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?
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.
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
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.
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.
It's because of economics we're in this mess in the first place.
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.
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.
This is a stylised misinterpretation of economics.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.