Rivalarrival

Theorem McTheoremface

If you’re pulling CO2 out of the air, why in the world would you turn around and burn it???

Because the CO2 we pull out of the air is not in a form that we can feasibly sequester. It's padded with excessive hydrogen and oxygen into carbohydrate chains. When we burn that vegetation, we convert it to primarily to H2O, along with some CO2. Targeting the CO2 alone, we can sequester a lot more for the same energy and same volume.

The structure of the rock is destroyed by the process, it’ll just leak out.

That rock sequestered hydrocarbons from the biosphere for millions of years. It's not destroyed by the process. We use comparable methods for the strategic petroleum reserve and the national helium reserve.

This whole scheme is a fever dream designed to continue burning fossil fuels

That may be true. And yet, when used with non-fossil fuel sources, it does, indeed, serve to remove CO2 from the atmosphere, rather than simply reducing the emission of CO2.

Ok… Come on now, I know you’ve been propagandized, and propaganda works, but let’s think this through

Please read what I wrote, not what you think I said.

If you capture CO2 out of smokestacks, what have you done?

It depends on where that carbon came from. If it came from petroleum or coal feedstocks, you've slightly reduced emissions. But, the carbon from biofuels originated from the atmosphere. Vegetation captured that CO2 directly from the atmosphere, and incorporated it into the biomass. Burning it converted the biomass into concentrated CO2 and H2O; we're capturing the concentrated CO2 out of that stream.

Again: this does not replace the need to suspend fossil fuels. But the specific process I described does, indeed, extract CO2 from the biosphere.

If we plow the vegetation under, we are burying the hydrogen and excess oxygen as well as the carbon. Burning it, we release the hydrogen (as water), but still bury the carbon.

And all of the aside, this doesn't math even if it worked. It takes too much energy to pull CO2 out of the air

They aren't taking it out of the air. They are taking it out of smoke stacks. It's far easier to pull it out of highly concentrated sources like smoke stacks than to try to pull it directly out of the atmosphere.

we'd have to put up CO2 condensers on a percentage of earths surface...

You're describing biofuels. Vegetation "condenses" the CO2 out of the atmosphere, incorporating it into carbohydrates.

Burning biofuels, we produce H2O and CO2 in the smoke stacks. Every pound of CO2 pulled from the smoke stack is a pound removed from the atmosphere.

Any introduction of fossil fuels into the process defeats the purpose, but the underlying technology is theoretically feasible with biofuel carbon sources.

Your own fault for living west of your workplace.

They can't have them coming home and sharing what they learned abroad.

That sure musta been something. I can only imagine.

Nah, "dividends" are easy to understand, as are "investment", "shareholder", etc. That's all capitalist language. You are getting paid because you are allowing another entity to use something that belongs to you. You're "renting" something out. You are entitled to compensation for another's use of your property.

Under capitalism, a robot performing labor means that the owner of that robot is entitled to the compensation for that labor. That robot is owned by a businessman, but the compensation you're talking about isn't being paid to that businessman. It's being paid to a citizen who has no ownership interest in the robot.

That's consistent with their understanding of "socialism" or "communism".

They will hate it, as it makes it sound like they aren't "rugged individualists" who can survive on their own. It makes it sound like they can't adapt to the free market, and need to rely on charity.

Frame it as a "Citizenship Dividend".

We "invest" our political authority in the government: Political authority is conveyed from the people to the government. We are entitled to a return on that investment.

I prefer to consider it a "citizenship dividend".

In the US, political power is (ostensibly) derived from We The People. We convey our political authority to government. The government uses that authority to provide the service of "law and order" to taxpayers. But the government does not (currently) compensate We The People for the use of our political authority.

That can change. We can, and should, receive dividends on our investment.

The IRS is going to take a big-ass chunk of your $1 million.

They're not going to get nearly as much from the pans.

Perfectly good billionaires and hundred millionaires all over the place, and someone's taking pot shots at guardsmen?

Unbelievable.