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Comment by rob74 | Hacker News Reader

If you want to be polite, you can call it an illusion. If you don't, you can call it a scam (wanting to convince public opinion/politicians that continuing to burn fossil fuels is not a problem because the CO2 can be captured and magicked away).

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The continuation of fossil fuel emissions and the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere don't have to be tied together. Of course the package of these two combined is a scam.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't scale up direct air capture to billions of tons of CO2 per year. The reduction in climate change effects would be absolutely worth it. It might also be more economical than decarbonizing absolutely everything (ie chemical processes).

Or worse a scam because it drives additional exploitation that would otherwise be uneconomic without government subsidy.

https://www.greenpeace.org/international/story/54079/great-c...

That article could use an update. The scam continues via hundreds of millions of subsidy through the Inflation Reduction Act (thanks Joe Manchin).

A pipe burst recently and asphyxiated people in a nearby town in Louisiana. https://theintercept.com/2023/08/24/carbon-pipeline-ccs-air-...

It’s true, every big industry needs regulation and oversight.

It's a logical progression from an industry that depends on it and went from "nah, human CO2 production is marginal" to "ok human CO2 is significant but it doesn't have an effect on climate", now "ok it has an effect but that's ok because someone (else) will come up with a magical solution".

Have we even moved past the first stage yet? My uncle was lecturing me yesterday about how warming is apparently caused by sun spots and burning coal is actually good for the environment because forest fires are natural, lol. And anyone who thinks otherwise is just a member of the deep state.

There's a good podcast called "the climate denier's handbook" that reminds me of those arguments, it usually finishes by a simulated conversation where you get lectured by a family member on these

On this website people both hate carbon sequestration from atmosphere and are worried that the planet is heading to the worst projected path by 2100 simultaneously. I have zero hopes for humanity by now, but observing this bipolar split is amusing. Sad, but amusing.

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