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Comment by jmward01 | Hacker News Reader

I am not against doing research in this area, please do, it is interesting and likely has many applications but global CO2 removal isn't one of them. Nothing proposed, including this, is within any orders of magnitude of a viable solution. The only solution we have is put less in the air in the first place. This tech looks interesting for transporting CO2 but that doesn't mean it sequesters it and even if sequestration was solved the scales here are massive. If we don't have the political will to reduce the amount going into the air then what makes anyone think we would have the political will to build out some system to capture and sequester? We need to focus more on not putting CO2 into the air and less on trying to take it out.

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> If we don't have the political will to reduce the amount going into the air then what makes anyone think we would have the political will to build out some system to capture and sequester?

Because political will requires coordination, building systems and turning them on doesn't have to!

> We need to focus more on not putting CO2 into the air and less on trying to take it out.

What part of the "we" in this coordination problem doesn't require political will?

The implicit model in "just emit less" is that human coordination problems are easier than engineering problems. That's historically backwards. We're extremely good at building things. We're terrible at getting everyone to sacrifice simultaneously for diffuse future benefits. Please generalize this!

Covid proved this generalisation is not a truism.

USofA was probably the only place that actively resisted the global effort.

I think people do want a better world. Greed is not universal. Most countries that grow a middle class find most people prefer to stop work. I.e. there are not that many infinitely greedy humans. And they can be taxed.

Despite neocon economic theory, most people aren't selfish. And those that are, are often happily rewarded with a plaque in their honor or a medal.

Just look at the length Trump goes to for an award.

COVID didn’t cost anyone anything in terms of improved standard of living. Curbing emissions growth would do that.

People aren’t “greedy,” but my family in Bangladesh absolutely wants to live like my family in America, or at the very least like my family in Canada. They don’t consider that “greedy” and if you tell them it is they’ll laugh at you.

The country’s CO2 emissions per person have increased by a factor of 5x since we left in 1989, consistent with per capita GDP going up by 10x. Even on an efficient development path it’s going to go up another 5x in order to increase the country’s GDP per capita another 10x, which will put it at the level of a poor eastern european country like Hungary or Croatia. That’s the earliest anyone is even going to listen to you about CO2 reduction.

Maybe with nuclear power? Are you already factoring that in under "an efficient development path"?

> COVID didn’t cost anyone anything in terms of improved standard of living. Curbing emissions growth would do that.

We live in a horrendously inefficient way. We ship everything from half way around the world in diesel ships, trucks, and trains, we buy shitty single-use plastic items packaged and shipped in single-use plastic packaging, we replace our phones instead of our batteries, our clothing and shoes degrade within a couple years, our restaurants and grocery stores throw away half the food they purchase, our agricultural system spends nitrogen and pesticides like they're free to grow corn as an industrial chemical component. I don't know exactly how much meat there is on that bone, but there's a whole lot of emissions we could remove that wouldn't negatively impact our lives and would probably improve them.

Forget how we live. Take the per capita CO2 output of Norway—which already generates 99% of its electricity using renewables—and somehow halve it. If the Indian subcontinent increases to that level, the added CO2 output alone will be double that of the entire EU currently.

And that’s the steady-state number. It’s impossible to believe that these countries can become twice as efficient as Norway, which already has a fully renewable grid, while building a ton of housing and infrastructure that Norway doesn’t have to build because it’s already built.

> USofA was probably the only place that actively resisted the global effort.

Really? China, Indonesia, Iran, South Korea, Italy, UK, Brazil, Tanzania, North Korea, etc.?

Making the COVID response sound like one global cooperative endeavor is some serious retcon'ing.

I strongly beg to differ. Building is the easy part. It is the political will that isn't. Try to build a train in California and it takes decades and you have a hundred different entities sabotaging you. Put five more lanes on a freeway and no drama, it just happens. We got to the moon when the political will was there but the engineering was still basically science fiction but once the political will dried up, even though the engineering was solved and 'easy', we couldn't get back. History is full of these examples.

