I’m listening to a podcast and the lady says we eventually will need to become a net 0 society and then go negative to reverse the effects of climate change.
This entails sucking carbon from the atmosphere. Why can’t we just invest in this now and keep our oil and coal energy? What can this carbon be used for once we have taken it from the atmosphere? She says we just pump it into the ground?
In: Engineering
Net 0 is ages away from today.
There are natural processes that will pull CO2 out of the air, but they don’t work fast enough to keep pace with human production.
CO2 is a gas, so storing it underground is a possibility, provided you prevent leaks. What we don’t have the energy to do is turn it into C and O2. If we could do that, the C would be super-pure coal, and we could burn it. However, even if we used 100% of the energy from burning this coal to separate C from O2, we’d still have to add more energy to break even.
Renewable energy is great, in the amounts we have. However, that’s only a tiny fraction of human energy use.
Latest Answers