Perhaps a naive question but what is the carbon overhead of the removal. And is that taken into consideration? edit: am I right in calculating that the average American citizen would need to purchase the 7 Eur plan 170+ times over to make themselves carbon neutral for a year
It’s certainly a good question. They may have done that analysis themselves, but I haven’t seen it.
And yes it’s about $20,000 USD per year to account for the average american’s emissions. I’m actually cheered that this is a good deal less than average GDP per capita. So as the tech scales the costs are at least possible to pay. It would be much worse if the costs exceeded GDP.
Meanwhile, buying a smaller subscription provides funds to help scale the technology which should lower costs. This is Stripe’s goal with Stripe Climate.
> According to them, the grey emissions for the construction, operation and deconstruction of a Climeworks machine are less than 10% of the captured carbon dioxide with the use of waste heat and renewable electricity. Our goal is to reduce this to 4%.
(Apparently this is most practical in Iceland because of the abundant geothermal energy there.)
The "grey carbon" (or emissions produced for the removal) are taken into account yes. Climeworks works with a geothermal power plant in Iceland for sustainable power to limit the CO₂ produced and only sells the "net negative emisssions" (so calculated after subtracting the emissions produced in the process)
CarbonPlan is doing a great job bringing transparency here by analyzing and publishing proposals to the major carbon removal programs to date (Stripe and Microsoft): https://carbonplan.org/research/cdr-database