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Really interesting.
Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air Into Gasoline
A team of scientists from Harvard University and the company Carbon Engineering announced on Thursday that they have found a method to cheaply and directly pull carbon-dioxide pollution out of the atmosphere.
If their technique is successfully implemented at scale, it could transform how humanity thinks about the problem of climate change. It could give people a decisive new tool in the race against a warming planet, but could also unsettle the issue’s delicate politics, making it all the harder for society to adapt.
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If these costs are real, it is an important result,” said Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution for Science. “This opens up the possibility that we could stabilize the climate for affordable amounts of money without changing the entire energy system or changing everyone’s behavior.”
The team published their results Thursday morning in Joule, a new American scientific journal printed by the same publisher behind the biology journal Cell.
“What we’ve done is build a [direct-air capture] process that is—as much as possible—built on existing processes and technologies that are widespread in the world,” said David Keith, a professor of applied physics at Harvard and the lead author of the new study. “That’s why we think we have a reasonable possibility of scaling up.” Keith is also a founder and executive chairman of Carbon Engineering, a Bill Gates–funded company that has studied how to directly remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
Carbon Engineering says the technique unveiled today has already been implemented at its small, pilot plant in Squamish, British Columbia. It is currently seeking funding to build an industrial-scale version of the plant, which Keith says it can complete by 2021.
Climate Change Can Be Stopped by Turning Air Into Gasoline
