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Comment by 233mhz | Hacker News Reader

CO2 capture is obvious greenwashing, just like electric personal cars. They're here to save industries, not the planet, I don't think anyone half serious believes anything other than that

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Yes on CO2 capture, but electric personal cars are substantially lower emissions than internal combustion cars. Anyone saying something different is pushing fossil propaganda - that is just not a fact-based argument.

Yes, getting everyone onto electrified public transport + scooters is better - but EVs do provide meaningful emissions reduction.

Maybe, but cement manufacturing by itself is responsible for a staggering 8% of global co2 emissions. And we really don't have a viable option for replacing cement, and probably won't for a long time. Capturing and removing that co2 has a meaningful impact. Even if CCS were limited to just that one industry.

There are absolutely viable ways to reduce concrete emissions by about 30% - but it is staggeringly difficult to get the construction industry (including architects, structural engineers, standards bodies etc.) to change practices.

You could apply it to existing power plants for example. I could see a use there.

But don't use it as a justification for a new coal plant saying it's zero carbon now....

It’s pretty easy to see how electric personal cars make a difference even if the initial vehicle manufacturing process is indeed dirtier, and plenty of serious people consider them a part of the solution. CO2 capture also isn’t greenwashing, it’s just handwaving away problems with the idea that tech will somehow save us, which is also true for like… every single solution to this problem we’ve considered.

Both perpetuate the idea that we can just continue business as usual and that we'll find a magic solution later.

2 to 3 tonnes of metal and batteries to transport 75kg of meat and sit uselessly 98% of the time is not the optimal way to transport people, no matter how you look at it

Nobody has ever, at any point been talking about “optimal”, so that’s irrelevant. Optimal is completely abandoning science and returning to nature. There is no better outcome for nature. That’s the optimal outcome.

Putting a bunch of meat in tubes is not optimal. Putting a bunch of meat on very large, multi-passenger vehicles is not optimal. Putting 9 billion bike and walking pathways for meat is not optimal. Cities made of concrete are not optimal.

Who cares about optimal? Actually serious people are discussing living in harmony.

If nobody is allowed to own a car, then nobody is happy. If the only way to own a car is to own an electric one, then many people are happy. This is not optimal. Nothing we’re doing or aiming for is, in any sense of the word.

with fusion you would have enough energy to do it?

It always puzzles me when people think fusion is just infinite free energy. You're not just gonna have one fusion plant producing a billion zetawatts of electricity. Each fusion plant will likely produce roughly the same as a large nuclear plant. So we would need to build hundreds/thousands of them, it would take many decades to build them. Fusion reactors are extremely complicated machines.

And even if we did this, we would also need tens of thousands of carbon capture facilities, and the infrastructure to actually store the CO2 somewhere.

Carbon capture (from air) is just completely infeasible. It's not even remotely realistic. There is absolutely no way it will ever make a significant difference.

We have biggest fussion reactor available to us on the sky everyday relatively for free. But that won't stop our greed and overpopulation.

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