Every time something like this comes up I think exactly the same thing: Did everyone flunk first year Physics?

Someone please explain how nobody seems to care about the fact that you cannot violate conservation of energy.

How much energy will it take to reduce atmospheric CO2 by 100 ppm?

Never mind time and resources. Let's just talk energy.

How much?

The simple answer is: More than the energy that went into creating the problem in the first place.

How much more?

A lot more. Because these processes are not efficient at all when looked into in their entirety.

A number?

OK. How did we get the CO2? By burning oil. What did it take to create this oil. Billions of years of plants and biological matter being crushed and cooked by...solar energy. Massive amounts of energy falling on this planet. The end result being a highly concentrated source of energy. When we burn a gallon of oil we are releasing the culmination of what took unimaginable time and energy to produce.

You are not going to make an impact without expending an equally massive amount of energy and resources.

Let's say I burn a pile of lumber inside a large sealed warehouse. Say, 100K square feet (about 10K square meters) and very high. Large volume. Smoke, particles, gases disperse throughout the volume.

You are tasked with cleaning it.

You can't open windows, etc. That would be cheating. There is not "and then a miracle occurs" scenario.

It would take an immense amount of energy and resources (relative to what it took to create the mess) to go find every particle and clean-up the noxious gases in that warehouse.

If we can't clean a warehouse, what makes anyone think we can magically deal with a planetary-scale problem?

We already know this. There are research papers that explain just how it is that even the idea of converting the entire planet to renewable energy sources is an exercise in futility.

My point is: If we could just stop lying to ourselves maybe we can devote brain power towards dealing with the reality of the problem rather than the fantasies of non-existing solutions.

I am not saying "let's be filthy and do nothing". I am simply saying we are not facing reality, which means we are wasting valuable time and resources "solving" a problem we cannot possibly solve without risking killing everything on this planet.

All you need in order to understand this is the atmospheric CO2 data from ice core samples going back 800,000 years. We know that if humanity was not around it would take about 50K years for a 100 ppm drop in CO2. In other words, with the ultimate "solution" --if we left this planet-- it would take 50K years. What makes people actually believe we can solve the problem in a generation or two if we stick around? That's not hubris, that's a delusion. Sorry.

If anyone disagrees. Great. I would like to learn how I am wrong. Kindly explain how you are going to achieve a rate of change between 500 and 1,000 times greater than what could be achieved if humanity --and all of our technology-- got erased from this planet. That's the challenge. No magical technology can do better than the absence of humanity and all of our toys. That should be self evident. And yet, without us around, the timeline is in the 50K year range.

Take your time, show how this 1000x improvement in rate-of-change will happen without at least 1000x the energy deployed at a planetary scale by natural processes.