3w ago

Drift!!

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The key to motivating a capitalist nation to participate in carbon capture is to first discover a way to profit off of the captured carbon.
- That's simple enough, create a process where CO2 is removed from the air and turned into oil. The chemistry of the individual steps is already known and achievable, the hard part is the energy input required to make it work.
  Edit: Okay so I typed the reply and then went and read the paper. Turns out that what I described is kinda-sorta what they've done, although it's certainly not a finished or industrially viable process at this point.
  
  Exactly. There are already several prototypes for products ranging from plastics to construction materials to butter (yes, really) made from captured carbon.
  It needs to be profitable, desirable, and competitively priced (when applicable) for VCs to put their chips in the pot. That, we have yet to see.
  
  This is a bit of an issue when what they want out of the oil is the energy. If you have enough energy to make oil, why not just use the energy directly?
  
  the one vaguely sensible use case is as portable fuel, but then it raises questions such as "why do we still have combustion cars" and "don't cars actually kinda suck? shouldn't we be running more trains instead?"
  
  Yeah, hydrocarbons are probably going to be really good energy storage for airplanes and gas turbine generators. Outside of that, I don't see much use for a rare, dirty, hot, energy source. Rockets I guess.
- What if we started a cryptocurrency that can only be mined by capturing carbon /s
  
  Holy shit that might work lol
  
  until someone sets up a continous loop where it spews carbon into a sealed chamber which is captured, and then emitted again.
- Yeah, one of the most infuriating things, that we have to find ways for the people who caused the problem to profit from fixing it to get anything accomplished.
- Exactly. Paper straws are undoubtedly better for the environment but if they aren't cheaper to make I will eat my own ass

13 comments