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
Energy produced from oil and coal creates carbondioxide aka CO2 as an undesirable byproduct. Whenever these materials are burned (in power plants, in cars, etc), CO2 is released into the atmosphere.
The point of using renewable energy is so that no CO2 is emitted. So you can see that to continue using coal and oil as energy sources defeats the purpose of using renewable sources instead. There’s no way around doing so during a transition period, but the goal should be to stop using coal and oil altogether.
CO2 captured from the atmosphere is useless to us. We want to keep it somewhere it can’t escape back into the atmosphere so pumping it into the ground (then sealing it) is an option.
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