The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California | Hacker News Reader

The first commercial carbon-sucking facility in the US opens in California

bloomberg.com

62 pointsLastNevadan105 comments

This is infinitely dumb. We’re burning carbon to pull some out of the atmosphere… the energy used to power this plant would be better spent just powering the grid and would have an actual positive impact.

People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something.

Of course, because tech and hype, woohoo. Never mind forests or even better swamps capture carbon "for free".

> Never mind forests or even better swamps capture carbon "for free"

They’ve also been releasing it back into the atmosphere for free since the end of the Carboniferous.

I while ago I rand some relatively unscientific numbers, and learned that even swamps and forests are relatively inefficient users of space as it pertained to carbon capture. For example, a well managed bamboo plantation will yield 25T/hectare/year of bamboo, and this includes quite a bit of labour for the management. Meanwhile, the same area, covered in solar panels, will get you to around 500MWh per year of produced capacity.

The world emissions per capita are presently around 5T per year, per capita. The world has 5 billion hectares (out of 13B total) of agricultural land in general, overall (and generally if land _could_ be used for agriculture it _is_ used for agriculture), so generally, there's not a tonne of space to do lots of carbon sequestering quickly with agriculture, especially as you'd need to move the carbon you've created somewhere else.

The moral is that if you can ever get sequestering carbon down such that you can sequester 1 tonne of carbon for 20MWh power, you're close to a major winner, at least in all the deserts where you clearly can't grow bamboo but can grow solar, because at that point your cost of operations is just cost of infra. That startup thinks it can get down to around 1MWh/tonne, which is comparatively awesome!

My conclusion (before getting to something super scientific) was that if you want to rely on trees and swamps for your carbon capture, you basically end up with massive geopolitical issues because you need to cover most of the world in trees and swamps, but most of the world's land is already used to grow food. Meanwhile, carbon capture can work in areas where land is not (as) valuable.

If they are able to get to $50/tonne, that implies 1MWh/tonne, so that's about 500 tonnes/year per hectare. That'd mean that if you covered arizona in solar panels, you'd be sequestering 1/5 of human carbon output. Whereas if you grew bamboo, you'd cover the contiguous US for the same output.

Do I believe them? No. But even 10x worse is cheap enough to change the world.

It indeed doesn't sound too bad this way, as long as we can realistically assume this is running 100% on renewables, ie not at night for solar. What's a bit unclear as of now is how much energy and thus possibly co2 emissions went into constructing this thing (material, transportation, etc.) and how long it will take to offset those. One or two years fine, ten years well, we'd have to see what the actual running costs other than electricity is. Should we throw in storage for our solar generated power so we can run it 24/7, we'd have to consider that too. I don't know what the current environmental footprint for lithium batteries is, but probably not negligible at that scale? I mean, I want to believe, I really worry about this, but this just sounds like feel-good project a bit too much.

There’s just an economic bar where below that point, it’ll be what happens. Similar thing with solar and electric cars. Already cheaper to install solar than keep running coal. Give it a couple years and a government will be offering a rebate on cars only if the car can double as grid storage when parked.

> People are literally celebrating a net positive carbon activity like they’ve accomplished something

In the same way we celebrate EV and PV production, even though those may still be carbon-positive at the outset. Especially when they were still in prototyping.

Any good sources on the carbon footprint of producing a single unit of, say, the low-end Tesla?

EVs:

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/lifeti...

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...

> Based on a series of assumptions, the data showed that a Tesla Model 3 in the United States, for example, would need to be driven for 13,500 miles (21,725 km) before it does less harm to the environment than a Toyota Corolla.

> The model was developed by the Argonne National Laboratory in Chicago and includes thousands of parameters from the type metals in an electric vehicle (EV) battery to the amount of aluminium or plastic in a car.

> Argonne's Greenhouse Gases, Regulated Emissions and Energy Use in Technologies (GREET) model is now being used with other tools to help shape policy at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the California Air Resources Board, the two main regulators of vehicle emissions in the United States.

> Jarod Cory Kelly, principal energy systems analyst at Argonne, said making EVs generates more carbon than combustion engine cars, mainly due to the extraction and processing of minerals in EV batteries and production of the power cells.

TLDR ~1-2 years of driving, more upfront carbon emissions in manufacturing EVs but lower lifetime emissions overall.

