What is the opposite of oil drilling?

Not necessary. The critical thing that limits CO2 capture by plants through photosynthesis is water, how they manage that gets you to the difference between C3 and C4 plants. A system based on PV might not need much water at all.

Plants not only capture CO2 from the air (pump out entropy) but they also reverse the chemistry to bind C to something like a carbohydrate molecule, whereas in carbon capture they usually compress the CO2 to 1500 psi or so and inject it underground. If you do want to do something useful with the CO2 you might have an e-Fuel factory that turns CO2 into CO and, together with H2, builds up gasoline and diesel molecules via Fischer-Tropsch chemistry which directly competes with (say) making ethanol from biomass. You don’t need so much energy to separate CO2 from N2 and compress it.

Aren't plants actually incredibad at photosynthesis? I thought that a really exceptional plant was 3-4% efficient, most of them are << 1%

It's a shame we suck at acknowledging the obvious inefficiencies in our systems and adapting our behavior accordingly and instead waste huge amounts of money, brainpower and energy for magical and unlikely to ever work techno fixes.

In this case: if we all agreed to drastically reduce our consumption of animal-based products, we'd free up huge amounts of land which we could use now to plant rapid growing, carbon-capturing plants. Then harvest them and either process them as biochar, where roughly 50% of the carbon remains captured and use the generated heat for energy/heat generation - or maybe even bury the harvested biomass in a way which ensures no methane or carbon will be emitted.

The plants would do all the hard work, we "just" need to reap its result.

Evolution gave us legs. We invented wheels.

Nature gave us eyes. We invented telescopes and microscopes.

Natural selection “only” does the bare minimum that beats the competition. It didn’t design plants to be maximally efficient at removing CO2. Plants do so while also having to deal with respiration, water conservation, heat management, reproduction, nutrient intake, disease prevention, etc.

I’m sure we can do better when we don’t concern ourselves with all that other stuff.

Nah industrial direct capture is a proven technology. Energy isn't the problem, plenty of sun in the southwest. The chemistry isn't a problem, we have sorbents that work great, it's just cost. We don't want to spend 1/3rd of global GDP on carbon sequestration for the next decade.

Not really. Living things absorb CO2 with the intent to live. The CO2 isn't the important part, the living (replicating) is. It's entirely plausible that one could improve efficiency by removing the requirement of living.

It'd be a lot more simple, and faster, for us to just stop releasing so much carbon into the atmosphere if we really cared.

The idea that we can invent our way into a scenario where we can have our cake and eat it too is just a lie that kicks the can down the road. How likely does it really seem that we will find a solution in which we can continue to use more and more natural resources but magically make all the negative externalities suddenly disappear? And is that likelihood more realistic or reasonable than just stopping creating the damage as much as possible?

Others have said the same but it seems you can use this argument against just about any machine.

Whenever you see a public policy issue that seems to be based on totally ignoring logic consider immediately jumping to the word “trust” and analyzing things that way.

People refuse to take a medicine despite the fact that science says it’s clearly the right move? They don’t trust the scientists.

Environmentalists refuse to see this as an engineering and accounting problem? They don’t trust the people who will be responsible for keeping the numbers in balance.

And so on.

It’s usually much less complicated when you look at things this way. And while I share the desire for the world to head in a more pragmatic direction that coldly analyzes the costs and benefits of policies, at some point we might have to confront the problem of “experts” being fundamentally full of shit across many aspects of public life.

I don't think it's fair to take that tone against climate activists without considering the larger context of the issues here. We have been lied to for decades by the industry and it's lobbyists. They knew damn well what greenhouse gasses were going to do to our world back in the fucking 70's, just like tobacco companies knew what their products would do to people's lungs, just like they knew what lead would do to people and still put it in gas, pipes, and fucking paint. Even now many are still clinging to the bullshit "check your energy impact" garbage, shaming individual consumers for the fact that they knowingly are setting the planet on a course to large-scale ecological disaster and have been since before most of us were born.

It's also worth considering that carbon capture is not a bulletproof solution without costs. The machines themselves are quite large if you want to capture at a scale sufficient to actually offset climate change, and if people hate the look of windmills, oh just wait till they get a look at carbon capture hardware. I've also not yet seen a carbon capture application for motor vehicles, industrial or otherwise (though I would love that). And, carbon capture does not assist us at all in getting off of oil in general, which is a finite resource that we only have so much of and so we really need to figure out different things for that. Not burning oil and it's byproducts saves a hell of a lot of oil for plastics, which we also need.

It is mostly an engineering problem. It's also a lying bastard corporation problem. It's also a complete failure on the part of regulatory structures to take on the problem, and political meekness from every standing government on the face of the earth. It's a problem that ties directly into many systemic failures of our society; the over-centering of profit above any and all other considerations, including our survival. It's a loaded issue.

That's definitely an issue; they are encouraged to sequester emissions, instead of reduce / eliminate them. Same with CO2 emissions rights; for some reason every company gets these for free, AND gets to sell them to other companies if they're under. They should be buying them from the government in the first place, and the price needs to go up sharply every year.

Too many of these ideas end up defeating the purpose.

Another example: NL and energy companies are investing heavily in offshore wind parks. What happens? Instead of existing power plants shutting down, a newly built Microsoft or Google datacenter buys the majority of the capacity of the new wind farm for the next decade or so. Instead of replacing power production with renewables, renewables are added and consumption increases alongside.

Makes sense in a capitalist system too, more supply means cost goes down means demand goes up means cost goes back up.

Compared to what? Seems like the externalities and entropy associated with our current path are at least as chaotic and difficult to reverse.

But we’ll only be able to consider an alternative once the 150-year petrochemical free ride is decisively over, and what-if arguments are no longer scary enough to cause doubts.

I'd like to see a massive CO2 -> limestone operation set up with the explicit purpose of creating artificial reefs. That would help offset overfishing in addition to removing carbon from the atmosphere.

I've heard basically "plant trees, bury them, plant new trees." I'm not sure if planting trees itself is sufficient.

> How much would we need to plant to reduce carbon to preindustrial levels

About 2 trillion trees per year, just to break even on current rates of CO2 emissions. More to reduce it further.

For reference, there's currently an estimated 3 trillion trees on Earth.

Exxon is still alive and well, so there must be something there.