Twenty-seven DAC plants have been commissioned to date worldwide, capturing almost 0.01 Mt CO2/year. Thats the equivalent of 2000 EVs.
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We pay in 8+ different ways for fossil fuels:
(1) Subsidies of trillions of dollars per year
(2) Ethanol and biodiesel subsidies
(3) Pay at the pump (or electricity)
(4) Pay for carbon capture to help oil companies extract more oil
(5) Pay for the consequences of climate change (a) increase of home insurance (b) bailouts of insurance and utility providers (c) dealing with the direct costs of climate change
(6) Health costs! Pollution is directly linked to every disease (except STIs?). Air Pollution Kills 10 Million People a Year. Think of all the cancers, cardiovascular, metabolic, every biological systems.
(7) We pay a cost of other pollutants. Lead (thank you oil industry!), mercury (thank you coal industry!). Fish was a source of food, the best kind of renewable food, where you do absolutely nothing other than catch it! This source is now gone, there is so much mercury in fish, that all recommendations of fish are to limit the number of servings!
(8) Every person on the planet is paying a fossil fuel tax (the 5 above), to the super super rich. It is a transfer of wealth from everyone to about ~100 people. This money is used to buy all assets (real estate), stocks and everything else, enabling the super wealthy to extract every more wealth from every sector of the economy.
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Lets talk about the smallest tax (subsidy!) we pay one of the 6 listed about, ethanol subsidies. 40 million acres are used to grow corn for ethanol subsidies (out of 93m total).
If we use these 40m acres for solar, Annual Energy Production (in watt-hours): 52,272 terawatt-hours (TWh)
To put that in context: The total electricity consumption of the U.S. is about 4,000 TWh/year. The energy generated from 40 million acres of solar panels could theoretically meet U.S. electricity demand more than 13 times over.
But, we'll need a lot less energy when we use solar/wind. We only need a third of the energy we use today, > 65% of the energy is wasted. So, solar panels on the same land used for ethanol production (and subsidized -- which is a lose-lose-lose idea) can produce 39x times US electricity demand (assuming ChatGPT calculation is correct).