this post was submitted on 15 May 2025
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As a starting point, the burning of fossil fuels, and to a lesser extent deforestation and release of methane are responsible for the warming in recent decades: Graph of temperature as observed with significant warming, and simulated without added greenhouse gases and other anthropogentic changes, which shows no significant warming

How much each change to the atmosphere has warmed the world: IPCC AR6 Figure 2 - Thee bar charts: first chart: how much each gas has warmed the world. About 1C of total warming. Second chart: about 1.5C of total warming from well-mixed greenhouse gases, offset by 0.4C of cooling from aerosols and negligible influence from changes to solar output, volcanoes, and internal variability. Third chart: about 1.25C of warming from CO2, 0.5C from methane, and a bunch more in small quantities from other gases. About 0.5C of cooling with large error bars from SO2.

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Climeworks’ capture fails to cover its own emissions (heimildin.is)
submitted 4 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Yeah doh, been saying this for years. A highschooler can figure this out.

Every chemical reaction has losses. A typical gas car has an efficiency of only about 30-ish %, for example. Converting fuel to energy has losses and it generates CO2 (mostly)

Similarly, capturing CO2 costs energy but also has losses. Storing the CO2 takes energy, or alternatively converting it, takes energy, all with losses.

While capturing and processing CO2, you need energy that also creates CO2 . Because of the losses, you generate more CO2 than you actually capture and process.

Okay, so you switch to solar/wind/nuclear or some other semi CO2 free source. Now you take CO2 free energy away from someone that now will have to use co2 generating energy instead. That too generates more CO2 than you are capturing.

The only way that CO2 capturing will finally be useful is when all energy producers are CO2 free. Until then, you're just a drain that keeps generating more CO2 than you capture

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Okay, so you switch to solar/wind/nuclear or some other semi CO2 free source. Now you take CO2 free energy away from someone that now will have to use co2 generating energy instead.

Not sure if this makes climate capture any less baloney, but energy, especially renewables isn't a 0 sum thing. A country with good renewables often generates more elecricity then it can handle and there's a negative price for electricity at those times.

If you can choose when you use elecricity, you definitely aren't forcing someone else to use CO2 intensive energy.

I don't think that makes a big change to your overall point, but it's an interesting feature of renewable energy so I figured it was worth saying.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

Otherwise unusable wind and solar exist seasonally in some places, and the same goes for geothermal in Iceland where climeworks operated.

This kind of thing makes sense as a research operation, not as a commercial endeavor right now.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Research, of course, is fine but as I understand it, this is supposed to be a commercial operation

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

Yep. The idea has been to provide greenwashing services to major emitters

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago

The key part about it being in Iceland is their energy mix is really green as it's all geothermal. So I get why they focused less on energy efficiency.

Would be good to see some analysis on the tech. They scaled up, does that mean it works, but needed to be bigger, or were they just doing it because they had the money and no other ideas?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (1 children)

Always a possibility. Now we know that won't work.

Edit: might have to prosecute grifters selling things they cannot deliver.

[–] Birch 8 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Lots of technologies were deemed not viable initially until they were improved enough that they became viable.

These guys just failed to develop the technology enough before starting to sell stuff they couldn't deliver and banked too much on government grants that are now drying up, and now they've starting to sack swathes of their staff because they're running out of cash.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 days ago

Yes. Their small scale versions should have proven that it would work before expanding. I strongly suspect the small scale versions either did not work well, or were never built.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I only found out about Climeworks recently and was watching a fluffy news segment about what they were doing.

My overriding thought at the time was, like, plant some trees, maybe?