I think you're actually agreeing with ctoth i.e. people think the engineering is difficult and politics is easy, BUT that's backwards if you look at history (which you then do). Political will IS the difficult part, and at least the three of us agree on that.

I guess my internal LLM hallucinated what I was expecting to read!

The is one trick that doesn't require political will. If you can make the microeconomics work it can be made to scale it self.

E.G. Make CO2 extraction so cheap it's worth everyone doing it and say, make a market to sell the CO2 to farmers. Then make burying inedible bits of plants so cheap it's done on a large scale.

Then you just wait. Microeconomics takes over.

They did this with plastic clean up. By building a machine that makes plastic into fuel & construction pellets. Then stuck such a machine on a plastic poluted island and waited.

For this trick. All you require from your políticans is that they don't lie or bomb the place.

Buried plants make methane…

This is true, but can be mitigated if the plant parts are first converted to to charcoal. It’s doable, but not trivial enough for farmers to do it without some other incentive.

Methane is valuable byproduct, which is easy to capture, store, and use at winter.

I think you have a point. It could be difficult to justify the cost of carbon capture based on sequestration alone. One of the reasons I think this might still work is that captured carbon can be used to create platform chemicals (various hydrocarbons) using the fischer tropsch process. Electrofuels are using direct air capture to generate fossil replacements.

Only requirement is energy and there too it isn't all that expensive to pull air in from the atmosphere or to seperate CO2 from adsorbent via low grade heat (70-100c)

So far into the future this method could allow us to continue produce critical hydrocarbon materials (used everywhere from plastics to pharamaceuticals) without having to depend upon concentrated and contested oil supplies.

More than energy efficiency its volumetric efficiency that's the issue. At the moment (to the best of my knowledge) kg of capturing materials capture tens of grams of CO2. Pulling it from air is not that energy intensive but finding materials that can actually filter out CO2 from that air is difficult. If breakthroughs are made in this area it will have industrial applications. Then it won't be just sequestering.

Of course the easier solution is to plant more trees and grasses but they grow very slowly and require valuable land. Still this approach is feasible in some uncultivable lands. Crops like cottongrass[1] can grow even in tundra climate and can be valuable source of both technically imp carbon via cellulose and a means to capture CO2. We don't have to make a choice. We can do both simultaneously.

[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/database/feis/plants/graminoid/eriva...

I wonder what the economics could look like for using this with remote solar for production instead of considering it for global removal/sequestration. If you build a solar farm in a desert and use this to pull raw materials from the air to create something actually worth money, what levels of efficiency do you need to make that profitable? How close is something like that in reality?

Giant miscanthus can grow on land that's not viable for farming food (other than grazing grasses), has a lot of properties that ready it for becoming charcoal (high tonnage per acre, self drying, minimal inputs needed). Without a price for carbon, it's hard to make it work, though.

Sequestering CO2 where it's highly concentrated, e.g. at power plants or cement factories exhausts, would be one way to emit less.

I've wondered if capturing carbon emissions from industrial-scale compost facilities would be a net positive. It would have the added benefit of the carbon initially being captured by natural organic processes (i.e. growing food), so it avoids the problem of the energy requirements from trying to just pull carbon from the ambient atmosphere. I don't know if this is feasible but I haven't seen any research on it.

What we need to offset the last 3 centuries of coal use is to reverse the process. Plant large amounts of trees, cut them, burn the hydrogen part of them, producing char and reclaiming some energy, then bury the resulting coal back in the abandoned coal mines.

Yeah, that too. There's not going to be one single solution, the problem is just too big for that. The idea with compost is that growing plants for food and dealing with the waste and excess (which is substantial) is something we're already doing, so can we tack carbon sequestration on top of that

> burn the hydrogen part of them

Could you elaborate

I guess Coke.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coke_(fuel)

How are we getting that out of a tree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charcoal

Did you ever do a barbecue? You first burn the light, hydrogen-rich substances of the firewood, with a large beautiful flame; that flame would burn down the meat, but it burns off quickly. What remains is charcoal, the source of most heat in the firewood; it does no produce a visible flame, but emits a lot of heat. It is mostly carbon.

Make char coal and store it underground.

