this post was submitted on 08 Mar 2026
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Climate
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Discussion of climate, how it is changing, activism around that, the politics, and the energy systems change we need in order to stabilize things.
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Nothing is as cheap, efficient and effective as not emitting CO2 in the first place.
Only an economist could recommend both smearing shit all over everything, then hiring an army of cleaners to clean the shit.
True, and until every power generation possible has been changed to non CO2 emissions it's not only less efficient, the CO2 extraction would actually end up adding CO2 because of what you said
Having said that, at some point when we do have everything running on carbon neutral, we still have the issue of CO2 levels being well over twice as high
THAT is the moment we need to star scrubbing, it will be a necessity because the world can't handle this by itself (at least not for millennia)
We already have countries where there are so many solar panels that the price of electricity goes negative on summer afternoons. Even if we build enough storage to carry that energy from afternoon to night, it's simply unfeasible to have enough storage to carry that energy from summer to winter.
So in the process of getting carbon-neutral in winter, we're going to have a massive amount of excess electricity in summer. We need some industry to spend all that free electicity, so why not carbon capture tech?
That's not a rhetorical question - any industry that is better than carbon capture tech will do - but right now the most likely claimants are terrible options like AI data centers or designing buildings to have less natural cooling and more air conditioning. And if we're going to use carbon capture tech at some point, better we have some small-scale experiments before that to work the kinks out.