Re:What if carbon removal becomes the new Big Oil?
by rschneid on Sunday July 26, 2020 @10:29AM
(#23957279)
I wholeheartedly agree! I think this is a stumbling block that all too many folks encounter and then give up on seeing the idea as a solution to climate change altogether, but there's a rather clever fellow named Klaus Lackner who frames the solution in precisely these terms. Air Capture is a waste removal problem with financially viable solutions today... It's really just about getting the right diffusion of cost.
I found out about him and his uplifting work through an appearance on the podcast Manifold [1]. But you can also learn about his research directly through ASU [2, 3].
Personally, it made me feel like the problem was far more tractable than I previously intuited.
[1] https://manifoldlearning.com/episode-040/ [2] https://asunow.asu.edu/20190429-solutions-lackner-carbon-cap... [3] https://cnce.engineering.asu.edu/
If someone asked me if I wanted to contribute to a new freeway in my city that I'm not going to use directly, no I don't, the marginal benefit to me is too slight. But I appreciate having sophisticated infrastructure, and when I see infrastructure spending on the budget, I'm more or less content with it.
By the same token I don't for example pay for trees to be planted for every ton of CO2 I generate, but I'm happy for my taxes to go towards addressing the issue. If someone asked me if I'd like a tax break on the condition that it came out of that line-item, I wouldn't.