Ahhh carbon capture in a nutshell
Ridiculous premise

Ah wow. This is really good.

An oldie but a goodie!

I mean, realistically we will need to invent/implement a massive form of carbon capture in order to return out CO2 levels down to a reasonable level at some point.

Ideally, we could just replant an absolutely shitload of plants - but even using a solar-powered industrial machine to filter out CO2 from the air would work.

But pessimistically - I think the pockets of civilisation that will survive are going to transition to AC-cooled structures while the outside world burns.

Wish this guy the best. It's a plan for success.

Read this out loud to my partner and we're laughing our asses off. Put it that way it really does sound stupid, doesn't it?

the problem is that, much like filtering alcohol from your blood, it's incredibly difficult and it's hilariously better in every way to just stop adding it in the first place.

Of course, all of the above is barring unforeseen circumstances such as economic decline, in which case Greg's sobriety might get pushed back by a decade or two. We must salute his openness to emerging technologies, however, and submit to the invisible hand of the market.

Yes, and we're trying a bunch of things there, too. Let's push to reduce CO2 generation from the processes that generate them, sequester the CO2 released from those processes and prevent them from entering the broader environment, and find ways to fix atmospheric or ocean carbon in ways that reverse the processes that have already happened in the past.

Yes, it's often cheaper to just prevent the release of CO2 in the first place. But in certain places and at certain times, there may be cheap ways to fix CO2, so that's worth doing in addition to attempts to reduce carbon emissions.

This is brilliant.

that would be great if it didn't get used as a way to keep emitting pollution, unfortunately in the current political climate any sort of carbon capture or carbon credits are just a smokescreen.

AFAIK the best we can manage to usefully do is encourage using wood in construction, which sequesters something approaching a noticable amount of carbon and is fairly difficult to greenwash. But it's still basically pointless compared to just getting people to drive less..

Its practical. It should give him time to work on a viable etoh sequestration program; maybe even consider a cap and trade arrangement with the boys at the pub.

Baby steps.

Yeah I think even a cursory glance at the economics of it demonstrates that prevention is much much more viable than sequestration after the fact.

That said, I still think it's worth studying because once CO2 emissions have reached zero it might make sense to start trying to bring atmospheric CO2 down a bit to prevent further warming. Especially if the doomers end up being correct and we enter some kind of feedback loop.

maybe, but so long as we're in the political climate that we are i really fear that even studying it feeds into greenwashing and slowing down the transition away from fossil fuels.

the big problem is that things are extremely fucking urgent, even the slightest delay to reducing emissions is going to kill.. thousands of people, at least.

I agree that there are issues with the accounting behind people who want to use these as carbon credits, but that's true of planting trees, too. And nobody says that planting trees is bad or that it gets used as an excuse to keep emitting.

The point is that it's worth doing, and that any fraud around the accounting behind getting credit for it is separate from the validity of the task itself.

Ethanol neutral by 2050! Now that's the slogan to rally around

It's basically a meme that's used for fraud... We deserve what is coming for us.