We definitely shouldn't let corporations to use carbon capture to greenwash themselves but doesn't mean we should stop any research in carbon capture.
this post was submitted on 02 Sep 2024
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The problem is we set a target of "net zero" by <in 2 decades>. So naturally companies will do it the cheapest way that requires the least changes to their business.
We don't need "net zero" we need "as closest to total zero as possible".
If the carbon is properly sequestered after capture, and the energy use is accounted for in emissions, wouldn't net zero be just as good as zero? It's almost always going to be way more expensive to take the carbon back out of the atmosphere than to not emit it in the first place, so I'd think you'd get mostly the same effect.
That if is the biggest issue. These carbon calculations require a lot of math and assumptions and uncertainty to work. In the global economy with many steps along the path from source to sink, every actor has an incentive to make things look better than they actually are. So research on the topic has found a wide variety of issues with carbon offsets and other strategies that aren’t direct reductions of in emissions. So it’s pretty likely that net zero would not actually be net zero. Reducing emissions directly is much easier to verify.
Also, millions die from air pollution every year and net zero doesn’t do anything about that.
No, it wouldn't. Nature is not a bank account where you can do debits and deposits. Because if you emit today and capture tomorrow, the carbon is still out causing harm for a day. And if you emit in a country and capture in another, the carbon would have to travel from origin to capture point. The only carbon capture that is effective is on-sight carbon capture at the place of production. No planting trees, no sucking air out of the atmosphere.
Even if we hit total zero tomorrow that still wouldn't save us, at this point. We need negative. Corporations and capitalism aren't gonna get us there, though.
If we hit net zero tomorrow it would prevent the vast majority of human suffering from climate change.
And since that just isn’t possible, we’ll also need net negative.
None of this should diminish the urgency if stopping greenhouse gas release.
Again, has this not been bs on repeat for decades now?
Don't worry about our pollution, look at this thing we made that makes the mess we made okay. It'll work this time, really
Carbon capture as a solution where you use power to filter out CO2 from the atmosphere is ONLY a viable strategy if we can make 100% carbon free power.
Until then you'd use 100 CO2 generating power to (after all losees) capture 30 CO2, it's dumb. If you use a solar powered system instead, you still are losing as now someone else that could have used your solar power is using 100 CO2 while you pull only 30 out...
Once everything runs on CO2 free power, THEN it makes sense to start carbon capture, until then it's only playfully pretending while making the situation actively worse.