[michaelaiello]

They key metric here is how much it costs ($/TON of CO2 Captured and Sequestered). There are a range of methods and approaches to do this. The average cost for Air Capture across modern approaches is $250/Ton of C02 Captured and Sequestered.

There are other approaches besides Atmospheric Capture and Sequestration which hold more promise 1. High concentration C02 Emission Capture at source 2. Ocean surface capture and de-acidification

Wrote a quick article describing all of them linking to specific research papers and their results here https://www.projectcelsius.com/2017/05/29/capture-methods/

I expect this will follow a similar journey to how solar panel adoption went... once things tipped over the critical ($/KWH) where it made sense over grid electrical, people started to adopt. I imagine once one of the techniques reaches a critical $/TON Captured & Sequestered, governments or institutions will pay to build whatever machines to start. Right now things are too expensive using any method (i.e. using the best method, it would cost ~$12 Trillion dollars to capture and sequester ~49 Gigatons - the estimated carbon emitted in 1 year by humans in 2020)

[phreeza]

The question is, what is that magical tipping point price? Unlike your solar vs grid example, isn't the alternative to capturing just doing nothing, which has essentially zero cost in our current economy?

[klunger]

This is the crux of the problem. There are no economic incentives for this, even if it became very cheap. We would simply have to agree, as a global society, to invest in carbon capture because it's the right thing to do.

Given our track record with this kind of thing, this does not look very likely. It's the tragedy of the commons writ large and I don't think anyone has a sane answer to it, or we would have done it already.

[mhh__]

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2019/11/25/u-s-public-vi...

Even in the US there is consensus for doing something. Thankfully by the time that something happens it will be too late thanks to lobbying by people history will not look kindly upon.

Ignoring the scientific fraud behind the alternative answers, only 14% percent of "Conservative" republicans believe in man-made climate change - conserving what then?

[kisamoto]

Agree with you.

I think extreme capitalism has driven greed to a point where people no-longer consider the ethical or social issues as they do not contribute to the bottom line.

However i do have faith that more emphasis is being put on the climate and people are gradually changing behaviour to prioritise industries helping transition to a net-zero society.

[dane-pgp]

Thank you for running those numbers. I hope you don't mind if I quibble with them a little.

Firstly, I tried to fact check your "~49 Gigatons" figure and came up with this quote: "Emissions are currently expected to reach 42.4 gigatons annually in 2020, rise to an estimated 49.4 gigatons per year in 2030" from [0].

Your figure of "$250/Ton of C02 Captured and Sequestered" is probably correct, but it's worth comparing that to this statement: "Table 1 summarizes the projected energy and dollar costs of air capture processes that have appeared in recently published technical analyses. The projected dollar costs are in the range of $100–$200∕tCO2" from a research paper [1] which may not include sequestration costs.

To present an optimistic scenario then, suppose that by 2030 we managed to reduce annual CO2 emissions to 40 gigatons and could capture and sequester CO2 at $100 per ton. That would make the cost $4 trillion per year. For comparison, the IMF projected Gross World Product to be $90 trillion in 2020, according to [2]. We would expect GWP to grow over the course of this decade, so the annual investment starting in 2030 should be less than 4.4%, although I wouldn't like to say what sort of effect that would have on the global economy, even if there were somehow a global agreement to spend that kind of money.

In conclusion, I agree with your assessment, and only ask that you take extra care to use the letter "O" in "CO2" and not the digit "0". It's not so important on a discussion site, but your linked article looks much less convincing due to that typo appearing eight times. (For extra presentational value, you could use a subscript character, i.e. "CO₂").

[0] https://www.globalcitizen.org/en/content/what-does-a-carbon-...

[1] https://sequestration.mit.edu/pdf/1012253108full.pdf

[2] http://statisticstimes.com/economy/gross-world-product.php