We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech

I have spent a not inconsiderable amount of resources reducing my footprint and I will be thrilled to death if we can manage our way out of this crisis and people get "free lunches". This is just trivial game theory and the sunk cost fallacy.

Regrettably, the numbers involved make me pessimistic. I think your idea of some deus ex machina technology is ungrounded optimism, wishful thinking, or denial. Nothing in the linked article gives any cause for such optimism.

Climate change math is like the ballistics equation. It is just a cold hard reality check. There is no free lunch in terms of the energy of a chemical reaction.

We are all getting really, really close to failing here. I think it's imperative not to be hopeless about it, but we should be honest with ourselves that we may not have modern human civilization as we understand it within a generation or two [edit: unless we act immediately, not soon]

explain please

>If an extra charge of $10 / month for everyone in Europe would 'solve' the problem, why don't we do it?

Considering how much excise taxes Europeans pay on their gasoline, you would think that climate change would already be a solved issue. Taxes are a larger part of the cost of gasoline than the gasoline itself. Yet somehow there isn't enough money to fight climate change?! The Netherlands pays $3.53 per gallon purely in excise taxes.[0] Bulgaria, a country with an average income of $9000 a year[1], pays $1.61 a gallon in excise taxes.

[0] https://taxfoundation.org/gas-taxes-europe-2019/

[1] https://tradingeconomics.com/bulgaria/wages

What the article leaves to the conclusion is what needs to be stated up front and center: it's virtually impossible to do this efficiently, cheaply, or effectively because there's so little CO2 in the air, meaning

a) adding even a little bit more greatly affects the CO2 levels b) with a global ppm of ~400, it basically means that you need to filter 2500 molecules of air to get a single molecule of CO2, and that's assuming perfect binding and effectiveness. There is no magic powder we can mix that'll cause CO2 to precipitate out of the atmosphere and fall to the ground like snow; it's a grueling energy intensive process to filter that out of the air around us.

Yes, but forests capture carbon quickly until the average age of the trees starts increasing. So zero to 50 years is good, but after that things really slow down. The amount of wood becomes relatively constant.

So slowly, very slowly leaves fall/get eaten by bugs, break down, and get absorbed by new trees. But there is a net gain, just a very slow one. Then things like continents collide, mountain ranges come and go, and significant biomass gets buried and under pressure and time turns into oil/gas.

So for scale we could cut down all trees and bury it and take 638 gigatonnes out of our ecosystem. Not sure of the average tree age, but assuming it was replanted we could likely repeat that every 20-30 years.

The annual oil consumption looks to be around 36 billion barrels. Each weighs around 300 pounds. If my conversion is right that's about 4.9 Gigatonne.

So burying all trees every 30 years would be about 21.2 gigatonne a year or enough to offset all oil consumption AND decrease our current levels to pre-industrial levels.

Or we could just use less oil.