Others say that we need to pursue multiple routes to slow climate change “There is no 100-percent solution,” Dr. “If you’re doing too little on the emissions mitigation side, then there is no point of carbon dioxide removal,” said Glen Peters, research director at the Center for International Climate Research in Norway.Ī recent study found that after taking into account the energy used to capture and isolate CO2 from flue gas at a fossil fuel-burning industrial plant, the carbon capture system would reduce the plant’s net emissions by only 10 to 11 percent, not the estimated 80 to 90 percent cited by proponents. Some experts and environmentalists have pushed back against efforts to develop carbon capture, saying it is at best only a partial solution, and at worst it may impede a global transition to clean energy by letting the fossil fuel industry continue doing business as usual.
Those proposals have been met with skepticism, though, by some environmentalists who say carbon capture could distract from efforts to reduce emissions in the first place.Ĭan these technologies make a significant difference to climate change? Encouraged by tax incentives included in the Inflation Reduction Act, some companies have proposed projects in the United States to capture CO2 and either use it or store it deep underground. For example, in China companies have developed experimental commercial air filters huge towers that clean air of pollutants on a huge scale. Though carbon capture is not yet being done on a large scale, it is being pushed by companies and politicians as a key part of plans to guide the country to a carbon-neutral future. Carbon capture technologies are still being developed globally, with individual countries creating strategies that respond to their own net zero goals. But is there anything we can do about all the carbon dioxide that is already in the air, and the millions of tons being emitted every day?įor most of human history, carbon emissions were balanced out by nature, said Rebecca Benner, a deputy director of the Nature Conservancy, but now we are “producing CO2 much faster than nature can recapture it.”Ĭarbon capture is an umbrella term for technologies, some of them first proposed in the 1980s, that aim to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere or catch emissions and store them before they are released into the air. To solve it will require moving away from burning carbon-emitting fuels and relying instead on cleaner energy sources like wind turbines and solar cells.
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