Because political will requires coordination, building systems and turning them on doesn't have to!

> We need to focus more on not putting CO2 into the air and less on trying to take it out.

What part of the "we" in this coordination problem doesn't require political will?

Only requirement is energy and there too it isn't all that expensive to pull air in from the atmosphere or to seperate CO2 from adsorbent via low grade heat (70-100c)

So far into the future this method could allow us to continue produce critical hydrocarbon materials (used everywhere from plastics to pharamaceuticals) without having to depend upon concentrated and contested oil supplies.

More than energy efficiency its volumetric efficiency that's the issue. At the moment (to the best of my knowledge) kg of capturing materials capture tens of grams of CO2. Pulling it from air is not that energy intensive but finding materials that can actually filter out CO2 from that air is difficult. If breakthroughs are made in this area it will have industrial applications. Then it won't be just sequestering.

Of course the easier solution is to plant more trees and grasses but they grow very slowly and require valuable land. Still this approach is feasible in some uncultivable lands. Crops like cottongrass[1] can grow even in tundra climate and can be valuable source of both technically imp carbon via cellulose and a means to capture CO2. We don't have to make a choice. We can do both simultaneously.

[1] https://www.fs.usda.gov/database/feis/plants/graminoid/eriva...

This may be part of the solution … or maybe we find a way to make a utopia where we can all agree to just stop polluting. Historically, the utopia has no precedent that I am aware of.

That’s not a solution either, because the developing world is not going to stop increasing their CO2 output until they fully industrialize. They’re just not. Feel free to seek reductions where you can, but don’t think of it as a solution because it’s not.

The technical problems with CO2 capture are far more solvable than the sociological problems with net zero emissions.

Firstly, it will always be more difficult and energy-intensive to extract CO2 than to just stop putting it into the atmosphere in the first place. Yet the world is nowhere near agreeing any meaningful framework on reducing emissions, and the party in power in the largest democracy in the world is in denial that a problem even exists.

But mainly, if there was an effective means of CO2 removal, who will be in charge of the dials, and who will set the targets?

Atmospheric CO2 is now 50% higher than when I was born. Will we go back to the levels as at the 60s, or perhaps the beginning of the industrial revolution? Obviously that is unfavorable to the frozen regions that are now thawing - like Russia (and Greenland), who benefit from climate change.

This could also be a good use case for #b where CO2 is captured before being released to the atmosphere. For example factories and vehicles could be mandated to use this.

But! Notice that abatement doesn't get us to 0. It merely slows the process. The remainder absolutely needs ACC. The output stream needs to be dirt cheap, the thermals need to be 100°C and not 900°C. Those sorts of things would bring ACC down to "hundreds of billions" rather than a trillion.

“Why not both?”

All the things silicon valley "caviar communists" say you need to stop doing are basically the dreams of a whole mass of people coming out of poverty. Nice food, traveling, having a car, having A/C, etc.

So we can either find alternatives, or slowly figure out more geoengineering projects like mass absorbing CO2 and the like.

Noticeable cognitive impairment starts in the 700-1000ppm range, whereas it is very common for homes to reach 2000-3000ppm, especially when in a closed bedroom.

I have no idea why the journalist that wrote this article choose to highlight the carbon density of the sub-header. It's almost completely irrelevant for carbon capture plants.

Another clear benefit is that it's a liquid.

Today people mostly use the substances that you called non-reversible in research plants (AFAIK, all plants are research right now). They are perfectly reversible, but that uses a lot of energy.

The hard part is capture and disposal.

https://www.researchgate.net/post/Minimum_necessary_concentr...

Imagine capturing CO2 to turn it into cement, used for constructions.

Pardon my ignorance, though.

Another concern, who will pay for maintenance ? See this for why you cannot let CO2 escape from underground storage:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Nyos_disaster

If stored near a populated area, hundreds of thousands could be kill, including all animals and insects, in a matter of minutes if the "vault" has a catastrophic failure. I would rather live near a nuclear waste site than a CO2 Site.

We and previous generations took out a loan and the payment is coming due.

Because of the framing about degrees in celcius change people are thinking in small numbers, like "oh, it's just 1.5'C over normal. oops, we missed that, well maybe we'll get it at 2.0'C. They don't realize that if we want normal we ahve to reduce the temperaure and to do that we need to take that c02 blanket off that we've been tightly wrapping around our collective bodies for decades.

And that endeavor is nearly unfathomable. Think of all the energy used by humanity since the industrial revolution and the energy we're going to be producing in the time period that we attempt to sequester the previously poduced C02. All of that needs to be accounted for.

And then there's the surplus energy roiling around in the system now, and the collapse of food webs.

I don't see how we get our way out of this in the next 50 years.

Recent article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/nov/28/africa-f...

