We need to first stop adding more CO2 to the sky. That's vastly cheaper and easier than trying to reverse the process. And potentially quite profitable.
The most effective form of carbon capture is to leave it in the ground. We need to stop any form of wacky carbon capture scheme that excuses companies into releasing more of it. This BTW. is exactly what most carbon capture adds up to. Burn a few tonnes of coal and plant a few trees or go to ridiculous lengths of trouble to pump less than a percent of the emissions in some underground cavity. It's a scam and it's the current reality of the industry. You hype it up, get the government subsidies & photo opportunity with the local government stooges and then a few years later it adds up to nothing worth mentioning. The planted forest has wilted away (or burned off), and the vast majority of the carbon that was supposed to go in the ground instead got released into the atmosphere. Australia has a carbon capture facility right next to a brown coal plant. It's beyond cynical if you start looking at the numbers.
The only way of even getting to net zero (never mind negative carbon) is by fixing the economics around the whole topic.
Releasing CO2 needs to be an expensive hobby with extremely low cost alternatives. That removes much more carbon from the equation than the cumulative carbon capture efforts (past, present, and planned future). Better still, it drives companies away from the business of making things worse. We are still subsidizing that even. Just stop doing that.
It actually can work quite fast too. Ten years ago, offshore wind was barely a thing, now it's heading to double digit percentages of energy supply in a lot of places. Same with domestic solar, batteries, etc. EV sales are going through the roof. All of that adds up to CO2 that we leave in the ground. Lots of it. Why is that happening? It's cheaper this way now. Simply accelerating what's already happening here will speed things up.
> We need to first stop adding more CO2 to the sky.
We need to do both.
Every single comment on an article that talks about one has commenters like you arguing "no but check this out, doing the other is so much easier/better/whatever".
We could use both, but only one option is viable with current technology.
Existing carbon capture should not be subsidized because it's pointless. Sponsoring research into carbon capture would be good, but existing methods don't achieve anything wrt the climate crises.
Sure, we need to spend in proportion to the effectiveness of the spending on this. So, $ per tonnes not added or removed. If you can remove a giga tonne for the same money it would take to avoid adding a mega-tonne, go for it. Unfortunately that's far from the current practice of carbon capture.
That line of reasoning would lead you to de-fund any form of carbon capture scheme because there is about a 3-4 orders of magnitude efficiency difference between the two. Much cheaper to prevent a million tonnes from being added than to capture a few tonnes. It just doesn't add up to meaningful results. And arguably keeping the polluters that push for this in business actually adds to the problem to a large extent than their own ability to offset their carbon.
... But at the current pace, we _will_ need active capture, so that we get back down from the suspected 2.5-3° temperature increase. Sure, carbon capture from air might not be the most efficient use of energy, but if you're overproducing energy (e.g. solar at a sunny day, and grid is otherwise saturated) then I would very much like to have all that energy go into removing carbon from the air.
The most effective form of carbon capture is to leave it in the ground. We need to stop any form of wacky carbon capture scheme that excuses companies into releasing more of it. This BTW. is exactly what most carbon capture adds up to. Burn a few tonnes of coal and plant a few trees or go to ridiculous lengths of trouble to pump less than a percent of the emissions in some underground cavity. It's a scam and it's the current reality of the industry. You hype it up, get the government subsidies & photo opportunity with the local government stooges and then a few years later it adds up to nothing worth mentioning. The planted forest has wilted away (or burned off), and the vast majority of the carbon that was supposed to go in the ground instead got released into the atmosphere. Australia has a carbon capture facility right next to a brown coal plant. It's beyond cynical if you start looking at the numbers.
The only way of even getting to net zero (never mind negative carbon) is by fixing the economics around the whole topic.
Releasing CO2 needs to be an expensive hobby with extremely low cost alternatives. That removes much more carbon from the equation than the cumulative carbon capture efforts (past, present, and planned future). Better still, it drives companies away from the business of making things worse. We are still subsidizing that even. Just stop doing that.
It actually can work quite fast too. Ten years ago, offshore wind was barely a thing, now it's heading to double digit percentages of energy supply in a lot of places. Same with domestic solar, batteries, etc. EV sales are going through the roof. All of that adds up to CO2 that we leave in the ground. Lots of it. Why is that happening? It's cheaper this way now. Simply accelerating what's already happening here will speed things up.