I can't wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
I mean, this may get downvoted, but trees are just trying to live, not fix the climate. They are a very real part of the solution, but I’m fine with considering ‘supplements’.
Sometimes the enemy of the good is the perfect.
If the construction of these can provide a more efficient means of carbon capture than growing trees then turning those trees into building materials over and over …. It’s a good thing.
If not … it’s performative tbh.
It's performative, the biggest 'carbon capture' facility made so far, didn't even come close to offsetting its own carbon footprint.
Totally agree.
This feels like Big Oil PR.
Like, 'nothing to worry about, we can just scrub the air later.' Which is a total lie.
I thought someone did the math because co2 scrubbing and the facility would be size of Georgia and have to draw in hurricane winds
Yep, it is, in part, a scam diversion by the fossil fuel industry
Leave it to those ghouls to greenwash in a way that is actually a net negative, rather than just ineffectual
I wouldn't doubt it. Personally I'd rather they put down a field of mirrors to reflect the sunlight. I'd be curious how effective that would be
Fuck this postt, this is all fiction. There are initiatives that AMERICA IS DESTROYING.
Occidental and 1PointFive can't secure permits, let alone funding, it's all hand waving slop.
3 fucking minutes of research is all it takes
I knew it was bullshit the moment I saw "The US is building..." and it wasn't a concentration camp
so burning fossil fuels to take Carbon dioxide out of atmosphere? hmmm
We just need to put solar pannels on them!!!
Only if we would have natural solution to this problem.... Let's fuck up the planet even more by producing more shit. How about planting trees and stopping the deforestation.
Planting trees doesn’t produce revenue for billionaires and shareholders. This does. Ergo we must produce expensive, over engineered machines to replace trees. Bees are next.
Trees are inefficient too but we actually already know what we need to do to ramp up the efficiency of the photosynthesis process in trees with genetic tinkering.
The bigger problem is that we have reached a point where trees aren’t enough anymore. The oceans have acidified. There’s just too much co2 to capture at this point.
Correct me if I'm wrong but as far as I know trees are no real solution. Yes, they take CO2 to grow, but everything is released again when they die and are consumed by bacteria which just didn't exist a few million years ago. So they only ever store what the forest is made of and not a bit more. They will rot and never ever become coal again. So while it sounds nice to plant a forest and there are other benefits, when if we planted a forest on every inch of the planet it would not solve our problem. Am I wrong here? Tell me!
The net new total biomass of the forests would all be captured carbon. Yes dead trees may release it again but the total amount of trees would be higher and act as a large buffer.
That carbon will stay sequestered if the trees are cut down, and the wood is used to build something that lasts for a long time.
People will do anything other than planting more trees and looking after the worlds ocean ecosystem health. Most air is cleaned by algae in oceans and then trees in land, in that order. But people will just make machines for things which were taken care of by mother earth for millennia.
Only if there was a small pipe or "smoke stack" that could emit these in super high concentrations of CO2 where we could just pipe it straight to the ground instead of capturing it through the air. Better yet, if we find all of those sources we could even stop them producing in the first place and leaving all the carbon in the ground. 🤔
/s
Well we still need to capture the excess CO2 that we’ve pumped into the air for the last 200 years.
Direct air capture is a scam. It requires energy that comes from somewhere else. Capturing CO2 requires energy, it’s basic physics/chemistry.
Nothing about it makes sense excpet as an expensive boondoggle and a distraction for correcting the root causes of climate change.
Only need half a million of them to keep up with current emissions.
For comparison, there are far fewer power plants that release co2. Based on some rough estimates I foind, there are fewer than 10,000 in total plants, most have more than one generator.
And those turn a profit, no one is going to fund half a million capture plants. Building out more solar and wind is insanely more financially prudent. N.
Over building with nuclear power with its massive capital costs makes far more sense than these things.
These solutions always remind of this scene from Futurma.
The biggest carbon sink on the planet are oceans. We need to stop messing them up.
If they can make like the size of 100-floor building, maybe there will be some differences rather than using trees that only occupied horizontal plane.
I'll just leave this here in case people are actually falling for this scam. Planting trees is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective...
Trees very quickly stop being effective though. As soon as they die, they return all that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere
You'd also joined to plant billions of trees just to keep up with current CO2 emissions, let alone all part emissions
Basically, to convert all CO2 from the atmosphere into oxygen you'll need to spend the same amount of energy as you got out of it by burning fossil fuels. With losses included, you can triple that. Add to that the energy required to gather the CO2 and the e energy required to safely store it and you can easily quadruple it
So basically take all the energy we've generated since the industrial revolution, quadruple that, and that will be the amount of energy we'll need to spend to remove the CO2 from our atmosphere. If for the next, say, 200 years we stop emitting CO2 and double our output, we spend 50% of the world's power on CO2 scrubbing, we'd end up with a clean atmosphere. That is being generous
Planting a few trees won't do anything at all
Planting entire forests the size of larger countries would do little
We opened Pandora's box and it'll cost us centuries to close it
You're right about most of this, but the carbon doesn't return to the atmosphere "as soon as they die".
I have a log in the back garden that has been there for twenty years, there's wood houses a hundred years old
Wooden houses will typically have a waterproof roof and some kind of treatment to prevent them rotting. A log that's left outside will release all it's carbon in much less than a century. Human intervention is needed for trees to achieve permanent carbon capture.
That wasn't always the case, though. After trees evolved lignin, it took a while for fungi to evolve ligninase to digest it, so trees fell over and just got buried under more trees later without rotting, and that's where a significant fraction of all coal came from.
Carbon capture is the inverse of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). You have to dump energy (from the grid) into a chemical processes that "refines" the air back into concentrated carbon
The only way this thermodynamically is viable is with a surplus of carbon neutral energy
So either nuclear, or fusion
(There's no way solar or wind generate enough energy, for several decades at least)
I remember when people said the same of electric cars and grid scale solar and wind.
But planting trees doesn't provide transportation or electricity, it does pull CO2 directly from the atmosphere though. In this case you can compare the capture technology to trees planted on the same area of land and see which one is better land use for the same purpose.
carbon capture is always a bad idea because the energy it uses cancels out the co2 it pulls from the atmosphere
If you put it right on the exhaust of a power plant it should be good no? Or not good as in good good, but better than nothing.
I can't believe the ghouls in the Texas government let anyone past their ideological minefield to even get the permits signed, much less build the thing.
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