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MATT SIMON SCIENCE 11.05.2021 07:00 AM

It’s Time to Delete Carbon From the Atmosphere.

But How?
It’s not enough to drastically slash emissions. To stave off the worst of climate change, humanity needs to capture the
carbon that's already in the air.

PHOTOGRAPH: GETTY IMAGES

THIS WEEK AND next, government representatives are gathering FEATURED VIDEO
in Glasgow for the United Nations Climate Change Conference,
or COP26, the latest of an increasingly frantic string of meetings
as humanity runs out of time to drastically reduce our
greenhouse gas emissions. Everyone agrees that carbon is bad.
And everyone agrees it’s hard to get rid of; carbon dioxide lasts
up to a thousand years in the atmosphere. The world even has a
common goal: keeping global temperatures from reaching 1.5
degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the boundary set by Scientist's Map Explains Climate Change

the Paris Climate Agreement.

But nations don’t agree on how we’ll get there: Staving off the
worst of climate change will require cutting carbon emissions
Press the Green Button for epic
and developing ways to pull them out of the atmosphere. Here views and the warmest of
are some of the options delegates will likely be discussing as welcomes.
COP26 continues.

The Problem With Net Zero Discover more ›

You’ve probably heard of a sticky little concept known as net-
zero emissions: If you put any carbon into the atmosphere, you
have to take the same amount out. On Monday at COP26, India’s Most Popular
prime minister, Narendra Modi, announced that his country
would reach that goal by the year 2070. Earlier this year, BUSINESS

President Joe Biden said the United States would do the same by Google Sta! Squirm as
Remote Workers Face Pay
2050, a goal the UK has also pledged to achieve. Cuts
SOPHIA EPSTEIN

It’s a popular idea, although it’s based on achieving the bare

minimum. “I think the main reason we're going probably see a SECURITY

A Drone Tried to Disrupt the

lot of discussion about it at COP26, and certainly going forward, Power Grid. It Won't Be the
Last
is that the world continues to pay lip service to the idea of
BRIAN BARRETT
limiting warming to one and a half degrees,” says Zeke
Hausfather, a climate scientist and the director of climate and SECURITY

energy at the advocacy group the Breakthrough Institute. 1.8 TB of Police Helicopter
Surveillance Footage Leaks
Online
The problem with net zero is that it doesn’t mean that these LILY HAY NEWMAN
countries will stop spewing greenhouse gases by those target
dates. It just means that by that point, they won’t be adding any GEAR

16 Great Deals from Target’s

to the atmosphere in aggregate. Net-zero can be a cop-out, Early Holiday Sale
because it allows nations to keep polluting so long as they’re also JESS GREY AND GEAR TEAM

capturing that pollution. It’s a bit like trying to drain a bathtub

with the tap still running full blast.

It might even encourage nations to keep spewing greenhouse

gases, so long as they’re also sequestering them. Or a country
might make a big deal about offshoring its carbon-intensive
industries like steel production, disavow all those emissions, and
then just import those materials anyway. Corporations, too,
aren’t incentivized to actually reduce their emissions if they can
just buy carbon credits. “It is absolutely a very reasonable
concern and something we all have to guard against,” says
Angela Anderson, director of industrial innovation and carbon
removal at the nonprofit World Resources Institute, “the
temptation and certainly the desire by some interests in the fossil
fuel industry to not have to reduce emissions to preserve their
existing business plans.”

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The nebulousness of how these international exchanges will

work makes it very difficult to agree on what net zero even
means. “The definition of what is net zero, nobody has the
faintest idea,” says Janos Pasztor, executive director of the
Carnegie Climate Governance Initiative. Broadly speaking, a net-
zero nation should add and remove the same amount of carbon
to the atmosphere, he continues, “but what that means, and how
you measure it, and how you demonstrate it, that remains to be
seen.”

