“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.”
The problem is focus. This is a bit like a building flooding and breaking out the mop while gallons are still pouring in - you’ll need that mop eventually, but right now there are much more important things that need your attention.
That’s not a good metaphor. A better one would be:
“A building is flooding and you need to invent the concept of a mop. While you are plugging the leak, send one of your people to start working on creating a mop to use later, everyone in the room can’t be plugging the hole anyway.”
Sequestration tech isn’t there at the moment. If we wait until we we figure out green energy entirely, we will then have to wait again while we figure out sequestration.
We need to be doing both, but we need them to have separate budgets and separate people working on them, because otherwise, yeah, we’ll be in a bad situation where we are diverting green energy time/money into sequestration. The problem is that we are fighting against people who don’t want to spend any money on any of it. If the fossil fuel people want to work on sequestration instead of green energy, fine, let them. Hell, force them to. Pass laws making them be net-neutral on carbon and that can either be from shutting down plants or capturing everything they put out. If they don’t choose to shut down, they’ll spend R&D on capture, and we can use that tech more widely in the decades to come.