I know that there is ‘legacy carbon’ in the atmosphere that needs to get removed but why aren’t we leveraging carbon capture as part of industrial processes (e.g. at the factory’s smoke stack, for example). Or maybe we are already?
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I worked at a manufacturing company with plants all across NA and they had carbon capture technology but rarely used it apparently because the maintenance slowed down production time so they literally installed it only before a compliance officer showed up. I worked on the product side so I don’t know the terminology really well but I was actually working on an initiative to track carbon emissions (their data was insanely outdated) so we could meet code and this is what some of the plant managers told me. Totally blew my mind that they had the tech but didn’t use it unless someone was checking.
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That’s the original carbon capture idea, which later turned into direct air capture, which is just trees but tech
The problem is that governments don’t take climate change seriously and don’t implement carbon taxes that will make it financially logical for factory owners to capture their own carbon emissions
A company can’t do it if they are the only one, because manufacturing has slim margins unless you’re operating out of a slave hole like China.
National enforcement won’t work locally because it will destroy what’s left of a very mature industry that has huge international competition and consumers won’t pay more.
Consumers guide this by changing their buying behaviour. Vote with your wallet and stop buying imports, then accept higher again prices from these kinds of initiatives.
They almost universally do. I worked in a lab for a short time that did carbon scraping directly between the exit using state of the art methods. Any capture percentage was a win
Regulations and laws are stupid as hell. You can’t burn methane cause you need to pay for the CO2. But you can just release the methane in atmosphere. So companies now don’t burn their methane.
Methane is a worse GHG, it’s just not regulated.
Carbon capture uses so much energy and is so expensive that it’s easier, cheaper, and cleaner to just use clean/renewable energy in the first place instead of burning things to generate energy and having to add carbon capture to it. Carbon capture at emission sources also hasn’t lived up to the efficiency standards that it’s been advertised at. The tech just isn’t there, but the tech *is* there for renewables. The biggest source of emissions for most industrial processes is the energy use, which we can mitigate by electrifying processes and continuing to build out more renewable generation to provide that electricity.
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