Technology

60090 readers

5363 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

152

How Much Energy Would It Take to Pull Carbon Dioxide out of the Air? (www.wired.com)

submitted 6 months ago by jeffw to c/technology

72 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (2 children)

The problem is that this is a theoretical minimum, not an actual, proposed process. We'd need a way to attract CO2 to separate it from the rest of the air, and afaik that doesn't exist. Any actual process is likely to be far less than 100% efficient, probably an order of magnitude or more less.

This is an example of a real proposal, but I have no idea how efficient it is. It would be a lot more helpful if this article provided a realistic example instead of some back-of-the-napkin math.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Oh yeah, I agree it's super inefficient currently. But if the theoretical 100% efficient process is 5% of our current yearly energy expenditure, that sounds promising and suggests we shouldn't just write off the idea.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

Exactly. I want to see some investment into CO2 removal. If that's cheaper than retooling everything, we should do it. If it's not, we should do a little bit of it to help remove the negatives of climate change as we transition to a more responsible society.

I say we tax carbon emissions at around the theoretical removal cost, and then use some of that to invest in removal tech.

[–] shrugs 0 points 6 months ago (1 children)

We'd need a way to attract CO2 to separate it from the rest of the air, and afaik that doesn't exist.

Call me crazy but what about plants and trees?! 🤷🏼‍♂️

They might not be 100% efficient but it's dirt cheap to plant them, let alone not destroy the rest we still have

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

That's important too, but it doesn't scale very quickly, and requires a lot of space (read: lifestyle changes).