Can't we just suck the carbon out of the air

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TL;DR

Hot take

Direct Air Capture is a technology that is in it’s infancy, will require ridiculous amounts of energy and needs to be located somewhere. It is orders of magnitude easier to avoid the emissions in the first place.

Explanation

The promise of direct air capture is like a fat pill - some easy solution we can take to wash away the sins of our past, cumulative emissions.

The reason we talk about net zero is because we want to balance out carbon emissions with carbon removals, rather than eliminating carbon emissions completely. When I say we want to, I mean that is what the world is planning for.

A lot of money - I mean billions of dollars, has gone into making DAC a reality. In mid 2022 we had enough of these facilities to capture around 8,000 tonnes of CO2 per year. Our annual emissions in 2023 were about 36.8 billion tonnes. 36,800,000,000 tonnes.

I really like the time machine analogy - we have enough of this technology to take us back 10 seconds in time. Or in other words, with an entire year’s worth of effort we can capture the emissions we make in just 10 seconds.

So we need more machines, or ideally: less emissions in the first place. More machines means more energy, so now we need even more renewables and batteries to power these things. We also need to put them somewhere.

People don’t want wind turbines and solar farms near their properties, they aren’t going to want to live near these loud industrial machines. The location of these in some cases is also limited to certain geologic locations if the CO2 is pumped underground. So you can’t just put them anywhere. All part of the challenge.