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Comment by geysersam | Hacker News Reader

Stop living in a fantasy. Direct air carbon capture can never be more efficient than just not burning fossile fuels in the first place.

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Sure it can. Why wouldn't it? Say you find a source of energy with zero cost. Now direct air carbon capture is free. "But you don't have a source with zero cost." Great, now we're talking numbers, how cheap does it have to be? So long as energy transport has inevitable losses, carbon capture stands a chance. In other words, IMO we should consider fossil fuel offsetting with carbon capture as a highly lossy energy transport technology that can reach any fossil fuel consumer on earth.

Even with free energy, you'd need to invest a lot of capital and then dispose of the CO2 somewhere.

Energy is not the only cost. There are also massive material costs building the carbon capture infrastructure. A reasonable estimate for the scale required is the existing fossile fuel infrastructure.

That is, direct air carbon capture means investing an amount on the order of the value of the existing fossile fuel infrastructure to spend energy to achieve nothing of value (except offsetting the damage we caused by not switching to renewables earlier).

It's a complete nonstarter. Only a vehicle used by the fossile industry to delay the transition.

I wonder if people may be able to organize some entity that collects money for everybody to use in projects that benefit the society...

But I guess, no, that's impossible!

Having excess energy from solar could make it possible to capture the excess co2 over time.

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