This is called Carbon Capture and Storage and so far it has never been worth it energetically. And the only companies doing it are oil companies in a process known as enhanced recovery which pushes more co2 out than is pushed in. The OP was right. Better to leave it in the ground

You can have 100% renewable energy. You can't realistically produce cement or steel without using and exhausting large amounts of CO2. This has to be addressed, even if it costs energy (which, as we agreed, can be 100% carbon-neutral).

there is no world in which it is cheaper to produce steel releasing CO2 and recapturing than fobbing off recapture until later. the thermodynamics just don't work.

Sorry, I don't understand. You're comparing 2 things. For the 2nd thing, are you including the cost of later recapture or not?

If you're not including the cost of later recapture, then it's not a fair comparison.

If you are including the cost of later recapture, why is it cheaper to recapture later than to do so immediately?

I think OPs point is this tech is good only if you sink it after.

I. e. Collection is half the problem.

Collecting it in a way it's cheap to get it back again is potentially just less than minus half the problem.

Did a bit of searching: fizzy drinks companies sometimes go and get stored CO2 to put in drinks or make it.

Any atmospheric extraction has a net positive compared to that.

There are applications where weight still makes battery storage impossible. By capturing carbon, we may give ourselves the ability to harvest fuel from the air instead of the ground. Given the sometimes negative cost of electricity, this could make it more cost effective to do so. If we replace fossil fuel drilling with sequestration then we are at net zero.

This may be part of the solution … or maybe we find a way to make a utopia where we can all agree to just stop polluting. Historically, the utopia has no precedent that I am aware of.

> The only solution we have is put less in the air in the first place

That’s not a solution either, because the developing world is not going to stop increasing their CO2 output until they fully industrialize. They’re just not. Feel free to seek reductions where you can, but don’t think of it as a solution because it’s not.

The technical problems with CO2 capture are far more solvable than the sociological problems with net zero emissions.

I think they are, but more by accident. They’re going to industrialize with renewables, batteries, EVs and electric everything. It’s inevitable due to economics

They will increase emissions more slowly than European countries did at the same phase in their development, but emissions will still go up a ton compared to now. China's CO2 emissions per capita is now almost double that of France. India has gone from 0.5 tons/person in 1980 to over 2 tons/person today. They're building some renewables, but they're also building a ton of coal and gas. The EU retired 11 GW of coal in 2024, while China built 30GW and India built another 6 GW.

It's not just economics, it's logistics. Countries like Bangladesh don't have the space to build wind and solar, and they don't have the sophistication to manage long distance grids with batteries, EVs, etc. That's why they keep building more coal. They're not stupid, there is just are practical concerns these countries confront that don't exist in countries that have more central organizational capacity.

And the math just sucks. Say countries like India industrialize with a high percentage of renewables, etc., so they end up with developed economies at just double the current CO2 output of India (4 tons/capita). That would mean that the growth in CO2 output from the subcontinent alone (India+Pakistan+Bangladesh) would exceed the current CO2 output of the entire EU.

China couldn’t jump past the fossil fuel stage of technology development, but now its technology development and gigantic manufacturing capacity allows it to help poorer nations fully bypass that stage.

I think it’s entirely possible that giving first world money to poor nations to buy Chinese solar and batteries is a more cost effective solution to carbon emissions than paying western skilled labour wages to decarbonize energy production in the west.

Of course, I’m sure you’ll have tremendous success convincing “candy for dinner” American voters to pay third worlders to spend in China

You can’t use trends from 1980, because cheap renewables didn’t really exist until ~2023. 86% of all power generation china added in 2025 was renewable.

Renewable and battery is now ( recently) cheaper than coal. They are not stupid, that’s what they’re going to build, not coal. they’ll follow chinas trajectory closely, delayed by a couple of years. It’s well underway in Pakistan, just google their 2025 solar boom

Developing world generally has a lot more sunlight, and now very cheap solar energy.

