CDR is a giant industry in its infancy
CDR is a giant industry in its infancy
Despite major investments from Big Tech and “startling” maturation of CDR technology, mid-century removal targets are far off.
It's the worst deal in history for us.
If it works, we'll probably have to pay tax dollars for pulbic contracts to remove CO2 from the air for the rest of our lives (do you think they'll clean it out of their own goodwill? For their own survival? Without charging us?). And that doesn't seem likely.
If it doesn't work, we're fucked.
Currently, we get a lot more millage out of reducing obvious carbon sources (transit with fossil fuel engines, meat production, cruise ships, energy production) or reducing inefficiency in other industries (textile, etc.). The problem with reducing at the source, I think, if if you go all in you'll quickly realize that it essentially means acknowledging we can't do as much as we could before (at least not until we've adapted, and that will take awhile). And that is poison to our system (politically and economically).
There is about 1000 gigatonnes of excess carbon dioxide in the Earth systems from the burning of fossil fuels. It is already THERE, and will not naturally return to the lithosphere in less than thousands of years. So that is a really terrible deal for sure. Of course we should not keep adding to the problem - we must get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible. But there are likely to be some hard-to-eliminate uses and there is already this giant legacy of CO2 we have to deal with. I don't think we have any actual choice to not do carbon dioxide removal - not and retain an appreciable percentage of the world's biodiversity.
I'm a bit worried about the other responses in this thread automatically assuming this task will be performed by the private sector. That line of neoliberal thinking helped get us into this mess and I don't think it will get us out. The government should be doing the research and eventually the removal and storage. There's never going to be a market force that pursuades the private sector to do it, so the public sector should just take on the task.
I'm probably wrong, but this is what I'd prefer. Imagine someone connected to an old oil company getting richer removing carbon that their grandparent got rich putting in the air. That would be insanity.
From what I am reading, the agencies we might imagine as having a role in direct research have been almost completely stripped of that capability over the last few decades by relentless budget cutting. So the entire focus of CDR development nowadays seems to be two forks: policy initiatives to create market incentives for CDR activities, and grant programs to fund basic research by large and small organizations (with the basic capability to pursue grants). For sure some of that is being siphoned into oil companies.
The common thread in all these articles about CDR is that they focus on corporate investment into large scale projects. If the government was serious about meeting climate targets, they would be raising taxes on the largest companies, and giving the money to small scale, open-source carbon removal solutions. People to run these could be pulled from the enormous unemployed labor pool, and given grants in the form of equipment and technical education.
It seems like CDR could be done on a small scale with photovoltaic panels and an open-source hardware direct air capture (DAC) system. People could be subsidized to place panels on their home, and side-step the logistics of connecting it to the grid by having it wired directly to a DAC system. The existence of panels would be an incentive for the electrical grid get re-designed at a faster pace. It is currently not possible to feed energy back to the grid in a lot of places for worker safety reasons, but this creates a chicken and egg situation where the costs of re-aligning the grid for domestic energy production needs the existence of existence of domestic solar capacity to help justify the costs, and domestic energy production is much more expensive if you can't benefit from selling your surplus back to the grid. Having subsidized DAC justifying the installation of solar capacity would solve the bootstrap problem.
Of course the additional funds to do a program like this would have to come from raised taxes on the most polluting industries. This is all wishful thinking.
Governments are starting to spend on CDR development, but it is not enough - considering the scale of the problem. There are also a variety of ways that governments are promoting CDR through tax means - creating a market for low-carbon concrete or giving tax breaks for low-carbon activities. I received a nice tax discount when I installed my own solar panels. I am in a CDR volunteer collective called OpenAir (openaircollective.cc) where we are trying to promote CDR in many directions.
I did not install a grid tie connection at my house - the connection is one-way and I seldom use any grid power at all. But it is nice to know there is a back-up. I would have been willing to cross-connect and share power, but there were barriers: high connection cost and very low payback. Here in Puerto Rico, there is an activist group promoting micro-grids at neighborhood-scale or city-scale to make the system more resilient - but I do not think their efforts are catching on with the entrenched interests at the power authority, unfortunately.
The existing fossil fuel subsidies would go a long way to developing the CDR technologies we need. The money is there, but it is going the wrong place.