It’s not enough to get to zero emissions. We’re well past the point where we need to get to negative. And afaik these machines can’t scale to even a fraction of the way to net 0 unless we start building out fission/break through with fusion.

Think of it this way. It’s more energy intensive to capture carbon than it was to generate the electricity from that carbon. The amount of energy required to make this work requires you to generate roughly the same order of magnitude of energy as has been emitted through the burning of fossil fuels since the beginning.

I’m a big fission supporter but I doubt even fission could get to the cost scaling needed to generate all this energy effectively. Even fusion might struggle since we don’t actually yet know what the unit economics of it will be.

We might get lucky and figure out a way where recapturing carbon is net cheaper energy than it generated but I doubt it as that feels like it would be very close to a perpetual motion machine scenario.

Consider UK; 204 trees * 65 million people = 13.2 billion trees. Woodland estimates there's approx 3 billion trees in the UK now. That's over 4 fold increase in trees every year. I doubt the terrain/nature could support such a significant increase in just one year, let alone a number of years. But I like the idea of more trees.

https://woodlands.co.uk/blog/woodland-economics/how-many-tre...