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Comment by SCHiM | Hacker News Reader

Well, you almost need to be claiming that. If you claim otherwise the energy requirements are truly stupendous. That doesn't event mention that the energy must be green by necessity.

Another commenters on this site (can't find the link) put it like this:

You'd have to drive every mile ever ridden on fossil fuels in reverse. Every single ICE in boats and planes too. All gas, coal and oil plants too. The energy requirements are incomprehensible, truly. We're having trouble going carbon neutral already, but this scheme requires we go neutral and _then some_.

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The climate models clearly show that carbon capture is needed to meet the 1.5-2 degree C target. Without carbon capture of some sort we will very likely have >2 degree C.

Once you come to that understanding, the question is not how do we pay for carbon capture. Rather, it is why wouldn't we pay for carbon capture now so that we avoid the massive costs and negative consequences associated with a >2 degree C rise in global temperatures (droughts, more intense storms, massive human migration, sea level rise, etc.).

You can't just criticize the cost of carbon capture without acknowledging the costs associated with not doing carbon capture.

We probably don’t need to capture all of the CO2 though ?

We can combine carbon capture with other solutions for example reforestation ?

I actually wonder if a time might come where global cooling (too quickly) could become an issue. I know that sounds crazy today but suppose we get very good at reducing emissions and CO2, maybe things will require time to adapt too a cooler world.

Eh, you can worry about global cooling as a hypothetical outcome -- for instance, there is a "snowball Earth" feedback loop with the albedo of ice sheets -- but from a geoengineering perspective releasing CO2 into the atmosphere isn't that hard, and we've still got more than half of the known oil in the world left.

We have a very well known set of processes to fix the issue of too few emissions, so I'd doubt that'd ever be a concern.

No, I'm just saying by the time emissions start coming back down, we might need to becareful how fast that happens from an ecological standpoint.

You're completely missing the point that you put CO2 into the ground, not unoxidized carbon. So you're ahead by the enthalphy content of those carbon-oxygen bonds. Obviously you need some energy to concentrate the CO2 out of a waste stream and pump it miles below, but that's comparatively trivial.

The good news is we pick the time, the place, the scale- and it can be stationary. It's a political & economic problem, not a technical impossibility.

>You'd have to drive every mile ever ridden on fossil fuels in reverse.

No you don't, nature still function...at least for the moment.

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