There is also research into capturing co2 bound in sea water, where it's concentration is much higher (sCS^2 process). Which would in turn reduce the co2 in our atmosphere, because they can use their giant surface area to bind more. Additionally, the co2 would be bound in limestone instead of gaseous form.

I’m fortunate to have a lot of smart viewers out there and some of you picked up on an error: forests capture 10 tCO2 *per year*, whereas the video implied this was total. Although this doesn’t really affect the main point of this video (which is calculating DAC thermodynamics limits), I wanted to address this regardless! So how does this affect things? Well the 10 tCO2/yr number isn’t trivially scalable because forests eventually mature. Bastin et al. (2019) investigated this (www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aax0848) and found that there’s about 0.9 billion hectares of arable land that could be potentially forested which would capture 205 GtC = 752 GtCO2. For comparison, in RCP8.5, by 2050 we’d need to remove 540(1310) GtCO2 to reach 450(350) ppm levels. By 2300 this becomes 11946(12717) GtCO2. So in RCP8.5 this is definitely not a long term solution. For RCP4.5 these numbers are better, we’re looking at 385(1156) GtCO2 long term to reach 450(350) ppm. So a hot 450ppm level with aggressive carbon cuts plus a billion new hectares of forests is a viable outcome. But of course with only 0.9 Gha sequestering ~9Gt/yr, its just not fast enough to offset our current emissions and thus CO2 levels would rise for decades still, and of course that’s where DAC comes in, with mechanical trees being 1000x more efficient at sequestration (eu.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona-environment/2022/04/22/asu-researcher-builds-mechanical-tree-capture-carbon-dioxide/7398671001/ ) than trees (hence no need for a billion hectares of land, but instead a lot of power). Either way, it’s going to require a huge change to our planet. No silver bullets. Thanks everyone!

Renewables + nuclear - the way to go

Did my PhD on CCUS and have been working in the area in various capacities for last 15 years. DAC is the absolute hardest way to do CO2 removal, but likely needs to be done. The good thing is that regeneration of the sorbent or solvents can be done with low grade heat, in places like TX it might even be done via solar heat not needing electric at all. Unfortunately, compressing the CO2 for storage is also quite consuming. The other major issue is moving the air through the device. The chemistry is fairly easy to understand, but the engineering for reduction of energy is quite hard.

Advanced nuclear, nuclear, nuclear!! Even though you didn’t mention the word once or show a picture of one, your entire video is actually an advertisement for advanced molten salt nuclear reactors. You successfully argued we need way more energy than we currently generate in order to terraform our own planet (whatever direction it needs to go) and that must be clean, safe, and simple-ergo molten salt nuclear reactors that first burn our current stockpiles of nuclear waste and then burn thorium.

Capturing co2 while we're still burning fossil fuels is like mopping the floor with a tissue while the bath is overflowing.

Outstanding and thoughtful analysis, as always from Cool World 🙏

The amount of time, effort, research and content your pour into your videos is outstanding. Thank you, David, for your passion on this extremely important topic. You have a way with words; your writing and your delivery show exactly just how passionate you are. And of course, thanks for keeping that beautiful "Life in Binary' song going in your background music! I will be showing this video to my science students!

