Saviour or sinner?
Full details
| Authors & editors | |
| Publisher | New Scientist |
| Year of publication | 2023 December 2 pp 14-15 |
| Languages | |
| Medium | Article |
| Edition | 1 |
| Topics | Climate, environment and development > Global climate issues |
| Tags | |
| Scope & content | Will carbon dioxide removal tech help or hinder climate targets? Billions of dollars are pouring into the carbon dioxide removal industry, which aims to clean up emissions and slow global warming, but few companies have delivered results. Is the technology a planetary saviour or a risky bet? At the moment, around 2 billion additional tonnes of CO₂ are taken out of the atmosphere each year, over and above existing carbon sinks, but this is almost entirely due to efforts to expand forests or other nature-based approaches. To keep emissions in line with the Paris Agreement goal of staying below 1.5°C of warming, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates we need to be removing between another 5 to 16 gigatonnes a year by 2050, depending on emissions reductions elsewhere. CDR technologies, which can store CO₂ for longer periods and may be able to scale up more quickly than nature-based approaches, have the potential to close that gap. But to date, they have removed only around 115,000 tonnes of CO₂ |
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