Multiple Megatonnes of many different materials are mined at much lower concentration, and that requires digging up rocks. CO2 has many properties that make it fairly easy to select for.
We've already figured out that last part, it's called putting a few tens of square km of solar panels and heliostats (don't need it all to be electricity) in egypt or bolivia. A square metre nets you enough energy for a few tonnes per year in realistic current tech. This will never stem the tide if we don't go to net zero first, but reversing the damage in a century is doable by covering one medium sized desert.
Maybe. Just maybe there's a middle ground between something being unfathomably difficult and impossible because big number bad, and being trivial?
There are lots of potential avenues for stuffing the genie back in the bottle with a small fraction of the energy we got out of releasing it. All that's lacking is the political will to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable, stop them doing more damage, and confiscate the proceeds of their crimes to start undoing the damage.
This last part isn't helped by reactionaries constantly screaming 'big number mean impossible' and 'der entropy'. Almost as if the goal of such discourse is to prevent solutions.
You were concern trolling to try to shit on the best plan we have for a planet that remains habitable by vaguely gesturing about how hard it is with no context.
Then you sullenly implied I was saying it was trivial when I contextualised the actual scale involved.
This is part of the standard reactionary fud playbook.
Now you're playing the victim and trying to imply that's never what you meant.
You might want to re-read the thread and actually follow the site rules this time?
Feel free to read my prior comments if you want to see how completely false your perception seems to be of my motivations too.
My point is this takes time and treasure, and it isn’t yet solved - and incremental improvement helps, because if we were to try to actually do things at scale with our current level of knowledge, we lack the infrastructure to do so without burning more oil.
Which will slowly change over the next couple decades and centuries, but not without a lot of fallout first due to the speed of change.
I looked at your previous comments and retract my accusation. Apologies.
Most of the time when someone mentions CO2 air concentration it's as a prelude to pushing CCS or some vague idea about producing 100s of kW of energy per person using nuclear abundanceand I pattern matched a little preemptively.
This doesn't excuse your rhetoric about it not being urgent though. The damage may take effect later, but it is being done right now.
You might want to recheck again though on that urgency claim. I never said that either.
To recap some discussions in other threads, what I’m pointing out is due to the sheer size of the problem, this will take decades to centuries to get under control (if the models are right, barring some truly revolutionary technology), no matter what.
Depending on the level of force used, it can and likely will lead to large scale war, which burns even more oil based on the way military operations are run now (and for the foreseeable future).
Even if we did things at the urgency level of the Manhattan project with infinite resources - unless we burned more oil. Even then, probably.
This is a heavily overloaded train that has been building up speed for 150+ years.
As to if any individual should be panicking or calm about this is up to them, but I personally find panic to put someone in a place where they are easily misled and results in bad and poorly thought out decisions which can often make it worse.
Which tends to be why folks go to fascism when they’re overloaded and scared, IMO.
As to if this discussion is useful or not? I don’t know. But I figured I’d throw it out there.
We've already figured out that last part, it's called putting a few tens of square km of solar panels and heliostats (don't need it all to be electricity) in egypt or bolivia. A square metre nets you enough energy for a few tonnes per year in realistic current tech. This will never stem the tide if we don't go to net zero first, but reversing the damage in a century is doable by covering one medium sized desert.