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Comment by bequanna | Hacker News Reader

I’m having a tough time understanding how this makes sense.

Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits?

Put another way, are the people funding projects like this assuming there will be some kind of carbon credit system in place that will pay absurdly high prices to sequester carbon?

Additionally, I suppose you will be compensating farmers for their corn stalk bales, but you can’t take something OUT of a field long term without replacing. Those bales contain more than just carbon and the farmers will eventually have to amend the soil to compensate.

Which, if we are then living in your sky-high carbon credit world, fertilizer (and everything else) pry got MUCH more expensive.

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> Is this even close to being financially viable if there is never any such thing as carbon credits?

You're right as far as your comment goes — it will probably never be financially viable to scale this up, and the companies funding the limited scale development are doing it purely for public relations purposes.

What your comment misses, though, is that to survive the coming century, we are going to have to figure out, as a society, how to do things that are not financially viable. Financial viability is what got us into this mess in the first place.

There's a quote attributed to Einstein that says, "We cannot solve today's problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." The quote is disputed, but probably comes from a paraphrase of something he actually said in 1946 in the context of the threat of nuclear warfare. It applies more generally to the multiple self-created existential threats humanity is currently facing, however.

> ...how to do things that are not financially viable.

I don't disagree with you, but if we go that route I have a pretty good idea what that will look like:

1. Wealthy people invest in carbon capture schemes like this.

2. Once there is sufficient wealth invested in #1, they've essentially created a solution looking for a market.

3. What does this mean? It is time to market the shit out of whatever existential problem your solution claims to solve. Market with fear, make solving this "problem" part of the national agenda. Get the hysteria to the point of: "We need to solve this AT ANY COST!" Oppose the approved messaging and you're an idiot, luddite or terrible person.

4. Combine the political will you are creating in #3 with aggressive lobbying for credit programs that make life more expensive for regular people and don't really accomplish anything. Conveniently, the new programs make the group in #1 even more wealthy.

Carbon purchasing already exists.

Voluntary purchases like Frontier: https://frontierclimate.com/ and many other corporate buyers.

Regulatory cap-and-trade markets like CA ARB LCFS: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low-carbon_fuel_standard

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