Why the Climeworks debacle doesn’t interest me

It would take a superhuman feat of physics-defying genius for DAC to go from totally irrelevant to, well, still total irrelevance.

AI slop courtesy of ImageFX

If you’re deep in the weeds of the carbon dioxide removal world, you may have heard about the Climeworks debacle — news that the Golden Child of the Direct Air Capture world is laying off a tenth off its staff after news hit that its technology doesn’t even remove as much carbon dioxide from the air as its operations put into it.

Cue the glee from the anti-CDR crowd, the handwringing from the pro-CDR crowd and…indifference from me.

Yes, indifference. I don’t think any of this matters. At all. The little climate world freakout around the Climeworks fracas strikes me as a sign of intellectual rot.

Let me try to explain.

Imagine scientists announce that, for some pressing reason, we need to drain the Pacific Ocean. This is a gigantic task, and we don't have the technology to do it. At all.

Along comes Oceanworks and designs a revolutionary new engineered technology that takes water out of the ocean one teaspoon at a time. Soon, investors are giving Oceanworks 1.2 billion dollars to perfect its shiny high tech teaspoon.

Much hope is invested in this hyperengineered spoon.

In time, a scandal breaks out when it's revealed that the teaspoon operators were adding 1.2 teaspoons of sweat to the ocean every time they took a teaspoon out with their fancy spoons.

People get very upset about this. This whole ocean draining thing is a scam, they say!

Faced with the backlash, CDR peeps get very annoyed.

“Oceanworks" is new!” they say. ”Their teaspoon is only proof of concept. They’re working on scaling up, they just need time. By next year, they could be doing tablespoon-scale removals! And that’s only the beginning. By the 2030s, they could be at 100 times their current scales, taking whole mugfuls of water out of the ocean in one go. One day, in the far future, who knows, you could even imagine them scaling up to much larger scale, mechanizing the whole thing and taking whole swimming pools-worth of water out of the ocean at a time! It’ll cost tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars, sure, but they could do it. They just need time!”

This, I think, is more or less the state of the public debate around the Climeworks scandal. It feels disconnected from reality because none of it is happening at climate-relevant scale.

Using industrial chemistry to pick out the one molecule of CO₂ out of every 2,342 air molecules is a thermodynamic nightmare. That’s the core reason the methods we have are eye-wateringly expensive and irreduceably energy intensive.

Even if Climeworks did work (which it doesn’t), and even if it could drop costs by two, three, or even four orders of magnitude (which it can’t), we’d still be trading in gestures. Symbols. Expressions of concern.

None of it would move the needle in terms of atmospheric chemistry.

So why are we even arguing about this? I guess, mostly, because people struggle to deal with big numbers.

As Paul Krugman puts it, anything that ends in ‘illions’ sounds the same to normies, and when it comes to kilotons and megatons and gigatons it’s just as bad. Because we lack an intuitive sense of proportion when numbers get this big, whole oceans of ink (or, well, reams of electrons) get spilled on debates that literally mean nothing to the climate. At all.

Climeworks is operating at the scale of hundreds of tons of CO₂ per year. Realistically, to move the needle at climate scale, we need to remove tens of billions of tons a year.

In other words, DAC is currently eight orders of magnitude away from having any appreciable impact on the atmosphere’s chemistry.

Even if they could scale up 10x not once, not twice, not three times but four times —which would demand some sort of thermodynamic miracle— they would still be working at irrelevant scale.

Think about that. We’re spending billions of dollars on technologies that would require herculean, unmanageable feat of physics-defying genius to go from total irrelevance to, well, still total irrelevance.

Of course, there’s something to be said for not pre-committing to a given technology before all the facts are in. But it’s no less true that there is a limited (and smallish) pile of research money for CDR. Choices have to be made. When capital flows largely to techniques that can’t scale and won’t scale, it tarnishes the whole idea of CDR, making it all seem like a scam. Worse than that, it also starves techniques that could scale of needed early funding.

Am I resentful?

Hell yeah! Climeworks has raised more than a billion dollars and wasted them on a boondoggle that’s solidifying the already pretty congealed opinion that CDR is a dead end. Meanwhile scientists working on biotic ocean CDR, an approach with a far clearer pathway to gigaton scale, sweat blood to mobilize much smaller sums.

I’m honestly very confused about why this is. I suspect it comes down to the fact that even theoretically sophisticated climate funders are just as adrift between kilotons of this and megatons of that and gigatons of the other thing as your Aunt Hilda is. Because a swimming pool sure does look big when you’re next to it. Much bigger than a teaspoon! With no relevant context, swimming pool scale might seem like a reasonable scale to aspire to reach.

It isn’t.

We need to figure out an affordable, feasible way to capture CO₂ by the tens of gigatons per year.

Only ocean life has any reasonable hope of achieving that.

The rest is a distraction.