It seems absurd to argue that we can double our energy production and devote all of that extra production to carbon capture. But what if we didn't dismiss it, and asked, "can we actually do this, and how could we do so cheaply?" There is one conceivable way we could solve this, that I don't see discussed much. There is a method firmly grounded in thermodynamics that we could use to generate absurd amounts of energy for relatively low costs - extremely large nuclear reactors. Fission plants are interesting in that the fuel costs are a rounding error in their overall budget. All the cost is in building the plant. But fission reactors, like any heat engine, tend to be more efficient the larger you make them. And in particular, they tend to be cheaper the larger you make them. There's a reason the nuclear industry has tended towards large GW-scale reactors. These are the economies of scale needed to make fission practical. But what if we went larger? A lot larger. Orders of magnitude larger. Imagine if we built terawatt-scale fission reactors. Think of how cheap we could make large amounts of energy if we were able to build such massive reactors. Why hasn't anyone done this before? Because for most cases, it's not practical. A TW-scale reactor is largely useless for the electricity market. Even if it can make electricity for a very low unit cost, there simply won't be a TW's worth of electricity demand within a reasonable distance. You would have to ship that energy hundreds or even thousands of kilometers, and line losses would eat you alive. Even though monster reactors might be able to produce huge amounts of energy cheaply, we don't use them because the market within a practical transmission distance can't soak up a TW's worth of production. But CCS is one of the few cases where such monster reactors might actually make sense. You avoid crippling line losses by building your monster reactor right next door to your big CCS plant. And you can put your CCS equipment almost anywhere (or anywhere suitable geology exists.) So in principle we could construct some monster reactor and CCS plant right next door to a uranium or thorium mine, power all the mining and processing equipment with said reactor, and make the whole process as efficient as possible by minimizing transportation needs. We have access to the energy needed to do this. The US has alone has enough depleted uranium sitting in warehouses that we could probably cover the whole process with this. And beyond that, reactors can be built to work off thorium, natural uranium, etc. Ideally, you would design such a reactor to specifically meet the needs of large-scale CCS. For example, you might design them to operate with unenriched uranium and thorium, large breeder reactors. Also, you might be able to skip the electricity production process entirely. As you note, often for CCS most of the energy budget goes into heating whatever compound your plant uses to absorb CO2. So you could have a plant that has a primary cooling loop going through the reactor core, passes through a heat exchanger, and gives the water to a second fluid loop that provides the heat needed for the CCS equipment. You could design the reactor to primarily serve as just a heat source directly, and thus avoid the large thermodynamic losses necessary in thermal electricity production. And you can go further. When you start really thinking on this scale, a lot of things become possible. For example, it's likely there isn't a foundry in the world that can build reactor vessels large enough to make such monster TW reactors. But when you're thinking on this scale, simply building the necessary foundry, right on site, to produce such vessels becomes a practical option. You avoid the transportation nightmare of transporting a TW reactor vessel long distance by building your reactor vessel foundry right on site. If we want to seriously talk about atmospheric CCS, we're talking on a scale that involves dedicating a few percentage of total global GDP to the project. And when you start thinking on that scale, all sorts of options open up. If the technology to do what you need hasn't ever been scaled to the necessary level, you have the funds to scale it. If a foundry that can build a reactor vessel large enough doesn't exist, you can build that foundry. If enough nuclear engineers and technicians to run such a complex don't exist, you can pay the entire education cost of an entire cohort of students to get the training they need. It's a bit like the original Manhattan Project. Building a nuclear weapon in 1940 seemed impossible, the logistics were insurmountable. But when you start throwing around a budget big enough to construct entire cities from scratch, a lot of things that were once impossible suddenly become possible.

Pasture naturally absorbs a lot of CO2 and doesn’t decay. Hadrian’s wall looks so short today because the earth around it has risen, that stored carbon right there. Pasture is a quicker carbon sink than forests are, but the Kyoto protocol doesn’t measure carbon absorption by plants that are too small, so everyone focuses on trees instead. Creative accounting has permeated the world with the wrong incentives.

Profound video. Thoughtful, compassionate, scientifically/technically on point, and well spoken. Beautifully done.

As an automation engineer I wish that I would see work opertunity to work on these issues... Thanks for harsh reality and a good video.

Video was released 8 minutes ago*. Within those 8 minutes, 10 climate-change-denial comments were posted, the earliest being posted within 3 minutes of the video's release. Video is 25 minutes long. Tells me everything I need to know about climate-change deniers. *: not counting the time it took for me to read the comments and post this one

Thanks for watching! Check out our sponsor betterhelp.com/coolworlds for 10% off your first month of therapy with BetterHelp and get matched with a therapist who will listen and help. Let me know down below your thoughts on DAC - do you think efficiency will increase far above 8%? Do you think we'll use fission/fusion power to meet power demands in time? Or do you think DAC won't work and we'll need another solution.

