Between April 2021 and October 2024, British physicist Michael de Podesta paid £40 per month to carbon capture company Climeworks. In return, the company promised to remove 50 kilograms of carbon dioxide each month. But in September 2024, de Podesta wrote that “when I checked the other day they had removed precisely no CO₂ from the atmosphere”.
The following day, de Podesta wrote, “I conclude that I am indeed a gullible idiot.”
Climateworks’ business model involves selling carbon credits for CO₂ that it hopes to capture in the future
Good scam if you can convince people…so have they convinced anyone
Microsoft, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Stripe, Shopify, British Airways, Lego, Swiss Air, PwC, and TikTok.
Oh /s
I guess “in the future” is a promise you can always give, like “free beeer tomorrow”
There is absolutely no way to remove carbon from the atmosphere in quantities that will make any kind of difference. The only thing we can do is to stop polluting. This does not start with cars, it starts with cruise ships and industry. And since we all know that will never fucking , just celebrate the end of the world.
Honestly, I don’t even know why the sub exists.
Seconded. Plant life has spent hundreds of millions of years perfecting carbon capture. We’re so cocky as a species, thinking we can speed-run terraform tech and that might somehow allow us to continue our culture of constant growth without consequence.
Relying on carbon capture to fix climate change is like calling in a construction company to rebuild your house while it’s still actively on fire.
Probably worth trying though?
We can concentrate energy way better than plants can, so the possibility is there. The problem is that as Climateworks is a private company, they are not releasing the data that might help others.
The best part about all this is that once humans destroy themselves, the Earth will keep going and life on it will resume eventually. Humanity will, in the end, be just a blip. We will be hardly remembered.
This comforts me so much, as I hate the human species so fiercely! The Aliens movie scene where they have to make sure it doesn’t get off the planet is haunting now for me. We must, at all costs, make sure humans never get off this planet. We are a destructive force, a cancer.
“We told you so” (sponsored by 2nd law of thermodynamics)
I like those green algae bubblers set up on the exhausts of thermal powerplants, though, those are fun and work (partially), unlike this carbon capture fairytale bullshit.
It’s also kind of obvious by accounting for concentrations why this kind of carbon capture is a fairytale, isn’t it. Trying to capture from a carbon source like an exhaust, you’ll see a gas that’s easily 80% CO₂, compared to the meager 0,04% (400ppm) concentration in regular air. My guesstimate is that you’ll easily produce more CO₂ than you’re able to capture just trying to move enough CO₂ molecules through the capture device, even if you’re 100% efficient in capture.
Also a sidenote: I think carbon capture at the source has its use in combatting climate change, but we must not forget reduce > reuse > recycle. Carbon capture is very much recycling, so we should be careful to only do it for situations where it’s very hard to decarbonize.
The reasonable RCP pathways we’re trying to follow require us to remove a net 2 Gigatons of CO2 a year from the atmosphere per year.
And yeah we can’t really do it this way because of entropy unless we work a miracle, best we can do is tip the Earths natural carbon sinks into our favour but we’re doing the exact opposite of that.
Those carbon sinks can also take millenia to find a state of equilibrium as well.
I know I sound like a pessimist so here’s my take from this, these companies have insidiously compartmentalised an existential threat to our species to the confines of the economy.
These companies will never amount to anything significant, they will ride a model of perceived hype around some vaporware tech that flies in the face of thermodynamics.
This detracts from real solutions to a very real problem that falls beyond the comprehension of these arseholes and they don’t deserve our attention much less the time of day.
isn’t there already carbon capture with biochar?
https://ecologi.com/impact-shop/support-biochar-carbon-removal-projects
