• FrostyCaveman@lemm.ee
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    1 year ago

    It’s always seemed nonsensical to me. Now I studied the computer stuff, not physics but… it seems like you’d need a gigafuckton (SI unit right there) of energy to get the CO2 levels down in an appreciable way when the levels were talking about here are in the hundreds of parts per million… just seems like it’d be incredibly inefficient at best

    • wosat@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      I’m with you. Also, it seems like it would be much more efficient to do carbon capture at the source, where the fuel is being used, like a power plant, where the concentrations are relatively high, compared to atmospheric capture where CO2 is less than 0.1%.

    • serratur@lemmy.wtf
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      1 year ago

      We would need clean energy production to cover demand and then have the capacity to produce excess energy for it to ever be anything to consider at all, we are nowhere close to that.

    • phoenixz@lemmy.ca
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      1 year ago

      We’ll actually HAVE to do it at one point but yeah, it will take a good 30-50% of the world’s energy budget for decades to centuries to do so.

      However, until we’re on 100% nuclear / renewable, you’re just generating 100 carbon for every 30 you capture. That’s where the stupidity lies. Even if you use renewable energy to power your capture plant, it still be more efficient to just route that energy directly into the grid where it would then avoid someone else having to generate the carbon to use the energy.