...I endorse fossil fuels but, because I believe it may be necessary if there is to be any hope of restoring the planetary atmosphere in some distant future.
I am fairly certain that few people here are more in favor of the elimination of fossil fuels than I am.
I am fully aware of the hurdles, which includes high energy demand, both to overcome to entropy of mixing and to reduce the carbon dioxide to a nonvolatile form. The latter will require reproducing all the energy that was released by the combustion that put it there.
It strikes me as feasible, neither simple, easy or cheap, but feasible, and I respect the scientists working on the project.
It is feasible to generate hundreds of Exajoules of energy every year without the use of fossil fuels. It isn't popular, because we have a lot of assholes carrying on about fossil fuel derived hydrogen and fossil fuel charged batteries, but it works, and it saves human lives. It's nuclear energy.
The key to my mind is the utilization of Brayton cycles driven by nuclear heat with air as the working fluid. I've shared some thoughts on this with my son, noting that gamma radiation of air will also destroy many potent fluorine containing greenhouse gases, as well as combusting trace methane released by fossil fuel use. In this case it would involve the recovery of exergy via process intensification using heat networks.
Now if there are bad guys hyping direct air capture, that has nothing to do with the ethics or wisdom of this research.
I remind folks that one of the most fuel efficient cars available in the 1950's and 1960's was the Volkswagen bug. It was designed by Ferdinand Porsche at the request of Adolf Hitler. There were many things that made Hitler a terrible person, but advocating for the design of the Volkswagen Bug wasn't one of them.
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