Physics rules everything, once you start trying to run at scale.

The density of carbon per unit volume in solid materials of interest doesn't vary that much, whether you sink it in trees or in exotic materials like diamonds. That means you can calculate the volume of material required so sink a desired amount of atmospheric carbon.

If you want to have a measurable impact on the atmosphere, say dialing it back to 1980 CO2 levels, you're talking not about making a pile of stuff but about making a mountain range that's a mile high and hundreds of miles long.

Now figure out how many trucks you're going to need to move that much material from where your sequestering machine is to where your pile of stuff is.

Or if you want to dump that material in the ocean (which someone else will certainly object to), extend your calculation to figure out how many container trucks worth of material you need to dump into the ocean every hour to accomplish your atmospheric cleanup in whatever amount of time you choose (a decade? If it takes a century, that's not fast enough).

And finally think about surface to volume ratios. You're trying to sink it into a volume, but you can only get the gas into the volume through its surface, so the speed of your process is limited by surface area.

If you want to do it with trees, my personal spitball estimates are that you probably need to plant somewhere between the entire state of Connecticut and the entire state of Colorado to have the kind of impact one would want (there's more subtlety to tree calculations than one generally likes to admit, so feel free to come in with way higher numbers than I did).

Which brings us back to economics. If you have a well-managed forest of that size and scale, someone is eventually going to come along, maybe in 100 years, maybe in 500 years, and say "hey if we cut this down, we could burn the wood to heat our homes" and all that carbon goes back into the atmosphere, so you actually need to sink it into something that is energetically unfavorable for recovery, which means you also need to expand a huge amount of energy to sink the carbon into that energetically unfavorable state.

1. Even if we do magic and emit nothing, we still need to remove CO2 from the atmosphere or it will cook us over time, just longer.

2. We would need an enormous area for forests (which i great), which would mean a lot of intervention, like resettling people, demolishing and constructing new buildings, a lot of machinery time to move people to and from the new forests, a lot of planting and forest maintenance involved. And add he work to cut and bury resulting wood. If you would sum all the incidental emissions from this process it would rapidly become much less efficient (if at all).

Without either CO2 capture or a sun shade of some sort, the CO2 levels and temperature will only ever increase, just like now.

In this case, it looks like they get CO2 as a gas. It's cheaper because you don't have to use energy to undo the burning, but it's difficult to store for a long time.

(I'm not sure if someone tried to make a fake underground bog in abandoned mine. Just fill with wood and water to keep the oxygen low and make the wood decompose slowly.)

For those curious about numbers for 2025, a couple links: https://optics.marine.usf.edu/projects/SaWS/pdf/Sargassum_ou... https://abcnews.go.com/International/scientists-concerned-re...

> Nobody is certain why the sargassum has appeared in such volume lately

For the record 2025 volumes specifically, the ABC article notes that sudden phosphorus flushes as a result of multi-year drought-hit watersheds finally being flushed out likely contributed. Ocean ecology at scale is usually highly correlated with nutrient density.

I feel like anything I hear about that teases net negative sequestration at scale eventually falls apart or is found to be akin to a perpetual energy machine that eventually is debunked.

https://oceanvisions.org/ocean-alkalinity-enhancement/

But in general carbon absorption by oceans leads to acidification and habitat destruction.

Why would it gather more CO2 over there than it does where it already is?

One application I think is neat is that it’s a pretty robust refrigerant in a heat pump application.

On a much smaller scale I've been hoping for a small solar powered CO2 compressor to exist so I could use it for mosquito traps. The state of the art for those right now is burning propane for the CO2 combined with a scent emitter for the human smell to attract female mosquitos.

Synthetic materials is another. For example carbon electrodes for batteries.

CO2 is fairly inert. This makes it useful. Welding steel is a typical example of something you can use CO2 to shield. There are many other examples in the chemicals industries of things like that where you want to do something at a "higher than natural on earth" temperature to make a reaction happen or happen faster but you don't want that reaction to happen with oxygen all around.

And on the other end of the temperature spectrum....dry ice.

Electro Carbon https://www.electrocarbon.ca/en

https://sustainablebiz.ca/clear-the-runway-electro-carbon-be...

Their process for generating potassium formate is greener than standard methods. It does require electricity as an input but that can come from renewable, green sources.

Potassium formate is used in de-icing products, fertilizer, heat transfer fluids, drilling fluid, etc... so a useful, monetizeable output comes out of the process.

Disclosure - Know the founders personally. Wanted to shoutout their work. No financial ties to the company.Chemistry is not at all my expertise & I don't have details on their process beyond what's on the website.

IDK, build houses out of limestone like we have been doing for ages.

/s

One of the subplots from the excellent Delta-V series by Daniel Suarez.

It seems like we have not yet done the full circle, but we are close.