Carbon dioxide removal
David Ho wrote Carbon dioxide removal is not a current climate solution — we need to change the narrative. He argues that carbon dioxide removal is currently too futile to curve the emission.
In 2022, the world emitted 40.5 billion tonnes of CO2 (P. Friedlingstein et al. Earth Syst. Sci. Data 14, 4811–4900; 2022). At that rate, for every year of operation at its full potential, each hub would take the atmosphere back in time by almost 13 minutes, but in the time it took to remove those 13 minutes of CO2, the world would have spewed another full year of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Meanwhile, if everyone on Earth planted a tree — 8 billion trees — it would take us back in time by about 43 hours every year, once the trees had matured.
The time-machine analogy reveals just how futile CDR currently is.