[rsanek]

I think you're measuring one method against a goal it wasn't set for. I assume you are referring to Mammoth direct air capture in your comment -- Stratos in Texas will soon be up, at ~15x the size of Mammoth. But DAC is only one method, and it's the hardest to scale. Just look at options outside of DAC, like Vaulted Deep, whose costs (financially and energy-wise) are far lower.

I do agree that it's unlikely that we can ignore reduction and just depend on purely scaling capture, especially if we care about avoiding more negative climate effects as the scaling goes on. But to say it is "completely infeasible" is not accurate.

[sfn42]

A 15x improvement over mammoth (spot on by the way) is still many times more capture plants than we have power plants. And there's limits to the efficiency of these facilities in terms of how much air they can consume per day. Not to mention the carbon costs of building and operating them.

Maybe I'm wrong, I'm certainly not an expert. It just seems like a hopeless case to me. Even if they make one significantly more effective than this Stratos you mentioned, we're still talking about tens of thousands of them to have a real impact.