Honestly, we could have dealt with this back in the 90's but capitalism said "No."
Theoretically it gets converted into rocks - basically speeding up one of our planet's natural forms of carbon sequestration. Their funding is a mix of government grants and corporations looking for ways to offset future or legacy emissions. Climeworks website answers a lot of these questions pretty clearly. Whether it's all accurate is an open question, of course, but when I looked into it in the past Climeworks was a lot less sketchy than some of the other DAC+S companies. It's been interesting keeping an eye on them.
I was guessing earlier, but it turns out Climeworks has a page about this.
See the above page - it runs off of geothermal energy and theoretically off-sets much more carbon than it creates.
According to the IEA there are 130 large scale plants currently in development. They say:
I'm skeptical that all of those plants will get to the operational stage but I guess we'll see.
Can you plant more than 790 trees on the same area that this machine needs? If so, trees are a better plan lmao.
We already have those! Plants, trees, plankton... are self-replicating carbon capture devices! These are more efficient than any machines we make. They are also enough. If capitalists wouldn't literally set the forests on fire to make a buck. Because that's the real issue. You can't plant a tree and then next to you they're chopping half the rain forest, we need to stop them doing that.
"From the moment I understood the weakness of my flesh, it disgusted me. I craved the strength and certainty of steel. I aspired to the purity of the Blessed Machine."
Yes. I think we should be doing everything possible. Plant trees and nurture our current forests, and scale up carbon capture technology. Putting the technology at odds with the planting of trees like we can only do one or the other bothers me a lot.
The reason why people are 'doomers' about projects like these is because the world isn't changing any of its other behaviours and are basically hoping for tech solutionism to solve a problem.
Oh wow, a drop in the bucket! I had no idea! I guess that means it's better to not do anything, not try any solutions, and not plant trees. I mean, after all, if we can't plant 42 million trees a day, what's even the point in trying anything? Shame that this company is also the one doing the deforestation or something. A shame also that they claim is the complete end of the climate crisis and have told everyone else to stop doing anything to mitigate things.1.5 million trees! Wow. That's a lot! I wonder how much one would need to curb deforestation to achieve the same results...
...About 3% of a day of deforestation worldwide. Now which is more scalable in the short, medium or long run? If you could stop deforestation in the Amazon for single day, it would achieve the same net results as what that plant can do for a year. "We can do both" and why aren't we then? Is it because we live in a globalized system that justifies 42 million trees being cut down every single day because some day somehow an industrial project will be scalable and efficient enough to offset this?
...Nah, it's because every square meter of habitable land matters... for those who can buy it anyway.
The point is that we actually know the solutions. The problem is that no one wants to give up their current quality of life to implement those solutions, so it is what it is.
Right, and in the meantime, we do this, and everything else we can thing of - which still doesn't make this, as some people seem to be thinking, a bad thing.
The 'bad thing' comes when people think they don't need to change because this technology exists, as mentioned in the OP's article. The fact that oil companies are bullish on this technology should be enough of a red flag at least, like cigarette companies investing in vapes.
And that's on other entities, while the same can be said for literally any climate action ever taken. Certainly any action possible within the control of a non-lawmaking group like this one.
It's more like "cutting down one tree saves 1.1 trees". The hope is that eventually the process gets more efficient and cutting down 1 tree would save 2 trees, then maybe 5, then maybe 20. But if we stop cutting down 1 tree to save 1.1 because cutting down trees is always bad, we'll never get there.
Well, I can tell you I'd most definitely be dunking on people who say one day of 3% reduction in deforestation is bad, is greenwashing, is capitalism run amok, and so on. Small companies and people, turns out, aren't governments and can only do so much, and until said megacorps/governments do start moving with more urgency, yeah 3% reduction is pretty unequivocally a win. A huge win? No, but I never said that, never said other efforts shouldn't also happen, and wouldn't call a few forum posts as "championing mankind" or whatever. I'll take any improvement I can get from anywhere, and my sentiment is one far more opposed to Giant Step Doomers than it is positive feelings towards this particular project.
I just want to know what "Quality Of Life" means. What is everyone going to be giving up in the short term, the medium term, and the long term to help fight climate change? What "Quality Of Life" items beyond red meat and fish and off-season fruit and cars and stuff like one-day Amazon shipping are people going to be giving up?
ourworldindata.org
That's the issue. This is a bad thing. This is a net negative. A huge waste of energy that could have gone to preventing 15 times the emissions this captured. This exists solely to make some VCs rich, nothing else.
I'm not a meteorologist so I don't know exactly how bad the different scenarios look like. If we immediately stopped all CO2 today, would the planet still be warm enough for sea levels to continue rising as the icebergs that broke off continue to melt? Would we have worse and worse "rare" weather phenomena happening regularly? I don't know.
