U.S. to Fund a $1.2 Billion Effort to Vacuum Greenhouse Gases From the Sky | Many scientists are skeptical of the technology, and environmentalists have criticized the approach.
U.S. to Fund a $1.2 Billion Effort to Vacuum Greenhouse Gases From the Sky | Many scientists are skeptical of the technology, and environmentalists have criticized the approach.
Many scientists are skeptical of the technology, and environmentalists have criticized the approach.
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“vacuum greenhouse gases from the sky” … “many scientists are skeptical of the technology”
well … when you phrase it like that, I wonder why?
Basically: you can do it, but for almost all applications, it's a lot cheaper to avoid burning fossil fuels than it is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere afterwards.
The problem is there's a few hundred billion tonnes or so that needs removing and it can't go from 0 to billions of tonnes per year overnight, but as soon as you start doing it publicly propagandists will flock to it and use it to delay more effective and pressing action.
Mitigating ongoing emissions is cheaper than removing well mixed past emissions.
Again. The machine needs to be in place a few years after all the low hanging fruit are picked in terms of new emissions (which is hopefully about 10 years away at the current pace of decarbonization technologies). But any public action on building the industrial base will be coopted to cause a delay. It's a hard problem with no easy answer and one that needs to be worked on soon.
I hope this means someone sensible in one of the well funded militaries has thought about it and is building the required infrastructure to the scale of hundreds of millions of tonnes in secret so it can quickly scale to billions, but this seems like a stretch given who controls their purses.