It is time to remove carbon from the atmosphere. But how?

The vagueness of how these international exchanges will work makes it very difficult to agree on what the net zero is means. “The definition of what is clean zero is that no one has the slightest idea,” says Janos Pasztor, executive director of the Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative. In general, a zero nation should add and remove the same amount of carbon to the atmosphere, he continues, “but it remains to be seen what that means, and how you measure it and how you prove it.”

And what’s more crucial, according to these experts, is that having a zero goal isn’t going to be low enough. We need to remove some of the carbon that is already in the atmosphere. “We will almost certainly exceed 1.5 in the coming decades,” says Hausfather. “And so the only way to get back to 1.5 C is to actively absorb carbon from the atmosphere. There’s almost no other way to do it.”

“The reality is that what we should have done 30 years ago we didn’t do, which is then reduce our emissions enough so that we don’t stay in the situation we are in today,” Pasztor admits. “It’s too late now to reduce emissions.”

Carbon Capture Technologies

The U.S. government seems to have received the message: the White House announced it on Tuesday Negative carbon footprint (a play of a “moonshot”), an initiative to accelerate the development of carbon removal technologies. In a news report, The White House acknowledges that some industries will be adamant about decarbonisation — think manufacturing and rail transportation. “That’s why,” the report says, “removing CO₂ from the atmosphere it will be essential for the US to reach zero net by 2050 and then achieve net negative emissions. ”

Carbon capture technologies are of two main types. Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, means taking and storing emissions from fossil fuel power plants. It involves the removal of carbon dioxide, or CDR, from free machines that pass through membranes that absorb air and extract CO.₂. (This technology is also called direct air capture.) Basically, capture and storage methods would hijack the emissions that a nation currently generates, while air removal methods would hijack emissions of heritage from the atmosphere.

But what about that CO₂ once caught? One option is to dissolve it in water – like the largest glass in the world – and pump it underground to a highly reactive, carbon-absorbing basalt stone. it locks. Injecting trapped CO₂ it is a fairly durable underground solution. (Except for the supervolcano it throws all this material up into the sky.)

Another option is to become one fuel for aircraft and cargo ships. Both are difficult parts of the transportation industry, given the size of the machines. This strategy is not carbon-negative, but carbon-neutral: carbon is taken out of the air, burned again, and returned to the atmosphere. It is better than extracting more fossil fuels, and it reduces the demand for new fuel sources, but it is not yet a general reduction.