World News

Ah, ClimeWorks. They also operate a plant in Iceland, which I used to offset a few minor car journeys. If I'd ever use a plane, I'd do the same.

That being said, the overall approach is very questionable. Even if the plants are run 100% by renewable energy, the question of opportunity costs remains. Is the whole grid already 100% renewable energy, or do we 'steal' low-carbon electricity from other appliances? Even if the whole grid was fully green, is DAC really the best use for the excess, or should we rather use it to produce green hydrogen, to prevent emissions elsewhere?

Direct Air Capture will be needed to stabilize our climate (or to reach neutrality by 2050 in the first place), which means we need to gain experience with it. But first and foremost we need to keep fossil fuels in the ground! Capture is economically and physically so expensive, it just isn't feasible to see it (regardless how, wether it's trees or fans) as an escape. It never will be. Keep fossil fuels it in the ground.

A guy in india is also removing carbon... by planting trees for decades now.

Carbon capture has had trillions and decades and still can't reach reasonable efficiency rates. Certainly real world performance is nowhere near what it would need to be to make a contribution to the environment.

The companies investing in CCS are the companies mining fossil fuels and natural gas. They are using CCS to divert funding away from renewables and to greenwash their current mining operations. In most cases the material captured is used in further mining operations. Like a 2xdmg to the environment bonus.

Carbon offset is a scam.

Id expect it to be cheaper to have pools of water and try to cultivate algae blooms then scoop it all into barrels and bury it than to run this technology.

Yes, it is not feasible; it costs more to extract it from the air than the benefit obtained from burning it, and then it still needs to be stored for at least a few hundred years in solid or gas form. Otherwise, it goes right back into the atmosphere and the effect will be null. We looked at a similar concept at my university, and the professor said, I quote, "Whoever comes up with these bullshit solutions does not really understand how climate change or physics works; it is not a solution to our problem." We also had a project like this in my city where they captured it just to sell it to a greenhouse, which releases it back into the atmosphere, so the concentration stays the same and, de facto, they have removed zero carbon from the air because it basically goes right back into the atmosphere. Actual solutions exist, but they are expensive and extensive; people will start implementing them in, let's say, 70-120 years from now, right around when we start feeling the full effects of rapid human-induced climate change.

The problem is not carbon, it's CO2. They are 2 very different things. Carbon is fine, carbon is literally life, CO2 has to be transformed in some other carbon-based substances, otherwise capturing it is literally doing nothing on the big scale.

Unless they are converting the captured CO2, this thing is useless overall.

Newspapers, companies and politicians should stop talking about carbon. It is confusing and plain wrong. No one needs de carbonization of anything, we need transformation of CO2

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The case for investing in Africa is heightened by the disproportionate impacts of climate change, such as extreme drought and flooding, on African nations that have contributed little to the world’s greenhouse gas emissions.

“There’s a real need for safeguards on where these projects are taking place,” said Ugbaad Kosar, the director of environmental justice at Carbon180, a climate nonprofit that advocates for equitable carbon removal.

The plant, projected to be completed by 2028, will be built in the Great Rift Valley, an intercontinental depression rich in deep basalt formations that extends across Kenya from Tanzania and onward to Ethiopia.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, a professor of philosophy specializing in climate justice at Georgetown University, said he was skeptical that the project would benefit Kenyans over protecting the companies’ bottom lines.

Whether the technology is helpful or harmful, most experts agree that direct air capture is limited by massive price tags, heavy energy requirements and lack of scalability.

Julie Gosalvez, chief marketing officer of Climeworks, said judging the potential of a technology based on its current efficiency is not right, adding that the company plans to bring their net carbon removal into the billions of metric tons over the next few decades.

The original article contains 936 words, the summary contains 201 words. Saved 79%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Oh, I see, someone is milking funds in Africa as well.