Non-AI Bullsh*t: Carbon Capture

Believe it or not, there are more kinds of potential bullshit in the tech world than AI. AI gets most of the attention because it gets most of the hype, but technology, not software, has eaten the world. All of our problems supposedly have a technology solution. Supposedly is the important word in that sentence, because it turns out that technology is not always the solution. Carbon capture is a good example of this.

Carbon capture is the idea that we can remove carbon from the atmosphere and safely store it (either by just, well, storing it somewhere it cannot get back into the atmosphere or by using it in products that lock it out of the atmosphere but also have a useful, or at least commercially viable, purpose), thus reducing one of the drivers of the greenhouse effect. The hope, of course, would be that carbon capture can reverse, at least partially, climate change. Unfortunately, it seems that the promises are widely overblown.

A recent study shows that DAC (direct air capture) products likely cannot live up to their purported promise:

In their paper, the MITEI team calls DAC a “very seductive concept.” Using DAC to suck CO₂ out of the air and generate high-quality carbon-removal credits can offset reduction requirements for industries that have hard-to-abate emissions. By doing so, DAC would minimize disruptions to key parts of the world’s economy, including air travel, certain carbon-intensive industries, and agriculture. However, the world would need to generate billions of tonnes of CO₂ credits at an affordable price. That prospect doesn’t look likely. The largest DAC plant in operation today removes just 4,000 tonnes of CO₂ per year, and the price to buy the company’s carbon-removal credits on the market today is $1,500 per tonne.

Basically, they cost too much, they require too much energy to work, and they are doing something that physics makes hard to do. I do not think the takeaway should be that we stop researching this technology. In fact, I argued for diverting research funds away from AI and into carbon capture. One technology shows potential to do something useful. One tells you to glue your cheese to your pizza. The choice is not all that hard.

The takeaway from this report is neither that carbon capture is bullshit, despite the cheeky title on this newsletter, nor that we should stop work on the technology. It does highlight that the initial promise of technologies in complex environments (and there is hardly a more complex environment than, well, the environment) cannot be the basis for plans. Maybe that promise pays off, but until it does, you cannot make your decision on the future around it. That is not planning, that is wishing.

Which, I suspect, is the real appeal of these technologies. I actually think carbon capture will play some part in our adapting to climate change. I don’t know how large a part, which is why I think spending money on it until we have a sense of that capability is a good use of our dollars. But too many decision makers want the silver bullet that will turn their political problem into a technological problem. Betting on a technology is easier for a politician than figuring out how to get gas cars off the road, or how to pay for upgrading the transmission system in the country, or how to transition coal miners to new jobs or pay them off. All of those problems have solutions (and most of those solutions start with taxing people like Musk appropriately, but that is a story for another post), but they are all political solutions and thus harder to implement than a magical technology that will suck the problem right out of the air.

Be cautious in what you believe about technology until it is proven is not much a bomb-throwing conclusion, I know. But sometimes reality is prosaic. Unfortunately, reality is also sometimes hard. And asking people to accept the hard choices rather than the easy solution, even if that solution is vaporware, is difficult. It is important that we reward the people who do so and that we press for policies and laws that remove the temptation to follow the illusion of tomorrow instead of the solutions of today.