A Boring Dystopia

Greenwashing is an issue, but so is avoiding complicated nuance by simply laughing at an idea without understanding it.

The country I live in is mostly powered by renewables, they focus on reducing emissions, then capture at source, but they are currently having a healthy nuanced debate on whether to implement something like this.

The original set of these were built without reguard to their specific carbon offset as they were built to be exerpimental and to experiment with the technology. As with almost anything on engineering.

Modern ones have to go through a Life Cycle Assement (LCA) where they figure out when the break-even point will be before they are built and they are typically built where there is renewable energy sources. They must be net carbon negative for government subsidy.

Arizona and Texas are mostly desert where trees may not be a viable option but they have solar and wind farms. Deforestation is awful and reforestation can be a great option but these two climates in particular have not had forrests for thousands of years.

The largest one in Texas is owned and operated by an oil company, likely powered by oil, and the CO2 is used to frack more oil. For them it needs to be net profit rather then net carbon negative. Protest and ridicule away.

Iceland has the most successful powered by geothermal and is over 90% net carbon negative already and likely to increase the longer it runs.

Other places inject the CO2 into concrete building blocks making them stronger and a viable non destructive form of storage.

Others turn them into burnable fuels effectively "recycling" the CO2.

Others use them for industrial production of urea, methanol, fire exstinguishers, or even for drink carbonation or food preservation. Scrubbing the air for CO2 instead of the traditional method of capturing off-gases.

I remember seeing something about fitting ACs for carbon capture. What ever happened with that?

Why spend energy to make energy when you could make solar. Or capture at source tech for non energy producing carbon sources?

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.

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.

MIT tech review article

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...

This feels like Big Oil PR.

Like, 'nothing to worry about, we can just scrub the air later.' Which is a total lie.

Total waste of fuckin resources

I thought someone did the math because co2 scrubbing and the facility would be size of Georgia and have to draw in hurricane winds

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.

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.

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.

The biggest carbon sink on the planet are oceans. We need to stop messing them up.