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If we could suck 101% of the carbon we produce in a day out of the air, how would the effect global efforts to go carbon neutral? (midwest.social)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Obviously, this will probably never happen. In the best future for humanity, maybe we can drop our emissions enough to allow for such a thing. But more likely societal collapse

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Then we should massively increase our CO2 output as the 1% that would be removed grow with the output.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

It'll be something like the tragedy of the Commons. People in jurisdictions that don't enforce carbon neutral activities would just ramp their activities up with more abandoned, relying on the scrubbers to save them. And they're definitely going to be able to outpace the scrubbers.

In our current economic modeling, a carbon generating activity is a profit center, a carbon sinking activity would be a cost center. So every business would be incentivized to generate carbon and not sinking any of it. And it'd be difficult for governments to pay for sinking it. Especially when carbon can be produced outside their own jurisdiction.