The conclusion: if we want to save ourselves from ever more dangerous weather there is no alternative to halting the production of carbon dioxide in the first place.
How to bait liberals:
Give them an expensive, futuristic sounding, many partner collaborationship having, sophomorically technically novel, red herring strategy that will work, assuming an infinite amount of optimism, and also time, and funding.
When time is known to be limited, and funding is known to be precarious to secure, at best.
When this strategy predictably fails, throw up your hands and say ‘well, I tried’, content in the effort expended on a fundamentally flawed strategy.
On that note, how well are incremental strategies working to address homelessness and the housing crisis going?
Do we need to run some more viability pilot programs?
Oh whats that? All your funding to all those programs just got yoinked, after not going far enough to make a publically noticeable impact?
Dang thats rough, nobody coulda seen that comin’.
No worries, the goal is to stop global warming and billionaires will soon throw money to something shiny like spraying diamonds and sulfur in the air.
Just more selling tech as savior to justify biz as usual.
This is at least less harmful than geo engineering.
… yet.
All tech takes time and effort to develop to a point where it’s useful. Sure there are a lot of dead ends too. But some carbon capture is better than none.
It really depends. If it displaces investment from a more effective solution, it’s worse. And if the side effects are worse than the benefits, it’s also worse.
the problem with carbon capture is it’s somewhat akin to saving money when you have loads of credit card debt. In order for it to make any sense at all you need the process to produce less carbon that powering it emits, which essentially means you have to power it with renewables, and until the world is on 100% renewables it would be better to just use them to replace fossil fuel production instead.
Sure. But it’s better than nothing. There are renewable power sources available. It might not make sense now but unless we push the tech forward, it will never get there. At one point solar and wind weren’t really viable options, but people pushed the tech forward and now they are.
If it’s powered by fissile fuels, it’s literally worse than nothing. If it’s powered by renewables then instead of powering the carbon capture plant, we could be using that same power to reduce dependence on fossil fuels which would cause less carbon to get into the atmosphere in the first place than you could remove with the plant. Until we’re at the “okay we’ve stopped the bleeding now we need to reverse the damage” phase, carbon capture is a pointless endeavour that only exists so that corporations can say “see? Doesn’t matter that we’re polluting, we’ll just fix it with magic technology!”
Edit: just realized that I and the article are talking about two different things. I’m talking about carbon capture plants, article is talking about carbon capture at the source. That’s what I get for not reading the article before commenting.
