• Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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    6 hours ago

    And all of the aside, this doesn’t math even if it worked. It takes too much energy to pull CO2 out of the air

    They aren’t taking it out of the air. They are taking it out of smoke stacks. It’s far easier to pull it out of highly concentrated sources like smoke stacks than to try to pull it directly out of the atmosphere.

    we’d have to put up CO2 condensers on a percentage of earths surface…

    You’re describing biofuels. Vegetation “condenses” the CO2 out of the atmosphere, incorporating it into carbohydrates.

    Burning biofuels, we produce H2O and CO2 in the smoke stacks. Every pound of CO2 pulled from the smoke stack is a pound removed from the atmosphere.

    Any introduction of fossil fuels into the process defeats the purpose, but the underlying technology is theoretically feasible with biofuel carbon sources.

    • theneverfox@pawb.social
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      5 hours ago

      Ok… Come on now, I know you’ve been propagandized, and propaganda works, but let’s think this through

      If you capture CO2 out of smokestacks, what have you done? You’ve slightly reduced emissions by going after the lowest hanging fruit possible

      Are we going to do that to every power plant? Is every containment effort going to work? Does that actually fix the problem?

      • Rivalarrival@lemmy.today
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        5 hours ago

        Ok… Come on now, I know you’ve been propagandized, and propaganda works, but let’s think this through

        Please read what I wrote, not what you think I said.

        If you capture CO2 out of smokestacks, what have you done?

        It depends on where that carbon came from. If it came from petroleum or coal feedstocks, you’ve slightly reduced emissions. But, the carbon from biofuels originated from the atmosphere. Vegetation captured that CO2 directly from the atmosphere, and incorporated it into the biomass. Burning it converted the biomass into concentrated CO2 and H2O; we’re capturing the concentrated CO2 out of that stream.

        Again: this does not replace the need to suspend fossil fuels. But the specific process I described does, indeed, extract CO2 from the biosphere.

        If we plow the vegetation under, we are burying the hydrogen and excess oxygen as well as the carbon. Burning it, we release the hydrogen (as water), but still bury the carbon.