Wasn't expecting a new Cool Worlds video, on this rainy Tuesday evening! ☺

Always a fantastic day when David and the team release a new video 😊

Maybe installing DAC on or around factories where the concentrations are highest and using some of the waste heat from productions to reach that 100C temp. But in the end I think DAC is going to be a bandaid and buy us time for better technologies to be developed.

Great video as always. But you really need to balance the audio levels better. The background music is too loud.

Children’s anxiety comes from the adults. There is more to this story than we know. And I’m sure that the truth has been inflated. Let’s just start at nuclear.

Thank for this video, Dr. Kipping, I don’t know much about the ins and outs of DAC but I figured the outcomes would look pretty bleak and I wasn’t surprised about that. It definitely would be nice to just stop emitting altogether, but I highly doubt that’s going to happen any time soon, especially with no other completely economically accessible alternatives. Hopefully a combination of these technologies and a different way of viewing society may help in solving this crisis. 🙏

What about simpler solutions? In particular, promoting healthy soils? Due to their degradation, they often exhibit a sizeable carbon deficit relative to historical levels and so there is a significant potential for them to re-store large amounts of carbon by simply improving their quality

Liquid Air storage for grid scale energy storage has a neat side effect. You will get frozen co2 as a side effect, that you can then capture or use in some innovative Cement or steel processing that need a carbon source.

I've been thinking about this a lot since I've been taking a course on it in college this semester, excited to hear what this is all about

I am happy I don't watch news or talk politics, I never have to think about climate change. I just go about my life, trying to join the middle-class homeowners and not die in poverty.

a sunshade sounds more realistic now. I think in reality we will not only rely on 1 solution for this problem, but many different ones all contributing something, so we will probably not scale 1 solution up to this amount. anyway I'll be in my O'Neil Cylinder.

So....what happens to the CO2 that gets separated by DAC?

great Video again Prof Kipping , quite enjoy the calm and collected manner in the way you approach and present the topic , will you do perhaps a Video on the recent finds of K2 -18 b aswell , perhaps a Video on that subject is stil in the pipeline

Even if we capture the CO2, there is still methane and SO6 remaining?

One of the thing about using trees to capture CO2 (I think it has to be one of the method in our portfolio of CO2 capture) is that we have to cut trees once they have reach maturity so that their carbon do not get transformed into CO2 by rotting and store them so that we can restart a new batch of trees.

"Feet" are what you walk with. "Metres" (or meters) are what sciency people measure with. 😊

There are more energy efficient ways to remove CO2 from the atmosphere than this. One of the interesting ones is one kind of CO2 battery, useful for grid scale storage - which can provide both energy storage and CO2 capture. Taking in atmospheric CO2 during charging, and emitting pure CO2 during discharge - making it much easier to capture the concentrated CO2 Another interesting one, is extracting CO2 from seawater, which also ends up removing it from the atmosphere. This can be done using just a fraction of the energy compared to removing it from air.

thanks much for this, I was wondering the exact same thing about these devices, whether they are physically feasible. Indeed, you just gave the greatest argument for nuclear fission I could ever imagine - you can create these machines, standalone, almost completely automated and in remote locations, without needing to create all the infrastructure necessary to hook it up to the grid. They could run off primarily thermal power generated from the fission reaction and run without C02 emissions. In addition, you could use that thermal energy TO produce things like concrete and steel without needing to create electricity from it. I'd love it if you made a follow-up video describing that, where nuclear is used for direct substitution of industrial process heat and in heating for residences and buildings, as well as driving these processes.remotely and in scruibbing flue gases. and see how the math shapes up here.

It's interesting, because of the high energy requirements it seems like deploying DAC on industrial scales in locations at distance from major power generation facilities might very well work hand in hand with the recent advances in Small Modular Nuclear Reactors. Because of their smaller size and modularity these reactors can be more easily scaled up and power generation could take place right at the sight where the DAC is located without needing to worry about transmission loss or building an expensive coal power plant or an environmentally destructive dam (looking at you Site C).

