> Eventually people do the math. Well let's do the math. There are a variety of methods, no one alone will suffice. Let's consider a combination regenerative

> Eventually people do the math. Well let's do the math. There are a variety of methods, no one alone will suffice. Let's consider a combination regenerative agriculture and plantation cellose crops like bamboo or timber as one small part. There are many variations, but a lot of them make useful stuff (or just dryable things or better soil to improve productivity next year) out of about 20t of carbon per year. It doesn't matter what so long as it gets buried. We'll take as our resource half of the land that is currently used for animal feed and ethanol. A low meat diet is a reasonable price to pay by splitting the rest of the animal feed land 50/50 for the remaining 25% of grain/soy fed animals and protein for human consumption. So we have about 400 million hectares. I'll assume we can replace 90% of emissions with some combination of nuclear, renewables, and efficiency improvements. This will happen basically on its own now without radical and rather extreme measures to prop up fossil fuels -- we can still hurry it up by several decades though. Our 400 million hectares can sequester 8bn tonnes of carbon each year. That's about one ppm. Need half for our remaining 4bn tonnes or so of emissions so this method alone can achieve a 100ppm reduction in a couple of centuries. Not great, but a start. Is it going to happen? Probably not, the social problems are really hard. But it indicates fairly definitively that the scale of the problem is a human one (it can be done with methods we know using resources we already use). It also disproves the assertion that machine-derived work well in excess of the heat initially released has to be put in to solve the problem. You don't have to turn it all back into oil and carbon, just contain it. Step 0 is to do that 90% reduction as fast as possible though.