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Comment by TekMol | Hacker News Reader

    Isn't carbon capture harder than emitting carbon

That's the question.

To burn coal, we have to dig it up from the ground. Is it possible that we one day find a way to "dig it up from the air" instead which is "less hard" than to dig it up from the ground?

Or that we find some other process which has seperating carbon and oxygen as a byproduct? Like some form of photosynthesis? Trees already do this.

The fastest bird can fly 200 mph.

Apollo 10 flew at 25k mph. A factor of over 100.

Maybe we can increase trees by a factor of 100 too.

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> Maybe we can increase trees by a factor of 100 too.

I don't agree: using a bird and an Apollo space mission in speed comparison is a completely invalid support for that proposition: the rocket which launched Apollo 10 had to burn 770 tons of kerosene and 1300 tons of liquid oxygen in 150 seconds to achieve these speeds which are possible to be kept then only once outside of atmosphere and outside of the earth "gravity well". It didn't depend on anything of unknown physics or chemistry: Tsiolkovsky published his rocket equation in 1903.

Contrary to that, your "maybe 100 times" would depend on something different from what we know the physics and chemistry say for the last hundred years.

> Is it possible that we one day find a way to "dig it up from the air

That makes zero sense — thermodynamics prefer lower energy states. Coal burns on its own, so that’s the direction of the reaction. It doesn’t become coal on its own, so you have to put energy into that and you net lose on that.

That's why the most effective "carbon capture" we can possibly make - is not emitting it in the first place. It's really that simple...

I'm not saying we shouldn't invest money and time in carbon DAC, it will become important later after we stopped emitting tons and tons of CO2 every day.

You're almost there.

How do trees get the energy to sequester carbon?

From the sun.

So you use solar and other renewables to power carbon sequestration.

Startups like Terraform are taking things further by converting that into fuels we already know how to use, which will displace fossil fuels: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2023/01/09/terraform-indu...

"At the fundamental level, Terraform’s machines capture carbon dioxide (CO2), generate hydrogen (H2), and react them to form carbon-neutral natural gas (CH4). Our CO2 concentrators can also capture enough water from the air to supply our process with plenty left over. "

They seem to very deliberately not use the name methane in their presentation. CH4 is methane.

While they are at it, won’t you start cycling to power your country? It would have similar efficiency..

Doesn't scale the same.

But the burden of proof is clearly on carbon capture then.

Most carbon we produce is caused by burning of energy-dense fuel, leaving well:

heat, smoke, gas dissipation and some forms of energy that are useful to us.

If I understood basic thermodynamics at school, this process is irreversible and claims to the contrary are charlatanery.

We don't have to reverse the process of creating energy from fuel.

Firstly, we only need to seperate carbon and oxygen.

Secondly, we get thousands of times more energy from the sun than we need.

So even if seperating carbon and oxygen requires energy, that is not fundamentally a problem.

> We don't have to reverse the process of creating energy from fuel.

> Firstly, we only need to seperate carbon and oxygen.

Separating carbon and oxygen is literally reversing the process of creating energy from fuel. That's how physics works.

Please stop trying to make arguments when you don't even understand the fundamentals of the subject.

So it would be like using our solar potential to capture and then turn atmospheric carbon into fuel again. Probably battery storage will be cheaper, right?

Clear to see how cynical it is if you keep pumping carbon out of the ground at the same time as trying to reclaim some bit of it from the atmosphere.

At that point, why don’t just stop the ever-increasing rate of CO2 release we do? Sounds much easier than recreating millions of years worth of photosynthesis that did the same thing (coal, oil is from plants mostly that lived many millions of years ago) we conveniently dig up.

> Is it possible that we one day find a way to

Blind, naive techno-utopianism will doom us all.

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