Climeworks has just opened the world’s largest direct carbon capture plant. It can suck around 36,000 tons of CO2 from the air each year, burying it underground.
You know… that actually doesn’t seem that bad when you consider that the global GDP was 90T in 2022 - assuming linear scaling, sequestering the entire global carbon footprint would take 30% of global GDP.
Assuming that the economy grows (let’s say 3%/yr) with lower carbon intensity (i.e we do some of the other things on the climate change bucket list) and manage to prevent emissions from growing, the global GDP surplus by 2030 would cover sequestering the costs for capturing all global emissions.
Now that’s just napkin maths - and carbon capture is terribly inefficient and seems like an upper bound of cost. So, now consider how much less it might cost if we use efficient methods: Renewables, nuclear, HVACs, hydrogen steel, co2-binding concrete etc etc.
You know… that actually doesn’t seem that bad when you consider that the global GDP was 90T in 2022 - assuming linear scaling, sequestering the entire global carbon footprint would take 30% of global GDP.
Assuming that the economy grows (let’s say 3%/yr) with lower carbon intensity (i.e we do some of the other things on the climate change bucket list) and manage to prevent emissions from growing, the global GDP surplus by 2030 would cover sequestering the costs for capturing all global emissions.
Now that’s just napkin maths - and carbon capture is terribly inefficient and seems like an upper bound of cost. So, now consider how much less it might cost if we use efficient methods: Renewables, nuclear, HVACs, hydrogen steel, co2-binding concrete etc etc.
Eh, just a thought.