Cool idea but I wonder if in 100 years time, we have the opposite problem where corporations have built businesses around co2 removal and then they take too much.
Doubt it. The major problem with these projects is they inadequately address the volume of carbon needed to make a meaningful impact, and then you have to come up with ways to store the carbon, which is equally problematic.
This to me is a way to allow businesses to continue polluting at increasingly higher numbers because now we will ‘supposedly’ have technology that will just captures it so they can keep on being dirty, or possibly feel ok with being even dirtier than they used to be.
TLDR: They use a machine to capture carbon in the air. The machine solidifies the carbon into 3 inch square blocks that are then burned for energy.
Except that’s not what the article actually says. It says the carbon either goes to make concrete or gets pumped and stored underground. It does not get burned for energy.
… Which releases carbon into the air that is captured by these machines, pressed onto a 3 inch block and burned for energy.
It creates jobs and cleans the air.
Cleans the air of what?
I’m sure they’re hoping it cleans the air of people telling them to “do something” about “climate change” and let them get back to giving huge giveaways to oil companies.
Seriously, I might be wrong but last I knew carbon capture tech wasn’t anywhere near good enough. How long would this thing have to run to do much as break even on the emissions building it caused?
I remember Bill Gates talking about this like a decade ago and then nothing came of it, that’s all I remember
Spending that money on munitions for any existing coal plants would be more effective.
Decommissioning might be a better idea than artillery barrages.
Yeah, but that’s boring!
Regardless of the method, carbon capture is not going to work fast enough to make meaningfully change. The only realistic solution to keep earth from going runaway warming and becoming perhaps even another Venus, is to radically increase earth’s albedo to a point where the energy balans goes from +2W/m² to -2W/m², using brightening agents like sea salt for instance. In the mean time more realistic methods to manage CO2 en especially also methane levels in the atmosphere can be devised for the longer term.
I’m a fan of Lagrange Point solar shades that double as solar power collectors. Decrease sunlight and shitloads of solar energy that can be microwave-beamed to dirtside collection arrays.
I’m also a fan of science fiction-like solutions but only in the “oh that would be so cool!” sense, not as a viable solution to the current problem of what could be a runaway greenhouse heating cycle that turns earth into “Venus the 2nd”. Keep dreaming, though because what seemed like science fiction just decades ago is becoming reality today and as a future method to regulate earths temperature it seems at least worth a look.
using brightening agents like sea salt for instance.
Is this something that would be combined with desalination plants for drinking water?
Absolutely. Powered by solar or wind or what other green source is available.
Yep keep wasting our tax dollars you dipshits.
