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Comment by gustaf | Hacker News Reader

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...

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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 :)

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