Comment by zamfi
3 years ago
No one thinks infeasible miracle cures are the solution, so he's doing much more than "pointing that out": he's making an argument about the infeasibility of carbon capture.
In particular, he's saying it's impossible to capture enough carbon at scale in a cost-effective manner, so therefore we should not even be looking at this option until we've exhausted the alternatives. But he's wrong: it's not impossible, it's merely expensive, and anyway we should be pursuing all possible remedies in parallel, not dismissing something as infeasible because someone's armchair analysis makes it look like a scam to them.
What we need are people trying both likely and unlikely solutions, not knee-jerk gatekeeping from randoms on the internet.
There will be better physical, chemical, environmental, cost, and overall economic advantages resulting from efforts at source reduction than air capture.
This will always be what matters when resources need to be deployed most efficiently for abatement.
When you do the math, unless resources become unlimited, source capture is the better use of limited infrastructure.
It's really kinda-sorta completely impossible to fool Mother Nature on things like this.
The problem is not enough effort is going into source removal since the responsible source would be the only one that would be facing the added cost above what they are doing now.
With remote air capture the much less efficient and costly process can be spread among huge numbers of different but smaller payers whether they know it or not.
If that makes significant progress occur sooner that should make DAC be good to go forward with in the short term, but eventually people will be able to do the math at scale and most will say WTF were we spinning our wheels so long for?