It took us hundreds of years to get here. These ideas to get out in a few decades are simply not realistic. However the damage done by not hastening our back pedal is unfortunate

Great video! My initial scepticism was proved wrong. And it's nice that I happen to TA thermodynamics this term. I'll try to use this as an example in class.

Great vid as usual! Does someone know what's the plant in the background? I've been seeing it for months and I really need to know what it is 😢

I did a small essay on Direct Air Capture for my engineering degree and it costs 2x to 10x more than planting trees to capture the same amount of CO2. Plus trees provide shelter for animals and prevent soil erosion. Direct Air Capture is not cost efficient at all for large scales

Soil and how we treat it seems like one of the better solutions. Right now much of our agriculture removes carbon from soil through herbicides, tilling and grazing but if we change our practices it can store a lot of carbon (three times more than trees without losing arable land. It's not a one solution fix thing, obviously we will need others, but it can turn an emission practice into a sequestration one.

There is an interesting study of farming and sinking seaweed like kelp out in the middle of the ocean and since it wont break down it will just sequester at the bottom of the ocean as a carbon sink. some can double their biomass in a day and the energy would mostly come from the sun. Maintaining the farming ship and the sinker tech would be the most expensive energy which could also be powered by the sun and batteries for travel. Its one of the most promising methods I've heard about and most energy efficient.

Excellent, excellent video!! I appreciate anyone that covers this and can be objective in a way that doesn’t trigger everyone and gives them time to actually think! Mutually exclusive from this in the video, every single one of us needs to not fall for greenwashing…. I keep thinking of the carbon capture training, but I won’t get into something like that on here.. But this topic is very massive and very complex, and at the end of the day, I wish people would realize that a lot of solutions that would help substantially, get overlooked, delivered in a tiny little package with a bow on top of it, overlooking serious details, and/or things like nuclear, which intentionally end up having a horrific stigma attached to them… I’m really glad you talked about DAC the way you did, though, as it is definitely one of those complex in an efficient way to do it.. I also feel that we need to focus more on other greenhouse gases, other than just CO2

A great video! Thank you for making this. People need to understand the situation we are in. We need to come together and tackle this problem.

Lets be honest, certain companies put profit over the planet and governments let them.

Not often I say this...I loved this video and I hated it...Your thought process is wonderful and even the final conclusion is palatable but I will admit that it is most troubling, especially if we keep doing nothing about the problem, the scenario that worries me the most. I teach competitive robotics at the high school and University level. The bright and inspiring students I get to work with give me hope. 20 years ago I used to joke that one day they need to be as smart and creative as possible so they could be the "real" super heros and build technologies that would save lifes...turns out I may have been more on the mark than I intended, and literally they may have to save the world...but the students I work with give me hope... Thank you for the thoughtful video.

Great job as usual, thank you! I think RCP8.5 (Representative Concentration Pathway for radiative forcing of 8.5 W/m^2) was slightly misdescribed as a "business as usual, total pedal to the metal future". It's a pure physics model based on just heat balance. For policy implications, we need to look at the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs), which model policies. Each starts with current progress as a baseline. No SSP follows RCP8.5 because it's considered too unlikely, given the progress we've made. We have made progress! But at the same time, extinction is still possible, so "pedal to the metal" could actually be *much* worse than RCP8.5, especially if we back away from Paris etc.

Interesting map. There seems to be a distinct lack of DAC plants in the two biggest polluting countries on Earth. Meanwhile, the nations who are making the attempt are being continuously battered about the head and shoulders.

The frustrating thing to me is that we've had a major piece of the solution available to us for generations now, yet haven't used it. Further to that, the loudest opponents of its use have generally called themselves environmentalists. Nuclear energy is our best tool to take fossil fuel use offline. At this point nobody who expresses anti nuclear energy views has any credibility to call themselves an environmentalist.

