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The idea of sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere to combat climate change might be a necessary intervention, but it always sounded like a longshot.
Unfortunately, it seems like the strategy is already hitting a wall. A new report published this week found that ongoing carbon dioxide removal (CDR) efforts are barely putting a dent in the fight against global warming — and that for them to start making an impact, they would need to be scaled up at a rate that rivals the adoption of solar panels.
In other words, we’re not doing it big enough, and we’re not doing it fast enough. And the longer we wait to get the ball rolling, the more carbon removal we’ll need to do to mitigate climate impacts.
“Countries have pledged around 2.7 billion [metric tons] of carbon removal by 2035 and about 3.6 billion by 2050, but climate pathways require much more, especially in the long term,” report coauthor William Lamb, a scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, told The Guardian. “This leaves a gap that grows significantly over time.”
Scientists generally agree that CDR efforts will play a small but necessary role in limiting global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit — but only as a complement to the primary goal of aggressively reducing our emissions, and eventually hitting net zero emissions by 2050. The International Panel on Climate Change considers carbon removal to be “unavoidable,” or essential to achieving climate targets, because some industries will be difficult to completely decarbonize, such as agriculture.
That said, there’s a risk of overstating its importance to the public, letting us off the hook from actually having to revolutionize energy production and consumption. Scientists are wary of advocating for geoengineering efforts, like dimming the Sun, for the same reason, even if they do prove necessary.
In any case, progress is meager. According to the report, deliberate human interventions currently remove around 2.2 billion metric tons of Co2 per year, which is about five percent of global annual emissions. The bulk of this is achieved through interventions like planting trees. But novel high tech solutions, such as using machines to suck greenhouse gases straight from the atmosphere — direct air capture — made up just 0.1 percent of that multibillion ton total.
That’s despite these novel forms of CDR growing at a rate of 40 percent a year, because they’re essentially starting from scratch. For them to catch up, they would need to grow at a breakneck pace similar to the rapid adoption of solar panels and electric vehicles, the report found.
So, it’s possible. But the industry is in a precarious position. Microsoft, which purchased over 80 percent of the novel carbon credits that fund these CDR efforts, stopped buying new credits in April, The Guardian noted, which could signal the ways the winds will be blowing as the Trump administration tears up climate laws and backs fossil fuels.
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