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There are several dangers with "early DAC". One is that fossil fuel proponents will use it as a specious way of saying climate change is "solved" so we can burn
by gary_0 2y ago
There are several dangers with "early DAC". One is that fossil fuel proponents will use it as a specious way of saying climate change is "solved" so we can burn as much carbon as we want. Sort of a Jevons paradox[0] where the efficiency is mostly fictitious.
Also, scaling up a DAC industry while all industry is still necessarily carbon-intensive is a bad idea. And we also need to be on a decarbonizing "war economy", and DAC might distract from that. DAC (or some other kind of re-terraforming) needs to phase in after decarbonization. Timing is going to be critical because we left things so late.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
- DennisP 2y agoThe fossil industry is going to make specious arguments no matter what we try to do. It's not like they'll say "oh, you're focusing on solar, guess we'll just shut down our businesses then." In my ideal world, we'd have a fee on CO2 emissions equal to the cost of verifiably absorbing them, and use the money to actually absorb them. If the fossil industry wants to rely on DAC and keep emitting, that's what that looks like. Pointing that out is an easy response to those specious arguments; the fossil industry definitely does not want that world, because the fee would be high enough to drive rapid adoption of low-carbon technologies for everything but the most difficult cases. Back in the real world, since DAC is at the start of its exponential adoption curve and depends on political action to reach any kind of scale, it's unlikely to get big enough to interfere with renewables in any meaningful way over the next decade at least, probably more. We can afford to work on it.