I loved this. I read the Ipcc as well and ran my own numbers. Even if these dacs worked… we still have a monumental roll out problem. We need to be building them yesterday at speed to meet the Ipcc targets (which of course are fantasy)

Wonderful analysis, thank you SO much. One thing crossing my mind is the "start date" (onset of the Industrial Revolution) may mark a step change in our ability to foul our own nest, though scarcely "Start Point", for which we need to consider slash/burn dating from the initial agricultural revolution. This assertion is evidenced by samples taken from those ice sheets currently melting at an alarming rate. In case folk feel that's doing no more than increasing the height of the cliff at which we're collectively teetering, whilst true, it likely also adds to the number of potential components of any solutions ... if everyone isn't panicking too much to play any useful part in some ultimate solution (which isn't the Anthropocene Extinction, at any rate).

I like how your analysis laid bare the complications with this mode of carbon capture. It really needs a multipronged approach on a global scale to solve it.

Another problem I see is the simple and direct waste heat generated by DAC (not to mention the Urban Heat Island effect of such facilities). Maybe that was already worked into the efficiency equations, but if so, it was not made clear.

Speaking of "BetterHelp," and more specifically, Prof. Kipping's videos, I have come to realize he accomplishes what he ascribed to therapy in anxious times: he and his lab, through the topics they choose to research and explicate, help us become better versions of ourselves. That won't be a new idea to longterm fans of this amazing channel. But to anyone new to Cool Worlds, please continue, whether you love astronomy, physics, the geologic history of the Earth, or the contingencies of finding exoplanets and exomoons. Because listening to the interests of Dr. Kipping, his logic in explaining new and complex ideas, and the deep, obvious humanity devoted to every issue he examines, we are inarguably given opportunities to nurture better versions of ourselves. And that is the only way to a better incarnation of this carbon-burdened planet. My own interest in Cool Worlds is a somewhat tangential interest in celestial mechanics. And supporting Cool Worlds' research lab, by sharing it with links or with a modest, monthly amount of money, is a sure trajectory and steady compass to the distant shores of a sustainable world.

Just to get a better feelings of the cost: 44g of CO² equals a minimum of 19505 J or 5.42 Wh per mol of CO2 so we could suck 8.1kg per Kwh of electricity at room temperature. This is 124 kWh per ton CO2. This sounds ridiculously low to me, since if solar electricity at a price of 2 cents per kWh would be used for this, the electricity cost would be only $2.48 per ton of CO2 removed from the atmosphere. Or am i wrong somehere?

David thank you for jumping into this topic. I first started understand the problem after listening to Bob Wells talk about it on his channel and I'm just blown away how it can be ignored. I've been to the Philippines six times now and everytime I visit there I get sick after I spend a lot of time in downtown Manila the smog is terrible... I don't think we should leave our children a Legacy of pollution and climate change

Open discussions about mitigation strategies and technologies, such as Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) and Direct Air Capture (DAC), are crucial in raising public awareness of what could very well be humanity's last 'controllable' stand against irreversible damage to our biosphere. While these technologies offer potential solutions, they also highlight the immense energy demands and politically divisive challenges we must overcome as a global community. Climate destabilization is a threat that transcends borders, requiring united efforts on a global scale. It's truly encouraging to see the quality of scientific, data-backed conversations like this that underscore the significance of addressing climate instability as a collective endeavor.

20:32 That scenario sounds like it'd make an amazing setting for a post-apocalyptic book/show.

This sounds like an excellent carbon capture plan for selling co two credits if wind farms that are down due to no demand for their power could be processing co two as a side gig , But maintenance time would have to be calculated in. And also, downtime is also needed for maintenance. So I'm sure scheduling would have to be recalculated.

I love the videos, but sometimes the background music makes them hard to finish. Any chance you could lower the volume a bit:) cheers!

This seems like it's a problem that we can't simply avoid. It may be time to spend 1% less on weapons.

Good video. One thing it doesn't seem to mention is what to do with the CO2 once you pull it out of the atmosphere. Is underground storage proven/stable enough ?

Good video. It is now clear that we need an all-hands-to-the-pumps effort, as big as the WWII effort on both sides summed up. No one application will do the whole job; everybody must do all they can; nobody gets a free ride. The big question is how bad does it have to get before we can build this team?

