The New Climate Gold Rush: Scrubbing Carbon From the Sky

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/climate/carbon-capture-global-warming.html?smid=re-share

by Slight_Bat5565

8 comments

  3. Capitalism will not save the planet.
    Article highlight:
    “There are a few dozen facilities operational today, including ones in Iceland and California. But the biggest of these capture only a sliver of the greenhouse gases humans produce in one day. Even if hundreds more such plants were built, they would not come close to counteracting even 1 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions.

    “Let’s not pretend that it’s going to become available within the time frame we need to reduce emissions,” said former Vice President Al Gore, a co-founder of Climate Trace, which maps global greenhouse gas emissions.

  4. Capitalism will save the planet, but you have to have regulation that targets ending emissions. Regulatory capture is the problem. If there’s a load of money to be made capturing and restricting emissions, the best way to fund the projects is by borrowing.

  5. We burn millions of tons of coal per year. No one is capturing and storing millions of tons of CO2.

    This is a red herring to detract from the damage the fossil fuel industry is continuing to cause.

  6. How much energy are these carbon capture technologies going to suck up?
    My money would be to bet on carbon capture just ending up as a ploy for corporations to continue what they’re doing to maximize profit and avoid changing anything else.

  7. tax emissions directly – its the simple ans effective answer and the one the fossil fuel industry has adamantly opposed and undermined government’s to avoid since before the Kyoto Protocol was signed in 1997.

  8. FWIW [direct air capture is an absolutely trivial fraction of overall climate venture capital](https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/esg/climate-tech-investment-adaptation-ai.html), which has on the whole been shrinking. It comes nowhere near removing even 1% of current yearly emissions.

    It’s basically a few rich people making a bet that they can get paid to run a PR operation for the fossil fuels industry, in the hope that the underlying technology might eventually be deployed by government at scale.

    Also, a [gift link to the original article](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/22/climate/carbon-capture-global-warming.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jU4.lotR.dX7cHq5inGWr) for people who actually want to read it.

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