Getting Angry for No Reason

I refuse to read the whole article, but this piece in the New York Times on capturing carbon dioxide from the air seems dumb as hell. Here's a passage:

The technicians had in front of them 12 large devices, stacked in two rows of six, that resembled oversize front-loading clothes dryers. These were “direct air capture” machines, which soon would begin collecting carbon dioxide from air drawn in through their central ducts. Once trapped, the CO₂ would then be siphoned into large tanks and trucked to a local Coca-Cola bottler, where it would become the fizz in a soft drink.

This is just so dumb. It reminds me of the way people used to describe electric cars as "carbon free" because they don't literally release carbon dioxide into the air. Of course if those electric cars are recharged with electricity from coal power plants, they are hardly "carbon free." People were taking the term far too literally.

Similarly here. If you remove a bunch of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then use it to carbonate Coke, guess where that carbon ends up? The question is not whether the technology is capable of literally removing the carbon dioxide from the air, the question is whether that's a more useful (i.e. less carbon-intensive) way to produce carbon dioxide than existing methods.

This is especially dumb because we already produce a lot of carbon dioxide as a byproduct of industrial activity. For instance, fermenting beer creates a lot of carbon dioxide, and a handful of breweries capture it and compress it for use carbonating their beer. This carbon dioxide is "free" in the sense that almost all of the energy used to produce it was going to be used anyway to make the beer, so the incremental environmental cost of capturing the carbon dioxide is simply whatever machinery has to be installed to capture and pressurize the carbon dioxide from the fermentation.

The same is true of all kinds of commercial and industrial activity. Now conceivably the technology profiled in the New York Times article is superior in some way. But if so it's not because it removes carbon from the air (only to put it back into the air when people open their cans of Coke), it's because it does so more efficiently than other methods of producing carbon dioxide for commercial use.