Direct air capture: our technology to capture CO₂

The company may not be interested until ordered by judge. Or resented an air cleaning bill. Or having loss of market when customers require ecology-aware approach. Sometimes companies aren't interested even then. Our job is to change this.

I have my priors & you have yours. "Your priors" seems to be that funneling money to large institutions fixes our problems. My prior is that funneling money to large institutions creates corruption & misaligned incentives. History has shown that large institutions which have utopian ideals make dreadful mistakes often based on a silver bullet mentality. If only we kill all of the sparrows there will be more food. If only we remove CO2 from the air, we will achieve some sort of balance...which has yet to be defined.

> This is a very simple, mostly linear switch on top of very very very complex systems, ie CO2 concentration.

Given how little we know about the Sun's cyclic behavior & the inaccuracies the climate models have been in their predictions...I am skeptical of your "silver bullet" assertion.

> Your argument is basically "we broke it, but if we fix it it will be more broken" and there's just no evidence for that, just speculation.

Actually, my argument is that the climate always changes throughout Earth's history. We broke nothing except polluting local areas, which btw is not measured with CO2. In Earth's geological history, there's more evidence that CO2 lags increases in temperature...indicating that CO2 is a side effect of increased temperature. The anthropocene is different as there are emissions from humans, yet there have been periods of mass burning from cosmic sources, volcanic activity, etc. During these times the "runaway greenhouse effect" failed to materialize.

The temperature records have shown an increase after we left an ice age a little more than 200 years ago. I'm not surprised that temperatures increase at the end of an ice age.

> As long as other bad policy decisions aren't made because of the existence of CO2 sequestration there is absolutely no reason not to use it, but it's one out of perhaps 100 major initiatives that will be required to get us back to a good level.

Mao & his scientists also had "absolutely no reason" not to kill all of the Sparrows. Within their contextual worldview, it was logical...yet in reality it was dreadfully wrong. Bad things happen when people & institutions become arrogant in their assertions & approach broader systems with dogma instead of curiosity.

The Earth has gone through periods of significantly higher CO2 & yet life flourished. Plant growth benefits from CO2.

> get us back to a good level

What indicates what a good level is? CO2 on Earth has gone through large fluctuations.

> you're living in a man-made climate crisis

Earth has gone through some far greater climatic variability than we are seeing today. The climate models models are speculative & horrible at predicting what will occur within a few years span, let alone decades. If we are so concerned about man-made impacts on the environment, why not concentrate on pollution that damages ecosystems & people instead? If we are concerned about climate change which has always occurred in Earth's history & will continue to occur, why not focus on helping people adjust to the impacts. Spending vast amounts of money based on speculative & inaccurate models is a terrible idea & will probably have "unforseen impacts".

Luckily this is probably dead on arrival. People are more interested in their own well being than appeasing some sort of doomsday scenario based on models that have so far been useless in their predictive abilities.

You started with a complex macro object and said it's difficult to reassemble. I noted that the reaction is actually simple, this isn't an information problem.

This is a technology problem, and one we are actively working on. And with the correct technology it is a not a large problem.

Trivial, really.

I disagree with none of your points. The only reason I can imagine for your comment is that you've misunderstood there term green washing perhaps? This is it's official definition:

> Greenwashing, also called "green sheen", is a form of advertising or marketing spin in which green PR and green marketing are deceptively used to persuade the public that an organization's products, aims and policies are environmentally friendly.

The socialized cost I was speaking about wasn't the resulting environmental degradation but the literal cost of both researching the technology and building sites which do it. That's why carbon capture is so beloved by the industry: they can offload the literal costs to society while virtue signaling by giving token support for this pointless effort.

To add another point to the carbon capture fiasco: the energy spent capturing the CO2 is quite significant, so it's not even certain that their CO2 contribution is subtractive at the end.