Whenever We See an Artist’s Rendering, Rather than a Photograph of a Working Prototype, We Need to Wonder
This artist’s rendering at left suggests a device that its proponents say will, one day, capture CO2 from the Earth’s atmosphere, and mitigate the growing threat of climate change. But let’s think about this for a moment.
The concentration of CO2 in our atmosphere is fairly consistent from the planet’s surface up to about 60 miles in elevation.
Given that the radius of the Earth is ~4000 miles, and that the volume of a sphere is 4/3 πr3, this means the volume of this section of our atmosphere is 4/3 π 40603 – 4/3 π 40003 = 11.7 trillion cubic miles.
How many of these devices will be required to make a significant dent in the overall CO2 concentration, given that they need to process almost 12 trillion cubic miles of our atmosphere? What’s the cost per each one? How will they be powered, given that our grid-mix is largely fossil fuels? Won’t this only make matters worse?
This is a sad joke, but even sadder, it’s not the only one out there.
