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by beckingz 1306 days ago
We should continue investigating methods for carbon capture.

But none of them look even close to cost competitive.

2 comments

That was true of solar power 20 years ago, too. But eventually, we got there.

We will probably get there with carbon capture too.

Though I do agree, we should focus more heavily on nuclear power now, because it is much closer to ready-for-prime-time than carbon capture.

Still, I think that carbon capture is an excellent future technology for the production of carbon-neutral liquid fuels. Liquid fuels are super great, and they can be made into a very clean portable power source through the use of nuclear power and carbon capture tech.

Each dollar diverted to nukes from solar and wind brings climate catastrophe nearer.

The money spent on coal alone while waiting for a nuke to come online would suffice to build out enough solar and wind to match the nuke's output. The money spent on the nuke itself would pay for many times that much solar and wind. The solar and wind would start displacing carbon emissions almost immediately, not many years later. Displacement would increase throughout construction, and power generated early would help fund subsequent construction.

Carbon capture cannot be any kind of solution to excess carbon emission rate.

However, after carbon emissions has been substantially curtailed, we will need to capture the carbon already exhausted, because otherwise it hangs about for many decades, doing harm the entire time.