PV:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09218... ("Implications of Trends in Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROI) for Transitioning to Renewable Electricity")

> Recent papers argue that the energy return on energy invested (EROI) for renewable electricity technologies and systems may be so low that the transition from fossil fuelled to renewable electricity may displace investment in other important economic sectors. For the case of large-scale electricity supply, we draw upon insights from Net Energy Analysis and renewable energy engineering to examine critically some assumptions, data and arguments in these papers, focussing on regions in which wind and solar can provide the majority of electricity. We show that the above claim is based on outdated data on EROIs, on failing to consider the energy efficiency advantages of transitioning away from fuel combustion and on overestimates of storage requirements. EROIs of wind and solar photovoltaics, which can provide the vast majority of electricity and indeed of all energy in the future, are generally high (≥ 10) and increasing. The impact of storage on EROI depends on the quantities and types of storage adopted and their operational strategies. In the regions considered in this paper, the quantity of storage required to maintain generation reliability is relatively small.

Right ...... Because we should wait until the grid is fully clean before developing this technology. Serialize all progress!

I keep thinking about why we’re going through this effort rather that using trees, which can also be harvested for lumber and the sequester that carbon in construction.

My super rough math, from quick Google searches, this unit 1,000 tons per year. A mature tree is estimated to capture 48 pounds per year. That would be about 42,000 trees. At roughly, 100-200 trees per acre. Let’s just say 150, so that’s 280 acres of forest/trees to roughly match to performance of the system. Granted, it’s on much less land, but still.

That doesn’t seem like a lot of land when you consider that large protected parks like Yosemite are 759,620 acres.

Let's say you jam your trees in at 40 foot spacing (you want large mature trees) - that gives you 27 trees per acre.

Assuming your math is right, and we need 42,000 mature trees per year capturing carbon, that means we need 1,555 newly planted acres of trees _per year_ to match this plant (and, there will be 25-30 years before the first batch to be planted actually matches in terms of capture). So you have a small problem of finding land that isn't already forested, finding labor to plant and maintain your growing forest, and continuing to do the same year after year.

And, bear in mind that this plant is just a rounding error on the problem in terms of capacity, so in reality you need to scale by orders of magnitude.

27 trees per acre is a low number, and based on my own experience with land returned to a forest with decent canopy, the 150 trees per acre is not unreasonable.

That said, even with my estimates you’re correct that this is a lot of land, but I wanted to quickly put it into perspective. We are losing forests all over the planet, and this can also help understand the impact of that.

Also, the labor you mention is probably a wash compared to the construction of this plant.

Edit: as an example, if you ever have a chance, go tour a maple tree farm as a good reference. Now, that said I did just google for maple farm tree density and they estimate 70 per acre.

No doubt we need to get deforestration under control. I'm just trying to point out that "just plant trees" is not a sufficient answer to climate change by itself. It helps, certainly.

No one thing is the answer. The answer is to do many things, for example, planting trees.

Many things, presumably including this facility?

Is it not a "thing"?

Yes, and also this facility should help as well.

Is it not a "thing"?

We're pointing out that this will help in addition to other things. This won't be the sole solution, however, it will help.

It isn't really viable as a carbon capture measure, and there's been a lot of research in recent years to show that decades of tree planting campaigns across the world have very often failed outright or--in some cases--been a net negative to communities, ecosystems and forest coverage, and/or atmospheric carbon levels.

Saplings are cheap. That's why planting trees is such an appealing "solution." All of the math is based on the assumption that the saplings survive until they can mature and start sucking in carbon. Most don't; one study found mean mortality rates of 44% after five years over 176 sites in tropical and sub-tropical Asia[0]. A Turkish effort saw over 90% of 11 million trees dead in under a year.[1] Other studies have found similarly horrible numbers, and that's not including the other ways[2] such projects can fail: degradation of grassland ecosystems that were already highly effective carbon sinks[3], decreased biodiversity, increased fire risks with non-native saplings, cultural and economic losses, etc.

There are wildly successful reforestation projects, but they take considerably more investment, local community support, and active long-term monitoring and intervention.[4] All of which undercut what originally made mass tree planting so appealing as a climate solution: the seemingly cheap cost.

We absolutely need to plant trees, both in urban environments because the quality of life benefits of urban trees are so numerous that it's an absolute no-brainer and as part of wider reforestation efforts, but it's never going to be a silver bullet for climate change. It's just one of many, many things we need to do.

0. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rstb.2021.009...

1. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jan/30/most-of-11m-tr...

2. https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22679378/tree-planting-for...

3. https://www.vox.com/down-to-earth/22662490/grasslands-better...

4. https://www.science.org/content/article/reforestation-means-...

Because someone is being paid, and someone is being given power/control that gets them paid.

Did it cost more in carbon just for the construction workers to drive their pickup trucks to build this plant than what the plant will actually remove?

I'd like to know this too, the article only let me read two paragraphs.

I found a NASA stat that an US average car will emit a metric ton of CO2 in 3 months of use.

"The U.S. EPA has found that a typical 22 MPG gas-based car emits about 5 tons of carbon dioxide per year. On average, you emit one ton of CO2 for about every 2,500 miles you drive".

CarbonCure(the partner of Heirloom here) agrees with me on the math: "CarbonCure’s global network of concrete producer partners has produced more than five million truckloads of carbon mineralized concrete, removing and reducing more than 365,000 metric tons of CO2. That’s equivalent to taking more than 80,000 gas-powered cars off the road for a year."

So this 1000 metric ton CO2 DAC plant could offset the activities of 100-400 vehicles in a year... minus the activities of the employees to get to the plant. That's what I wanna know. When are the workers going to stop driving 60 miles round trip to work? And how many need to be at work everyday at the plant?

I guess at least California is pushing electric cars.

Indeed, automation is not just about eliminating the payment of wages, it's also about removing the need to burn dinosaurs shuttling hoominz around.

How 'bout if workers at carbon capture facilities are prohibited from driving fossil-fueled cars to work. Maybe they could get e-bikes as a job perk ? It would be on-brand.

Or electric shuttle that would pick them up. And/or company could build cheap/free housing for employees nearby. So many good logical solutions!

How is that logical? You want a nascent carbon capture startup to also build employee housing and/or operate a bus line. That sounds like a great waste of money and resources.

They are working on one part of the problem, carbon capture. Many others are working on the problems of electric vehicles and green electricity production.

Maybe California is running the bus line that services hundreds of these factories along Highway 58.

> So this 1000 metric ton CO2 DAC plant could offset the activities of 100-400 vehicles in a year

So it's basically useless? Just for show? Surely you could have done much more for the environment investing that money in a smarter way?

Or it's a stepping stone in design that shows a technology can function. Future designs could be more efficient.

Solar panels required people be clothed, fed, and transported in excess carbon emissions than the first 10,000 reduced.

This reminds me about how they tried to fix the problem in: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exhalation_(short_story)

it seems very labor-intensive to prepare trays of special dust and slide them in and out of these gigantic towers of them

When they say "commercial"... How does this thing make a profit? Carbon permits? Negative electricity costs? Or is it in fact some kind of non profit?

It seems companies (eg Microsoft being the big customer in this example) pay to offset their carbon emissions so they can use that fact for marketing purposes.

Last I read about this topic, it was way more efficient to just buy better ovens for Ruanda and Nigeria [1] instead of trying to capture carbon. Was there any recent technology advancement that changed this?

1: https://www.atmosfair.de/de/save80/ - just an example, there are many ways of reducing co2 emission.

Yes, we need that too.

This happens a lot in climate policy discussions - "what about this other solution?" The answer is always "yes, that too!"

I'd be hard pressed to find it again, but I remember watching a video years ago talking about the issue of buying new ovens for poor Africans in villages not actually working to reduce carbon as intended because what ended up happening is that they would just use now two stoves, the old one and new one, at the same time instead of tossing the old one and only using the new one. Great in theory and a seemingly easy low-hanging fruit, but may fall apart in practice, unfortunately.

Really? They're stove-limited rather than fuel-limited? Even if so, it's fixable by simply giving them as many of the new stoves as they want. It's merely a marginal inefficiency in the program.

or allow them to trade an old stove for a new one rather than give them for free.

How on earth is this ever going to be economically feasible. Wouldn’t it be more economically viable to literally just bury paper in the ground, or like simply not use the carbon in the first place?

How on earth could you possibly make an economic argument on the future viability of our species on this planet?

It's because of economics we're in this mess in the first place.

That's silly. That's like condemning logic or mathematics.

If you want future viability, you can ask if there is a cheap way or an expensive way to get what you want. That's economics. It says nothing about what your goal is.

