> I don't understand how people think Carbon Capture is a solution.
While the current crop of carbon capture technologies are rather inefficient and useless, once we've got more of a mastery of bioengineering, it's by far the best answer to the long term greenhouse gas problem (not without its risks though).
The tens of meters deep peatlands that cover Canada, Russia, and the rainforests of the tropics hold enough biomass to more than triple the planetary CO2 ppm if they were burned. Those peatlands only started forming 18,000 years ago when the glaciers started receding so we have hard evidence that nature is capable of sequestering mind boggling amounts of carbon very quickly. That suggests that if we engineered a system we could do it even faster. It might take us a century to develop the biotech to that point, but long term the solution is on the horizon.
If we had the political will now we could get a decent head start by industrializing seaweed, algae, and other fast growing organisms for CO2 capture.
The ocean. It not only significantly simplifies nutrient delivery but eliminates the geography problem and can utilize the giant hypoxic dead zones in the ocean to aid in organic capture. It also provides a constant mechanism for supplying carbon as atmospheric CO2 dissolves in the oceans that has a positive feedback loop with the climate and houses plankton that is already responsible for the majority of the world's CO2 uptake. There we can store carbon in many forms including microorganisms and seaweed that don't decompose, calcium carbonate in seashells, and so on.
And it doesn't need to be 1000 feet deep, just a few meters worth since we only need to collect an equivalent of a fraction of the CO2 that's stored in peatlands - which cover only about 3% of the Earth's land surface to begin with*. The trick is to sink it in just the right way to keep it from reentering the carbon cycle.
We actually do have a lot of space that's already capturing far more carbon than we ever possibly could ourselves, the organisms filling that space just evolved to maximize survival, not maximize carbon capture to save humanity.
* Edit: actually that's just cold climate peatlands, I haven't seen estimates for tropical peatlands
The best technology that exists is much lower tech than most people think. It's called reforestation. We have lots of space for complex forest ecosystems, and we'd have a lot more if we could start reversing car-dependent suburban sprawl.
While the current crop of carbon capture technologies are rather inefficient and useless, once we've got more of a mastery of bioengineering, it's by far the best answer to the long term greenhouse gas problem (not without its risks though).
The tens of meters deep peatlands that cover Canada, Russia, and the rainforests of the tropics hold enough biomass to more than triple the planetary CO2 ppm if they were burned. Those peatlands only started forming 18,000 years ago when the glaciers started receding so we have hard evidence that nature is capable of sequestering mind boggling amounts of carbon very quickly. That suggests that if we engineered a system we could do it even faster. It might take us a century to develop the biotech to that point, but long term the solution is on the horizon.
If we had the political will now we could get a decent head start by industrializing seaweed, algae, and other fast growing organisms for CO2 capture.