Climate Solutions: Is It Feasible to Remove Enough CO2 from the Air? - by Elizabeth Kolbert

A U.S. scientific panel reports that technologies that take CO2 out of the atmosphere could be a significant part of a strategy to mitigate global warming.  In an e360 interview, Stephen Pacala, the panel’s chairman, discusses how these fast-developing technologies are becoming increasingly viable.

Is there still time to avoid runaway climate change?  To a large degree, the answer depends on the feasibility of “negative emissions” — techniques or technologies that suck CO2 out of the air.  In the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), all scenarios for limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius depend on negative emissions technologies, or NETs.  Most 2-degree scenarios also rely on negative emissions; many call for removing billions of tons of CO2 per year by mid-century.

Yet most NETs remain either untested or unproved.  To help bridge this gap, the National Academies convened a panel of scientists and asked it to propose a research agenda.  The panel considered several possible techniques, ranging from the low-tech — planting more trees — to the high-tech — developing machines to scrub CO2 from the sky.  It also looked at a hybrid technology that has become known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS.  The panel recommended several billion dollars be directed to research on NETs.  Such technologies, it suggested, ought to be viewed as a “component of the mitigation portfolio,” rather than as a futuristic, last-ditch effort to reduce atmospheric CO2.

Read more at Climate Solutions:  Is It Feasible to Remove Enough CO2 from the Air?