Report: Efforts to suck carbon from the air need to be intensified

WASHINGTON – The country must redouble its efforts to suck gas that holds heat and fight climate change, a new US report said.

The report released Wednesday by the National Academy of Sciences indicates that the technology to do so has improved and that climate change is worsening. In the middle of the century, the world must eliminate about 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide from the air each year. This equates to about twice the annual emissions of the US market.

Last year, nearly 37 billion tons of carbon dioxide were released worldwide and emissions increased.

Dr. Steve Pacala, Princeton University biologist and panel chair, said in an interview that having ways to eliminate gases that retain heat from the atmosphere would make the task of combating climate change. "

"It makes us think differently about the climate problem when we have a safety net," he said. "And the ultimate temperature we face is going to be lower."

This report follows a United Nations scientific report that portrays a gloomy picture of the world's ability to avoid dangerous global warming. Wednesday's study "is somewhat more optimistic; it gives operational advice, "said Kate Gordon, policy researcher at the Columbia Center for Global Energy, who was not part of the report panel.

The 370-page report called on the country to invest in technologies and methods to eliminate the heat-retaining gases, such as carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, that are generated by human activities such as burning coal and natural gas for electricity or gasoline and diesel for combustion. transport. The technologies described include the simple and the futuristic:

– Plant more trees, better manage forests and limit land use by the people. Plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air and use it to grow.

– Keep soil better so that they can store more carbon dioxide and produce more food.

– Conserving and restoring coastal plants, such as marshes and seagrasses.

– Relatively new technology called direct air capture. The pilot projects have started using giant fans that suck the air, use a chemical reaction to suck the carbon, and then inject it underground.

– A technology yet to be developed based on certain types of rocks that can absorb carbon dioxide.

– Burn more biofuel – such as wood – and capture the carbon dioxide after combustion and bury it underground or turn it into solids that can be spread on the dirt.

"These technologies will clearly help, because we have a lot of fun," said Mario Molina, a Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist at the University of California, San Diego, who was not part of the report's panel.

The good news is that technology in this area has grown more in the last nine months compared to the previous decade, said study co-author Christopher Jones, professor of engineering at Georgia Tech.

Pacala said that natural methods such as tree planting are very cheap and available right now. But he said that they could do much more than "because there is a limit to available land".

Jason Furtado, professor of meteorology at the University of Oklahoma, was not part of the report. He called the bioenergy method more promising, but not necessarily the easiest.

Direct capture in air, used by Climeworks, Carbon Engineering and others, is mainly cost-limited, Pacala said.

The Acting Chief Scientist of Carbon Engineering, David Keith, a professor at Harvard University, said the removal of carbon in the air only made sense if humans had stopped putting in as much in the air. "The idea that humanity can continue to produce huge fossil fuel emissions while balancing them with their elimination is stupid. You seal the leaks before banging the boat. "

The report responds to concerns that it creates a "moral hazard" – raising hopes that these promising carbon reduction technologies could give civilization a pretext for not reducing coal, oil and gas emissions. now. Pacala said that carbon removal technologies could not replace massive reductions in carbon emissions. These are tools for reducing global emissions, he said.

"The fact that we need large-scale negative emissions basically tells us that we have left (too) late to solve the problem," said Norwegian scientist Glen Peters, who tracks carbon emissions around the world .

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Follow Seth Borenstein on Twitter: @borenbears.

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