Since everyone's talking about carbon capture again I just want to point out yet again that you can't cheat the laws of physics. The industry that removes carbon from the atmosphere must be on a similar scale to the industry that currently puts carbon into the atmosphere.

The median CCS in scenarios for 1.5C-2C according to Glen Peters could involve 15 billion tonnes of CO2 being buried underground per annum. We currently extract 4.8 billion tonnes of oil every year. To do this, you will need a lot of physical infrastructure.

You gotta actually move the stuff around, people. You need pipelines. You need thousands of facilities to do it. It's thermodynamics. There are no first-order innovations that are going to magically solve this problem by changing the need to pull billions of molecules around.

Let's look at other techs. Klaus Lackner's artificial plastic trees are a direct air capture tech - innovative stuff. He thinks you could cancel annual CO2 emissions with a fleet of them, but you'd need 85 million, 10 million new ones a year, not dissimilar to auto industry size.

And they need water, energy to remove the CO2, and you have to bury it all underground.

People talk about bio-energy with carbon capture and storage as a way to get to negative emissions and produce baseload electricity.

But to do it on the gigatonne scale requires a huge swathe of global agricultural land. To use this solely to reach the levels of negative emissions in some models would require land 2-3 times the size of India devoted to growing biofuels.

People talk about grinding up olivine - crushing a rock that reacts with CO2 to increase its surface area - and sprinkling it around the place. You could maybe cancel out 10% of annual emissions that way... but you need to sprinkle it over *the entire tropical land region*

If you mined that much olivine to get that 10% reduction in emissions through negative emissions technology, olivine would be the second most mined substance on Earth, comparable only to coal, close to iron ore.

The ratio is nearly 1 to 1 - to suck in 4 billion tonnes of CO2 (10% of emissions) you need around 4 billion tonnes of olivine.

People love to talk about afforestation. But again you need to cover vast swathes of the world with new forests to make a sizeable dent.

None of this means the tech is pointless to research, but understand: fancy innovations can perhaps make these things slightly cheaper but there is no conceivable technology that breaks thermodynamics and means you can move around billions of tonnes of CO2 without a huge industry

Your industry to undo the damage will have to be on a similar scale to the industry doing the damage... which happens to be most of industrial civilization
and, as we all never tire of reminding you, that industry does not currently exist. And the free market will not produce it.

i don't know if @JKSteinberger @theresphysics @KetanJ0 @KevinClimate @Peters_Glen @TricksyRaccoon or countless others I've forgotten would find this useful as a quick response to some Musky shenanigans but it comes from a series I'm writing now and I have receipts for all of it