Sucking carbon dioxide from air is cheaper than scientists thought (Surprise, no carbon tax need)

Hey look, the market is figuring this out.

No carbon tax needed. I am shocked.

By the way, many people believe that a carbon tax would have created dependent “industries” that would need carbon emissions at a high level to continue to exist.

There were many people clamoring for a carbon tax during the Obama years and it is an issue with which I am intimately familiar. I examined the issue from a pro-market perspective for a couple of years and concluded that a carbon tax would be horrible for the economy and for liberty. Taxing the very air that we breathe is crazy. But I also think addressing carbon emissions isn’t a waste of time. If it’s really an issue the market will solve it via insurance and new technologies. If “climate change” isn’t, then it won’t.

(From Nature)

Founded in 2009, Carbon Engineering is one of a few companies pursuing direct air capture technologies. One competitor, Climeworks in Zurich, Switzerland, opened a commercial facility last year that can capture 900 tonnes of CO₂ from the atmosphere each year for use in greenhouses. Climeworks has also opened a second facility in Iceland that can capture 50 tonnes of CO₂ a year and bury it in underground basalt formations.

Climeworks says that capturing a tonne of CO₂ at its Swiss plant costs about $600. Company officials expect the figure to dip below $100 per tonne in 5-10 years as operations ramp up. In the meantime, Carbon Engineering’s paper provides the most detailed look yet at the cost of such technology.

“It’s great to see human ingenuity marshalling around a problem that at first pass seemed to be intractable,” says Stephen Pacala, co-director of the carbon-mitigation initiative at Princeton University in New Jersey. Pacala also credits the Carbon Engineering team for publishing its results. “They have a proprietary interest in the technology, and nonetheless, they put out a readable and reviewable paper for sceptics to look at,” he says.

I say let’s capture all this carbon, turn it into carbon fiber and make super strong and super light sports cars. Now that’s a future that sounds pretty good to me.

http://www.againstcronycapitalism.org/