Kind reminder that the first solar panels had an efficiency of around 10%, and are now at 22%. The cost of photovoltaics has decreased 60% over the past decade alone.
Of course there is no ‘silver bullet’. But the researchers of the original article still recommend working on projects like these.
Science: “I know! . . What if we don’t fix the problem!”
Industry: Excellent. You’re hired. Have a lot of money.
But, we do have “technology” for direct carbon capture. Trees and plants. It will consume a lot of valuable real-estate, but we could plant a lot of plant life which would use carbon for growth.
There is just not enough will and to much economy incentives to not terraform earth.
Yeah, trees are pretty amazing! There’s also a mammoth amount of carbon capture in the ocean (more than land) mostly via plankton but also sea grass and the like.
Trees play a massive role in the ecosystem we’re part of aside from just being carbon stores. If we just focus on carbon storage and invent new tech that does that, it might somewhat improve the situation, but we’re really just kicking the can down the road, and waiting for our extraction based economy to cause chaos somewhere else.
You can do that, but not at anywhere near the scale of current emissions from fossil fuel burning.
Actually making any kind of removal meaningful means scaling down fossil fuel use to near zero compared with current extraction and burning.
Agreed, fossil energy sources add more climate gases to the eco balance. I suppose the original idea of “carbon capture” was to capture the excess and store it back under ground.
Or the original idea was to run a PR exercise for the fossil fuels industry, creating social permission to keep on extracting and burning.
There’s no serious scientist who believes in direct air carbon capture.
And yet wasn’t it central to the last ipcc report, that we could hold to 1.5C of we stopped all carbon emissions dead and came up with as yet not invented ways for carbon capture. And everyone said “sounds great someone should totally get on that”
More like “carbon capture you say? That sounds like a great reason to stop caring about emissions”
A bit more subtle than that but it can basically be read like that, yes. That’s the magic of ‘net zero’: overshoot now, find miracle cure later. That religious belief in tech is one of the many reasons why we’re fucked.
