301–310 of 349 posts
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What we need to offset the last 3 centuries of coal use is to reverse the process. Plant large amounts of trees, cut them, burn the hydrogen part of them, producing char and reclaiming some energy, then bury the resulting coal back in the abandoned coal mines.
> burn the hydrogen part of them Could you elaborate
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The is one trick that doesn't require political will. If you can make the microeconomics work it can be made to scale it self. E.G. Make CO2 extraction so cheap it's worth everyone doing it and say, make a market to sell the CO2 to farmers. Then make burying inedible bits of plants so cheap it's done on a large scale. Then you just wait. Microeconomics takes over. They did this with plastic clean up. By building a ma…
Buried plants make methane…
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In today's world there is a roadmap for a However Chinese domination, global geopolitics being changed and fossil fuel industries and countries still being extremely large and powerful make even choosing the obviously cheapest (and incidentally clean) option difficult in many parts of the world. Nonetheless, it seems much more optimistic today in 2025 than say 2015 speaking purely based on where technology stands
> However Chinese domination .. make even choosing the obviously cheapest (and incidentally clean) option difficult in many parts of the world. In what way? China has basically dwarfed solar installations of any other country combined for the last two years, and produces so many panels and so cheap that EU and US competitors are being driven out of business. China might be the reason we CAN make the transition actual…
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> most of us don't control any CO₂ production we can turn off. Uhm what? Driving? Flying? Heating? > Sure, it seems very unfeasible with current technology, but that is bound to improve as you work on it. Improve, yes. Break the laws of thermodynamics? No. You can improve a perpetual motion machine but it's never going to be useful.
Should every car owner personally optimize the CO₂ emissions of their car? I have definitely not argued against the laws of thermodynamics. I'm sorry, I don't even know what you're arguing for.
They can if they want to, maybe by buying a car with lower/zero emissions at the point of use?
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> most of us don't control any CO₂ production we can turn off. Uhm what? Driving? Flying? Heating? > Sure, it seems very unfeasible with current technology, but that is bound to improve as you work on it. Improve, yes. Break the laws of thermodynamics? No. You can improve a perpetual motion machine but it's never going to be useful.
Should every car owner personally optimize the CO₂ emissions of their car? I have definitely not argued against the laws of thermodynamics. I'm sorry, I don't even know what you're arguing for.
We're not asking people to stop breathing while there's no good DAC on the horizon, but I wonder what were the other important CO₂ producing activities you intend to do less of.
The following isn't breaking the law of thermodynamics; just wilfully ignoring it..
Gemini: >To offset a single typical gasoline car's emissions (around 4.6 metric tons CO2/year), you'd need a substantial fraction of a large DAC plant, as current large plants aim for 1 million tons/year, meaning many tiny DACs or a small portion of one large one; as of late 2025, the largest operating DAC (Mammoth) captures 36k tons, requiring about 80 such facilities to match one average ICE car's annual output, highlighting the massive scale-up needed, with projects like Texas's Stratos targeting 500k tons/year (equivalent to ~108 cars).
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> most of us don't control any CO₂ production we can turn off. Uhm what? Driving? Flying? Heating? > Sure, it seems very unfeasible with current technology, but that is bound to improve as you work on it. Improve, yes. Break the laws of thermodynamics? No. You can improve a perpetual motion machine but it's never going to be useful.
Should every car owner personally optimize the CO₂ emissions of their car? I have definitely not argued against the laws of thermodynamics. I'm sorry, I don't even know what you're arguing for.
Yes!! Obviously! Buy an electric/hybrid car or at least one with good fuel efficiency. Drive it in an efficient style. Try to avoid unnecessary journeys.
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The problem with any scheme to capture and store carbon from the atmosphere is the incredible amount of carbon we've blown into the air in the last 150 years. Just look at the size of the machines we use to harvest coal. Essentially you'd need to have machines of similar size working for many decades to re-bury the carbon we extracted and burned. Who's gonna pay for that?
There’s no getting around it. If we reduce CO2 emissions to zero it’s either plants or carbon capture, and one way or another the planet will have to do something with all that carbon. Last time it took plants millions of years, and that was before things started eating wood. I’m pretty sure that we’ll have to have a hand in the process if we want to reduce CO2 levels in timespans shorter than geological.
Well, instead of repeating myself manually, I'll paste in a comment of mine here from a past discussion on carbon capture: It's easy to forget why there is a bit of a challenge to getting C02 out of the air: there's so little of it, comparatively. In order, air is, broadly, made up of the following: Nitrogen: %78.084 Oxygen: %20.946 Argon: %00.934 CO2: %00.042 The stuff is essentially beyond a rounding error - it rea…
Indeed. I've always had trouble picturing how to efficiently "unmix the cake" too. CO2 is rare and throughout the whole atmospheric column. What kind of concentration gradient can you get going to meaningfully pull it out from everywhere in human timescales? (Sorry if this nerd-snipes someone stronger with calculus than me.)
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> high CO2 levels cause cognitive impairment Sounds seriously unlikely. How would this work in practice, at the level of bodily functions?
I don't know the mechanism, but: https://www.google.com/search?q=co2+cognitive+impairment