Uplifting News

Tree drops seeds on its own.

Let the tree become part of earth.

I mean, someone needs to be thinking about it and perhaps even building infrastructure so it can be used once the grid is clean but it's not something that should be in use

This is the way I would want to see it happen. If pollution tax is high enough, it will incentivize companies to act more reasonably. Hopefully coal power plants will shut down permanently while blast furnaces will be modified to meet the new requirements. Processing all of that CO2 won’t be cheap, but steel production has to continue so the company doesn’t really have that many options. The government could also support the transition so that production won’t disappear into other countries.

He says it makes no sense to do it, because not only are you basically using twice the energy to get it back down, often using energy made from fossil fuels to begin with, you then also have to tackle storage and that's nearly impossible at the scale we need to take it out of the atmosphere. Any use case, such as green houses and whatnot don't help, because they put the CO2 straight back into the atmosphere with a bit of a delay, same with trees.

Which makes it a futile exercise. It's basically gold plated HDMI cables. Sure it works, but it makes no sense whatsoever, because it doesn't do what it claims to do.

I think it's more nuanced than that.

Some people are saying it's bad because they're using it to "produce more oil" - and that I don't buy. Sure, they're directly pumping oil with the CO₂ they inject - but this is oil they'd extract either way, with or without direct air capture. In a strict comparison between the two situations, doing it with direct air capture is less bad than doing it without.

The actual harm that could come from it is mentioned in the article - that they want to use this to justify pumping for longer than they would otherwise. It was actually a bit shocking to see how brazen and open the oil company representative was about that. If they succeed in using this to justify continued pumping, then that's definitely bad. I don't think the politics will work out in their favor though, especially not 10 or 20 years from now.

But in the long-term I still see this as an absolute win. Above all else, what this technology needs to do is exist and be effective. For that it needs to be invested in heavily, and built and tested and run even when it's ineffective and unprofitable. We aren't anywhere near the stage where we have the technological capability to actually do direct air capture on a scale that matters globally. Helping us get to that point, to me, makes this move still a net positive. A pragmatic good.

While I don't disagree, I think it's important to note that "our immediate priority needs to be stopping emissions" doesn't mean "we shouldn't be investing in this yet". Technologies take time to develop and reach maturity - sometimes decades. If we wait on developing the tech until removing CO₂ that's already out there out-prioritizes reducing ongoing emissions, then we'll be multiple decades behind where we should be when it matters most.

I both agree and disagree with this. If it can be made profitable, then all the better - because then economics and policy can combine to bring it about faster than either would alone. But if it can't be made profitable then I agree absolutely that it should be done anyways with tax revenue.

Long-term it's definitely not good to use it as an excuse to pollute more - these won't do an ounce of good if they only exist to offset emissions we still produce. In the short term though, allowing carbon capture to act as an offset for emissions could still be a net long-term positive, in that it would shift the economics more in its favor - allowing faster development and a wider buildout. This assumes that the industries that use it in this fashion do eventually decarbonize anyways - which you could perhaps guarantee by having carbon capture stop counting as offsets at some designated future date.

I think the pragmatic solution is to introduce yearly shrinking carbon caps, and allow them to be offset with carbon capture for a limited time - say, 10 or 15 years after the "net zero carbon" goal date. After that it's all about building up that net negative number.

A great example of something that needs to be done in addition to direct carbon capture and all the other things that need to be done.