Is Carbon Capture Cause for Hope? a new facility to suck carbon out of the air shows why it's more complicated than that.

newrepublic.com

Is Carbon Capture Cause for Hope?

18 comments

I wish it gave me hope. I guess the only bright side is "we're trying, maybe, a little".
In another post a while back, someone (may have even been OP), said something to the effect of 'carbon capture is just social permission to keep using fossil fuels'. I think about that a lot, and definitely agree.
- I would change this slightly to:
  the idea of future carbon capture is just social permission to keep using fossil fuels right now'
  Because of this it is in my opinion actually harmful. And don't even start thinking about who gets to shoulder potential future costs vs todays profits.
The real question is how to make it profitable. Turn the captured carbon into building materials somehow?
As it stands, who pays for it? Can’t rely on government subsidies, and can’t rely on business doing it unless they’re compelled.
I wish it would work but I just don’t see how it fits in the current system at any meaningful scale.
- Turn the captured carbon into building materials somehow?
  So, trees ...
  
  You might be onto something.
  
  Limestone is also a suitable building material.
- The problem is, usually the result of this capture process comes in the form of CO2 gas. Turning that into something useful takes even more energy.
Even if it was straightforward and easy, the eventual outcome will be people assuming it is enough to offset the pollution that it will never keep up with and make people even less interested in getting companies to stop putting carbon into the atmosphere in the first place. Just like the whole 'carbon neutral' and 'recycle plastic' have been blatant lies that make people fine with more pollution and trash.
- Agreed. Carbon capture is absolutely an important tech that we should deploy after the cheaper, better solutions of removing carbon from our economies. Carbon capture should be the final phase where we help the Earth heal the damage we've done after we stop doing the damage. We need to first implement those stop-doing-the-damage phases.
Realized carbon storage efficiency is abysmal: typically -25% of estimates, and highly variable, and that's before you factor in the economics. You don't get anything tangible from CCS, either.
- Trees are pretty good at carbon capture :)
  
  Trees are sadly inefficient for the scales we need. I'm not saying we should cut down more trees or stop planting them, but it will take much more than that to get us out of the hole we've dug ourselves into.
  
  While this is true, we only tend to plant monocultures.
It's a scam. Right Wing politicians up here in Saskatchewan have been rolling on about it for at least a decade as a response to the "damn lilbural's and their climate agenda."
It's not viable. It's never been viable. It's a through-line that they can feed their idiot followers to say "look...we aren't bad for the environment, it's just the left telling you we are."
It was never efficient/fast enough.
No its dumb