How carbon removal technology is like a time machine | Sucking greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere could help address climate change. So far, available technology is barely winding the clock back
We will likely need both carbon reduction and sequestration to actually be effective in reducing carbon emissions in general. Here's an article that touches on that and as well as goes over concerns about relying too much on carbon dioxide removal.
I get that carbon collection on industry exhausts are necessary and a must have for a lot of products (like steel). But other than that this is silly. Plant trees and use them to build stuff, plant new trees after that. Rinse, repeat.
Yeah the thing is that the sequestration takes more energy that we got before when we put it in. So I can see that we need it but its not effective until we essentially have carbon free energy serving all our needs and it would use the spare energy we don't need. Until then we have to cover more and more of what we are using today with carbon free or (much better) reduce what we use.
If the world is emitting just under 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide in a year, how far back in time could this year’s total carbon removal take us? Right now, the answer is somewhere around 10 seconds.