> Carbon capture is fraud.
Planting and growing trees is a form of carbon capture and it is one that has worked in Earth's history to bring CO2 levels down over the last millions of years from 7000ppm during the Cambrian Age to less than 700ppm.
Planting and growing trees is a form of carbon capture and it is one that has worked in Earth's history to bring CO2 levels down over the last millions of years from 7000ppm during the Cambrian Age to less than 700ppm.
Another good idea would be to mandate working from home for everyone that reasonably can do so. During Covid I've only measured about 300ppm as the bottom baseline, while nowadays I do not measure lower than 400ppm. (Co2 measuring devices are fairly cheap and good to have in your office, as high Co2 affects your ability to think clearly. Without opening a window and having just one person inside Co2 easily climbs to about 3000ppm within a few hours just from your breathing.)
The idea that we can lock up land, forever, planted in trees to offset our consumption is blissfully naive
In New Zealand large swatches of land are being taken out of production, for a onetime big payment
It neglects two things:
1. Trees burn. Forests left untended for years choke with fuel and then catastrophically burn releasing all that carbon
2. We need the land. Future generations, this generation in a few years, will not be sympathetic to the vast swatches of unproductive land (that due to 1. above create costs)
We must stop producing carbon. It will mean many obscenely rich will be downgraded to wealthy. And the prospect of that is enough to burn the world
Carbon capture is physically unable to be as effective as we need it to be. To an approximation, growing a tree is able to capture as much carbon as burning the wood from that tree. If most of our released carbon came from burning wood, we would just need to re-grow that amount of wood (unfortunately it's not even that simple, as the soil stores carbon long term in a way that just growing the tree doesn't capture, and is also released over time when old growth forests are cut down). Instead, the carbon we're burning comes from processes which efficiently concentrated the carbon from plants and microorganisms over millions of years to create coal, oil, and gas.
Carbon capture technology would have to artificially replicate these millions-of-years-long processes, and do it on a scale of years to decades. The scale of carbon capture we need is entirely unfathomable, requiring processes that don't exist, because they have to work against entropy itself.
Carbon capture at the point of burning fossil fuels to abate further emissions might be economical. Capturing already released carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (concentration of ~0.04%) is a fiction pushed by fossil fuel companies to muddy the debate and distract from the urgency of immediately stopping the burning of fossil fuels.
I think it's more productive to not entertain wild fantasies and be realistic about what can be done.