Engineers have been toying with ‘carbon
capture and storage’ technology for years, but have struggled to make it economic (and leak-proof). Direct air-capture, in particular, was seen as unjustifiably expensive. However, Climeworks claims to have been able to capture CO2 at the plant in Iceland for the equivalent of less than $30 a metric ton. Even that is four times the current price of carbon on exchanges in Europe, where companies and utilities can trade certificates to meet their mandated emissions reduction targets. But it does at least offer a glimpse of how carbon capture
might be done cheaply enough to make a real difference.
Read: Pope Francis Criticized the U.S. for Pulling out of the Paris Climate AccordAccording to Quartz, carbon-sucking is important for a number of reasons: there’s no way at present to deal with the CO2 released by cars, ships, and planes. Without active extraction of CO2 from the atmosphere, it will be impossible to keep to the limits adopted by world governments in the Paris Climate Accord. Those were the upper limits deemed consistent with capping the long-term rise in global temperatures at less than 2 degrees celsius.
