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Comment by kisamoto | Hacker News Reader

Carbon removal is definitely required at this stage.

I read a lot of "Trees are _The_ solution"-esq news whenever Climeworks is brought up and while they do sequester carbon the reality is they are slow and cannot solely be used to lower atmospheric CO₂ levels.

Earth, as we know it today, has the potential to plant an additional 0.9 billion ha of canopy cover (~1.2 trillion trees)[0]

Trees will ultimately help in the long run, no doubt, but will need to be supported by a myriad of other methods such as Climeworks. Ryan Orbuch of Stripe wrote a great primer on some of the other carbon removal methods[1].

If you want to really take meaningful action, choose taking CO₂ out of the air over carbon credits. Even if we reduce to zero tomorrow there is still an excess of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere today.

[0] https://carbonremoved.com/learn/forestation/ [1] https://www.orbuch.com/carbon-removal/

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I like the idea of stacking up a lot of 1 meter cubes of carbon into nice shapes. Each cube is just over 2 metric tons of carbon, or the equivalent of 8 metric tons of carbon dioxide. 20 cubic kilometers per year is enough to get us back to pre-industrial levels in no time, and build some interesting monuments while we're at it. A roughly 4-kilometer tall pyramid, anyone? Low low price of 2 trillion dollars each.

Interesting concept!

I came across a company making CO₂ negative thermo-plastics the other day[0] which is the closest so far I think we can come to your idea :-)

[0]https://www.madeofair.com/

> If you want to really take meaningful action, choose taking CO₂ out of the air over carbon credits. Even if we reduce to zero tomorrow there is still an excess of carbon dioxide already present in the atmosphere today.

Why not both? Allow companies to buy additional carbon credits from co2 sinks? Allow companies to decide between stopping a harmful industrial process or paying for its externalities.

Fundamentally I agree but only if choosing to do both, not either or.

To truly reverse the emissions an individual or company has, Carbon Removal is really the only way.

Carbon credits _can_ encourage businesses to reduce their emissions (and if a company has money to help - great!) but reducing a third-parties emissions is not a green-light to justify my own wrongdoings.

If I emit a ton and pay credits to offset a ton, a ton is still out there. If I emit a ton and remove a ton I am at net zero emissions.

> If I emit a ton and pay credits to offset a ton, a ton is still out there

The basic idea is to allow companies to ramp down their emissions by releasing fewer credits each year.

I could see a compromise being that one carbon credit is worth a tonne of carbon emissions, but two tonnes of sequestered carbon. So companies would have to pay for the removal of some factor of what they produce.

I like it - having the ability to both support sequestering and the transitioning of others with a single "credit".

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