The last edition of The Economist notices that on September 9, the world’s biggest carbon-removal plant located in Iceland has started sucking carbon dioxide directly from the air. It will capture 4000 tons of CO2 every year https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/09/18/the-worlds-biggest-carbon-removal-plant-switches-on
Of course, 4000 tons is almost nothing (it would require 125 years just to reach 0.5 million tons), the same as the carbon dioxide absorbed by 200.000 trees and much less than the 1 million tonnes per year that will be sequestered by the massive carbon removal plant that is now being built in Scotland to become operational by 2026 https://pacheco-torgal.blogspot.com/2021/06/a-massive-plant-capable-of-removing-one.html
Even assuming that the aforementioned Iceland carbon removal plant would already be able to suck 1 million tons per year wouldn´t it be better to avoid massive deforestation that is able to store 7.6 billion tons of carbon per year https://www.nature.com/articles/s41558-020-00976-6 than to built expensive carbon removal plants (Iceland plant cost almost 15 million USD which means 75 USD/ton of carbon just for plant cost) ?
Wouldn´t it be better for Iceland to copy Norway's example the country that paid 24 million USD to Indonesia to avert almost 4.8 million tons of carbon-related deforestation which means a cost of just 5 USD per ton of carbon ?
It´s worth mentioning that Norway has also agreed to paý Colombia 50 million USD per year to avoid deforestation https://www.regjeringen.no/en/aktuelt/colombia-og-noreg-styrkjer-skogsamarbeidet/id2596990/ And let´s not forget that paying poor countries to avoid deforestation is also an excellent way to reduce the number of the many "millions of young people living in miserable conditions that can easily be radicalized to engage in terrorist actions"
PS - Not to mention that building carbon removal plants will be unable to prevent the biodiversity crisis caused by deforestation that even worries the Financial Times. See the article below where one can read that Swiss Re estimates the value of biodiversity at 33 trillion USD a year https://www.ft.com/content/d29231ca-3bdc-4bd1-a477-5504c772259a