You're forgetting a key factor though: politics.

What you're arguing is a rational idea of economics that doesn't exist. Instead, we have this bastard version influenced by politics, which in practice, cares nothing of the key objectives which concern future viability.

Instead, we get this thing that demands infinite growth and consumption. That's modern economics and it's destroying us.

> we get this thing that demands infinite growth and consumption. That's modern economics

This is a stylised misinterpretation of economics.

so you are just saying that you dont like a particular brand of politics.

Huh? Even with extremely important life-saving goals, you still want to use a cost-effective method to get there.

Also if it was actually expensive enough, we'd simply be doomed. Economics can't be ignored. They're a proxy for how much we can accomplish.

I agree in principle, but my question to you, is how do we make something economic i.e. CO2 pollution, which in principle provides no value?

The same goes for fossil fuel consumption. There's nothing economic about not using fossil fuels.

Understandably it's a compromise, but the first reaction shouldn't be "it costs too much, so don't do it". This attitude is the reason why nothing ends up getting done. I would much rather an uneconomic solution, than no solution at all, which seemingly is the status quo.

Taxes are one straightforward way. But no matter how you're paying for it, if you have method A and method B, and they'd both do the job, you don't pick the one that costs 5x as much because you think economic arguments are a bad thing.

That's an extremely sad point of view. Of course humans can accomplish things that are not economically viable.

Perhaps it's become harder in our current society, but many great projects of man were economic folly.

To give one admittedly a little cliche example, landing on the moon never made any economic sense.

That's not what I'm talking about. Pretend getting to the moon would have cost a quadrillion dollars. We wouldn't have been able to do it.

> Pretend getting to the moon would have cost a quadrillion dollars. We wouldn't have been able to do it.

This is a statement of reality, not economic system. A society that decided to divert resources, today, to building a Dyson sphere on Alpha Centauri would fail, irrespective of economic system, because the goal demands more resources than it can sustainably divert.

> This is a statement of reality, not economic system.

Yes, that's my point. The worry about "economically feasible" in the ancestor comment is a question of what plans are realistic with unlimited motivation. It's not about economic systems holding us back.

This is a first of its kind, I'm sure over time they'll become more efficient.

But yes, probably not using carbon would be better, so maybe if we have proper capabilities and laws in place, companies might be forced to remove all the carbon they release - that will either make them pay for such service or push towards reducing carbon as much as possible

The last one, not burning it in the first place, is the thermodynamically-easiest thing to do.

However, there's already a lot of CO2 in the air, and we'll be wise to pull that out, too, so the impacts of warming are blunted.

Part of the way people will begin to vote for carbon-usage restrictions is when they begin to discover exactly how expensive it will be to remove from the air. The big catalyst, of course, is when they begin to personally feel acute effects of climate-change.

This [1] was my catalytic moment. Everyone's will be different, but we're each going to have one or more experiences that change our view on fossil fuels.

[1]: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cw09t0gPAwm/

Well, I think they'll move the whole thing to a nearby coal or gas power station and fit over the chimney stack. After all, that's where the CO2 is concentrated. It wouldn't make sense to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere as a trace molecule at 430 PPM - that would be stupid. Hopefully they plan to miniaturize the technology and fit it over transportation exhausts and wherever else we're dumping out CO2 in high concentrations.

> simply not use the carbon in the first place

No one is disputing this is obviously the best move. But telling humans not to consume stuff has a rather long and unsuccessful history. Let's not try to keep doing that.

turning trees into paper is too slow. anything you can do with trees is too slow, actually.

if carbon capture is undertaken seriously enough to just break even at current burn, the storage alone will be the largest industrial project in human history.

if we somehow stop burning carbon tomorrow we will still see catastrophic change as the carbon we've already emitted takes effect.

the beginning of any solution is to stop, but nobody can afford to stop.

Wouldn't it be simpler to plant trees instead of using energy to capture carbon? To absorb 1000 tons of CO2 a year, you'd need roughly 200 acres of land, which seems more feasible.

It would be cool if the facility blew oxygen then it could be switch from suck to blow

How does carbon capture help? Wouldn't it need to be stored somewhere? What happens if the storage leaks? People say that trees is a bad solution because the carbon is still there. This is even worse than trees. Trees at least looks good.

Do what now? Who is complaining that “the carbon is still there?” Surely the total amount of carbon on Earth is relatively fixed and only changes slightly from, like, meteorites and space launches and radioactive decay.

