Comment by 1d22a

Carbon capture is physically unable to be as effective as we need it to be. To an approximation, growing a tree is able to capture as much carbon as burning the wood from that tree. If most of our released carbon came from burning wood, we would just need to re-grow that amount of wood (unfortunately it's not even that simple, as the soil stores carbon long term in a way that just growing the tree doesn't capture, and is also released over time when old growth forests are cut down). Instead, the carbon we're burning comes from processes which efficiently concentrated the carbon from plants and microorganisms over millions of years to create coal, oil, and gas.

Carbon capture technology would have to artificially replicate these millions-of-years-long processes, and do it on a scale of years to decades. The scale of carbon capture we need is entirely unfathomable, requiring processes that don't exist, because they have to work against entropy itself.

Carbon capture at the point of burning fossil fuels to abate further emissions might be economical. Capturing already released carbon dioxide from the atmosphere (concentration of ~0.04%) is a fiction pushed by fossil fuel companies to muddy the debate and distract from the urgency of immediately stopping the burning of fossil fuels.