Carbon removal isn’t weird anymore. That worries scientists.
Carbon removal isn’t weird anymore. That worries scientists.
Tech fixes for sucking climate pollution from the air are gaining ground globally. It was never supposed to happen.
It is very simple. If companies want to use air carbon removal, they should be forced to do that for all of their emissions. No cheap carbon credits, but real proper removal. I am fully aware that that costs $500/t or so, but that happens to be the real carbon price.
If they do have a problem with that then they can always stop emitting.
It seems like if a company was actually going to try to remove all carbon that they emitted, it'd be a HELL of a lot easier to just capture emissions directly at the major sources and capture it then. For things like power plants and refineries that's a lot fewer sources to filter than the entire atmosphere.
Sounds like greenwashing.
The headline sounds like the rhetoric that a greenwasher would say.
If Tech-Based-Carbon-Removal (TBCR) was practical, scientists who are concerned about climate change would be promoting it.
"We" don't promote TBCR because it's not a scalable solution. The fuel Industries are 'worried' because they know they will one day go out of business. But, for as long as they can get away with it, they promote anything that makes burning their fuels sound 'sustainable'
Making the Good into the enemy of the Perfect, yet again. We all generally understand that the adoption of Carbon Removal will probably mean polluting industries are theoretically slower to phase out. What concern over that ignores is the much more realistic understanding that those polluting industries aren't actually going to phase out in a sufficiently timely manner (if ever) even without carbon removal. We can't afford to hold out for perfect solutions at the expense of partial fixes, because those perfect solutions are never going to happen. We need to take what we can get while it might stand a chance of making a difference, and hope it buys us the time to actually fix something.
You're making fantasy the enemy of reality.
The article states it very clearly: the technology does not actually exist. When people talk about how carbon capture will be necessary to reach net zero, they're talking about a speculative technology, not a real one.
But it's a very appealing speculation. So appealing that fossil fuel companies and heavy polluters are using simply the idea of it to make the public complacent and avoid conversations about how seriously we need to transform society to avoid total collapse.
And it would be a mistake to assume that some kind of engineering wizardry will make the technology suddenly feasible on a timeline that lets us avoid collapse if we just throw enough money at it (which we're not even doing at the moment). Fossil fuel companies prey on the public's "science optimism", the comforting belief that science can magically solve our problems.
But scientists and engineers still need to contend with the laws of physics and so far entropy has always had the upper hand on us. It would be delusional to think that's going to change any time soon.
The only realistic answer forward is to massively transform society or go extinct. If you believe that we can't get a handle on these polluting industries in a rapid time scale (and you may very well be right) then brace yourself for extinction.
I believe scale to be a problem but carbon capture already exists so I'm not sure what you mean by "speculative technology."
You're making your own misconceptions and possibly desires the enemy of reality.
The technology doesn’t yet exist at the scale necessary to offset even modest levels of residual emissions.
Let me repeat the important part:
at the scale necessary
You're making it sound like we need to figure out a problem like nuclear fusion from scratch. Scaling up something that already exists is a lot easier. It's still difficult, but definitely possible, although it seems kind of dumb to remove the CO2 instead of preventing its release in the first place.
The technology doesn’t yet exist at the scale necessary to offset even modest levels of residual emissions.
Let me repeat the important bit:
at the scale necessary
It's an engineering problem. You're acting like we'll need to figure out a problem on the scale of nuclear fusion.
My guess is that they will get serious about it right about the same time as a dense pockets of CO2 begin to roll across the planet and suffocate everything in their path.
Don't forget, they want to decrease the number of people living on the planet. Their eyes glisten with the idea of cheap real estate and scared people willing to do their every bidding.
No no no you radical centrist everyone has to do it my way or not at all, why do you hate the environment?!?!?!?!?!?!
Oil-producers want to stay relevant so they do the mock conferentions like COP28, because their business is built on it and it guarantees their further political power. What Dubai could be like if not for all this oil? An artifical installation in the desert that is kept alive by exports alone. Cutting consumption of local, international oil should be a no-brainer. It's always more effective than cathcing emmisions after the fact.