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Comment by IneffablePigeon | Hacker News Reader

The conditions leading to the Cold War were reversible, this crisis is becoming very much less so. Despite what the carbon capture techno optimists say.

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If you actually look at the numbers of carbon capture its entirely obvious that it can't work. It's honestly strange to me that they even waste money on it, personally I think it's a distraction - "look we're working on a fix, now let us just pump up the rest of this oil in the mean time and we'll definitely fix it later".

In order to just offset our current emissions, we would need around a million carbon capture facilities equivalent to the largest one we currently have. For comparison, the number of power plants in the entire world is a few tens of thousands. So we'd need maybe like 50 times as many capture plants as we currently have power plants.

Like it's not even in the neighbourhood of realistic, it's just completely infeasible and I am sure engineers know that. You basically need to suck the whole atmosphere through facilities, and there's a lot of atmosphere.

I think you're measuring one method against a goal it wasn't set for. I assume you are referring to Mammoth direct air capture in your comment -- Stratos in Texas will soon be up, at ~15x the size of Mammoth. But DAC is only one method, and it's the hardest to scale. Just look at options outside of DAC, like Vaulted Deep, whose costs (financially and energy-wise) are far lower.

I do agree that it's unlikely that we can ignore reduction and just depend on purely scaling capture, especially if we care about avoiding more negative climate effects as the scaling goes on. But to say it is "completely infeasible" is not accurate.

A 15x improvement over mammoth (spot on by the way) is still many times more capture plants than we have power plants. And there's limits to the efficiency of these facilities in terms of how much air they can consume per day. Not to mention the carbon costs of building and operating them.

Maybe I'm wrong, I'm certainly not an expert. It just seems like a hopeless case to me. Even if they make one significantly more effective than this Stratos you mentioned, we're still talking about tens of thousands of them to have a real impact.

>The conditions leading to the Cold War were reversible, this crisis is becoming very much less so.

During the covid start lockdowns when everyone was forced to WFH and nobody was driving to work for a couple of weeks, we saw a massive decrease in CO2 and emissions. So it can be reversed, we just don't want to because we gotta keep the GDP hamster wheel moving

We did not see a massive decrease. We saw a short-lived drop to levels normal in the mid tens. It is barely a blip on the graph. WFH won’t save us, unfortunately.

My bad, I was only talking about the readings in my city, not the whole planet. I assumed it would scale to the whole planet in that period.

Ah. I’d consider _city-level_ readings an absolutely useless metric here, because, particularly if it’s a city with a large commuter hinterland, a lot of people were simply not present in the city, but still existed out there somewhere, running their heating/cooling/etc. Daytime populations of large cities generally dropped during the covid wfh period, so yeah, no shit CO2 emissions dropped; people were off emitting CO2 elsewhere.

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