Reality check on technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air
An MIT Energy Initiative study finds many climate-stabilization plans are based on questionable assumptions about the future cost and deployment of “direct air capture” and therefore may not bring about promised reductions.
Science: "I know! . . What if we don't fix the problem!"
Industry: Excellent. You're hired. Have a lot of money.
There's no serious scientist who believes in direct air carbon capture.
And yet wasn't it central to the last ipcc report, that we could hold to 1.5C of we stopped all carbon emissions dead and came up with as yet not invented ways for carbon capture. And everyone said "sounds great someone should totally get on that"
A bit more subtle than that but it can basically be read like that, yes. That’s the magic of ‘net zero’: overshoot now, find miracle cure later. That religious belief in tech is one of the many reasons why we’re fucked.
More like "carbon capture you say? That sounds like a great reason to stop caring about emissions"
But, we do have "technology" for direct carbon capture. Trees and plants. It will consume a lot of valuable real-estate, but we could plant a lot of plant life which would use carbon for growth.
There is just not enough will and to much economy incentives to not terraform earth.
You can do that, but not at anywhere near the scale of current emissions from fossil fuel burning.
Actually making any kind of removal meaningful means scaling down fossil fuel use to near zero compared with current extraction and burning.
Yeah, trees are pretty amazing! There's also a mammoth amount of carbon capture in the ocean (more than land) mostly via plankton but also sea grass and the like.
Trees play a massive role in the ecosystem we're part of aside from just being carbon stores. If we just focus on carbon storage and invent new tech that does that, it might somewhat improve the situation, but we're really just kicking the can down the road, and waiting for our extraction based economy to cause chaos somewhere else.
Kind reminder that the first solar panels had an efficiency of around 10%, and are now at 22%. The cost of photovoltaics has decreased 60% over the past decade alone.
Of course there is no 'silver bullet'. But the researchers of the original article still recommend working on projects like these.
Projects like this are completely necessary, for after we phase out fossil fuels. Not "while we ramp down" or "so we don't have to shut off this plant over here". Once the phaseout is complete these systems help reign in the overshoot.
Except in this case, the atmosphere is a known (huge) size, the number of points at which capture technology can be applied is not that great, and the more CO2 that's captured, the harder it will be to capture more. And the way gases circulate through the atmosphere, it'll be even harder to ensure that it flows past the places where the scrubbers are located.
Unlike battery tech, none of those factors has a technical solution.
The whole carbon-capture business model is a con. Stop pollution at source, it's the only way that actually works right now. Quit pissing away money, effort and precious time on displacement activities like this and hydrogen.
Nationalize the fossil-fuel companies and start an orderly shutdown. It's the only way we will survive.
