Key Points
A certain amount of this is goodwithout CO2 the Earth would be so cold, the oceans would freeze..
The only problem is that removing the tiny fraction of C02 from the air, which is 99 percent nitrogen and oxygen, takes a lot of energy, and our hunger for energy is what got us into this mess in the first place...
Here's the cool thing: We can use the same idea about changes in entropy when separating gases to estimate the energy requirement of removing CO2 from the air..
If we assume both the nitrogen and CO2 molecules behave as ideal gases, then we actually deal with the gas pressure instead of the volume..
We would have to use the pressure to find the volume anywaybut in this case we can consider the nitrogen to be at close to 1 atmosphere of pressure and the partial pressure of the CO2 would be 400 millionths (0.0004) of the atmospheric pressure..