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Highly Experienced Team
Headwater Gold Most Popular
Open
BUSINESS

Google Sta! Squirm as

Remote Workers Face Pay
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And more crucially, these experts say, aiming for zero isn’t
SOPHIA EPSTEIN
aiming low enough. We’ll have to remove some of the carbon
that’s already in the atmosphere. “We're almost certainly going SECURITY

to pass 1.5 in the next few decades,” says Hausfather. “And so the A Drone Tried to Disrupt the
Power Grid. It Won't Be the
only way to get back down to 1.5 C is to actively suck carbon out Last
of the atmosphere. There's pretty much no other way to do it.” BRIAN BARRETT

SECURITY
“The reality is that we didn't do what we should have done 30
1.8 TB of Police Helicopter
years ago, which is to reduce our emissions back then enough so Surveillance Footage Leaks
Online
that we wouldn't be in the situation where we are today,” agrees
LILY HAY NEWMAN
Pasztor. “Now it's too late simply to reduce emissions.”
GEAR

16 Great Deals from Target’s

Carbon-Capturing Technologies Early Holiday Sale
JESS GREY AND GEAR TEAM

The US government seems to have gotten the message: On

Tuesday, the White House announced the Carbon Negative Shot
(a play on a “moonshot”), an initiative for accelerating the
development of carbon removal technologies. In a new report,
the White House acknowledges that certain industries will
stubbornly resist decarbonization—think manufacturing and rail
transportation. “Because of this,” the report says, “removals of
CO2 from the atmosphere will be critical to enable the United
States to reach net-zero by 2050 and to achieve net negative
emissions thereafter.”

Carbon-capturing technologies come in two main varieties.

Carbon capture and storage, or CCS, means grabbing the
emissions from fossil fuel power plants and storing them. Carbon
dioxide removal, or CDR, involves free-standing machines that
suck in air and pass it over membranes that pull out the CO2.
(This technology is also called direct air capture.) Basically,
capture and storage methods would sequester the emissions a
nation is currently producing, while the air removal methods
would sequester legacy emissions already in the atmosphere.

But what happens with that CO2 once it’s been captured? One
option is to dissolve it in water—sort of like the world’s biggest
glass of soda—and pump it underground into highly reactive
basalt rock, which absorbs the carbon and locks it away.
Injecting captured CO2 underground is a fairly permanent
solution. (Unless a supervolcano blows all that material sky-
high.)

Another option is to turn it into fuel for airplanes and cargo

ships. Both are hard-to-decarbonize parts of the transportation
industry, given the size of the machines. This strategy isn’t
actually carbon-negative, but carbon-neutral: The carbon is
pulled out of the air, burned again, and returns to the
atmosphere. It’s better than digging up more fossil fuels, and it
reduces the demand for new fuel sources, but it’s still not an
overall reduction.

Removing carbon from the atmosphere is not going to be cheap

—far from it. Earlier this year, researchers called for a wartime-
style investment in CDR technology, calculating that it’d take Most Popular
between 1 and 2 percent of global gross domestic product to
BUSINESS
build enough machines to pull 2.3 gigatons of CO2 out of the
Google Sta! Squirm as
atmosphere a year. But at the moment, humanity is spewing 40 Remote Workers Face Pay
Cuts
gigatons a year. We’d need 10,000 of these plants by the end of
SOPHIA EPSTEIN
the century to even sequester 27 gigatons a year.
SECURITY
“We are so far from that, it is just A Drone Tried to Disrupt the
Power Grid. It Won't Be the
not funny. So it requires Last
acceleration, the kinds of things BRIAN BARRETT

that governments can do by

SECURITY
funding innovation, funding
1.8 TB of Police Helicopter
research,” says Pasztor. “Of Surveillance Footage Leaks
Online
course, the most important one to
LILY HAY NEWMAN
help financing would be a carbon
The WIRED Guide to price.” That is, to slap a tax on GEAR

Climate Change emissions from businesses, 16 Great Deals from Target’s

Early Holiday Sale
especially utilities and oil and gas
The world is getting warmer, the JESS GREY AND GEAR TEAM

weather is getting worse. Here's companies, and use the proceeds

everything you need to know to develop systems for sucking
about what humans can do to
that carbon out of the air. But the
stop wrecking the planet.
financial onus of funding carbon-
BY KATIE M. PALMER AND MATT SIMON
eating devices should not fall on
economically-developing
countries, says Pasztor, given that ultra-polluting powers like the
US got us into this mess in the first place.

