Between April 2021 and October 2024, British physicist Michael de Podesta paid £40 per month to carbon capture company Climeworks. In return, the company promised to remove 50 kilograms of carbon dioxide each month. But in September 2024, de Podesta wrote that “when I checked the other day they had removed precisely no CO₂ from the atmosphere”.
The following day, de Podesta wrote, “I conclude that I am indeed a gullible idiot.”
Climateworks’ business model involves selling carbon credits for CO₂ that it hopes to capture in the future
Good scam if you can convince people…so have they convinced anyone
Microsoft, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Stripe, Shopify, British Airways, Lego, Swiss Air, PwC, and TikTok.
Oh /s
I guess “in the future” is a promise you can always give, like “free beeer tomorrow”
There is absolutely no way to remove carbon from the atmosphere in quantities that will make any kind of difference. The only thing we can do is to stop polluting. This does not start with cars, it starts with cruise ships and industry. And since we all know that will never fucking , just celebrate the end of the world.
Honestly, I don’t even know why the sub exists.
Seconded. Plant life has spent hundreds of millions of years perfecting carbon capture. We’re so cocky as a species, thinking we can speed-run terraform tech and that might somehow allow us to continue our culture of constant growth without consequence.
Relying on carbon capture to fix climate change is like calling in a construction company to rebuild your house while it’s still actively on fire.
Probably worth trying though?
We can concentrate energy way better than plants can, so the possibility is there. The problem is that as Climateworks is a private company, they are not releasing the data that might help others.
The best part about all this is that once humans destroy themselves, the Earth will keep going and life on it will resume eventually. Humanity will, in the end, be just a blip. We will be hardly remembered.
This comforts me so much, as I hate the human species so fiercely! The Aliens movie scene where they have to make sure it doesn’t get off the planet is haunting now for me. We must, at all costs, make sure humans never get off this planet. We are a destructive force, a cancer.