Betting on Carbon Dioxide Removal to Save the Planet

The good news, when it comes to meeting the goal of the Paris Agreement to achieve net zero carbon by 2050, is that roughly 1 billion “additional” tonnes of carbon is being removed from the atmosphere each year—a gigatonne—with the word in quotes meaning more than through previously existing carbon sinks. The bad news is that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change “estimates we need to be removing between another 5 to 16 gigatonnes a year by 2050, depending on emissions reductions elsewhere,” according to New Scientist.

Nature-based solutions exist, of course, and afforestation and other ecological methods explain the “additional” removals. They have been promoted in an effort to thwart global warming ever since the UN climate convention was signed more than three decades ago. But nature is difficult to scale up when only a quarter century remains to reach the net zero goal the IPCC says is necessary to keep humanity (and everything else on the planet) on the trajectory to max out at below 2 degrees Celsius over the pre-industrial global average temperature.

Hence, the need for technology to remove carbon from the atmosphere and safely store it in perpetuity. There is progress there, and research is being fueled by the Nationally Determined Contributions committed to under the Paris Agreement. Spurring on this progress additionally are private firms who have pledged to go “carbon negative,” prominently including Microsoft, Ikea, and Spotify. Such yearnings have led to the emergence of firms developing ways to remove CO2 cost-effectively for businesses that make pledges to meet or beat abatement targets or comply with regulatory restrictions.

Unfortunately, carbon dioxide removal, or CDR as it is widely known, is extremely difficult and expensive so far, and to date all technologies together have removed only 115,000 tonnes. That’s less than 0.0023 percent of what’s needed each and every year for the next quarter century under the low end goal of 5 gigatonnes annually.

“The question remains whether big bets on CDR technology will pay off in time—and will do so without detracting from efforts to directly slash emissions by transitioning away from fossil fuels,” according to New Scientist. This backsliding is what economists call “moral hazard,” and it’s an important consideration. A hazard indeed: it is far more economically efficient to keep carbon out of the atmosphere than to pay to remove it later, by several orders of magnitude.

Engineers are busy working out systems at scale that have proved promising in the laboratory. In the words of Gregory Nemet, a scientist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, this is the “formative phase” for CDR development. When it comes to real-world success, “inevitably, it’s a messy period,” he adds.

According to New Scientist, “There are a slew of CDR technologies, but two are likely to dominate: bioenergy with carbon capture and storage and direct air capture.” The bioenergy approach involves growing plants that naturally absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The plants are then burned for energy, and the flue gases are captured.

The direct air capture method involves using materials that naturally absorb atmospheric carbon dioxide, then heating them to release the gas, which is captured and stored permanently. This process of course takes energy, a lot of it.

According to New Scientist, “The stream of CO2 from either approach can then be stored underground, turned into rock, or locked away by using it in any number of products, from concrete to condoms.”

The magazine notes that the track record so far, in terms of numbers, is dismal: “None of these methods has yet been used to remove more than a few thousand tonnes of CO2, but all have their sights set on billions.”

There are downsides as well: “Cost, steep energy and land-use requirements, and potential consequences for people and ecosystems,” according to the magazine. In the words of David Ho, a researcher at the University of Hawaii’s Manoa campus, technology proponents don’t understand “how difficult CDR is and how ineffectual it’s been. We haven’t shown that we can do this.”

New Scientist presents two parallel timeline charts, one showing the nascent removal industry’s total sales and the other total removals, both from 2020 to the present. The two curves rise sharply, with success in dollars or tonnes removed on the vertical scale. Indeed, “carbon dioxide removal technology firms have ramped up sales of their services in recent years. Such purchases would amount to removing almost 5 million tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere, if fulfilled.” That’s a tenth of a percent of what’s needed each and every year. Worse, “actual removals so far lag behind . . . [at] around 2.3 percent of what has been paid for.”

University of Wisconsin’s Nemet says it best: “I think the CDR community is looking for a sense of legitimacy.” He points to wind and solar as technologies that once seemed impossible to scale. “We have gone that fast before.”

Notice & Comment is the editor’s column and represents his opinions.

