> About 173,000 TW of energy strikes earth continuously. We have all the technology and we have all the resources we need to rapidly limit greenhouse gas emissions to sustainable levels and to start to remove CO2 from the atmosphere.

No, we don't. Great sounding assertion, no analysis whatsoever.

To start, read this:

https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-...

And then, this:

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/reversing-ocean-acidification-aggr...

And then do this math. Let's use your number, "173,000 TW of energy" coming into our blue marble in space.

BTW, the Watt is a unit of POWER, not energy. Ignoring that minor detail for a second...

How is petroleum made?

Dead plants + dead animals + dead insects + possibly other stuff + lots of solar energy + millions of years

How much energy goes into creating one gallon of oil?

n<followed by an unimaginably large number of zeros>

How was it possible for humanity to affect such a dramatic change in atmospheric CO2 concentration?

Well, we burned oil.

Why was that so effective?

Because burning one gallon of oil, to put it in simple terms, is like burning an entire chunk of a forest...and we can burn a gallon of oil much faster than the equivalent forest area would burn. In other words, we can burn the result of a massive amount of raw matter, combined with a massive amount of solar energy and millions of years to produce it, in mere seconds.

In fact, one estimate says that one gallon of gasoline (not oil, that's worse) required some 98 tons of plants to produce:

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/654287

From the article:

""Can you imagine loading 40 acres worth of wheat – stalks, roots and all – into the tank of your car or SUV every 20 miles?" asks ecologist Jeff Dukes, whose study will be published in the November issue of the journal Climatic Change.""

So, by burning one gallon of gasoline, we are burning the equivalent of some 40 acres of plant matter in roughly 20 minutes on every vehicle on earth (seat of the pants average, it's likely worse than that).

Wow! OK, how many gallons of oil do we burn per year?

Barrels. We burn about 35 BILLION barrels per year:

https://www.worldometers.info/oil/

BILLION, not million.

Going back to my "it's a closed system" observation. All we have is some amount of energy coming in and some being lost to space. No magical vacuum cleaner to help us fix anything. And we have resources, minerals, etc. under and above ground. That's it.

What you have to balance in an equation when evaluating a proposed solution is the amount of energy it took to create the materials we used to be able to release so much CO2 into the atmosphere. It will not take less energy to claw it back, in any form. It will take more. Even if we found parity and it took the same amount of energy, it would be an impossibly large number. Even if we found a magical juju bean that could do it for 1/10 the the energy, it would still be an unimaginably large number, not to mention what it would take to go mine, process, transport, deploy and clean-up the magical juju beans.

Just a little bit of thought and high school math quickly reveals we are being sold fantasy after fantasy. We can't fix this. We need to start talking about adapting. There is no Superman.