It's not cheaper when you factor in the batteries, the need for sophisticated electric grids, etc. China and India continue to build huge amounts of coal power. It's not because they're too stupid to buy the cheaper option.

it is still cheaper. In the past decade, China has gone from their electricity being from 66% coal to under 58% this year, with the amount of wind and solar climbing from <5% to >12% over the same period. Their coal usage has gone up in absolute terms, but at current rates of solar and wind expansion that will reverse itself in the next 5 years with coal plants used increasingly as peaker plants. The only reason China is building coal plants still is that global pv production isn't sufficient to transition all power to it immediately.

> Solar panel imports will reduce fuel imports. The savings from avoiding diesel can repay the cost of a solar panel within six months in Nigeria, and even less in other countries. > The solar panels imported into Sierra Leone in the last 12 months, would generate electricity equivalent to 61% of the total reported 2023 electricity generation.

https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/the-first-evidence-...

A lot of people simply dont have electricity. They don't have grids. Night comes, it's dark. People are buying solar panels to get electricity directly. Now they can recharge lights during the day.

> China and India continue to build huge amounts of coal power.

One factor here is finance: companies make more money building coal plants. Banks loan the money so they can make money. Solar isn't as lucrative. It's the cheapest source of energy.

Actually, solar and other renewables are making it easy to skip legacy hydrocarbon based infrastructure and the 'developing world' (not the west) is snapping it up [1]. Additionally, the big problem countries aren't really the developing world. China is rapidly hitting its targets and other than a brief moment where they threw up a lot of coal fired generation to meet immediate demand it looks like they will very rapidly decarbonize in the coming years and start having so much excess renewable energy that they will pay people to use it for manufacturing [2][3].

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/30/climate/solar-south-afric...

[2] https://energy.economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/renewable/g...

[3]https://www.pv-magazine.com/2025/06/23/china-hits-1-tw-solar...

I wonder if we will see more DC grids. You can get a decent 5 - 20% efficiency improvement out of it as most end user devices are DC now.

Might be most devices by count, but certainly not by power consumption. EVs are the only major appliance that’s DC, and most people don’t even have them.

We'll need this tech later. If and when we get emissions to net zero we'll still have too much CO2 in the air. Better to have begun the research now.

We need this even if emissions went to zero overnight. World is a big place, can do more than one thing at a time.

Removing CO2 from the air is a pipe dream for several obvious reasons.

Firstly, it will always be more difficult and energy-intensive to extract CO2 than to just stop putting it into the atmosphere in the first place. Yet the world is nowhere near agreeing any meaningful framework on reducing emissions, and the party in power in the largest democracy in the world is in denial that a problem even exists.

But mainly, if there was an effective means of CO2 removal, who will be in charge of the dials, and who will set the targets?

Atmospheric CO2 is now 50% higher than when I was born. Will we go back to the levels as at the 60s, or perhaps the beginning of the industrial revolution? Obviously that is unfavorable to the frozen regions that are now thawing - like Russia (and Greenland), who benefit from climate change.

> Removing CO2 from the air is a pipe dream for several obvious reasons.

For me at least both your arguments are not obvious.

There are a lot of things that are harder to put in the atmosphere than to remove them. Stones for example.

The second one is less of an argument, but rather a question. Why not the UN, the US, China, or Europe?

Stop writing confident rhetorical takes on about which you know nothing.

You really created an account to post this?

Not just that, he burned a cool username for it. Shame on him!

It's not practical now but maybe in a more enlightened (and warm) future it may be? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_fertilization could be cheap for example.

Unfortunately, Technological solutions are more politically feasible than attempting to reduce via restrictions and regulations that require intense global coordination that does not exist.

You are 100% right that we _should_ be focusing on reducing emissions, but the reason we would prefer to capture-and-sequester is... money. We make money by emitting C02, and it looks like we will also pay to have it captured again. Is this madness? Also yes.

Someone will make a trillion dollars out of this.

There are 4 different categories of fixing the global CO2 challenge: a. Remove CO2 from atmosphere b. Prevent adding new CO2 from reaching atmosphere

This could also be a good use case for #b where CO2 is captured before being released to the atmosphere. For example factories and vehicles could be mandated to use this.

You might think it is silly to do this, but what if carbon emission trading makes this profitable?

