Over the past month, Elon Musk, Alphabet, the parent company of Google, and several groups of private equity investors have pledged $2 billion (€1.9 billion) to startups offering smart ways of conducting carbon removal.
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Solutions include vacuuming CO2 and planting massive seaweed forests at the bottom of the ocean.
After years of countries being slow to take up climate action plans, the world is now at a crisis point. This isn’t news: there are dozens of articles and reports every day about the latest precipice the world finds itself at.
Most recently, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its Sixth Assessment Report, which looked at sources of global emissions and the success of current global climate change mitigation plans.
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Carbon removal is now “unavoidable”, it says, if the world is to reach its global temperature targets. This solution isn’t new either: in November, the EU had already started to take steps toward using carbon removal techniques to reach climate neutrality.
By 2030 it planned to remove around 5 million tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere every year. According to the Global Carbon Atlas 2021, this is about equivalent to the territorial output of Moldova – not a bad start, but not enough either.
Carbon removal can come in many forms – such as direct air capture, where carbon is literally sucked from the air, tree restoration or enhanced mineralisation. Pursuing all versions of carbon removal – including hybrid strategies, such as ocean-based carbon removal, is now one of the main ways of successfully meeting climate targets.
The current issue with carbon removal, however, is that when it is removed from the air, the carbon is not being properly disposed of. In many instances, for example, it is simply put back in oil wells. The growing interest, therefore, from such high profile investors could mark a turning point.
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“This is a watershed moment,” said Erin Burns, executive director of climate protection group Carbon180.
Speaking in Bloomberg, Burns added, “We are seeing massive amounts of private-sector and federal investment, with bipartisan support.”
Elon Musk also launched a new carbon removal technology competition earlier this year, which had a giant cash prize of $100 million to be shared amongst winners. XPrize says this is the largest incentive prize in history. 15 milestone winners for the prize were revealed in April.
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