[ericd]

This is one of the potential paths (look up BECCS/bioenergy with carbon capture and sequestration). Basically, grow something that grows very quickly (I think switchgrass is usually discussed), burn it for energy, and put something to capture carbon from the flue gas in the exhaust pipe, then sequester it.

But it has tradeoffs. It costs money, and compared to eg direct air capture, it uses land that would’ve otherwise gone to growing food or something else, so a not-insignificant opportunity cost.

And we’re not even doing carbon capture on coal plant flue gas, because there’s just no incentive.

If we rolled out serious carbon taxes, this would become more feasible in addition to putting capture on existing plants.

If you’re interested, I highly recommend the AirMiners course, it gives a good overview/survey of the literature. The tldr is that we’re going to need a cocktail of all sorts of these technologies to hit anywhere near our targets, in addition to getting to net zero. We need to be pushing for a carbon tax politically, hard, to make this economically viable to do at scale. People need to become single-issue voters on this, and let politicians know that they are.

Good primer on carbon tax with dividend and border adjustment: https://clcouncil.org/economists-statement/

[sfn42]

Carbon tax in the west doesn't matter when china and India keep pumping out CO2.

I agree that carbon tax would be good, but unless it's a worldwide implementation it just won't have the desired effect - all it will achieve is disadvantage those who implement it relative to those who don't.