22:46 “ it could actually unify us” - that’s when I started to suspect it😂😂😂

unfortunately the co2 lowering oceans and also plants are not mentioned anywhere. Especially the oceans are with 10 Gt/yr a stable sink.

Great Video, I was wondering if there was any video's, podcast's, essay's or papers combining multiple options at CO2 capture like DAC, re-forestation, ect? How about extracting CO2 from the ocean? would it be easier? higher volume extraction compared to air?

Pre-industrial emissions were 280 ppm CO2, not 350.

How many feet did sea levels rise in the last 20,000 years? If you don't know already, the answer may surprise you. We need to be able to adapt as a species, not sacrifice ourselves to the altar of an immutable world.

How would the Earth fare with 750-800 ppm? To my knowledge anything about 1000 ppm would start having direct health impacts. I'm asking those questions because we're on our way there, and most solutions are just feel good vaporware, such as this carbon capture scheme.

So good, important topic & presentation! Order of magnitude is the magic key to understand this "mother of all problems"... Thank you so much.

I wonder is it possible to include methane capture/oxidation too since levels of methane seem to be spiking in the last few years.

Absolutely wild hom many of y'all subscribe to a science channel and get pissy when it presents you with science.

6:12 Forget the "trigger warnings", Doc, and let's look at how such blowback as this occurred in the first place. After we do this we should have a better idea of what to avoid. This way, moving forward, we don't oversell an idea (or its proposed solutions) to the point where large percentages of our children are seeking mental health therapy as a result of the situation. 🤔👍🙂

In addition, I'd love to get your reaction and/or take on the OTHER main geoengineering possibility for saving our skins - namely spraying aerosols into the troposphere. Thunderfoot did a video on this recently and I would like to know whether or not you think his math checks out from a physics perspective.

Wondering why you didn't mention the option of distributing pulverized rock to leverage the weathering effect? That entails energy expense to pulverize & distribute, but none to "operate" the rock dust thereafter :)

We lost already! We are done for 😆

We are technically in the beginning of the ice age 1. if we did not have Co2, we will cease to exist. 2. I used to buy liquid Co2 for my greenhouses for most plants cannot survive on less that 250 ppm, after increasing my Co2 to 650 ppm, my growth increased to 37%... Note, consider ourself lucky in a global worming condition for an Ice age would be a disaster for all mankind.

Thanks for the video, always look forward to them.

All new commercial building should have some sort of DAC system mandated for the HVAC systems. Where possible existing structures should be retrofitted. Imagine the recapture potential with a city acting like its own co2 DAC system.

What if there was a solution that actively emitted fresh air. Like the water powered car which burns hydrogen and emits oxygen. Wouldn't adopting a technology that actively benefits the air, rather than being neutral to the air just not emitting further carbon like current EVs, be the ideal solution? I can't see why anyone would build one of these DAC plants without the research funding that surely funded the first ones. Do they generate any income? Building a water powered car would generate income while fixing the air. So it seems on the surface anyway. I'd like to see a video on this topic. It's a lithium free solution as well.

EV car? You mean coal fueled.

I'm right there with you David, I data mined a temperature history website and I did find an upward trend in temperatures in the past 50 years. The data speaks for itself.

I've seen a lot of talk about the tech itself but never about where it should go. Wouldn't these things be more effective around large population densities vs somewhere remote?

Do more of these environmental videos please

The glaciers and Ice caps grow and shrink in cycles over 100s, 1000s of years. They arent going to shrink and completely disappear and the human affect on any of this process is quite frankly, a drop in the bucket compared to the natural cycle. If anything we should be worried about sliding into a deeper ice age, global cooling is more dangerous to humanity than CO2 and global warming.

Great video: Yet, your hard limit given by entropy can be overpassed without breaking the laws of physics with one condition: All energy do not need to come from the grid. One part can be brought by some natural phenomenon. Absorption of the CO2 by the ocean for instance. With such a trick, humanity would only need to pay for a portion of the total required entropy. And make the whole thing much less difficult.

Professor Kipping what about the CO2 emitted in the production of electricity? With most countries still relying on the use of coal in the production of electricity.

