Comment by hutzlibu
3 years ago
"It would be hugely helpful to have carbon removal technology in our climate change portfolio"
Planting trees and establishing more forests is a already working technology with lots of other nice side effects, while I see the "artificial carbon removal" tech often just used as a excuse to not do anything now at all and wait for the magic game changer.
"Set up a CO2 removal station in the desert, power it with a few square miles of solar panels, and run it when the sun shines."
And I totally like anything related to this, but as long as we build new coal plants, building this would be just symbolic.
So first I would use the desert solar power for actually powering the grid, removing the need for coal.
The fact you were downvoted is pretty good evidence that we'll commit a mass extinction on par with the great oxygenation, denying it the whole way.
Planting trees is not really viable to deal with CO2 emissions on any significant scale.
Assuming a tree absorbs around 20kg of CO2/year, you'd need to plant 250 trees per year (!!) for every single passenger vehicle (~5tons of CO2/year).
And the problem does not stop there-- these numbers only work for the first 20 or so years of tree growth, and afterwards you have to seal you trees (under high pressure to turn them into hydrocarbons? :P) or plant even more trees to compensate for older trees decomposing (releasing CO2).
Kind of sounds amazing if we could pull it off (of course we can't) but imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one.
"imagine a world where there is just too much wood (woodworkers be salivating) and there are massive jungles everywhere we could fit one."
That's how the world looked like, before humans chopped or burned them down and let cattle, goats and sheep prevented new forests from growing again.
Reforesting at least parts of that back, would capture significant amounts of CO2. No matter that a old tree composes at some point, because at the same time another tree growing where the old one stood, will compensate that.
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Regarding the trees, I hope they research that claim!
Regarding the concept that it's a distraction, I think that's folk behavioral psychology with an unhealthy dash of moralism. It needs to be substantiated with evidence before I take it seriously. We are talking about a real carbon mitigation research avenue that could have real benefits.
You mean you want quotes of people, who say climate change is not so bad, because we (will) have co2 removal tech?
I want evidence that there are people who wave away climate change because of proposed future CO2 removal tech, who would not wave away climate change if we stopped all research on CO2 removal tech.
I'm not trying to impose an impossible standard here. If you can show examples of something like this happening in contexts other than climate change, I'm open to that. What I don't accept is mere folk behavioral psychology speculation driving what an entire civilization does to mitigate a massive risk.
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