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Comment by Gravityloss | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised you think carbon removal from the atmosphere is relevant.

Just from a physics perspective, a dollar invested into substituting coal burning is likely to be many orders of magnitude more effective than first burning the coal to CO2, diluting it to 400 parts per million in the atmosphere, concentrating that CO2 back to some high percentage, maybe turn it CO2 to some higher density form of carbon again etc.

Every step requires a lot of effort, capital and energy.

The best way to store carbon is coal. And it's already there, in the ground.

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I think the transition to near 100% renewable technologies is a foregone conclusion at this point: the economics of carbon-based fuels basically don't make sense any more, and it's just a matter of transitioning away. Natural gas has already basically killed coal and that transition is well under way, and renewables+batteries are now starting to eclipse natural gas peaker plants, transportation, etc.

But there's still 200 years of carbon emissions in the atmosphere to deal with.

Yeah, but if you're going for most bang for your buck, improving and making accessible renewable tech is still better value. I also think you'll have an easier route to profitability with alternative fuel over carbon removal.

Ultimately, I think carbon removal will be a necessary technology if we want to maintain a similar climate to what we have now, but it's farther out there. Would be awesome to see something come out though!

We don't want to encourage carbon removal as a way to continue burning fossil fuels - we want to solve climate change. Solving climate change requires carbon removal to hit 1.5C degree goal. We need to remove carbon from the atmosphere and we need to get good at it and do it cheaply. Here is a good primer gohttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/11/20/can-carbon-dio...

Although "cheap energy" eventually gets around that. If you had extremely cheap energy, e.g. fusion, you could literally turn atmospheric CO2 and water back into hydrocarbons, and once you've reduced atmospheric CO2 enough, you could run a closed-loop process where you recycle enough hydrocarbons out of the air and water to balance out what's burned for fuel.

It makes sense to do this if hydrocarbons are still more energy-dense than batteries, for instance. If we end up inventing fusion power before we invent an electric jet airliner, for instance.

Cheap energy is critical to massive carbon removal. I think solar might also be the answer

Solar is definitely more attainable on the commercial level right now. On the other hand, ITER so far has cost “mere” tens of billions of dollars, so it’s not unimaginable for VC to fund parallel tokamak research if they’re willing to wait a long time to realize return. Solar power is a lot easier to harvest if you can build your own sun :)

Agree with your logic regarding avoiding additional emissions. The extra piece that this RFS add is, we've got about a trillion tons of extra carbon already up in the atmosphere, how do we mine it?

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