“Direct air capture is expensive, unproven, and will ultimately make almost no difference in reducing climate pollution… Capturing just a quarter of our annual carbon emissions would require all of the power currently generated in the country.”
“Direct air capture is expensive, unproven, and will ultimately make almost no difference in reducing climate pollution… Capturing just a quarter of our annual carbon emissions would require all of the power currently generated in the country.”
If you put money into it, the technology should improve. If you test it, the unproven will become proven. Just a dumb argument.
Seems like everybody like you wants to spend money without diligence when it’s the public money.
Proven methods of combating climate change are being ignored here. Hell, the government need not even invest in proven techs like wind farms and solar… they could put that money into modernizing the power grid and even that would be better than… whatever shit this is.
It seems absurd to me that we’re spending effort on reversing entropic processes (effectively unburning burned carbon by filtering it through a mixed atmosphere) when there are far more straightforward solutions involving not burning that carbon in the first place. Or, hell, even just putting carbon filters on the power plants.
Because the second law of thermodynamics applies here. It will always be more efficient, simpler, and cheaper to not release the carbon in the first place. And if we are not even doing that… What solution could direct air capture ever provide?
No they aren’t, those things are getting investment too.
Opportunity cost exists, yes this money could have gone to solar power instead, but we need to know if it’s possible to do carbon capture at scale in addition to doing everything else because it’s the only way to possibly reverse what we have already done.
It’s next to impossible to disprove a scientific approach. We already know carbon capture has been ineffective. We’re already in the phase to reduce the funding and focus on proven methods. That’s what net-zero by 2050 means.
What’s likely to happen with carbon capture is that we supply money for decades if not centuries because it’s hard to disprove.
Sure, but we’re not against pollution scrubbers because it allows companies to keep making goods while removing the downside associated with them. If the bad thing is fully counteracted then I’m not mad about how much bad thing happens during their production process. We can’t just dislike it because scummy businesses like it, it deserves the research to see if it can help.
A full removal of fossil fuel based technology from every country in the world in time to prevent major global warming isn’t going to happen, and we’re already so far down the road that it would be very good if we had a way to reverse the flow of carbon into the air, in addition to other measures.
If it doesn’t end up working, it doesn’t end up working, but there is good reason to try.
That one possible catch to carbon capture projects is that it could also inadvertently give a justification for putting more carbon in the air.
It isn’t inadvertent. The primary purpose of carbon capture projects is to provide green cover for fossil fuel companies.