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Comment by sanderjd | Hacker News Reader

Nobody thinks direct air capture is a scam. There's already more CO2 in the air than we want. Even after we get to net zero emissions, we'll want to suck some of it back out. It's reasonable to question whether it makes sense to be focusing resources on it right now, when it is not the lowest hanging fruit toward reaching net zero, but personally I think it is, because it takes many years for technologies to mature, so it makes sense to get that flywheel spinning on these technologies now.

I think what you're responding strongly to is capturing emissions from point sources where fossil fuels are being burned. I don't think that's a scam either - I'd characterize it as an unfortunate necessity due to path dependency - but it's a very different thing than direct air capture.

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An oil company running a piddly project and getting it covered on NPR, with a favourable reaction from the Department of Resource Extraction, is a scam.

> Nobody thinks direct air capture is a scam

I do

Sorry I meant nobody who works seriously on climate solutions. There are many people who are in that category and reasonably believe point source capture is a bad / scam idea (which, again, I disagree with this strongly), but it's still clear to those people that we need to get direct air capture of some kind working at some point in time to reverse the trend rather than just mitigate it like we're doing now (though many reasonably believe now isn't the right time, which, again, I disagree with).

Any solution that draws electricity from the grid is a scam because it's better to shut it down along with the matching amount of power generation.

Any solution that relies on scarce resources like fertile soil, freshwater or agricultural waste is a scam because it has zero impact at this scale and will never grow beyond that.

In theory, there are feasible solutions that would rely e.g on solar energy and seawater, but I'm yet to see one.

If you people "who works seriously on climate solutions" want to be taken seriously outside of your circle, you first need to call out openly and honestly all the scams in your field.

But since they amount to like 95% of it no one dares to disrupt the flow of money. Basically you're like "people seriously working on mortgage derivative solutions" in 2008.

> If you people "who works seriously on climate solutions" want to be taken seriously outside of your circle, you first need to call out openly and honestly all the scams in your field.

I didn't say I was one of those people. But the reason the people who do work seriously on climate technology don't consider DAC a scam is not that they are dishonest, it's that it isn't a scam; it's a nascent technology that may not work out, but currently seems promising.

> Any solution that draws electricity from the grid is a scam because it's better to shut it down along with the matching amount of power generation.

The nice thing about connecting things to the grid is that then instead of decarbonizing the energy use of a bunch of heterogenous things, you can focus on decarbonizing the grid, and then everything connected to it benefits at once.

> > Carbon capture is a scam.

> Nobody thinks direct air capture is a scam.

Yes, folks do. points up

Two more examples in this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452537

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37452761

As a general rule, "nobody thinks that" or "nobody is saying that" are false -- there are always folks who do, sometimes very vocally. We must stop pretending extremists aren't out there.

And you need to stop referring to people who disagree with you as "extremists"

I thought it would be clear from context that I meant "nobody who seriously works on this problem" rather than "no internet randos". People on social media believe all kinds of dumb things.

But there is an actual and notable difference of opinion between point-source carbon capture and direct air capture among people who work in the space.

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