We have 40 m sqkm of agricultural land. This means that we could potentially capture 5*10^10 ton of carbon in 10 years. 50 billion tons of carbon. That is 180 billion tons of Co2. ...
Great! If it’s so easy, why hasn’t it already been done? ? ?.... And if it were, what would we eat?
For the same reason that we couldn't stop COVID. Politicians are stupid and lazy. So is everyone else. Habits change hard.
...
So we agree! I think.
Let’s say it is definitively determined that to remove the necessary amount of carbon from the air, we can switch to harder farming methods and expend millions of person-days planting millions of acres of trees/grasses/whatever, if we start a wartime-like effort right now. (And we determine how that would change the ecology of the affected areas, for better or worse....)
OR
The X Prize for the best new physio-chemical method of decarbonization results in a procedure that can be applied at an industrial scale, in “decarbonization factories,” which can be built around the world, in tiny footprints, comparatively speaking, and in locations not suitable for agriculture.
So of course it’s not an either/or. We do both.
But if everyone were required to choose between, say, giving up five years of their life somewhere far from home, working physically every day planting and tending to planted vegetation...
OR...
giving up 5% of their income, to build and maintain decarbonization factories in their region, with no further effort required on their part,
...
which option do you think the majority of people would choose?We need a solution for the lazy folks, and we need a monetary impetus to find that solution, quickly, and get started rolling it out globally. (And yes, we need to determine how that might adversely affect the environment, too.)
Thus, the Musk prize. Because just planting stuff the right way isn’t sufficient, or fast enough.