I can't wait until they makes these no cost, low-maintenance, and self-replacing. Oh man, just think of how easy it would be to fix our climate issues!
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2025
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I'll just leave this here in case people are actually falling for this scam. Planting trees is orders of magnitude cheaper and more effective...
Carbon capture is the inverse of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). You have to dump energy (from the grid) into a chemical processes that "refines" the air back into concentrated carbon
The only way this thermodynamically is viable is with a surplus of carbon neutral energy
So either nuclear, or fusion
(There's no way solar or wind generate enough energy, for several decades at least)
Don't count solar out, the growth trajectory is looking like it'll supply most of the world's electricity in a couple of decades. Solar will be the MVP that makes all these inefficient energy uses more viable.
Only because it's not being built, so really very very very misleading.
In sunny places like the southern parts of the USA, if you took the land footprint of a typical nuclear power station and covered it with solar panels with regular sized walkways in between, you generate pretty much the same power output, but with none of the toxic nuclear waste.
If you put a used EV battery under every 40-80 of them, now you have 24 hour instantly responsive power.
Onshore wind power is the cheapest way of generating electricity, by some margin.
Guess why we're not doing all this. Is it the cost? Of course not! It's far more expensive to build a nuclear power plant. Is it the output? Of course not! Is it the environmental impact? Of course not! Is it the political lobbying and online FUD from vested interests in the power industry? Bingo bingo bingo! Of course it is!
Get energy nearly for free from the sky? But then who would pay for the oil cartel's overpriced energy?! Exactly. And there you have in one the reason we want this and the reason there's so much right wing opposition to it.
I started playing around with solar just for hobbyist/emergency preparedness type stuff and it's actually crazy how good and cheap the tech is now. With blackrock getting into the power grid business and datacenters driving up prices I'm considering investing in enough panels/batteries to run most of my daily power usage so the price hikes don't hit as hard later on.
Sound plan. I wish I had done so a decade ago before the global price hikes by the oil industry.
The reason i discount solar is that, (i'm assuming) carbon capture requires equivalent amounts of energy that was produced by burning the hydrocarbons
This means, we would need to produce roughly double our current energy consumption (1x to continue current consumption, 1x to carbon capture at a rate comparable to historic carbon emissions)
Also, solar and wind are intermittent, and therefore not ideal for dealing with real-time grid demand. However, that may make them ideal for passive carbon capture
I think that's a huge part of the long term solution: intentionally building overcapacity so that lower production days still produce enough energy to meet needs, but especially sunny or windy days have surplus that needs to be used. If the intermittent energy surplus meets a carbon-fixing method to consume that surplus energy, then we can have carbon capture without that energy use displacing a reduction of greenhouse emissions elsewhere.
Yeah carbon capture is nonsense and we just have to stop burning the carbon, it's the only sane option.
Wind and solar is absolutely used note for grid, and increasingly. Whoever is telling you you can't use them for grid is telling a bare faced lie. Onshore wind being the cheapest energy isn't theoretical. It's practical. It's now.
I said
The grid has to meet demand in real time. You can't make the wind start blowing within a few seconds to ramp up supply, and battery technology isn't capable of storing enough juice to handle this either
That's why the grid uses different power sources, each with different response times, each serving a different purpose
I never said solar and wind cannot be added to the grid
Australia installed battery farms made from of EV batteries to cope with the discrepancies between supply and demand.
You can't turn the wind on when it's calm, but you can turn wind turbines off, and solar still generates power on dull days, just less.
Oversupply of cheap clean green energy is the win. Right wingers can fuck right off with the coal firing.
Anyway, you could have written something more balanced from the start instead of leading with the contextless FUD like some maga nut or petrochemical shill would.
planting trees also only works for carbon capture if you don't cut them down until they have lived their entire natural lives, which is not the way it's done anywhere.
Explain that one to me. The tree is made of carbon, storing the tree somewhere outside the carbon cycle would reduce the amount of carbon. Why would they need to be fully mature?
Yeah, just cut it and store it when the growth brings diminishing returns
okay, they would need to fully mature to completely do the carbon capture job we want. point being, these carbon capture plantations are not protected in any way, so they are usually used for farmland after a few years and the trees are burned for fuel. even if they go into something ostensibly carbon neutral, say, housing, they're usually cut down before having absorbed all the carbon they can.
and then before discussing the lost carbon capture potential that stems from creating big plots of monoculture...
Even if you let them fully mature they will eventually breakdown because that’s what trees do and then all that stored carbon will return to the atmosphere. This carbon capture is mostly fruitless as the amount of carbon they store is negligible compared to how much we are adding to the atmosphere but if they are turning it into “rock” which is likely just graphite that would take carbon out of the carbon cycle and actually sequester it. which we desperately need to do to offset the ridiculous amount sequestered carbon we are adding to the atmosphere
Trees very quickly stop being effective though. As soon as they die, they return all that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere
You'd also joined to plant billions of trees just to keep up with current CO2 emissions, let alone all part emissions
Basically, to convert all CO2 from the atmosphere into oxygen you'll need to spend the same amount of energy as you got out of it by burning fossil fuels. With losses included, you can triple that. Add to that the energy required to gather the CO2 and the e energy required to safely store it and you can easily quadruple it
So basically take all the energy we've generated since the industrial revolution, quadruple that, and that will be the amount of energy we'll need to spend to remove the CO2 from our atmosphere. If for the next, say, 200 years we stop emitting CO2 and double our output, we spend 50% of the world's power on CO2 scrubbing, we'd end up with a clean atmosphere. That is being generous
Planting a few trees won't do anything at all
Planting entire forests the size of larger countries would do little
We opened Pandora's box and it'll cost us centuries to close it
I remember when people said the same of electric cars and grid scale solar and wind.
But planting trees doesn't provide transportation or electricity, it does pull CO2 directly from the atmosphere though. In this case you can compare the capture technology to trees planted on the same area of land and see which one is better land use for the same purpose.
Youre not getting it. The people suppprting trees only dont comprehend that the tech will get better. Its not stuck as is. This is/was the issue complained about for those other technologies 30-50 years ago. This WILL get better and it will do it faster than trees can evolve. As well as everyone one of the supporting systems for it. Its luddite logic.
I'm not sure I agree. There's efficiency gains to be had in the tech, but I think it's better not to count your chickens before they hatch. In arid climates where trees struggle to grow it makes sense to deploy carbon capture tech, but I think there's a also a profit motive that muddies the best practices. Nobody gets rich by replanting forests and leaving them alone, but there's a lot of money to be made in these power hungry facilities.
At the core trees are just a more advanced technology in many ways. They have biological processes that don't only remove the carbon but build it into useful timber; plus they're entirely solar powered by default.
There's also the potential to combine high tech solutions with our existing flora, either through genetic modification or specialized sensor based agriculture. Something isn't low tech or backwards just because it involves plants, they've been scrubbing carbon for millions of years and are valuable tools.
Yes they do get rich by this. When policies are created that allow them to avoid taxes and cleanup because they paid to have trees planted. No trees are a haphazard attempt to maintain existense in a chaotic and wildly changing environment. This is more 'noble savage' lines of thought. Just because somethings grows on its own doesnt make it better than something designed and created. And modifying a plant to work inside of technology IS a technological advancement not a natural one. The exact kind of development and evolution i was talking about that is explicitly outside the bounds of natural evolution.
Entirely different use cases. Planting trees makes a deeper reservoir to store carbon, but it doesn't take that carbon out of the carbon cycle. There is still more carbon than the carbon cycle evolved to handle. We need to do both, and also stop bringing more carbon from outside the carbon cycle into it.