Direct air capture (DAC) and carbon sequestration COULD be useful if they could be made much more efficient, if they could be hugely scaled up, and if they run on renewables, as they're energy intensive.

But they're a money pit because there's no profit in sticking carbon in the ground instead of turning it into fuels, meaning they depend entirely on governments burning money to make it happen.

They're worth investigating further, but people need to stop pretending they're a magic bullet.

I bang this drum occasionally because all the optimistic climate projections rely on some form of carbon capture and sequestration to paint the rosy picture they do.

But this technology is primitive and while it might, potentially, someday scale up to be useful, at the moment, it is primarily being used to justify continued carbon burning on the theory we'll deal with it later.

Well, this is later.

@gwynnion It's extremely seductive to people to think that a technological silver bullet will solve this problem. No one has to personally change their habits or inconvenience themselves in any way!

The technological silver bullet hope has underpinned climate inaction for at least the last thirty years. It's a massively harmful attitude

@gwynnion It really is the equivalent of the Futurama solution of just dropping larger and larger ice cubes in the ocean to keep it cool.