| 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 |