The lake that allows the Panama Canal to function recorded the lowest water level ever for the start of a dry season this year, which means that vastly fewer ships can pass through the canal. The extreme drought, exacerbated by an ongoing El Niño that is affecting Gatún Lake and the whole region appears likely to last into May.

The Panama Canal Authority has reduced daily traffic through the narrow corridor by nearly 40 percent compared with last year. Many ships have already diverted to longer ocean routes, which increases both costs and carbon emissions, while the global shipping company Maersk recently announced they will shift some of their cargo to rail.

Panama typically sees a dry season from January to May, but climate change has made rainfall patterns much less predictable. The result is that the increasingly severe droughts and extreme deluges can push canal infrastructure past its operational limits. Rising temperatures also evaporate a significant amount of moisture from the reservoir and its watershed.

—New York Times

The typical American receives about 41 pounds of junk mail each year, according to the Center for Development of Recycling at San José State University, and much of it ends up in landfills.... The Sierra Club estimates that 80 million to 100 million trees are cut down each year to print junk mail, while cities and counties spend $1 billion a year to collect and dispose of it.

—Washington Post

News That's Reused

Those who binge-watch cable TV are probably familiar with shows like Fixer to Fabulous, which is available on Home and Garden Television. They are all based on This Old House, which emphasized historical preservation. However, the plot of the spinoffs is always the same: acquisition of a cheap wreck of a structure, renovating it, and improving habitability and market value—all in half an hour. Very satisfying, but apparently Fixer to Fabulous has been caught cutting corners when it comes to compliance with EPA’s Lead Renovation, Repair and Painting Rule.

In January, the agency announced via a press release “a settlement agreement with Marrs Construction Co., of Bella Vista, Arkansas,” for alleged violations of the RRP rule. Indeed, the agency declares, “This is one of multiple cases that EPA has settled involving improper lead-based paint renovation practices demonstrated on home renovation television shows on the HGTV/Discovery network.”

Environmental enforcement protects public health, and the settlement with Marrs includes public education on compliance with the rule, which shields residents and construction workers.

“It’s important that the public understand that any renovation, repair, or painting project in a pre-1978 home can easily create dangerous lead dust or expose children to dangerous, sometimes deadly, paint chips,” according to EPA’s enforcement chief, David M. Uhlmann, in the press release. “Home renovation TV programs in particular have an obligation to show the public how to renovate old homes safely and lawfully, not in a manner that is dangerous, misleading, and puts the wellbeing of children at risk.”

The release also notes, “The harmful impacts of lead disproportionately impact environmentally overburdened, low-income families and their communities.”

There are a lot of disturbing global environmental catastrophes unfolding in the daily press, but add to that this New York Times headline: “A Supernova ‘Destroyed’ Some of Earth’s Ozone for a Few Minutes in 2022.” The newspaper reports on “a new study [that] suggests that explosive events in space have the potential to temporarily switch off the natural shield that protects us from harmful solar radiation.”

The study, published in Nature Communications, reports new information about the burst’s impact on the Earth’s ozone layer.

“The ozone was partially depleted—was destroyed temporarily,” the newspaper quotes Pietro Ubertini, “an astronomer at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Rome who was involved in discovering the atmospheric event.”

The Times reassures that “the effect was detectable for just a few minutes before the ozone repaired itself, so it was ‘nothing serious,’” quoting Dr. Ubertini. “But had the supernova occurred closer to us, he said, ‘it would be a catastrophe.’”

Supernovae are some of the most extreme events in the universe. Some stars are so massive that they burn out in just a few hundred million years. As their nuclear fuel gets consumed, the stars shrink, forcing the atoms into ever-tighter arrays. Eventually there is a huge explosion so bright that a single supernova outshines 100 billion stars in its galaxy. It also wipes out any life on planets circling neighboring stars even dozens of light years away.

In 2022, “Telescopes in space picked up a jet of high-energy photons careening through the cosmos toward Earth, evidence of a supernova exploding 1.9 billion light-years away. Such events are known as gamma ray bursts, and astronomers who have continued studying this one said it was the ‘brightest of all time.’”