We're emitting around 40 billion tonnes of CO2 per year on this planet. This removes 1000. We need another 40 million or so of these facilities to take out what we emit. And mind you, what we emit, is still growing, by about 300M tonne per year. So, at best you could say that this slows down this growth by a tiny meaningless percentage.

At this scale, it's a cynical form of green washing that is so futile that it's not even worth talking about. The point of installations like this is to allow polluters to buy off their sins.

The church built a booming business out of allowing people to buy off their sins in the middle ages. It didn't really help but it made people feel good about themselves. This sort of is the modern day equivalent.

Worse: this type of greenwashing gives businesses (and politics) an excuse to do even less about the actual problem.

Direct-air carbon capture is (at best) about as useful as re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic.

can we bring back ice age if we build enough of these?

Yes, theoretically.

It's interesting, the limiting factors for biomass production are bioavailable nitrogen, carbon dioxide, sunlight and water, in that order. The ability to remove carbon dioxide from the air is the ability to modulate the amount of life on the planet, even to 0 if desired.

"The plant is capable of removing 1,000 tons of CO2 a year"

So about equivalent to 100 hectares of forest?

Anyway, cool, another 50 million more of these facilities and we'll be at break-even.

As another yardstick, it will cost about 2x the annual world GDP to mitigate all emissions this way. With normal amortisation rates and operating costs, it will be about 1.5x-2x more than entire energy expenditure worldwide. I wonder if this is simply a scheme to siphon public money. What a good catch for Fox News!

Of course, if $100 per ton ever becomes a reality, then it's just 3% of world GDP and is probably affordable. But that's a pie in the sky "forward looking statement".

People on this technology forum seem skeptical that technology can improve or get cheaper.

I think they just understand that this is very unlikely to work even with best case estimates from people with a direct financial interest in this working

It’s part of the IEA’s net zero by 2050 plan. An understanding of basic physics is all that is required to see that DAC must be in the mix to achieve net zero emissions globally.

Where is all this energy going to come from? Cause fission is the only thing I’m aware of that we know that can generate enough new electricity capacity to do reclamation. Fusion is too far out and solar/wind can’t handle enough of the grid to have enough left over to also be doing reclamation.

The economic and legal arguments are a joke. The only serious plan would involve 100x or even 1000x our investments in fission R&D and capacity build out (and fusion research too because fission needs to get us there).

Don’t see that happening until the situation getting dire enough and that’s going to be too late because capacity can’t come online fast enough and these are runaway global processes. It’s taken 200 years of really bad destruction and it would take much longer than that running reclamation going at an insane rate to try to undo that damage. Arguably we’re already in runaway territory - We didn’t go to 0 but it was the single largest global reduction in co2 and still one of the worst global warming events we’ve seen so far. Do not expect anything magical from net 0. At this point it’s massively negative 0. That 2c of warming is a dream at this point. I don’t know what the actual number is because the international reports are constantly getting rewritten by politicians because the scientists are just being “too alarming”. It’s a joke.

People on this technology forum are skeptical that an incredibly inefficient technology used to recover carbon from air is a better investment than using technology to emit less carbon in the first place.

Those seem like different goals. Don’t we need both?

Yes. Defense in depth is somehow only applied to computer security around these parts.

This isn't defense in depth, this is deciding what color you want the background of you 'about our security team' webpage, while your system is actively getting compromised.

When there's a giant hole in the bottom of your boat, you don't dispatch your limited resources to start bailing water out with a tablespoon.

You patch the hole. Once you deal with that, then you can start bailing.

The first solar panels were completely useless, therefore, it makes no sense that solar panels today are much better. QED

It's a defining feature of this place, no optimism is allowed. If it isn't perfect from the start, it can never be good enough.

> As another yardstick, it will cost about 2x the annual world GDP to mitigate all emissions this way.

How did you calculate the cost for this number? Is that supposed to be annual operating cost?

> it will be about 1.5x-2x more than entire energy expenditure worldwide

We could use non-carbon sources to triple energy production if we really wanted to.

>How did you calculate the cost for this number?

$53M for 1K tons of capacity vs 37B tons annual mitigation needs, assuming 20 years amortisation, and purchase price being about half of the total lifetime costs including financing, which is typical for renewable energy systems, resulting in ~$200T a year vs $165T world GDP, so yes, oops, 1.2x world GDP :) which is still kinda too costly :D

>We could use non-carbon sources to triple energy production if we really wanted to.

exactly my point.

