Carbon capture company emits more than it captures | CCS illusion only delays the elimination of fossil fuels
Carbon capture company emits more than it captures | Climate & Capitalism
No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it. - Albert Einstein
If we stop emitting greenhouse gases nothing will get better, it will just stop getting worse. We also have to remove all the GHG that we put into the atmosphere.
"Stop getting worse" is a pretty major improvement. And yes, trees work as carbon sequestration.
Most (all?) CCS is not grabbing random carbon from the atmosphere. It's pulling it out of smokestacks so you can keep burning fuel while claiming it's green. It is not net negative even if working as intended.
Removing the GHG needs to be done but this is not how you do that. This is a way to say "look, we're trying so just let us take another hit of that sweet sweet crude OK?"
Plant trees. Simple.
Let the systems balance themselves out. Simple. Not fun but Simple.
CCS for industrial processes and that might one day be good enough to work on a global scale? Maybe but that's fucking ages away and it's certainly not this.
There's no amount of trees you can plant to actually put that genie back in the bottle in a reasonable timeframe. Consider how much highly concentrated plant matter we've dug up and then imagine how much we'd have to bury. We could spend centuries doing nothing but planting trees and cutting them down and burying them and still wouldn't make up that deficit.
Stopping it from getting worse is like half the work of controlling climate change, and restoring biodiversity is the way of removing GHG from the atmosphere, not silicon valley techno bro fans
Which - barring a sudden, rapid series of unprecedented technological advances in our ability to manage the chemical composition of our atmosphere - is the rough equivalent of saying, "unexplode this bomb"
Trees.
Is reforestation not simply the best way to do this?
In a very limited fashion it is. You can plant a forest and that amount of CO2 is what it'll be able to pick up. Trees will die, rot, emit their CO2 back into the air while new trees pick it up again. The system would reach a maximum equilibrium quickly and the relative amount of CO2 picked up isn't that high.
Most CO2 is actually processed by algae anyway
Pretty sure that was the unsaid core of the idea from the get-go
If these guys did it right, and they haven't, they have been right in that we also need to remove a shit ton of co2 from the atmosphere again and continue removing to compensate for unavoidable emissions, ALONGSIDE absolutely reducing and avoiding more emissions. But they fucked it up by becoming a bunch of greedy techbros that started selling shit they don't have, are not producing, and know they will never be able to produce. It's not just greenwashing, it's downright fraud.
It sounds like this is still at the R&D stage, not something we can count on today. This further reinforce the impression that most carbon credits are worthless and/or oversold.
DAC might contribute one day a little bit to fighting climate change, maybe. Don't hold your breath.
