[adamsvystun]

While the title of the article is easy enough to understand, and articulates a genuine concern, the article itself is pretty incoherent.

It does not establish clearly why carbon removal is not effective at slowing climate change, while assuming it isn't.

It critisizes as inefficient the early investing strategy to cast a wide net and give money to potentially failing ideas.

It in one place mentions that climate capture cannot "be easily scaled up" because it is "prohibitively expensive and energy intensive", while in the other part it concedes that the technology might progress in the future.

The entire article is laced with emotional contempt of technology and progress, and does little to help you understand the reasons of why you should be concerned with the problem it tries to present.

[Retric]

The technology isn’t even close to dealing with the scale of the problem, but sadly that’s not the primary issue.

The US, China, India, Russia, etc are unwilling to pay for significantly accelerated reductions in CO2 emissions even when directly economically beneficial. Carbon capture isn’t free and frankly nobody is willing to pay for it.

[ajross]

There's a real argument to be made there at the level of federal policy, but note that the US is at or near the top of the list in per-capita wind/solar/hydro and that it dominates world battery vehicle technology and production (though not yet deployment domestically).

There's a real schizophrenia problem politicly, and it's worth discussing. But really, americans are your allies here, and the US is doing a ton more help than harm.

[Retric]

The US had excellent wind/hydro/solar resources but we’re not exactly ahead of the game, we just use a lot of electricity per person. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power_by_country

Honduras is a standout at 14.9% solar, India ranks 7th at 7.5%, US is at 2.8%.

[ajross]

I don't think the solution here is going to be "Industrialized nations need to reduce consumption to Honduras levels". Honduras isn't "efficient", it's just undeveloped. There's no feasible efficiency path to consumption on that level.

The point is that the US has and is installing per-capita renewable power at a world-leading rate. You aren't going to get more by implying otherwise, we're doing it just fine in comparison. Everyone needs to do more, you can't point fingers here.

[Retric]

That’s not what I am saying. Solar isn’t a limited resource. It’s not like doubling consumption requires Honduras to use a lower percentage of solar power.

Germany is IMO over invested in solar because their so far north, and their at 8.6%.

[phkahler]

>> The US, China, India, Russia, etc are unwilling to pay for significantly accelerated reductions in CO2 emissions even when directly economically beneficial

How is it "directly economically beneficial"?

[spaetzleesser]

Reduction in storm damage or wild fires for example. Once people have to flee coastal regions there will be a lot of money spent on dealing with refugees and most likely wars.

[corty]

Yes, but currently, attribution is hard. And the press cried "wolf!" far too often with each and every lightning storm that was a little more severe than average. So currently there is no credibility in that future cost projections.

[Retric]

One example is solar hot water heaters are vastly cheaper than any other low grade heat source. Integrate them with traditional hot water heaters and you get all the benefits with nearly zero downsides. Yet, the technology is almost completely ignored by incentive programs instead of say adding them or other solar heat collection to building codes.

[Cthulhu_]

It isn't because of scale. Producing CO2 emissions is easy, capturing it will require an equal amount of capturing capacity. Unless we invent something that can scale up to capture 100% of current emissions (or even just 10%), reducing CO2 emissions will remain more economically viable.

The other problem is of course that if we can capture co2, the producers will just ramp up production. Compare with electricity production; if production goes up, cost goes down, consumption increases (because cheaper) and they will have to ramp production up again.