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Can our climate be saved by vacuuming carbon out of the skies?

Around the world, governments are banking on being able to suck excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as a way to stave-off climate change.

This June, the University of Oxford published research saying that if we want to limit warming to just 1.5 degrees (which would be catastrophic), humanity will need to extract between seven and nine billion tons of carbon dioxide out of the air each year by 2050. Obviously, getting more fossil fuels out of the ground to burn does not do very much for the climate, and ideally the governments of the world would just invest in effective carbon capture to prevent us from boiling to death. In 2022, the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis bluntly claimed the process “simply won’t work.” Part of the objection was that it can be (and is) used for enhanced oil recovery, but also that when DAC facilities are up and running, they’re often far less effective at capturing CO2 than initially promised.

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