4 ms·

And recapture isn’t going to be easy. We’d have to figure out how to drive the global economy off of the recapture process

Aachen 6y ago
If there are no significant emissions to tax, then fixing environmental damage done by past generations sounds like something for governments to pick up with public money. We also spend public money on forest management, wildlife bridges to create reasonably sized habitats, etc. It's also a while out. We have bigger issues today than "who's gonna suck back out some CO2 once we cut emissions sufficiently". We'll get to that in due time. For what it's worth, if you have unavoidable emissions today that you want to compensate, and want to also fund the people working on CO2 capturing technology, see https://climeworks.shop https://climeworks.shop for a pay-what-you-want option. I don't really believe in planting trees (which is way cheaper per ton of CO2 it claims to absolve you of), and these machines apparently emit "only" 10kg for every 100kg of CO2 captured (90% effective sounds reasonable), and it's accounted for who claimed which share of the machine's captured volume so it sounds directly effective to me. It's just that the scale is peanuts and will remain so until public bodies and companies start to run out of emission reduction options and decide to use it - but at that point we better have this tech geared up.
- imtringued 6y ago
  It's easier to just drive the prices of CO2 certificates up. A EU CO2 certificate for 1 ton of CO2 costs 25€. If you buy it and resell it at a higher price like 100€ it's either too expensive and will never be bought or if it will be bought you will be economically harming CO2 emitting companies.
  - Aachen 6y ago
    My initial thought is that funding those participating in an ineffective scheme does not strike me as the most helpful option. But I really don't know enough about it to comment on whether that is the case here, or if it might indeed make sense for me to do this. Do you know of any research (doesn't have to be published, a blog post with a good analysis is just as helpful) that looked into whether this is a good idea?

Aachen 6y ago

If there are no significant emissions to tax, then fixing environmental damage done by past generations sounds like something for governments to pick up with public money. We also spend public money on forest management, wildlife bridges to create reasonably sized habitats, etc. It's also a while out. We have bigger issues today than "who's gonna suck back out some CO2 once we cut emissions sufficiently". We'll get to that in due time. For what it's worth, if you have unavoidable emissions today that you want to compensate, and want to also fund the people working on CO2 capturing technology, see https://climeworks.shop https://climeworks.shop for a pay-what-you-want option. I don't really believe in planting trees (which is way cheaper per ton of CO2 it claims to absolve you of), and these machines apparently emit "only" 10kg for every 100kg of CO2 captured (90% effective sounds reasonable), and it's accounted for who claimed which share of the machine's captured volume so it sounds directly effective to me. It's just that the scale is peanuts and will remain so until public bodies and companies start to run out of emission reduction options and decide to use it - but at that point we better have this tech geared up.

imtringued 6y ago
It's easier to just drive the prices of CO2 certificates up. A EU CO2 certificate for 1 ton of CO2 costs 25€. If you buy it and resell it at a higher price like 100€ it's either too expensive and will never be bought or if it will be bought you will be economically harming CO2 emitting companies.
- Aachen 6y ago
  My initial thought is that funding those participating in an ineffective scheme does not strike me as the most helpful option. But I really don't know enough about it to comment on whether that is the case here, or if it might indeed make sense for me to do this. Do you know of any research (doesn't have to be published, a blog post with a good analysis is just as helpful) that looked into whether this is a good idea?