.

Right now, DAC costs about $250-500/ton. The average passenger vehicle in the US emits 4.6 tons of CO2/year. You say it’s not cost-effective but you could literally charge every passenger vehicle user in the US $1-2000/year and use it for capture and eliminate the single largest source. That is the same order of magnitude as vehicle registration fees (though of course you’d want to make such a tax progressive, etc.), at least in California.

More importantly, DAC provides a major price signal for the cost of carbon emissions: if it costs $250/ton to get CO2 out of the atmosphere, it starts to make more sense to charge emitters $250/ton in advance to remove it — and if we implemented such a system, the market would likely respond very quickly with rapid reductions in carbon emissions. Oil and gas companies think it’s the solution? Great, they can pay $250/ton for it.

Instead we’re selling everyone individual shame about what are really societal decisions, telling them not to drive as much, be too cold/hot at home, and eat less beef — while letting producers largely off the hook. That’s the real lunacy here.

> this kind of black-and-white thinking has no place in climate change mitigation.

This is not black-and-white thinking. He is pointing out that infeasible miracle cures are not the solution.

We need to focus on realistic possibilities, not Elon-Musk jesustech.

No one thinks infeasible miracle cures are the solution, so he's doing much more than "pointing that out": he's making an argument about the infeasibility of carbon capture.

In particular, he's saying it's impossible to capture enough carbon at scale in a cost-effective manner, so therefore we should not even be looking at this option until we've exhausted the alternatives. But he's wrong: it's not impossible, it's merely expensive, and anyway we should be pursuing all possible remedies in parallel, not dismissing something as infeasible because someone's armchair analysis makes it look like a scam to them.

What we need are people trying both likely and unlikely solutions, not knee-jerk gatekeeping from randoms on the internet.

There will be better physical, chemical, environmental, cost, and overall economic advantages resulting from efforts at source reduction than air capture.

This will always be what matters when resources need to be deployed most efficiently for abatement.

When you do the math, unless resources become unlimited, source capture is the better use of limited infrastructure.

It's really kinda-sorta completely impossible to fool Mother Nature on things like this.

The problem is not enough effort is going into source removal since the responsible source would be the only one that would be facing the added cost above what they are doing now.

With remote air capture the much less efficient and costly process can be spread among huge numbers of different but smaller payers whether they know it or not.

If that makes significant progress occur sooner that should make DAC be good to go forward with in the short term, but eventually people will be able to do the math at scale and most will say WTF were we spinning our wheels so long for?

> you could literally charge every passenger vehicle user in the US $1-2000/year

Politically (and practically) infeasible. Most likely it would be done as a fuel tax, but it would need to be in the ballpark of $3/gallon which would be suicide for the politicans who impose it and unaffordable to many of the people who would be paying for it. A tax that can't be paid can't fund anything.

Of course a literal tax is politically infeasible, not least because we're not at all serious about actually internalizing the currently-external cost of carbon.

But it's a mistake to consider a tax as something we can't afford because we are already incurring this tax bill by emitting the carbon in the first place. Whether we pay now to reduce the carbon or later to reduce the carbon and mitigate impacts, we will all be paying.

And I agree: imposing this tax today as a flat "usage" tax would be political suicide, but we have many levers that are far more equitable -- tax-and-dividend programs in particular have a lot of history.

From a purely rich western perspective it seems likely to me that OTHER people are going to pay much more than "the west" is going to: Wealth provides buffer against food shortages, lethal outdoor temperatures and sea level rise alike, and the regions that are going to suffer the most are also probably gonna be more like Bangladesh than Central Europe...

If your voters in general are not willing to pay the price for the damage they cause, what is a democracy supposed to do? Sad state of affairs.

You could literally buy people electric cars at that pricepoint instead.

Don't get me wrong, I'm strongly in favor of taxing CO2 emission, but the problem IMO is that people in general would rather ruin the planet than pay a fair price for the damage that their emissions cause, purely because they are USED to pollute and consume for cheap.

