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Comment by yesbut | Hacker News Reader

The only solution to this problem is reducing / eliminating carbon output. And the only way to do that is to stop making plastics, stop burning fossil fuels for smelting, and reign in all global manufacturing outputs completely. All of the solutions you guys are promoting ignore that and are trying to make a profit as part of the solution of cleaning up this mess. Pipe dream. Scam artists.

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Agree, net zero carbon emissions is mandatory. But it's not enough because the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere will continue to heat the planet and have to be removed.

This not carbon capture vs net zero, the goal is net zero AND carbon capture.

I don't disagree with you, but I don't think carbon capture will provide the gains needed in a realistic timeframe. I don't think its development should be abandoned, but we all have a tendency to go to sleep thinking "cool, tech will solve this for me" when in reality only public policy will.

All of our governments are owned by these corporations that are trying to either continue making money via the status quo or make money with these fly-by-night tech-will-save-us-all get rich quick schemes. Nobody is bribing the politicians to enact policy that cuts global manufacturing output.

Agreed, we have to find a way to do both. It's unlikely we will prevail. As is, the path we're on is about 4 million tons per year of removals by 2030. A new model from Rocky Mountain Institute suggests we need to be at more like 285 million tons annually of removals by 2030 to be on track. It's time to invest in scaling carbon removal.

The "good" news is that the scale of the problem to those that know explicitly precludes any of these scams being useful. They are almost tautologically insignificant.

But politically they can have a minor delaying impact, like birds killed by windmills (1/1000th the effect of skyscrapers), vids of collapsing/exploding windmills in the middle of nowhere (compared to oil transit and storagw explosions)

Making plastics does not contribute to CO2 emissions except indirectly as energy usage.

Perhaps in 2010 this would have been sufficient. Unfortunately decarbonization alone is no longer enough to stabilize at 2 degrees of warming. For a stable climate massive decarbonization and removal is needed.

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