this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2025
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Not trying to get too doomer here, but the odds of implementing this plan are as likely as the invention of the laughter-fueled CO2 vacuum. The scientific literature is stuffed to the gills with good ideas. We have more good ideas than we know what to do with, but we will do nothing with them because the oil runs through the veins of our ossified political system and will continue to do so until someone
the 
, ideally with a 
that causes as much 
as possible as a warning to future would-be 
. So I'm getting increasingly convinced that these studies just keep getting published because the cynical bastards know optimistic headlines can be used to keep us speeding to disaster; that so long as we "know" that potential fixes exist it can be used as justification to keep procrastinating on them.
I'm not saying you should honestly advocate for this, I'm saying you use it to poison the well whenever somebody want to build the next CO2 scrubber that creates more CO2 than it scrubs. Tree good machine bad for climate seems like an easy enough sell to a general populace and might serve to at least not get the greenwashed pollution machine that serves 0 value built.
The thing is it's not the general populace that's building them; from a recent (and exceptionally poorly written) NY times article:
The crappy CO2 scrubbers keep getting subsidized because oil companies use the CO2 to extract more oil. The dems started pulling this trick in the IRA.