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Re:Can Geoengineering Fix Climate Change? by jillesvangurp on Saturday October 02, 2021 @10:56AM (#28729046)
Carbon capture schemes are over sold and so-far under deliver to such an extent that these schemes serve almost no purpose whatsoever other than green-washing the polluters it enables to continue to pollute. Most of these schemes have good old coal, gas, or oil companies backing them. Their only agenda: delay the shutdown of their planet destroying activity for as long as possible. They spend billions lobbying for that. It's actually way more than what they spend on actual carbon capture. Planting a few trees here and there and going to ridiculous lengths to put a few tonnes of actual captured CO2 in the ground while they continue to release CO2 by the mega tonnes.

The total amount of captured carbon (since people started doing that) is measured in tiny fractions of a percent of what we dump in the atmosphere every year. The best form of carbon capture is leaving it in the ground and not removing it from there to begin with. It would be cheaper to pay these companies to simply shut down their business than to allow them to keep making things worse and then funding the cleanup of their mess.

Before we start hacking our planet, we need to pull the plug on doing the things that are actively making things worse to a far larger extent than we can feasibly clean things up. Why spent billions re-capturing a fraction of what we actually still put out every year? Much cheaper to stop doing that. That's carbon we won't have to put back into the ground.

Even better: instead of spending money on that, we could simply stop spending public money on enabling the active adding of carbon to our atmosphere. I'm talking about the collective tax benefits, subsidies, government sponsored 'research', the odd bit of war fare in the middle east, etc. that the oil and gas industry continues to benefit from. That adds up to being way more than we're spending on renewable energy or indeed carbon capture. The amounts are measured in trillions.

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