If there was the necessary political will to pay, then I believe that carbon capture would basically not be used at all, because it is MUCH cheaper to just not emit the carbon in the first place...

Yes, gas cars would disappear very quickly at that rate of carbon taxation.

"People in general" would absolutely use non-planet-ruining versions of basically anything, the problem is getting there -- most people do not even think about the polluting effects of every item they buy, and could not even if they wanted to given supply chain complexity.

Unfortunately these decisions are made for them, largely by the realities of economics and policy: when you have the option to pay to internalize the external cost of travel yourself, most people don't -- why would they? No one wants to act alone to hold that bag, that's literally one of the main reasons for policy: to engage in group action for group advantage where individual action is a competitive disadvantage.

Redistributive taxes on carbon emissions are likely something many people would support -- were it not for concerted efforts to the contrary by individuals and industries that stand to lose stature as a result. But on carbon capture: there will absolutely continue to be near- and medium-term use cases where burning petroleum products and then capturing the CO2 later is the most cost-effective approach. (Or vice versa, via synfuels.) There will still be a carbon cycle, and we will still want to have many levers on it.

> So any climate plan that relies on large-scale CO2 removal from atmospheric air is probably a complete SCAM.

The "scam" language is interesting to me.

I often run into people who seem to think that advocates of carbon capture technology are somehow being intellectually dishonest and are not serious about climate change.

In fact I think there are a lot of people who are interested in carbon capture tech who just keep an open mind about it. Not all scientific advances are obvious early on.

I think we should avoid assuming that people who are promoting carbon capture research are speaking in bad faith. There are lots of people who genuinely believe the tech may mature to a point it is useful to the fight against climate change.

Just because the fossil fuel industry promotes it doesnt mean that everyone who promotes it is a shill for the fossil fuel industry.

I'd not go so far and blame everyone involved in carbon capture tech; more specifically I thank that it CAN make sense if you're able to capture at the source (much higher concentration => less efficiency problems).

But I absolutely blame journalists and spokespersons that peddle this as some kind of viable technology when it's ABSOLUTELY not; this is similar to fusion tech, where people (sometimes deliberately!) create the impression that the technology could "solve" climate change and is just around the corner.

But in both cases no instance I've seen so far passes even a rudimentary smell test. If you have a novel method to catch CO2 from the air or are able to run your tokamak for 90s longer than that is awesome and interesting, but DONT run around and pretend to be heralding a scientific revolution in mainstream media (where both average reader and writer have an understanding of the subject and economics behind that is comparable with a average housecat).

I ABSOLUTELY blame people for doing that, and I consider it quite harmful because it creates the impression that there are some kinds of tech-based avenues out of climate change that never really existed at all, and this can even negatively impact decisions from policymakers.

It has been demonstrated repeatedly that the source of funding does implicitly bias research results.

But the bigger effect is the appearance of working on the solution is often used to prevent real mitigation efforts that are here and now, such as higher costs for CO2 emissions, reforming the carbon trading scheme, and investing in moving to more use of green electricity.

We spend on the order of $900B a year on the military. Imagine if $100B a year, every year, was spent instead on beefing up the power grid, investing in efficient long-haul power distribution, investing even more in solar/wind/nukes. With less need to strong arm the world to ensure access to oil, it could pay for itself in less military intervention. Obviously, there are many political reasons why even $1 reduction in the military budget is difficult to accomplish, but that is only an indication of how much the government is beholden to the military/industrial complex.

We don’t need to strong arm the world to access oil, we are a net exporter of oil. There’s lots of bad things to say about our foreign policy, but the idea that it’s about oil should have died with the Iraq War (where we spent trillions of dollars but didn’t get any oil).

You think the US bush and Bush senior administration would of given a thought about Iraq if it wasn’t an oil producing resource?

