Reality check on technologies to remove carbon dioxide from the air
An MIT Energy Initiative study finds many climate-stabilization plans are based on questionable assumptions about the future cost and deployment of “direct air capture” and therefore may not bring about promised reductions.
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But, we do have "technology" for direct carbon capture. Trees and plants. It will consume a lot of valuable real-estate, but we could plant a lot of plant life which would use carbon for growth.
There is just not enough will and to much economy incentives to not terraform earth.
You can do that, but not at anywhere near the scale of current emissions from fossil fuel burning.
Actually making any kind of removal meaningful means scaling down fossil fuel use to near zero compared with current extraction and burning.
Agreed, fossil energy sources add more climate gases to the eco balance. I suppose the original idea of "carbon capture" was to capture the excess and store it back under ground.
Or the original idea was to run a PR exercise for the fossil fuels industry, creating social permission to keep on extracting and burning.
Yeah, trees are pretty amazing! There's also a mammoth amount of carbon capture in the ocean (more than land) mostly via plankton but also sea grass and the like.
Trees play a massive role in the ecosystem we're part of aside from just being carbon stores. If we just focus on carbon storage and invent new tech that does that, it might somewhat improve the situation, but we're really just kicking the can down the road, and waiting for our extraction based economy to cause chaos somewhere else.
Only phytoplankton. Quite a lot of plankton biomass consists of animals and single-celled organisms that don't consume CO2.
Amazingly zooplankton does play a huge role in reducing CO2. The ocean carbon pump is a mammoth thing, and it's effects are just from the combined movement of life, not phytoplankton's direct FlCO2 storage.