this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2023
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Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR)
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CDR is removal of CO2 from the atmosphere - an essential basket of technologies for achieving UN IPCC best outcomes to mitigate climate change. This is a community for discussing advances and issues of CDR.
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It's the worst deal in history for us.
If it works, we'll probably have to pay tax dollars for pulbic contracts to remove CO2 from the air for the rest of our lives (do you think they'll clean it out of their own goodwill? For their own survival? Without charging us?). And that doesn't seem likely.
If it doesn't work, we're fucked.
Currently, we get a lot more millage out of reducing obvious carbon sources (transit with fossil fuel engines, meat production, cruise ships, energy production) or reducing inefficiency in other industries (textile, etc.). The problem with reducing at the source, I think, if if you go all in you'll quickly realize that it essentially means acknowledging we can't do as much as we could before (at least not until we've adapted, and that will take awhile). And that is poison to our system (politically and economically).
There is about 1000 gigatonnes of excess carbon dioxide in the Earth systems from the burning of fossil fuels. It is already THERE, and will not naturally return to the lithosphere in less than thousands of years. So that is a really terrible deal for sure. Of course we should not keep adding to the problem - we must get off fossil fuels as quickly as possible. But there are likely to be some hard-to-eliminate uses and there is already this giant legacy of CO2 we have to deal with. I don't think we have any actual choice to not do carbon dioxide removal - not and retain an appreciable percentage of the world's biodiversity.