He's the world famous asshole who sued PNAS and scientists publishing an article there when they questioned his belief that the entire world could be run on so called "renewable energy."
Stanford prof who sued critics loses appeal against $500,000 in legal fees
I'm not questioning the point of whether the DAC plant in Iceland works. It probably doesn't. Nevertheless it's pretty laughable for a high priest of the antinuke "renewable energy will save us" cults to be commenting on what might and might not be a scam.
It's well known that the removal of carbon dioxide from any matrix, from flue gas, to natural gas to air, is an energy intensive process. The more dilute the concentration, the more energy required. It's simple physics, involving overcoming the entropy of mixing. If one seeks to reduce the carbon chemically say to a useful form, one must add all of the energy released to put it there, and then some. It certainly isn't an easy problem to solve. I certainly am aware of this, but that doesn't stop me from thinking about it frequently, for instance, exploiting the use of air Brayton Cycles driven by nuclear heat to achieve this result. We pump air in all kinds of industrial devices, although most are powered by dangerous fossil fuels. If we pull the fossil fuels out of the line, it may be possible, even economically viable - although this is highly speculative - to capture carbon dioxide from the air. Just as we knew that flight is possible because birds fly, we should be aware that DAC is possible from the existence of photosynthetic plants. Ripping up the planetary surface area to build wind farms and solar farms will and does have the effect of destroying plants, even without the vast mineral mining exercises required for the effort.
Frankly I have far more respect for one of the prominent scientists in the field of DAC, Christopher Jones of Georgia Tech, than I do for Mark Z. Jacobson. (Jones consulted on Climeworks.) That this project failed does not imply that all such projects will fail. It was using dedicated energy in a renewable energy heaven, Iceland, where the main CO2 releases are connected with geothermal energy.
I obviously have no use for Mark Z. Jacobson, who despite his h-index, I regard as a fool but I am impressed by Dr. Jones (who has a higher h index) who is working to solve a very difficult problem, and who has been cited by other scientists 43389 times without generating any lawsuits being initiated by him.
Difficult problems are not solved without being littered with lots of failures in the effort. We damned well better figure it out because otherwise we're screwed.
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