Take: Debunking the Myths: Why Carbon Removal Can Scale with Klaus Lackner

Thu, 08 Oct 2026 10:00:00 +0000

Take on a podcast episode from Climate Chat, originally published Tue, 29 Se. Listen: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bnI-2ckIDMQ

TL;DR

Thermodynamic minimum for direct air capture is ~20 kJ/mol CO2 vs ~700 kJ/mol released burning gasoline; current DAC runs 10–20x above that floor. Useful framing.
Lackner’s practical cost floor: $10–30/t (materials, water, electricity only); $100/t is the “economy survives” threshold. Cost-floor argument is the episode’s strongest section.
Learning rate is the make-or-break variable: 20% per doubling scales to gigatons, 10% fails. Rarely stated this bluntly.
Policy ask: certificate of sequestration at the wellhead plus a reverse auction for government buying of historical emissions. Coherent, not new.
Arcusa (ASU) finding cited: roughly half of Microsoft’s carbon certificates are “orphaned” after 30 years. First time I’ve seen this number on a podcast.

Dan Miller hosts Klaus Lackner — the physicist who published the first technical direct air capture paper in 1999 and co-founded Global Research Technologies — for a structured walk through what he calls the myths about carbon dioxide removal. Episode: https://youtube.com/watch?v=bnI-2ckIDMQ. Topics are energy balance, cost floors, storage capacity, fossil-company moral hazard, scaling precedents, and the policy design Lackner wants. It’s a long interview with a live Q&A; the substance is front-loaded.

Climate-Chat on Captain Drawdown's CDR Databases

Take: Debunking the Myths: Why Carbon Removal Can Scale with Klaus Lackner