I didn’t back in 2003 when I was in the anti-war minority. But seeing how many of those same people just became democrats in the last 20 years, and are now talking about how we need to stay in Afghanistan or intervene in Ukraine, I was wrong. We never got any oil from Iraq because it was never about the oil. It was about remaking the world in America’s image. We were in Iraq for the same reason ISIS was in Syria. We are trying to establish our version of the Caliphate, except with liberal democracy and capitalism instead of Islam.

That is a very recent phenomenon. From 1958 until 2019 the US imported more than it exported, including during the Iraq War (both of them).

https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/us-energy-facts/imports-...

That could flip at any moment based on the price of imported oil vs the cost of domestic production. The US is still very much "investing" in the military to ensure a stable source of energy (as well as other national interests).

"It would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our climate change portfolio"

Planting trees and establishing more forests is a already working technology with lots of other nice side effects, while I see the "artificial carbon removal" tech often just used as a excuse to not do anything now at all and wait for the magic game changer.

"Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few square miles of solar panels, and run it when the sun shines."

And I totally like anything related to this, but as long as we build new coal plants, building this would be just symbolic.

So first I would use the desert solar power for actually powering the grid, removing the need for coal.

Regarding the trees, I hope they research that claim!

Regarding the concept that it's a distraction, I think that's folk behavioral psychology with an unhealthy dash of moralism. It needs to be substantiated with evidence before I take it seriously. We are talking about a real carbon mitigation research avenue that could have real benefits.

You mean you want quotes of people, who say climate change is not so bad, because we (will) have co2 removal tech?

I want evidence that there are people who wave away climate change because of proposed future CO2 removal tech, who would not wave away climate change if we stopped all research on CO2 removal tech.

I'm not trying to impose an impossible standard here. If you can show examples of something like this happening in contexts other than climate change, I'm open to that. What I don't accept is mere folk behavioral psychology speculation driving what an entire civilization does to mitigate a massive risk.

You really have not heard those people? Lucky you. Anecdotically there are plenty of them, and official sources (like politicians) are of course more careful in their wording, but the sentiment is exactly this.

"No real need to change the gasoline cars, as we will have CO2 removal."

I can probably dig up some ugly quotes, if you like. But those are not really my circles so I have nothing at hand.

(I should probably add, that I am from germany and loud cars and the making of them are important here. But I heard the same from US politicians)

"What I don't accept is mere folk behavioral psychology speculation driving what an entire civilization does to mitigate a massive risk. "

Well, how exactly could technical CO2 removal ever work?

We burn stuff for energy and then need even more energy to recapture the side products?

How would this be powered?

By the sun?

Solar panels still needs to be manufactured and deployed.

So if we would have all energy generation by regenerative sources AND we have overcapacity - then we could also extract some of the old released CO2, true, but have you done some calculations, how much area you would need, to power a significant amount of CO2 removal?

Lot's of it.

Forests on the other hand grow and expand by themself, once established and undisturbed, that's the beauty of them. They also help stabilizing local climate. And the real problem of climate change for lots of people will be desertification. So more Forests reduce CO2 AND provide actual better living conditions for the people affected. A lone symbolic CO2 removal on the other hand is really limited in its usefulness, while the coal plants are burning happily.

All I'm saying is that the technical debate between these different methodologies is what matters. If we agree on that, I have no dispute with you. I don't know what carbon capture method is best or how big of an impact carbon capture can have. I would like to see the research, which is what the article is about.

"I would like to see the research, which is what the article is about."

The article is about how big oil changed Standford's research focus. And their interest is simply to leave everything as it is and stall any further oil limitations, so they can profit, like they used to, without having to fundamentally change.

But yes, they are totally free to fund research that is in their interest and if they happen to find a magic solution acceptable to society, I am thrilled. I am just very sceptical that this is what will happen. I rather suspect it will be symbolism used by willing populistic politicians, to block uncomforthable legislation or stall it completely.

I just see no technical ground for this to really work, other than wishful thinking. And if the latter is the base, then it won't work, no matter how millions you spend on it.

