As discussed recently in Opti-Pessimist, capturing carbon emissions from the air and sequestering them is an inherently superior approach to GHG mitigation. It doesn't require totalitarian control of all of the societies on the planet, it just takes technique, energy and money. It's like cleaning up street litter rather than hectoring people to bin their discards. The streets have to be cleaned anyway, so all of the hectoring just degrades the quality of life while not actually saving any costs.

That post highlighted biochar as a means to do air capture, citing multiple benefits, not least the fact that biochar is carbon rather than carbon dioxide, a far more stable substance. Still, there are other air capture technologies available, and they are worth a closer look. The systems being developed by Klaus Lackner of Columbia University's Earth Institute and Global Research Technologies, LLC (GRT) have been mentioned in earlier posts and may perhaps be the best example so far.

A device with an opening of one square meter can extract about 10 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. If a single device were to measure 10 meters by 10 meters it could extract 1,000 tons each year. On this scale, one million devices would be required to remove one billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. According to the U.K. Treasury’s Stern Review on climate change, the world will need to reduce carbon emissions by 11 billion tons by 2025 in order to maintain a concentration of carbon dioxide at twice pre-industrial levels.

We spew about 30 billion tons a year now and that number will likely continue to rise. It would take a lot of GRT devices and a lot of money to do the job. Does it pencil?

. . . the idealized exercise conducted here finds that air capture using 2008 technology is of about the same costs as the costs estimates for stabilization at 450 ppm or 550 ppm carbon dioxide presented by IPCC (2007a) and Stern (2007). If the costs of air capture decrease to $100 per ton of carbon, then over the 21st century air capture would in fact cost much less than the costs estimates for stabilization presented by IPCC (2007d) and Stern (2007). This surprising result suggests, at a minimum, that air capture should receive the same detailed analysis as other approaches to mitigation.

It is hugely expensive, but so are the emissions reduction schemes beloved by authoritarians, and might be very mucher cheaper than other approaches. The problem I see is that long term storage of CO2 could be a problem. Biochar, on the other hand, is clearly not a problem, indeed it has benefits. But there's opposition of another sort.

If air capture is a possible contribution to mitigation some believe that it will lessen the ability to use climate policies to get at other agendas. So for some there is a reflexive almost irrational opposition to air capture simply because it is a technological fix.

Climate change, like earlier environmental scares, is exploited to advance the agendas of culture warriors in the same way that they used class and race war in the past. Often all of these concerns are exploited at the same time. They don't want emissions issues to be solved since that would take away one of their tools for harassing society.

IMV, those authoritarians are the greatest threat we face since there is no solution. They have always preyed on us and will always do so. If they did not exist we would invent them since there is a niche in the ecology of societies for such predators. They can't be eliminated, but having an open season now and then to cull their numbers would be helpful.