Trees very quickly stop being effective though. As soon as they die, they return all that captured CO2 back into the atmosphere
You’d also joined to plant billions of trees just to keep up with current CO2 emissions, let alone all part emissions
Basically, to convert all CO2 from the atmosphere into oxygen you’ll need to spend the same amount of energy as you got out of it by burning fossil fuels. With losses included, you can triple that. Add to that the energy required to gather the CO2 and the e energy required to safely store it and you can easily quadruple it
So basically take all the energy we’ve generated since the industrial revolution, quadruple that, and that will be the amount of energy we’ll need to spend to remove the CO2 from our atmosphere. If for the next, say, 200 years we stop emitting CO2 and double our output, we spend 50% of the world’s power on CO2 scrubbing, we’d end up with a clean atmosphere. That is being generous
Planting a few trees won’t do anything at all
Planting entire forests the size of larger countries would do little
We opened Pandora’s box and it’ll cost us centuries to close it
Lightfire228@pawb.social 2 days ago
Carbon capture is the inverse of burning hydrocarbons (fossil fuels). You have to dump energy (from the grid) into a chemical processes that “refine” the air back into concentrated carbon
The only way this thermodynamically is viable is with a surplus of carbon neutral energy
So either nuclear, or fusion
davidagain@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Only because it’s not being built, so really very very very misleading.
In sunny places like the southern parts of the USA, if you took the land footprint of a typical nuclear power station and covered it with solar panels with regular sized walkways in between, you generate pretty much the same power output, but with none of the toxic nuclear waste.
If you put a used EV battery under every 40-80 of them now you have 24 hour instantly responsive power.
Onshore wind power is the cheapest way of generating electricity, by some margin.
Guess why we’re not doing all this. Is it the cost? Of course not! It’s far more expensive to build a nuclear power plant. Is it the output? Of course not! Is it the environmental impact? Of course not! Is it the political lobbying and online FUD from vested interests in the power industry? Bingo bingo bingo! Of course it is!
StarMerchant938@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I started playing around with solar just for hobbyist/emergency preparedness type stuff and it’s actually crazy how good and cheap the tech is now. With blackrock getting into the power grid business and datacenters driving up prices I’m considering investing in enough panels/batteries to run most of my daily power usage so the price hikes don’t hit as hard later on.
davidagain@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Sound plan. I wish I had done so a decade ago before the global price hikes by the oil industry.
Lightfire228@pawb.social 2 days ago
The reason i discount solar is that, (i’m assuming) carbon capture requires equivalent amounts of energy that was produced by burning the hydrocarbons
This means, we would need to produce roughly double our current energy consumption (1x to continue current consumption, 1x to carbon capture at a rate comparable to historic carbon emissions)
Also, solar and wind are intermittent, and therefore not ideal for dealing with real-time grid demand. However, that may make them ideal for passive carbon capture
exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 day ago
I think that’s a huge part of the long term solution: intentionally building overcapacity so that lower production days still produce enough energy to meet needs, but especially sunny or windy days have surplus that needs to be used. If the intermittent energy surplus meets a carbon-fixing method to consume that surplus energy, then we can have carbon capture without that energy use displacing a reduction of greenhouse emissions elsewhere.
davidagain@lemmy.world 1 day ago
Yeah carbon capture is nonsense and we just have to stop burning the carbon, it’s the only sane option.
Wind and solar is absolutely used note for grid, and increasingly. Whoever is telling you you can’t use them for grid is telling a bare faced lie. Onshore wind being the cheapest energy isn’t theoretical. It’s practical. It’s now.
olafurp@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Don’t count solar out, the growth trajectory is looking like it’ll supply most of the world’s electricity in a couple of decades. Solar will be the MVP that makes all these inefficient energy uses more viable.