Yes, it works as a "plan B" (along with many other things).

Don't loose hope. We can still win. Keep pushing for producing less CO2.

There are 3 use cases I've seen.

• Making fossil fuel power stations "clean".

• CO2 recovery for long term storage.

• CO2 for industrial use.

It's no good for the first, due to energy consumption. This is the main use I've seen it talked up for, as something that can be retrofitted to power plants.

It's poor for the second, since the result is a gas (hard to store long term). We would want it as a solid or liquid product, which this doesn't do.

The last has limited requirements. We only need so much CO2.

The only large scale use case I can see for this is as part of a carbon capture system. Capture and then react to solidify the carbon. However, plants are already extremely good at this, and can do it directly from atmospheric air, using sunlight.

That's sad

Because we still need to bring CO2 levels down even if we stop burning fossil fuel.

And then we'll probably need to burn fossil fuel to keep them at the right level, since we are in a capitalistic society and we're never going to be able to shutdown the CO2 collectors if they are ever built.

Next time you write a scientific publication, /s, make sure to have it reviewed by at least 2 Nobel Prize ! 😋
(thanks for the explanation ... it was not clear at all)

That’s right. We should only do one thing, and that’s to switch away from fossil fuels. It won’t be a problem that we will still have all that CO2 warming the atmosphere and acidifying the oceans, we really shouldn’t bother trying to make that tech any better, it has clearly no use.

You fucking armchair Reddit-ass commenter.

I think the intention is that the switch is not going to be immediate, and so there will be a stretch of time where some places use renewable sources of energy and some places still use non-renewables. There's nothing you can do if your neighbor doesn't switch, other than to try to capture their carbon output

Renewable energy has many parts. I have listed the 5 most important here.

As you can see, renewable biomass and hydropower are also part of renewable energy. That is because they have the advantage of being both power-sources and energy-storages. That means people will continue to use biomass and combust it in the long term.

The argument is that there exist some use cases where we do not have a viable low carbon energy source yet (things like heavy farming equipment or aircraft), and one can effectively counteract the emissions of these things until we do develop one. Or alternatively, by the time that we eliminate all the high carbon energy, the heating effect already present may be well beyond what we desire the climate to be like, and returning it to a prior state would require not just not emitting carbon, but removing some of what is already there.

Because stationary energy generation is the easiest thing to decarbonize, while other sources are much more difficult. Also some carbon sources are so disperse to practically track down. You going to hunt down every person using a diesel generator in Subsaharan Africa, go to their rural villages, and take their generator from them? Maybe, or it might be easier to just set up one big nuclear powered DACC plant. Then you don't have to deal with the practical and political nightmare of hunting down millions of low intensity carbon sources among the poorest people on the planet. Just let the poor village keep its diesel generator til they're ready to switch to solar. You don't have to go in and start taking stuff from poor people. There are lots of examples of this, low intensity sources that add up in aggregate but would be a political nightmare to try and stop. DACC shines for this.