> $53M for 1K tons of capacity

Nothing says the company is spending all their money on this facility, and I massively doubt the second and third such facility would cost anywhere near the same amount.

Also there's no need to finance, just cap annual builds at N/20 per year.

> exactly my point.

Huh? I thought you were arguing capture needs too much power, and what I was saying was that capture does not need too much power.

If you're suggesting replacing most of our existing electrical production, I agree, but capture would still be useful.

I suggest that capture is a bullshit idea and this company is a bullshit company. We don't need capture, we need carbon-free renewable electricity and stuff powered by that electricity and batteries to store it. That's all solved, scaled, and economics is there. Everything else is just a detestable way to siphon public money.

If we have additional costs in the economy that just means GDP increases by that amount.

You could also phrase this as 'global GDP would triple from this initiative'. GDP is a silly measurement.

It's the CO2 equivalent of the two economists eat shit joke.

Alternatively, everybody might starve to death because there are real physical bottlenecks on GDP.

It doesn't matter how much money you print, someone can't be in two places at once, growing food and working in the carbon capture factory

> You could also phrase this as 'global GDP would triple from this initiative'

No, you couldn’t, not in real terms.

Let’s suppose a government diverted 2x GDP to this proposal. It can’t tax 200% of output—it must print money. G goes to 2x prior-year GDP. Pretty much immediately, every other component collapses to zero (besides expectations, the government is basically seizing all base metals production and transportation and labor) amidst hyperinflation. Which makes your real G, and GDP, lower than before.

And how much co2 is emitted while building these structures vs planting trees?

They talk about other plants doing over a hundred times as much, too.

You need to build small before you can build big.

Also need to build factories for these like they planned for SMR reactors. Mass produce and ship them out for installation.

The dream would be to build them out of the material that they absorb.

This comment thread is disappointingly low on valley/porn jokes.

With how dumb carbon capture is, the correct response is ridicule and jokes, not serious discussion...

https://archive.is/bl4XZ

It's too bad these DAC systems don't take it a step further kicking the o2 back into the atmosphere while turning the carbon into something physical and industrially valuable like say spools of carbon fiber fabric or graphene/carbon nanotubes.

Oxygen really likes being connected carbon so spitting it off takes a lot of energy. All the things you mentioned burn in oxygen for exactly that reason. Making them requires at least as much energy as you’d get back by burning them so is hard to justify right now when instead you could make it directly from the carbon in things like fossil fuels and not have to spend all the energy to spit oxygen off first

Maybe the DAC system can be put at the center of a giant heliostat for the required energy to split the C from the O2...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Font_Romeu_France.jpg

I guess that's something humanity can consider once the question of energy sources is settled. For now, whatever energy that could be used to gather energy to split CO2 into C and O2 could as well be used to replace fossil-burning generators, at likely better efficiency.

This is off topic, but does anyone else always get an infinitely reloading captcha for archive[.]is links?

That happens if you use Cloudflare as DNS.

archive.is has a notorious feud with Cloudflare over some technical detail they care about strongly.

Found some info on that

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/135222/why-does-...

Ok, now let’s go back talking about carbon and oxygen.

At this point every thread with an archive.is link has atleast one similar comment. Etiquette should probably shift to including this info in the same comment that posts the link to reduce the noise.

Those are called "trees" and were actively killing them to create farm land to feed an ever growing population.

*we’re

Have you considered that taking out CO2 from the air will also kill trees and other plant life? CO2 is their air to breath.

But of course, let's trust corporations and government to carefully calculate exactly how much CO2 they should take out.

Can't wait for the revival of the ice age scare from the 80s...

Taking out too much co2 won't be a problem until it turns massively profitable.

But are trees the most efficient technology for the job?

Trees evolved to work with the inputs of their environment, we can engineer practically anything in terms of what materials/inputs are available to a synthetic tree having the sole purpose of spitting out solid carbon.

It's non-trivial to prevent other nations from destroying their forests. But nations that care might be able to make up for it with engineering, from anywhere else on the planet, at least in terms of atmospheric co2. Is the best way for such a nation to do so to just plant trees, or can we do better? It seems like a path worth at least exploring the possibilities of.

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