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Comment by yread | Hacker News Reader

650M$ in funding and they will remove emissions from about 10 000 cars! You could just spend 32 500$ per each car to replace it with an EV and the second 32 500 on renewable energy and storage. We would need 100 000 of these plants to get back to equilibrium.

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Early lightbulbs had a lifespan of 14 hours and weren't much brighter than a set of candles. I'm glad they didn't quit and invest the money into candle factories!

The analogy isn't perfect, but the point is clear. Refining and developing imperfect Co2 extraction technology today can pay massive dividends in the future.

I like the analogy! I think it's clearer than the one about transistors I offered above.

Analogies get people interested in the topic. Science works on first principles.

14 hours is not way off from a lifetime of a candle. Not 100 000 times shorter for sure. And it doesn't smoke, can't start a fire and you can light thousands of them at the same time.

I mean you could be right, it could go right and they could figure out the thermodynamics and somehow built insane number of huge plants without adding significant additional CO2 emissions.

Or it could suck up billions in resources to produce 2M$ in revenue and give polluters a license to pollute some more

$650M in funding and they are developing first of its kind technology that will inspire better, more efficient systems and planetary change.

I offer that anyone looking at a DAC machine today could see the equivalent of the first transistor sitting on a bench in Bell Labs [0]. Gooey, weird, and packed with potential.

[0] https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10261887...

or even better spend next to nothing and just ban cars in cities and save billions of miles travelled while revitalizing our urban cores

The challenge is we already have a trillion tons of excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. So even if you halted all emissions right now, you would still have excess carbon dioxide sitting in the atmosphere heating up the planet for the next century.

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