The CO2 content of the exhaust from a coal-fired power plant is (fortunately) many orders of magnitude higher than what's found in the atmosphere. It would be

The CO2 content of the exhaust from a coal-fired power plant is (fortunately) many orders of magnitude higher than what's found in the atmosphere. It would be much cheaper to capture it at the source. But even that is still considered too expensive, which is part of the reason we don't see many large-scale carbon capture and storage operations popping up. But there are some encouraging news from Canada these days: http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/10/07/clean-coal-era-begins/ http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2014/10/07/...