GunnarSturla

I don't think this example counters the gender neutrality of "guys". Have you ever observed a straight man talk about the people he's dated?

Yes, you could say burning of fossil fuels is a reversal of some sorts, but the earth has always stored some amount of carbon (with some of it released in volcanic eruptions). But the carbon we've re-introduced into the atmosphere had been sequestered for a long time (thousands or millions of years?) and for all intents and purposes wasn't a part of the cycle.

I guess we could create synthetic polymers and store them, but the scale of the problem is just so insanely massive. We'd need a place to store all that plastic (I don't even know where to begin to do the math, but we use around 10 gigatons of carbon each year [1] so it would take up some amount of space), and we'd also have to hope that bacteria won't develop that can digest it

[1] https://www.wri.org/insights/co2-emissions-climb-all-time-hi...

We should do that too, but then the question becomes what to do with the carbon. It turns out that getting rid of it in a safe way is a pretty difficult problem. The solution that's described in the article needs a lot of freshwater and the right type of rock for it to flow through so it can't be done where most of the power plants are located.

That leaves basically two solutions; capture the carbon from the air, which takes a lot of energy, or ship it with tankers. The first is being done (at a small scale) and the second is being worked on.

In an ideal world, we wouldn't have power plants that release carbon, but that's another discussion :)

One note about Climeworks is that Climeworks only operates the carbon capture part of CCS. Climeworks can not store the carbon themselves so they rely on re-use of the carbon, or buying storage from other companies, mostly Carbfix (afik).

Carbfix, has been researching the storage part for a while now, and they plan to import CO2 to their facilities in Iceland with tankers from European polluters (crazy idea, but apparently works out).

If we trap it in biomass, it will escape if anything happens to the ecosystem storing the carbon (like a forest fire).

The fundamental problem is that the earth was in a balance, with regards to carbon; a bunch was trapped in biomass, and cycled through the carbon cycle [1]. Then humanity did two things; we destroyed a lot of carbon stores (with agriculture, deforestation and setting off soil erosion), and (more importantly) dug up and released even more carbon into the carbon cycle. It will not be enough for us to only trap it in biomass, we need to permanently remove it from the cycle.

We definitely need to do both, and storing carbon in biomass is probably more cost-effective currently, but if we're going to restore the balance, we'll need more than biomass.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_cycle

GitHub is having some issues too