[ceruleanseas]

When I was in college, a physics professor said investment in solar is a waste of time and that we should invest in nuclear instead. A part of his calculation was the efficiency of solar cells at the time, but he didn’t take into account the radical increases in efficiency that investment was able to bring, making our investments in solar worth it today.

I think this may be similar, in that maybe the current solutions are not going to solve the problem, but by investing in these, in the long run, they may prove to be necessary as we get better at it.

[OliverM]

No, not in this case. The article already assumes the existence of a near perfectly-efficient process. It's just looking at the minimum energy needed to remove the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, according to long-established physical laws, no matter what mechanism is used.

We could definitely work harder at supporting the existing natural mechanisms for removing CO2 from the atmosphere, but it's far, far easier to reduce the amount we're emitting.

[aeternum]

Are we all just ignoring that plants pull CO2 out of the air and produce usable energy in the process?

So clearly it is possible to do more efficiently.

[LinAGKar]

Plants aren't that efficient, there's just a lot of them. You could cover the requisite 764 GW with about 3000 km^2 of solar cells (assuming 250 W/m^2). That's a bit over the land area of Luxembourg. Minuscule compared to the amount of area on Earth taken up by plants, and sunlight that falls on those plants.

[jandrewrogers]

This article is about fundamental limits imposed by the laws of thermodynamics. Asserting it is not real limit is like asserting the speed of light is not a real limit.

You can't go faster than the speed of light by "radical increases in efficiency".

[downWidOutaFite]

The calculations here are based on the laws of thermodynamics that cannot be broken. This represents the ideal efficiency that is way better than we could achieve in real life.