| It’s become increasingly clear in recent years that if humanity is going to head off the worst consequences of climate change, we have to not only cut emissions, but reverse them. That is, somehow suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, thus helping cool the planet. We might do this by bolstering wetlands and forests to naturally sequester CO2. Or we can develop technologies like direct air capture, or DAC, machines that suck in air and scrub it of carbon. These machines actually already exist, though their deployment is extremely limited. To fix that, according to a group of researchers in a new paper in the journal Nature Communications, countries would have to treat the climate crisis like the next world war, throwing piles of money at the development of DAC. We’re talking on the order of 1 to 2 percent of global GDP annually over the next 80 years. With such an investment, we’d be able to scale up DAC networks to remove around 2.3 gigatons of CO2 a year by 2050. (For perspective, total global emissions are currently around 40 gigatons annually.) The idea would be to keep adding more and more facilities, totaling some 10,000 by the end of the century, at which point we could be removing 27 gigatons of CO2 a year. Let’s be abundantly clear: DAC is not the miracle cure-all for climate change. Without drastically and rapidly bringing down emissions, we’d still end up with way too much warming, even with 10,000 DAC facilities humming along.
But an emergency like climate change demands an emergency response. Here’s how DAC could be a powerful weapon in the fight to save our planet.
Matt Simon | Staff Writer, WIRED |
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