If people could focus as much on climate as on AI.
this post was submitted on 17 Dec 2025
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Yep, only probably more than 30. Also, only when all our power generation has gone CO2 free, so all renewable and nuclear or (one day, one day) fusion.
Until then it's just a waste of power as the power to pull the CO2 out of the air generates more CO2 than you're capturing. If you have partial renewable, like now, routing renewable power to capturing CO2 is less efficient then just routing that renewable power to other places because those other places still will be generating more CO2 than you're capturing.
So until the entire world (except maybe airplanes) is on renewable electricity, don't even bother unless it's for research and making better CO2 capture
So doable if all energy growth going forward is clean?
One single company producing steel in Australia uses something like 3-5% of the entire state's energy so consumption at scale doesn't seem unreasonable
If this was the only limit (its not), and you were willing to dump large parts of economic output into something which isnt turning a profit. Those are really big issues
Can you define economic output
How about total cost of all goods and services. Pretty standard GDP way.
So break all the windows in your neighborhood and the GDP goes up?
Sounds like a good way to stimulate significant parts of the economy, infrastructure-like projects generally do
Its a lot cheaper and broader to avoid burning fossil fuels in the first place.
Is it actually cheaper? If so should be easy to subsidise the greener options
Yes. By a lot. In almost all applications.
The problem is that the fossil fuels industry holds a lot of political power and uses it to block shifting off fossil fuels
lol. we would need a direct air capture that does not produce more carbon than it captures in its total lifecycle. So maybe doable is our totaly energy infrastructure is otherwise clean. Solar, geo, wind, hydro, nuclear, etc still produce co2 in their lfecycle. Im not sure if we will ever get resource extraction or recycling to be 100$ non co2 producing. I have not seen a direct air capture system that does not even produce less carbon than captures if its energy is not carbonless and that does not even take into account the prodcution of it and as people point out the fact it would need to be built and run with no economic incentive except for what governments produce by direct payments or carbon taxes.