Personal CO2 Removal as a Service

How does renewable energy project have anything to do with athmospheric carbon capture? It's a way to lower carbon emission into the atmosphere sure, but we got 100 years of CO2 to take out of it too. I also already do everything I can to go toward renewable energy.

> That's still at an experimental stage AFAIK

Okay... so not an alternative for me right?

> A more optimistic way to look at it is as such: if we commit to offsetting our emissions by buying carbon credits, rising prices will pressure us towards reducing our emissions.

We aren't all the same person you know? We are currently talking about someone that can afford 100x the price to offset his emission and is ready to do it. I'm not too far from being that person, I'm already trying to reduce my emission, why not both?

I have nothing against planting tree, it's an amazing solution, but its limit are well below what needed right now.

People don't want to pay more right now, it's a HUGE issue. Go look at Canada carbon taxes, most of the provinces are currently fighting it in court, they are putting sticker on gas stations to tell people that they'll have to pay hundred more. 100% of that tax which is MUCH lower than the true environmental cost of that CO2 will be used to refund people. I'm already ready to pay more, 100x even, but planting more tree won't make theses people more likely to offset their emission if it make it more costly, that solution though not only offset my emission, but also invest into a potential solution and show there's a market for atmospheric carbon capture.

> That's where we want to be headed, because there is NO future where emissions remain high and are totally offset.

Which come back to my first answer, why not both. There's no future where we don't take out the CO2 already in the atmosphere either. I have seen multiple article talking about how the current warming is enough already that what get naturally released from glacier melting is more than what we release. Something being too expensive is no longer a reason to not research toward a solution, we need to research them all.

> I would encourage you to rethink your approach as follows: invest in the transition, not in the destination.

I never talked about destination, I talk about what we will need during the transition.

>What makes you so sure that ClimeWork's solution can scale better?

Where did I say their solution will be the right one? Excluding it from being the right one is a much bigger issue. What I'm sure about is that if there's a solution that scale better, but also allow to scrub atmospheric level, but still not viable, seeing any investment into ClimeWork's solution will make them much more likely to go toward that, instead of waiting for tree planting initiative to become costly enough to finally justify researching their costlier solution.

>If you want long-term innovation, why not fund general CCS research instead?

As a private individual earning in the mid 5 figures, that's the best I can do. I can surely pay 100x more carbon capture than I consume, but that's not a viable solution if it will just make it costlier for someone else, and won't actually solve the issue. Instead I vote with my wallet, and that's one that seems viable to me.

If energy becomes more expensive -- say, by pricing in the externalities of some energy sources -- that decreases the equilibrium expenditure, because marginal mining can't pay for itself anymore.

The concept of "pricing out miners" doesn't even make sense to begin with. Miners are competing with other miners (including malicious ones). Any resource constraint affects all of them; it can't make all of them give up. To the extent that other coins become popular, that (again) just prices out marginal miners.