The only choice, Lackner says, is to "draw down" the atmospheric carbon dioxide - or to suffer unknown, devastating consequences.Ĭapturing carbon from the air, not from a factory smokestack, is called "direct air capture," and there are currently 15 direct air capture plants in Europe, the United States and Canada, according to the IEA. "The oceans have started to rise, hurricanes have gotten way worse, climate has become more extreme, and this will only get worse over the next decade," Lackner says. "By now we have 415, and we are going up 2.5 ppm a year at this moment." The consequences of that rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are already dire and will get worse. "We started the industrial revolution with 280 parts per million in the atmosphere," Lackner tells CNBC. As of December, atmospheric carbon dioxide stands at 414.02 ppm, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is tracked as in parts per million, or PPM. "But you needed to have this discussion 30, 40 years ago because back then you still had a chance to stop the train before we collide with something." "The question of whether you want to store or not to store was a very good question in 1980," Lackner tells CNBC. In terms of reversing global climate change, there's already been too much carbon released into the atmosphere for us not to try and capture carbon and store it, says Klaus Lackner, the director of Center for Negative Carbon Emissions and professor at Arizona State University. It has the capacity to take 1.1 million tons of carbon per year out of the emissions released by a corn processing factory, and stores that carbon a mile and a half underground. One example in the United States is in Decatur, Ill., where the food processing giant Archer Daniels Midland Company launched a carbon capture and storage project in 2017. By the 1990s, "activity really ramped up," he says. It wasn't until the 1980s that carbon capture technology was studied for climate mitigation efforts, but even then, it was "mainly lone wolves," Herzog says. The earliest CCUS technology was used for enhanced oil recovery, meaning the carbon dioxide is pumped into an oil field to help oil companies retrieve more oil from the ground, Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer at the MIT Energy Initiative and author of the book "Carbon Capture," tells CNBC. There are currently 21 large-scale CCUS commercial projects around the globe where carbon dioxide is taken out of factory emissions, according to the International Energy Agency, a Paris-based intergovernmental energy organization. Personal Loans for 670 Credit Score or Lower Personal Loans for 580 Credit Score or Lower Best Debt Consolidation Loans for Bad Credit
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