Comment by kragen

I'm skeptical of the Heimildin article, because it contains obvious factual errors:

> equivalent to almost four times Iceland's electricity production, which is about 20 terawatts per year.

You can't measure electricity production in terawatts per year; you can measure things like solar panel deployment speed in those units, as you correctly did. This makes me wonder how many other factual errors I failed to spot in the article.

But, yes, we should not expect atmospheric carbon capture to be economically feasible yet, and when it is, we should expect most companies that attempt it to fail, just as most solar panel companies have failed. But remember that solar energy is free when the sun is up; there's no economic benefit to curtailing your electric production because your batteries are full. So we should expect vastly more energy-intensive approaches than Climeworks' to be viable.

Atmospheric carbon capture isn't an alternative to renewable energy. It's what you do in response to the much lower energy costs resulting from renewable energy, and to reverse the damage already done.