I didn’t read the article but I did scan it and I saw this…
Oil and gas companies lobbied for the direct air capture money to be included in the law, arguing that the world could continue to burn fossil fuels if it had a way to clean up their planet-warming pollution.
The laws of thermodynamics would only be an issue if we were trying to convert CO2 back into oxygen and carbon. Even if you were using fossil fuel power, there’s no (thermodynamics issue) with the idea that it would take less energy to capture CO2 and store it somewhere than the CO2 released in that energy’s production.
That’s the issue, we don’t have the technology to do that at scale, the law of thermodynamics looks far away at a micro level, but at the macro it teleports behind you and sucker punches you
It’s all about scalability and its relationship to the law
Pshht… nothing… personnel, climate!
I’d be less skeptical if they were proposing to do this by retrofitting carbon capture onto industrial plants, major electrical generators, and IC engines. but expecting it work by just exposing it to the atmosphere I think underscores a misunderstanding of just how much air there is and how much time it would take to make an appreciable dent on the excess CO2.