Carbon removal technologies to help tackle climate change? Here’s what it’ll take.

This is a summary of an essay published in Foreign Affairs . A wave of destructive hurricanes, heat spells and wildfires has ravaged communities across the United States over the past year – bringing new urgency to the need for climate action, as both scientists and citizens are able to connect these extreme events to a warming Earth. Time is of the essence, but it’s not too late to solve the global climate crisis. A decade of extraordinary innovation has made a greening of the global economy not just feasible, but likely. Now a whole new arsenal is emerging in the fight against climate change: negative emission technologies. Alongside aggressive action to cut emissions, these technologies will be crucial to reaching “net zero” carbon emissions – the point where any climate pollution we add to the atmosphere is balanced by what we take out. The U.S. must reach this goal by 2050, with the world as a whole reaching net zero as soon as possible thereafter, if we are to stabilize our atmosphere. $1 billion – just to research it NETs are different from conventional approaches to climate mitigation because rather than seeking to reduce the amount of greenhouse […]

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