Different areas have different power availability from different sources at different times of the year. We have limited capacity to move and store that energy.

If the price of re-extracting released carbon is baked into into burning fossil fuels, then carbon capture will only be viable in places where energy is cheap, such as places with good conditions for solar, wind or hydro.

The economic viability of carbon capture is thus entirely dependent on the quality of the regulatory framework around carbon emissions. If we don't have that, then any advances in carbon capture technology won't matter. If we do have that, then giving the carbon capture industry a bit of a headstart with research will make the necessary overall emissions targets we need easier to reach.

So while carbon capture is indeed touted as an excuse to avoid those regulations by opportunistic politicians, those politicians would find some other excuse to oppose those regulations. So don't let them lead you think that carbon capture isn't an important part of the solution that is being developed by people who care deeply and climate change.

We've waited far to long already and simply can't afford to ignore any part of the solution that can help reduce total emissions faster.

"We've waited far to long already and simply can't afford to ignore any part of the solution that can help reduce total emissions faster. "

Totally agree. No dogmatic framework is helpful, that opposes solutions out of principle. I hope I am not doing that.

It is just, that ressources are limited.

Any solar, wind or water plant, that connects to the grid is helping. Likely also every nuclear reactor.

But the carbon capture solution I see not really helping, as long as coal plants are being build and are proposed by the exact kind of people, who said before that it is all not so bad and economy growth is always more important.

" So don't let them lead you think that carbon capture isn't an important part of the solution that is being developed by people who care deeply and climate change."

With what I know, I sadly really don't see it as part of the solution, but part of the distraction, part of the problem.

In germany the car lobby recently achieved, that the ban on new ICE cars in 2035 was in effect negated, because cars with E-Fuels should obviously excempt. Except that cars that can run with E-Fuels can also run with normal fuels and E-Fuels make no sense economically, so they already demanded for massive state subventioning of the concept. Spend lots of energy to generate a bit of fuel to continue the big roar of their loud engines. So all just fake. And those are the exact same people who lobby for the concept of carbon capture. Lot's of politicial "activism" to effectivly change nothing, except on paper.

So to repeat myself, I am not against carbon sequestering by principle.

I just think focussing on it now is just distracting from the real solutions needed now.

Once we stopped the last coal plant - then we can talk about spending surplus energy to capture existing CO2. Not before. And it is still a long way to get there.

>If the price of re-extracting released carbon is baked into into burning fossil fuels, then carbon capture will only be viable in places where energy is cheap, such as places with good conditions for solar, wind or hydro.

The same math could be used to determine those would be the only places it would be viable to burn fossil fuels to begin with.

Planting trees is not really viable to deal with CO2 emissions on any significant scale.

Assuming a tree absorbs around 20kg of CO2/year, you'd need to plant 250 trees per year (!!) for every single passenger vehicle (~5tons of CO2/year).

And the problem does not stop there-- these numbers only work for the first 20 or so years of tree growth, and afterwards you have to seal you trees (under high pressure to turn them into hydrocarbons? :P) or plant even more trees to compensate for older trees decomposing (releasing CO2).

Kind of sounds amazing if we could pull it off (of course we can't) but imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one.

"imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one."

That's how the world looked like, before humans chopped or burned them down and let cattle, goats and sheep prevented new forests from growing again.

Reforesting at least parts of that back, would capture significant amounts of CO2. No matter that a old tree composes at some point, because at the same time another tree growing where the old one stood, will compensate that.

What regions of the world are we talking about? Northern Africa? South America?

All of them?

Except the iciest colds in the north and most arid deserts, forests used to be the norm.

edit: of course not every land was covered by forests, prairie also existed natural, but forests were a lot more common, than they are today.

I guess I was unaware, I'd thought forests in North America were more or less at par with the last few millennia.

The fact you were downvoted is pretty good evidence that we'll commit a mass extinction on par with the great oxygenation, denying it the whole way.