I can't wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
How much carbon dioxide was produced to build this fucking thing.
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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And then to run it! I hate how these ideas get funding and are immediately being built without question. How much energy was put in the materials, in building it, and how much more will they need to run it to extract how much CO2 exactly? And then let's say it works. It works so well that in that region CO2 levels fall well below and reach normal levels. What then? They leave it there? Move it?
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Only if we would have natural solution to this problem.... Let's fuck up the planet even more by producing more shit. How about planting trees and stopping the deforestation.
Planting trees doesn’t produce revenue for billionaires and shareholders. This does. Ergo we must produce expensive, over engineered machines to replace trees. Bees are next.
Trees are inefficient too but we actually already know what we need to do to ramp up the efficiency of the photosynthesis process in trees with genetic tinkering.
The bigger problem is that we have reached a point where trees aren’t enough anymore. The oceans have acidified. There’s just too much co2 to capture at this point.
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Direct air capture is a scam. It requires energy that comes from somewhere else. Capturing CO2 requires energy, it’s basic physics/chemistry.
Nothing about it makes sense excpet as an expensive boondoggle and a distraction for correcting the root causes of climate change.
This will only ever make sense when we have carbon neutral energy that is “too cheap to meter.” So, like, nuclear fusion, or solar panels become cheaper than tar roofs. In other words, these systems will make sense after climate change is solved. lol.
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Trees are better carbon capture devices, you even get lumber from them.
I believe that's what OPs caption in the post body is getting at
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Fuck this postt, this is all fiction. There are initiatives that AMERICA IS DESTROYING.
Occidental and 1PointFive can't secure permits, let alone funding, it's all hand waving slop.
3 fucking minutes of research is all it takes
I knew it was bullshit the moment I saw "The US is building..." and it wasn't a concentration camp
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Only if there was a small pipe or "smoke stack" that could emit these in super high concentrations of CO2 where we could just pipe it straight to the ground instead of capturing it through the air. Better yet, if we find all of those sources we could even stop them producing in the first place and leaving all the carbon in the ground. 🤔
/s
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Current state of the art DAC plants are incredibly inefficient. Also, even if they would come with efficiency that is comparable to trees, they would still lack other positive ecological functions of trees.
It was always going to be inefficient trying to capture something that's 400ppm.
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Way to reinvent the tree I guess?
Fun fact, most of the O2 we breathe is processed from CO2 by algae, not trees.
I mean, trees help, but the planet is mostly covered in water, so algae has a bit of an advantage.
The problem is that the ocean has historically been one part that environmental activism has struggled with, because how do you hold someone accountable for ecological damage done on international waters?
Any damage there tends to then affect bays, natural marinas, shore lines, and other areas where algae like living.
Trees are good, but they can probably do more good by replacing these carbon capture systems with algae ponds. They're powered by the sun too.
I'll just leave this here in case people are actually falling for this scam. Planting trees is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective...
Carbon capture is the inverse of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). You have to dump energy (from the grid) into a chemical processes that "refines" the air back into concentrated carbon
The only way this thermodynamically is viable is with a surplus of carbon neutral energy
So either nuclear, or fusion
(There's no way solar or wind generate enough energy, for several decades at least)
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This feels like Big Oil PR.
Like, 'nothing to worry about, we can just scrub the air later.' Which is a total lie.
People will do anything other than planting more trees and looking after the worlds ocean ecosystem health. Most air is cleaned by algae in oceans and then trees in land, in that order. But people will just make machines for things which were taken care of by mother earth for millennia.
carbon capture is always a bad idea because the energy it uses cancels out the co2 it pulls from the atmosphere
Unless it uses hydro, nuclear, wind, solar
And the amount of CO2 it captures is miniscule in comparison.
This technology doesn't work. It is nothing more than a way to avoid taking the steps necessary to prevent catastrophic climate change for future and even our generations.
There is no stopping it. We will evolve through crisis, if we survive to evolve at all, which sounds silly now but won't by the end of the century, or sooner, if we continue on the path we are on.
then its a waste of money you could have spent to produce electricity renewably
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The biggest carbon sink on the planet are oceans. We need to stop messing them up.
Too late.
The thing about oceans is they have massive amounts of inertia.
We're still surviving on the inertia from before we fucked them up, but we've already fucked them up, and some of the consequences of that won't be apparent until 50 or 100 years from now.
Same with fixing them. We won't see the effects (or the unintended side effects) of anything we do to fix them for decades, and even then they'll probably be unnoticeable under the effects of how much we fucked them up before trying to fix them.
Stopping is probably indeed the best option, hopefully we haven't damaged them enough that they won't fix themselves eventually... but that'll take hundreds or more probably thousands of years.
I thought someone did the math because co2 scrubbing and the facility would be size of Georgia and have to draw in hurricane winds
Yep, it is, in part, a scam diversion by the fossil fuel industry
Leave it to those ghouls to greenwash in a way that is actually a net negative, rather than just ineffectual
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I mean, this may get downvoted, but trees are just trying to live, not fix the climate. They are a very real part of the solution, but I’m fine with considering ‘supplements’.
Sometimes the enemy of the good is the perfect.
If the construction of these can provide a more efficient means of carbon capture than growing trees then turning those trees into building materials over and over …. It’s a good thing.
If not … it’s performative tbh.
It's performative, the biggest 'carbon capture' facility made so far, didn't even come close to offsetting its own carbon footprint.
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My question is, wouldn't the power needed to run these negate the benefits they bring?
This is also ignoring the gross notion that these can make money so they're more worthy than trees when considering solutions.
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Only need half a million of them to keep up with current emissions.
For comparison, there are far fewer power plants that release co2. Based on some rough estimates I foind, there are fewer than 10,000 in total plants, most have more than one generator.
And those turn a profit, no one is going to fund half a million capture plants. Building out more solar and wind is insanely more financially prudent. N.
Over building with nuclear power with its massive capital costs makes far more sense than these things.
These solutions always remind of this scene from Futurma.
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Trees do not permenantly sequester carbon, they act as a reservoir. If we cover the entire land area of the earth in amazon rainforest, it'll sequester like 150 years worth of our carbon emissions. After that, there would be no more land left to plant trees on, and we would be back to where we are now. The only solution is to simultaneously stop bringing carbon from outside the carbon cycle into the carbon cycle, and also remove the carbon that we've already brought in.
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I can't believe the ghouls in the Texas government let anyone past their ideological minefield to even get the permits signed, much less build the thing.
Carbon capture is the preferred solution to climate change for oil and gas companies, because is the only one that doesn't require a reduction on oil and gas extraction.
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Why does this look like someone threw it together in Minecraft
I thought it was just a picture of a new graphics card that was coming out. I almost didn't read it because I said to myself I couldn't afford a new graphics card in the next few years.
And the look much better than trees too /s
I would probably name it T.R.E.E. Terrestrial Regeneration and Ecosystem Engine.
"The Mechanical Forest" sounds like a Ray Bradbury story.
so burning fossil fuels to take Carbon dioxide out of atmosphere? hmmm
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Don't they sell the CO2 to fracking companies?
It would probably take decades to offset its own carbon footprint, let alone making it negative. And then it would need to actually be significant.
Just plant trees and restore carbon sinks you fucking techno fascists.
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