Some things are so stupid that only a government could conceive of doing it. 

Unlimited money, friends whose beds can be feathered, and a complete lack of accountability can be the only reason why something like this could happen. No sane person would fund this without having an ulterior motive. 

There are over 3200billion tons of CO2 in the atmosphere.
8billion humans generate 35billion/yr
The USA generates about 5billion/yr
Colorado is around 0.125billion/yr
The natural annual cycle is around 700billion tons

sequestering 1gigaton would cost $180,000,000,000
to “solve”…

— Rep Ken deGraaf, CO HD-22 (@COrepKdeGraaf) December 23, 2024

Biden's Green New Scam, otherwise known as the Inflation Reduction Act, funded lots of stupid stuff, but this program rises to the top of the list. Biden has poured billions into "demonstration projects" and pushed the stupid idea of carbon removal credits, sparking what The New York Times calls a "gold rush" to cash in on a technology that will accomplish actually nothing good, even if you believe that the world is about to catch on fire due to climate change. 

The idea is to pull carbon dioxide out of the air at a scale significant enough to reduce the presence of CO2 in the atmosphere, countering the massive amounts being injected by human beings through industrial activities. And the idea is so stupid that it makes trying to count every grain of sand on a beach seem smart and easy by comparison. 

The technology, which did not exist until a few years ago, is still unproven at scale. Yet, it has a uniquely alluring appeal. Stripping away some of the carbon dioxide that is heating up the world makes intuitive sense. And with a small but growing number of companies willing to pay for it, investors are jockeying to be first movers in what they believe will inevitably be a big industry that is necessary to help fight global warming.

Companies working on ways to pull carbon dioxide from the air have raised more than $5 billion since 2018, according to the investment bank Jefferies. Before that, there were almost no such investments.

“It’s the single greatest opportunity I’ve seen in 20 years of doing venture capital,” said Damien Steel, the chief executive of Canada-based Deep Sky, which has raised more than $50 million to develop carbon dioxide removal projects. “The tailwinds behind the industry are greater than most industries I’ve ever looked at.”

The group assembled by Mr. Gates, known as Breakthrough Energy Ventures, is among the biggest backers of the more than 800 carbon removal companies that have been started in recent years. Others investors include Silicon Valley venture capitalists, private equity firms from Wall Street and major corporations like United Airlines.

Investors believe the market is poised for explosive growth.

Don't get me wrong: removing CO2 from the atmosphere is not especially difficult. The technology exists and is used all the time. It's the scale and the cost that are at issue. Human beings inject over 36 BILLION TONS of CO2 into the atmosphere every year. Compared to the total volume of the atmosphere, that number is not huge, but compared to what we can extract through industrial means it is unimaginably huge. 

Not even the most rabid climate change believers think that carbon dioxide removal through other than natural means--photosynthesis--will have any impact on the climate. We can't remove even a rounding error's worth. 

There are a few dozen facilities operational today, including ones in Iceland and California. But the biggest of these capture only a sliver of the greenhouse gases humans produce in one day. Even if hundreds more such plants were built, they would not come close to counteracting even 1 percent of annual carbon dioxide emissions.

Still, there is a method to the madness: there is money to be made, not from producing anything of actual value, but from diverting money from useful investments into an industry that the government and the transnational elites favor. It is a way for people who provide no economic value to the economy to extract enormous amounts of money from the productive side of the economy. It is a huge scam, funded by all the usual suspects. 

More than 1,000 big companies have pledged to eliminate their carbon emissions over the next few decades. As part of those efforts, more corporations are starting to pay for carbon dioxide removal. This year, Microsoft, Google, and British Airways were among the companies that committed a total of $1.6 billion to purchase removal credits.

That figure was up from less than $1 million in 2019, according to CDR.fyi, a website that tracks the carbon dioxide removal industry. Next year, industry executives believe companies could spend up to $10 billion on such purchases. In a recent report, McKinsey estimated the market could be worth as much as $1.2 trillion by 2050.

While huge sums of money are being dedicated to the nascent field, these projects will not have a meaningful effect on global temperatures anytime soon.

Yes, you read that right. $1.2 trillion diverted from useful economic activity into the pockets of investors funding an industry that accomplishes exactly NOTHING. 

The U.S. government is supporting the industry. The Inflation Reduction Act more than tripled the tax credit for capturing and storing carbon removed directly from the atmosphere, to $180 per ton. The bipartisan infrastructure law signed by President Biden in 2021 included $3.5 billion for the creation of four demonstration projects.

Executives don’t believe that the carbon dioxide removal industry will be knocked off course by President-elect Donald J. Trump, who has called climate policies a “scam” and has said he wants to roll back many of Mr. Biden’s climate initiatives.

Support for the new technology “has been very bipartisan,” said Noah Deich, who until recently was the deputy assistant secretary of carbon management at the Energy Department.

Last month, Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, and Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, introduced legislation that would create additional tax incentives for the carbon dioxide removal industry.

And the demonstration projects being funded by the infrastructure law have been championed by some Republicans. “This will help ensure our economy is built for the future,” Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana posted on X when his state was selected as one of the sites. “It is great for our state!”

Big money, which is good for the people getting it, but disastrous for the economy as a whole as this money has been diverted from useful investments or consumption that increases human well-being--all while doing nothing at all to reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. 

This is the point--all this talk about addressing climate change is mainly an excuse to rip people off and line the pockets of those who are selling the panic. 

No doubt there are millions of people who genuinely believe that CO2 accumulation in the atmosphere is a looming disaster, and while I disagree with them I understand their concern. But as a practical matter these people are being defrauded, sold a lie that all this "investment" will get them closer to "Net Zero." 

Industrial scale carbon capture is the environmental equivalent of wearing cloth masks--it is symbolic but accomplishes nothing other than funding the cloth mask industry. For the rest of us it just makes our lives worse. 

Gold rush indeed.