US will do literally anything other than reducing fossil fuel dependence
The funding was part of a law which mostly spends money on reducing fossil fuel dependence, and a little bit on carbon capture.
This should not be an alternative to reducing fossil but it could help mitigate the effects of climate change we have already signed up for. I hope we continue to invest in this technology.
The US is the most energy wasteful society ever seen, with a historic co2 foodprint putting others to shame. It’s time for the US to do it’s duty.
“vacuum greenhouse gases from the sky” … “many scientists are skeptical of the technology”
well … when you phrase it like that, I wonder why?
Basically: you can do it, but for almost all applications, it’s a lot cheaper to avoid burning fossil fuels than it is to remove CO2 from the atmosphere afterwards.
The problem is there’s a few hundred billion tonnes or so that needs removing and it can’t go from 0 to billions of tonnes per year overnight, but as soon as you start doing it publicly propagandists will flock to it and use it to delay more effective and pressing action.
Mitigating ongoing emissions is cheaper than removing well mixed past emissions.
Again. The machine needs to be in place a few years after all the low hanging fruit are picked in terms of new emissions (which is hopefully about 10 years away at the current pace of decarbonization technologies). But any public action on building the industrial base will be coopted to cause a delay. It’s a hard problem with no easy answer and one that needs to be worked on soon.
I hope this means someone sensible in one of the well funded militaries has thought about it and is building the required infrastructure to the scale of hundreds of millions of tonnes in secret so it can quickly scale to billions, but this seems like a stretch given who controls their purses.
Necessary
The article is mostly skeptical and most agree carbon capture is extremely inefficient compared to avoiding burning fossil fuels in the first place, which I agree with. But I also think in a broad strategy to leverage as many sectors and technologies as possible to fight climate change, using $1b from a $400b bill is not necessarily a bad thing, if only to diversify our approach or keep the potential alive for a breakthrough.