Some might wonder if upgrading fossil fuel plants to capture

carbon will ultimately suppress investments in renewables, like
solar farms. But the cost of those once-pricey green alternatives
is now crashing. “Even somewhere like China, if they have to
choose between retrofitting coal plants and increasing their cost
by 25 percent, versus building new clean energy, I think the
latter is going to be cheaper going forward,” says Hausfather. “I
think the economics of coal are getting to be bad enough these
days.”

Green and Blue Carbon

There is another way to sequester carbon: The planet is already
doing it, and all we have to do is help it along. Forests inhale CO2
and exhale oxygen. The storage of carbon in plant matter, or
even landscapes like Arctic peat, is sometimes called “green
carbon.” Conservationists are also increasingly turning their
attention to “blue carbon,” or coastal vegetation like kelp forests,
seagrasses, and mangroves.

Protecting environments like these not only helps more plants

sequester carbon, but it can lead to beneficial knock-on effects:
More biodiversity, more tourism, and more vegetation that
prevents erosion or absorbs the water from storm surges, which
will be particularly useful in places affected by sea-level rise.
“Sometimes the other advantages of the nature-based
approaches—for sustainability and local employment—may be
much more than the actual carbon saved,” says Pasztor.

Yet many of these natural carbon sinks are being threatened in

ways that may lead them to release the greenhouse gas.
“Unfortunately, climate change itself is threatening the
permanence of storing carbon in forests, for example with
wildfires,” says Anderson. Fires are becoming more massive in
the Arctic and the American west, and other human activities,
like farming and raising livestock, are also churning up soil in
ways that release sequestered carbon.

Climate experts say there is definitely one wrong way to go

about sequestering “green” carbon: Planting a single tree species
across a landscape and calling it a day. This is a flaw in many
carbon offset programs, in which a company or government
pays another entity to plant trees to compensate for their
emissions. This kind of planting is not an ecosystem—it’s a crop.
Single-species communities can be less resilient to disease, and
if the trees are not native to the region, they may not be well-
adapted to fire. (Not all fires have to be catastrophic for forests;
smaller fires clear out dead brush from healthy ecosystems, and
plants and animals that have evolved in fire-prone regions have
adapted to regular burns.)

The math also doesn’t quite check out; even planting a trillion
trees won’t be enough to hit that 1.5 degree goal. And Hausfather
suggests that this kind of easy out also disincentivizes
companies from making bigger changes. “You have all these
companies that are saying they're carbon-neutral, who have
only reduced their emissions like 15, 20 percent, because they've
covered all the rest with cheap forestry offsets,” he says. “Once
you’re carbon-neutral, and you get all the fun PR around that,
there's less of an incentive to actually reduce your emissions.”

Ryan Hanna, an energy systems researcher at UC San Diego, says

that this is one of the big advantages of investing in carbon-
eating machines over carbon offsets: It’s clear what that money
is buying. With offsets, “corporations can go in and do lots of
opaque accounting and engage in tricks,” says Hanna, who was
lead author on the paper that called for the mass deployment of
direct air capture technologies. “They can game the system.”

On the other hand, if you build a facility to capture carbon, he

continues, “You have durable, measurable carbon removal,
because you inject CO2 into a pipeline and you pump it
underground, and you can measure by mass and by volume.”

If we’re going to avoid the worst of climate change, we’ll need

technologies like these. But, ironically, if the delegates at COP26
don’t push hard for more drastic change, the existence of carbon
capture technologies could become a sort of fig leaf that allows
governments and corporations to keep pumping out emissions
as usual, while aiming to do no more than reach net zero. And
that will put the world between a CO2-infused basalt rock and a
hard place.

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Matt Simon is a science journalist at WIRED, where he covers

biology, robotics, cannabis, and the environment. He’s also the
author of Plight of the Living Dead: What Real-Life Zombies
Reveal About Our World—And Ourselves, and The Wasp That
Brainwashed the Caterpillar, which won an Alex Award.

STAFF WRITER

TOPICS CLIMATE CHANGE CARBON EMISSIONS ENVIRONMENT

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