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> Recapture is good, but not nearly as good as not emitting the carbon in the first place. That's not necessarily true -- it depends on the marginal costs of e
by pjscott 5y ago
> Recapture is good, but not nearly as good as not emitting the carbon in the first place.
That's not necessarily true -- it depends on the marginal costs of each. Right now carbon capture is pretty expensive, but I can see that potentially changing with more investment put into it, which is what Stripe is trying to do.
- StewardMcOy 5y agoI'm mainly talking about the present and the near future. But there's more to the equation than carbon in, carbon out. Recapture isn't going to fix the non-warming issues with emissions, like ocean acidification. In a world without renewables, we'd never get to a place where the marginal costs of carbon capture would be lower than the marginal costs of burning fossil fuels for energy. The best hope for recapture is to be powered by cheap renewables. This requires having a lot more renewable capacity than we do now, which is absolutely something that's happening and should continue to happen, but it's not environmentally free. Mining and battery production/recycling/disposal have economic consequences. In its best form carbon recapture is trading emissions today for the promise that they'll be mostly recaptured in the future using renewables. But renewables also have to serve our other needs. So all the carbon we burn in the meantime creates more demands for solar panels, wind farms, dams, wave farms, and batteries in the future. Thus, it is better to not emit than to recapture. We recapture because we have ti.