Comment by jmward01

> If we don't have the political will to reduce the amount going into the air then what makes anyone think we would have the political will to build out some system to capture and sequester?

Because political will requires coordination, building systems and turning them on doesn't have to!

> We need to focus more on not putting CO2 into the air and less on trying to take it out.

What part of the "we" in this coordination problem doesn't require political will?

This. The fossil fuel industry continues to overflow the tub with CO2, but instead of turning off the tap, we keep trying to invent a better sponge.

We need carbon taxes, tariffs on high-emitting countries and products, and support for adopting clean energy, clean transportation, and clean everything else. Lobbying and misinformation has made these actual solutions politically impossible to implement though, so we continue to waste resources on sponges.

I think you have a point. It could be difficult to justify the cost of carbon capture based on sequestration alone. One of the reasons I think this might still work is that captured carbon can be used to create platform chemicals (various hydrocarbons) using the fischer tropsch process. Electrofuels are using direct air capture to generate fossil replacements.

Only requirement is energy and there too it isn't all that expensive to pull air in from the atmosphere or to seperate CO2 from adsorbent via low grade heat (70-100c)

So far into the future this method could allow us to continue produce critical hydrocarbon materials (used everywhere from plastics to pharamaceuticals) without having to depend upon concentrated and contested oil supplies.

More than energy efficiency its volumetric efficiency that's the issue. At the moment (to the best of my knowledge) kg of capturing materials capture tens of grams of CO2. Pulling it from air is not that energy intensive but finding materials that can actually filter out CO2 from that air is difficult. If breakthroughs are made in this area it will have industrial applications. Then it won't be just sequestering.

Of course the easier solution is to plant more trees and grasses but they grow very slowly and require valuable land. Still this approach is feasible in some uncultivable lands. Crops like cottongrass[1] can grow even in tundra climate and can be valuable source of both technically imp carbon via cellulose and a means to capture CO2. We don't have to make a choice. We can do both simultaneously.

[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/database/feis/plants/graminoid/eriva...

There are applications where weight still makes battery storage impossible. By capturing carbon, we may give ourselves the ability to harvest fuel from the air instead of the ground. Given the sometimes negative cost of electricity, this could make it more cost effective to do so. If we replace fossil fuel drilling with sequestration then we are at net zero.

This may be part of the solution … or maybe we find a way to make a utopia where we can all agree to just stop polluting. Historically, the utopia has no precedent that I am aware of.

Sequestering CO2 where it's highly concentrated, e.g. at power plants or cement factories exhausts, would be one way to emit less.

We'll need this tech later. If and when we get emissions to net zero we'll still have too much CO2 in the air. Better to have begun the research now.

> The only solution we have is put less in the air in the first place

That’s not a solution either, because the developing world is not going to stop increasing their CO2 output until they fully industrialize. They’re just not. Feel free to seek reductions where you can, but don’t think of it as a solution because it’s not.

The technical problems with CO2 capture are far more solvable than the sociological problems with net zero emissions.

We need this even if emissions went to zero overnight. World is a big place, can do more than one thing at a time.

Removing CO2 from the air is a pipe dream for several obvious reasons.

Firstly, it will always be more difficult and energy-intensive to extract CO2 than to just stop putting it into the atmosphere in the first place. Yet the world is nowhere near agreeing any meaningful framework on reducing emissions, and the party in power in the largest democracy in the world is in denial that a problem even exists.

But mainly, if there was an effective means of CO2 removal, who will be in charge of the dials, and who will set the targets?

Atmospheric CO2 is now 50% higher than when I was born. Will we go back to the levels as at the 60s, or perhaps the beginning of the industrial revolution? Obviously that is unfavorable to the frozen regions that are now thawing - like Russia (and Greenland), who benefit from climate change.

Unfortunately, Technological solutions are more politically feasible than attempting to reduce via restrictions and regulations that require intense global coordination that does not exist.

There are 4 different categories of fixing the global CO2 challenge: a. Remove CO2 from atmosphere b. Prevent adding new CO2 from reaching atmosphere

This could also be a good use case for #b where CO2 is captured before being released to the atmosphere. For example factories and vehicles could be mandated to use this.

I'm going to have to disagree in a (hopefully) nuanced way. First, I just ran an end-to-end continent scale simulation of CO2 sequestration for the US, as is. To put it bluntly: there's no way outside of magical pocket sized fusion that will make this work. If you add full ground transportation abatement; full power abatement; and, then, use dedicated thermal sources, then the final cost is ~1 trillion a year. And, that's after all the positive upsides to the economy. There's a bunch of "almost unlimited upside" to be had from not having to move Miami, Houston, etc., but it's too complicated to model. However, just the healthcare implication upsides are roughly parity, disaster included.

But! Notice that abatement doesn't get us to 0. It merely slows the process. The remainder absolutely needs ACC. The output stream needs to be dirt cheap, the thermals need to be 100°C and not 900°C. Those sorts of things would bring ACC down to "hundreds of billions" rather than a trillion.

Maybe we need to genetically engineer special of trees that are active only during the day and sleep at night. Photosynthesis at daytime and Dormancy at nighttime for maximum CO2 conversion.

You might think it is silly to do this, but what if carbon emission trading makes this profitable?

Zoidberg is always worth quoting.

“Why not both?”

Thank you

There's no general will, it's not specifically political will. Emitting less CO2 means doing less things or doing them for much more money due to high taxes to discourage it (and also disproportionately affect poor people). Other than some luddites I've never met anyone that genuinely was willing to sacrifice eating a nice steak or going on vacation unless they are millionaires, and that's only because those people know they can do it as much as they want. You have a huge mass of people getting lifted from poverty that will tell you to fuck off if you tell them that now they are finally out of eating rice and starving they can't have a steak, because of CO2.

All the things silicon valley "caviar communists" say you need to stop doing are basically the dreams of a whole mass of people coming out of poverty. Nice food, traveling, having a car, having A/C, etc.

So we can either find alternatives, or slowly figure out more geoengineering projects like mass absorbing CO2 and the like.