It's the worst deal in history for us.

If it works, we'll probably have to pay tax dollars for pulbic contracts to remove CO2 from the air for the rest of our lives (do you think they'll clean it out of their own goodwill? For their own survival? Without charging us?). And that doesn't seem likely.

If it doesn't work, we're fucked.

Currently, we get a lot more millage out of reducing obvious carbon sources (transit with fossil fuel engines, meat production, cruise ships, energy production) or reducing inefficiency in other industries (textile, etc.). The problem with reducing at the source, I think, if if you go all in you'll quickly realize that it essentially means acknowledging we can't do as much as we could before (at least not until we've adapted, and that will take awhile). And that is poison to our system (politically and economically).

The common thread in all these articles about CDR is that they focus on corporate investment into large scale projects. If the government was serious about meeting climate targets, they would be raising taxes on the largest companies, and giving the money to small scale, open-source carbon removal solutions. People to run these could be pulled from the enormous unemployed labor pool, and given grants in the form of equipment and technical education.

It seems like CDR could be done on a small scale with photovoltaic panels and an open-source hardware direct air capture (DAC) system. People could be subsidized to place panels on their home, and side-step the logistics of connecting it to the grid by having it wired directly to a DAC system. The existence of panels would be an incentive for the electrical grid get re-designed at a faster pace. It is currently not possible to feed energy back to the grid in a lot of places for worker safety reasons, but this creates a chicken and egg situation where the costs of re-aligning the grid for domestic energy production needs the existence of existence of domestic solar capacity to help justify the costs, and domestic energy production is much more expensive if you can't benefit from selling your surplus back to the grid. Having subsidized DAC justifying the installation of solar capacity would solve the bootstrap problem.

Of course the additional funds to do a program like this would have to come from raised taxes on the most polluting industries. This is all wishful thinking.

I'm a bit worried about the other responses in this thread automatically assuming this task will be performed by the private sector. That line of neoliberal thinking helped get us into this mess and I don't think it will get us out. The government should be doing the research and eventually the removal and storage. There's never going to be a market force that pursuades the private sector to do it, so the public sector should just take on the task.

I'm probably wrong, but this is what I'd prefer. Imagine someone connected to an old oil company getting richer removing carbon that their grandparent got rich putting in the air. That would be insanity.