That’s like asking what happens if gravity reverses, the answer is irrelevant because the situation is not going to happen.

When a question assumes as part of its premise that something is a good idea, it is no longer a meaningful question.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

Maybe we need to genetically engineer special of trees that are active only during the day and sleep at night. Photosynthesis at daytime and Dormancy at nighttime for maximum CO2 conversion.

"The Wizard and the Prophet" by Charles C Mann sets up an interesting duality that I think more people should be aware of.

Mann describes "Prophets" as people who see a problem and then try to prod people to change their behaviour in order to avoid it. e.g. Thomas Malthus observed that exponential population growth had humanity on track to experience severe famine, conflict, etc. that would violently and savagely bring our numbers back within the carrying capacity of the Earth. Multiple people have made predictions about when humanity would reach the brink at numerous points in the years since Malthus, but were always wrong about when the Malthusian trap would finally spring...

...because of "Wizards". Wizards are people who set about solving problems with tech. Advances like the use of fertilizer, first bat guano and then the Haber-Bosch process, followed by scientific crop breeding have effectively raised the carrying capacity of the Earth so much that, despite our exponentially ballooning numbers, there are far more calories per person available now than in Malthus' day.

Prophets are valuable for their ability to observe and raise awareness about problems. The Earth does have an ultimate carrying capacity too, which we should keep in mind even if we don't know what it is. However, the track record undeniably favours the Wizards. They get things done. Prophets hate this, because it makes it look like they were wrong. They weren't wrong. They were just too focused on an approach to the problem that rarely works.

The modern environmentalist movement is dominated by prophets. So much so, that wizards are often portrayed as the enemy. History has shown that this is wrong-headed. We should value prophets for what they do, but ignore them when they tell us not to fund the wizards.

Wizards invented guns, good for them, but now the order is tall: they need to figure out how to undo the effect of their bullets.

This. The fossil fuel industry continues to overflow the tub with CO2, but instead of turning off the tap, we keep trying to invent a better sponge.

We need carbon taxes, tariffs on high-emitting countries and products, and support for adopting clean energy, clean transportation, and clean everything else. Lobbying and misinformation has made these actual solutions politically impossible to implement though, so we continue to waste resources on sponges.

I'm going to have to disagree in a (hopefully) nuanced way. First, I just ran an end-to-end continent scale simulation of CO2 sequestration for the US, as is. To put it bluntly: there's no way outside of magical pocket sized fusion that will make this work. If you add full ground transportation abatement; full power abatement; and, then, use dedicated thermal sources, then the final cost is ~1 trillion a year. And, that's after all the positive upsides to the economy. There's a bunch of "almost unlimited upside" to be had from not having to move Miami, Houston, etc., but it's too complicated to model. However, just the healthcare implication upsides are roughly parity, disaster included.

But! Notice that abatement doesn't get us to 0. It merely slows the process. The remainder absolutely needs ACC. The output stream needs to be dirt cheap, the thermals need to be 100°C and not 900°C. Those sorts of things would bring ACC down to "hundreds of billions" rather than a trillion.

Zoidberg is always worth quoting.

“Why not both?”

Thank you

There's no general will, it's not specifically political will. Emitting less CO2 means doing less things or doing them for much more money due to high taxes to discourage it (and also disproportionately affect poor people). Other than some luddites I've never met anyone that genuinely was willing to sacrifice eating a nice steak or going on vacation unless they are millionaires, and that's only because those people know they can do it as much as they want. You have a huge mass of people getting lifted from poverty that will tell you to fuck off if you tell them that now they are finally out of eating rice and starving they can't have a steak, because of CO2.

All the things silicon valley "caviar communists" say you need to stop doing are basically the dreams of a whole mass of people coming out of poverty. Nice food, traveling, having a car, having A/C, etc.

So we can either find alternatives, or slowly figure out more geoengineering projects like mass absorbing CO2 and the like.

I grew up in a trailer, and last month I flew halfway across the country and ate at a Michelin star restaurant that fed me truffles flown from Italy.

I am definitely part of this group you describe.

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