this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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173
Carbon Capture Tech Hype Is Fizzling Out, IEA Says (gizmodo.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 46 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

Lol it was always a lie, just like "clean coal technology."

The capitalists will always use the crises they cause to part you with more of your capital. They're just the evolution of ye olde traveling snake oil salesman that used their grift to become the world's owners.

And because so many poor, deluded peasants truly, darkly, hilariously believe capitalism can solve the problems capitalism propagates, we're going to be pumping carbon shit into the air until the capitalists have no more surface peasants left alive to bark orders at from their temperature controlled bunker compounds.

And even then, the owners will somehow still blame the corpses for not implementing their orders correctly or something.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

Carbon capture can make sense.

Not sure how you can spin that as some sort of capitalist shenanigans when in reality, a lot of universities and start ups created stuff with very little funding.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 11 months ago (1 children)

There is existing, and there is being effective for the advertised job. Carbon capture certainly exists in different forms and makes sense as an addon to an existing emitter. It's hyped to be a lot more than what it does, even used to excuse more emissions growth, and that's the snake oil being talked about. In the end the only true "solution" is to reduce the actual production of emissions, something that the overall world is not will to do. And I put solution in quotes because we're decades behind on action that would be meaningful, having exponentially increased the pollution since then. We'd have to do far more than just stop emissions to fix anything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Which is exactly why we need carbon capture more than ever.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Sure. There isn't a question of need, but of the math. Unfortunately the 2nd Law is a bit of a stickler. Far easier to get energy and release CO2 than to get the CO2 back into one place.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 11 months ago (6 children)

It’s always seemed nonsensical to me. Now I studied the computer stuff, not physics but… it seems like you’d need a gigafuckton (SI unit right there) of energy to get the CO2 levels down in an appreciable way when the levels were talking about here are in the hundreds of parts per million.. just seems like it’d be incredibly inefficient at best

[–] [email protected] 19 points 11 months ago (2 children)

It's even simpler to see how stupid it is. It costs more energy to capture the carbon and store it than is gained by burning it in the first place. It's literally more energy efficient to just not burn it at all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

If it weren't for the fact, that we put so much in the atmosphere already that it effects the climate, sure, it absolutely is. But since we're already way past that point of no return, there is no alternative in doing carbon capture with renewables in areas where no one would use the available energy anyway.

It's expensive as fuck, but countless studies show, even if we just stop carbon emissions all together, it wouldn't change much about the upcoming costs climate change brings, which will be absolutely biblical. Starting with more extreme weather and resulting insurance claims, over migration issues, food shortages and to a general collaps of the markets.

Putting up carbon capture technology is more important than ever, not because we can just keep in going but because we have to go back and get that stuff out the air below 300 ppm.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 11 months ago (2 children)

If not burning it were an option, we'd be doing that. But we aren't, so it isn't.

So we need to do something with the stuff in the air..

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

Not burning it is an option though.

..it's just cheaper not to. If you ignore the externalities for it. Which we do.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Yeah but when running carbon capture produces more CO2 than it can remove it is no point, its like running an air condition without exhausting the hot air.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I'm with you. Also, it seems like it would be much more efficient to do carbon capture at the source, where the fuel is being used, like a power plant, where the concentrations are relatively high, compared to atmospheric capture where CO2 is less than 0.1%.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Yeah. Carbon capture of flue gas would be much more efficient.. but we're also not really doing that so..

[–] [email protected] 7 points 11 months ago

We would need clean energy production to cover demand and then have the capacity to produce excess energy for it to ever be anything to consider at all, we are nowhere close to that.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 11 months ago

We'll actually HAVE to do it at one point but yeah, it will take a good 30-50% of the world's energy budget for decades to centuries to do so.

However, until we're on 100% nuclear / renewable, you're just generating 100 carbon for every 30 you capture. That's where the stupidity lies. Even if you use renewable energy to power your capture plant, it still be more efficient to just route that energy directly into the grid where it would then avoid someone else having to generate the carbon to use the energy.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

SI unit right there

Wonder what my physics teacher will say in the next exam when I calculate with it. What's the abreviation?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

Hmmm… Gfucks I suppose. Gotta capitalise the G!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Problem is not energy even, it's that they are not transforming CO2, meaning that is still there, simply temporarily stored. It is not a solution. It can be part of a solution. But currently there are better and cheaper overall solutions

[–] [email protected] 13 points 11 months ago

I drank the carbon capture kool-aid for a time early on. It sounded too good to be true. Unfortunately it was.