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Comment by sylvinus | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised by all the negativity here. Usually HN commenters are good at understanding exponential growth. Maybe it's easier when talking about Active Users?

Climeworks (and others) are just a couple orders of magnitude away from having real impact, with a clear roadmap lying ahead. Let's support them, along with all other potential solutions? We're going to need more than one.

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The pessimism here is because there is no real money to be made in carbon capture without significant and expensive policy change. Put simply, carbon capture is a public good, which will require significant public expense even in the most optimistic of cases. If we're willing to go that far, we're better off just implementing a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme for emissions.

Our problem is that this is a technological solution for a problem that needs a policy solution.

The problem needs both policy and technological solutions.

In fact, in a certain way the policy part is already there - the latest IPCC reports project that carbon removal will have to be part of our strategies for staying below the 1.5C target (https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/carbon-removal-un...).

That is not a policy. It is just a hint that a policy would be welcome if anybody would ever come up with one.

climate change regulation is the political equivalent of achieving fusion power, though. it's so hard. it's a planet-scale prisoner's dilemma.

every economic/political actor sees only long-term benefits from fixing the climate, and those benefits are the average of each actor's carbon contributions. everyone has an incentive to cut corners (spin up those coal plants to keep energy cheap) unless doing the right thing just so happens to be the easiest thing (solar costs less now.)

infinite economics and peace Nobels for whoever solves that. or physics Nobels for whoever makes fusion practical. it's basically the same thing, after all.

> The company broke ground on its Mammoth plant this week. With a CO₂ capture capacity of 36,000 tons per year, Mammoth will be almost 10 times larger than Orca.

> While Orca has 8 collector containers each about the size and shape of a standard shipping container, Mammoth will have 80.

This doesn't seems practical to scale. To capture 36,000,000 tons (1/1000 of the current global output) they'd need 80,000 shipping containers?

> Meanwhile, global emissions topped 36 billion tons last year.

> “We started with milligrams of carbon dioxide captured from the air,” he said. “Then we went from milligrams to grams, from grams to kilograms to tons to 1,000 tons.” That sort of leveling up over the course of 13 years is no small feat.

If it took 13 years to reach the current scale, how many more orders of magnitude are left to squeeze out?

Eight more orders of magnitude to move the needle.

It will have to happen, but it will be hard to keep people from thinking it is a substitute for doing what else will really be needed for it to end up making any difference.

13 years for 9 orders of magnitude. On that pace, in 13 years they would process the entire Earth's atmosphere in days.

How many orders of magnitude do you expect them to need?

Carbon removal is a brand new industry that lacks decades of industry and academic development, and potentially has few viable business models without a price on carbon. That's equal parts terrifying and exciting. We need a thousand shots on goal for carbon removal solutions to succeed. For anyone who wants to dig in to carbon removal, links in my bio.

I wrote an article specifically on this balance of impossibility and necessity here: https://tito.co/posts/necessary---impossible.html

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