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Comment by axus | Hacker News Reader

The recent news that Greenland was ice-free at +1.5C has increased my pessimism again.

yeah I think it's becoming clear that stopping emissions isn't enough and we will have to do carbon capture but Iceland has a functional carbon removal plant up and running and Exxon apparently sees it as part of their economic future. Lots of bad news out there and we need to accelerate the pace but optimism gives us energy for pushing the political front.

https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2023/exxon-carbon-denb...

The Iceland plant will pull 4000 metric tons of CO2 / year, so my toilet-paper math says we're going to need at least 9 million more of these plants to achieve net zero.

oh ya I'm saying we need to achieve net zero plus have carbon removal. We need to be net negative, we are already in catastrophe territory as far as much carbon is in the atmosphere (I am not a scientist to be clear).

To be clear, Net Zero requires massive direct-air carbon removal, i.e. the only way to achieve it 'net zero' is the permanent removal of billions and billions tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere and storing it somewhere.

36-37 Billion tonnes of CO2/yr, ..

That's actually a bit less bleak than I would have expected.

/sarcasm . dark humour

Sorry for the misplaced optimism , if it makes you feel more bleak, building all those DAC facilities, transporting them and running them will require millions more of DAC facilities.

I just mean that it seems like actually a somewhat possible number for humans to build, though obviously it's more like infeasible than impossible. I pretty well realized how fucked humanity is around a decade ago, so it has been interesting to watch the realization spreading.

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