this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago (15 children)

If we wanted to remove enough CO2 to get back to the preindustrial level of 280 ppm, it would take  2.39 x 10^20 joules of energy. For a reality check, that's almost as much as the world's total annual energy consumption (5.8 x 10^21 joules every year).

Isn't that over an order of magnitude difference? What am I missing? How is that "almost as much"?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago (4 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.

[–] shrugs 0 points 5 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 5 months ago

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

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