105–Robert and Eric review a news article about direct air capture (DAC) technology, particularly considering Bill Gates's investment in a Canadian DAC company. The hosts argue that DAC is not a viable solution to address climate change and is a distraction from more effective approaches like THE RED CUP. Overall, the discussion presents a strong critique of DAC, arguing that it's a costly distraction from real climate solutions and potentially a vehicle for a small financial gain rather than genuine environmental progress. They call for greater focus on renewable energy deployments and think the best sequestration approach is to leave the fossil fuels in the ground.

The con­ver­sa­tion cen­ters around Bill Gates’s $40 mil­lion invest­ment in a DAC project in Cana­da. Dr. Renew­able argues that DAC is not cost-effec­tive and won’t make a sig­nif­i­cant dent in atmos­pher­ic car­bon. He sug­gests the atten­tion would be bet­ter spent on renew­able, effi­cien­cy and demand projects. Eric explains the core issue with DAC: cap­tur­ing CO2 from the atmos­phere is more dif­fi­cult and ener­gy inten­sive because of very low con­cen­tra­tions — 420 parts per mil­lion. He uses an anal­o­gy of try­ing to address a small amount of diesel spilled in a large lake when peo­ple are still spilling lots of diesel into the lake at the same time. He also points out the hypocrisy of DAC while allow­ing con­tin­ued emis­sions from coal plants. Dr. Renew­able pro­pos­es that Bill Gates’s is engag­ing in ven­ture cap­i­tal tac­tics, invest­ing ear­ly in a com­pa­ny to then sell his shares for a prof­it, regard­less of the tech­nol­o­gy’s actu­al effec­tive­ness. Ear­ly ven­ture cap­i­tal investors refer to the next round of investors as ​“sheep” who are enam­ored by the ini­tial invest­ment into a tech­nol­o­gy and see it as ​“vet­ted”. Dr. Renew­able presents cal­cu­la­tions show­ing the cost of cap­tur­ing all year­ly CO2 emis­sions from coal-fired pow­er plants using DAC. He esti­mates DAC costs lev­el­ing out at approx­i­mate­ly $350 per ton of CO2, result­ing in a total cost of $13 tril­lion a year — a fig­ure dwarf­ing the glob­al ener­gy mar­ket. He argues that this makes DAC eco­nom­i­cal­ly unfea­si­ble com­pared to using 1 out of 10,000 pho­tons we get from the sun. Bill Gates is essen­tial­ly con­tribut­ing to an ​“apartheid against renew­ables” by pro­mot­ing a flawed approach. Eric also rais­es con­cerns about the embed­ded car­bon emis­sions asso­ci­at­ed with build­ing DAC plants (steel, man­u­fac­tur­ing, etc.) and the ener­gy required to oper­ate them. He high­lights the ten­den­cy to focus on spe­cif­ic envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems like min­ing elec­tric car bat­ter­ies while ignor­ing the larg­er issue of fos­sil fuel low­er­ing their over­all ener­gy effi­cien­cy to look like they are doing some­thing. Robert acknowl­edges that DAC sounds appeal­ing to the pub­lic because it offers a seem­ing­ly sim­ple tech­no­log­i­cal fix. They argue that renew­able ener­gy advo­cates need to become bet­ter at com­mu­ni­cat­ing the ben­e­fits of their solu­tions in a sim­i­lar­ly com­pelling way. Dr. Renew­able advo­cates for a direct approach: shut­ting down coal plants and invest­ing direct­ly in renew­able ener­gy infra­struc­ture. They believe this is a far more effi­cient and cost-effec­tive way to address cli­mate change than pur­su­ing tech­nolo­gies like DAC.