Between April 2021 and October 2024, British physicist Michael de Podesta paid £40 per month to carbon capture company Climeworks. In return, the company promised to remove 50 kilograms of carbon dioxide each month. But in September 2024, de Podesta wrote that “when I checked the other day they had removed precisely no CO₂ from the atmosphere”.
The following day, de Podesta wrote, “I conclude that I am indeed a gullible idiot.”
Climateworks’ business model involves selling carbon credits for CO₂ that it hopes to capture in the future
Good scam if you can convince people…so have they convinced anyone
Microsoft, UBS, Morgan Stanley, Stripe, Shopify, British Airways, Lego, Swiss Air, PwC, and TikTok.
Oh /s
I guess “in the future” is a promise you can always give, like “free beeer tomorrow”
The reasonable RCP pathways we’re trying to follow require us to remove a net 2 Gigatons of CO2 a year from the atmosphere per year.
And yeah we can’t really do it this way because of entropy unless we work a miracle, best we can do is tip the Earths natural carbon sinks into our favour but we’re doing the exact opposite of that.
Those carbon sinks can also take millenia to find a state of equilibrium as well.
I know I sound like a pessimist so here’s my take from this, these companies have insidiously compartmentalised an existential threat to our species to the confines of the economy.
These companies will never amount to anything significant, they will ride a model of perceived hype around some vaporware tech that flies in the face of thermodynamics.
This detracts from real solutions to a very real problem that falls beyond the comprehension of these arseholes and they don’t deserve our attention much less the time of day.