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Comment by derangedHorse | Hacker News Reader

I also think it's a useful tool, but the economics of carbon capture have to sustain the cost of developing these methods. Pointing consumerism in the right direction seems like the most effective way to drop carbon emissions from both a short and long term perspective. We need to "stop the bleed" before tackling anything else.

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That's the strategy of startups like Terraform [0][1] which use green energy production to synthesize carbon fuels using direct air capture, which are on track to be cheaper than fossil fuels without subsidies within the next few years (e.g., definitely this decade). This will both displace more expensive fossil fuels from the market while letting us leverage existing carbon fuel infrastructure.

The profit motive creates a self-sustaining cycle of rapid expansion and iteration, which should drastically increase the efficiency per unit as well as the horizontal scale of DAC so that eventually we'll have exponentially more DAC installed and then you can decide what to do with all the excess carbon, sequestering it in whatever ways make sense.

[0] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terrafo...

[1] https://terraformindustries.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/terrafo...

Pipelining is probably required, and there is no one magic solution here.

It took solar 45 years to become low cost, and carbon capture will probably be just as difficult. If we did things one step at a time, carbon capture wouldn't be economical until ~2080, which is too late.

> Pointing consumerism in the right direction

How do you do that?

Price signals.

One approach would be a revenue-neutral carbon tax on extraction of sequestered carbon. And border carbon taxes for imports from countries who don't also have an internal carbon tax.

I don’t think something like that would ever fly in the US. In fact, the opposite is more likely. The drill-baby-drill mantra is going to push everything in exactly the opposite direction.

I think any solution will have to come from industry, not government.

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