> If, for example, we somehow capture 20% more of the solar energy we receive on the surface and do not return it to space, we will cook ourselves. In other wor

> If, for example, we somehow capture 20% more of the solar energy we receive on the surface and do not return it to space, we will cook ourselves. In other words, any so-called solution that seeks to transform solar energy into magical beans to precipitate CO2 from the atmosphere has provide solid accounting of how it will affect energy balance. After all, a CO2 reduction solution isn't so unless it can operate at a planetary scale. And, because of that, it will require an astronomical amount of energy and matter to work. Trees and algae did it once. We can do it again with PVs which are 10-20x as efficient as photosynthesis. Also you're conflating renewable energy and geoengineering. Stopping the output is a much more tractable problem than gathering CO2 and doing something with it at 500ppm. For the former, you only need to pull a few economic levers, make some very rich people very angry, and current technology makes new fossil fuel extraction very difficult. For the latter, we have the technology, and the costs are even small compared to the amount of public money spent on suppressing prices of fossil fuels (a couple trillion would cover the energy, and a few trillion for sabatier reactors is small compared to just the most recent gulf wars) but the political problem is probably intractable under capitalism. More realistically geoengineering will likely take a less energy intensive form like high altitude sulfate seeding and have major 'unforseen' consequences that hurt people outside the global north.