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by palata 1015 days ago
CO2 removal is bullshit. It's an easy way to throw some money and buy themselves a conscience.

We need to consume less, that's all. There is no silver bullet here.
2 comments
stephen_g 1015 days ago
Definitely from an energy perspective it doesn’t make a lot of sense - it’s unlikely (due to the thermodynamics of it) that removing a ton of CO2 will ever get to the point where it requires less energy than the energy produced from burning the fuel that created that ton of CO2.

So even with clean energy, unless you have a totally clean grid with significant surplus energy, you’d do better to use the energy to put into displacing fossil fuels, because with the same amount of energy, you’d stop more CO2 being produced than you could remove with it.

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danbruc 1015 days ago
[...] it’s unlikely (due to the thermodynamics of it) that removing a ton of CO2 will ever get to the point where it requires less energy than the energy produced from burning the fuel that created that ton of CO2.

This argument only works if you want to reverse the entire process, turn the carbon dioxide back into something similar to oil or gas. If you would burn pure hydrocarbons with pure oxygen perfectly, it would be as simple as condensing the water in order to get pure carbon dioxide.

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sharlos201068 1015 days ago
It's not bullshit, it's necessary, we could magically stop all carbon production tomorrow and still need to remove existing CO2 from the atmosphere.
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palata 1015 days ago
The truth is that in a world without fossil fuels, we may not have the luxury to waste the energy needed for carbon removal.

Working on carbon removal counting on the fact that someone will discover a clean energy that can actually compete with today's use of fossil fuels is close to 4D chess: we don't have that clean energy and it's pretty sure we won't have it in time. Therefore it is probably useless to throw tons of money on CO2 removal.

What is necessary, though, is to stop carbon emissions. We could throw money at isolating buildings, for instance.

The thing is that to reduce carbon emissions, we have to do less. And in a capitalist world, that's hard to accept. We need to change our model of society and accept that economical growth = CO2 emissions.

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