Carbon capture. Some say it will help save the world, for others it’s a dangerous distraction
- Media Manager
- May 10, 2023
- 1 min read
CNN
Written By: Laura Paddison
Published: May 11th, 3023
The window to prevent catastrophic climate change is closing. Concentrations of planet-warming carbon pollution in the air are at their highest level in more than 2 million years – and the world has yet to even hit peak fossil fuel emissions.
The crisis is so urgent that scientists and governments are scrambling to find ways to remove some of this carbon pollution from the air, and to capture what’s still being produced by power plants and industrial facilities.
Long considered controversial, these techniques are increasingly landing a starring role in climate policies.
In its 2022 report, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that “all available studies require at least some kind of carbon dioxide removal to reach net zero” – where the world removes as much planet-heating pollution from the atmosphere as it emits.
Even if emissions fall significantly, the world would still need to remove between around 10 to 20 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year, according to the IPCC.
Very few people claim that carbon capture and removal alone will solve climate change.
“There’s no silver bullet here,” said Howard Herzog, Senior Research Engineer in the MIT Energy Initiative, who has studied carbon capture for four decades. But it’s “a tool in our portfolio” of options, he told CNN.
Others, however, fear that this is a reckless bet on technology that is expensive, unproven at scale, and too far away from full development to provide a meaningful answer to the climate crisis.
And they criticize these technologies as a dangerous distraction from policies to cut down fossil fuel use.