What a disingenuous pictograph of those balloons in NYC being stacked above the empire state building. Considering CO2 is 0.04% of the atmosphere, and humans produce a mere fraction of that percent, it should really be a miniscule dot in a vast void of nitrogen, oxygen, argon, water vapor, etc. Not to mention the NOx and SOx generated from combustion.

Not sure about the citing of the climate anxieties of the younger generation. These anxieties are completely manufactured by the media and are not necessarily the reflection of the real state of affairs. The younger generations are not all climatologists and their opinions on the subject matter are at best second hand. Not to mention that the younger generations are generally more anxious for a number of reasons.

Hello, Professor. I am in the industry of RE development, working in one of the world's biggest global developers. Even though what you are saying is 1000% correct from a scientific and engineering point of view, the most simple fact that with today's global economic system and how it's driven, add to that the worse fact of being unable to commercialize then Carbon capture systems and by that I mean that you can't get an income out of it, it is almost impossible to have the world's eye turning towards these types of projects. It will have to be either coming from a governmental initiative or a non-profit org. working on collecting donations for this to be picked up by a willing developer. It is a sad fact that everything is driven by money and every good action can be halted by global economic short-comings. I have been calling for my superiors to act according to our mission statement and lobby governments to create a fund aiming to have said "experiments" as they call it, materialized, continually researched, developed further and maintained for a better future for our children.

I guess were gonna need that Dyson Sphere sooner than later...

I've often thought how futile net zero for the UK was. We are a small percentage of the world's CO2 omissions, and the results of net zero seems to be a terrible example to others. we must innovate to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in amounts that mean we are a net remover of CO2 by a massive margin.

I think meddling with the atmosphere to the point going back to pre industrial levels is a really bad idea. Reminder that there is a supposed ice age coming, and trust me you would rather the Earth get hotter than getting another snowball earth

Very interesting, and sobering. What are the numbers on splitting CO2 into C + O2, vs. separating it and storing it?

That thumbnail should say: birds in;nuggets out

Here's a plan sir. If you want to sequester CO2... Plant large fields of crops. I think in 3rd or 4th grade I learned that Plants inhale CO2 and exhale O2. And as a side benefit maybe you could harvest the crops and feed them to human beings or animals. Hope this Helps.

We need more CO2 in atmosphere not less!

Good coverage. I was just trying to see what’s what, when I got to this video. 👍 I reached the same conclusion (1 trillion tons have to come out, net…) In any hard problem, we design to overshoot, hopefully to have cushion. Right? I can’t tell if your analysis already includes fertilizer production (i.e. food) and concrete (ie, shelter) at 2024 levels. (?) I agree emissions are high priority, but “zero emissions” is like your observation that DAC will never be 100% efficient. So, what are the consensus models for carbon cycling efficiency? Looks like most carbon removal strategies assume the carbon removed will simply be burned again. So we need to think “gain” for each step, rather than try to compute the entire food chain, no? (For example, we’re gonna need clean fertilizer production more than we need clean tractors. But it’s “and” not “or” right? Talking about how hard the problem is seems kinda pointless if we aspire to live better than Cyanobacteria… Speaking of which…?

What about enhanced weathering? Olivine sequestration.

What is depressing is thirty years of people believing the doomsday predictions that have come and gone and people still believing the next doomsday prediction.

Unsubscribed. Tired of those who humor the sensationalism, and those who say that the FIRST thing we should do is “curb emissions”. And you don’t curb emissions by closing regulated factories and mines in the West, just so China can open hundreds of filthy unregulated factories and mines each year. How does that “curb emissions” overall exactly??? FIRST you come up with workable power alternatives*, then you make them a truly widespread practice, and then you can finally curb emissions. Ciao * Not coming from the now energy crippled West, of course. Good luck getting China to do them for you.

I was looking into a SOFC (Solid Oxide Fuel Cell) power source for an automobile.

How much carbon is produced during DAC manufacturing, installation, maintenance and repair? There is no free lunch. That's an old saying about the conservation of energy and mass and everything under the sun.