Greenhouse gas emissions have to be sharply and rapidly cut, but some emissions are easier to cut than others, and some are going to persist for a long time. These are the basic facts behind the “net” of “net zero” — the mantra that has come to define the green energy transition. Electric cars are here, and electric rail and trucks are coming along, but electric airplanes and electric shipping aren’t happening anytime soon.
taking a new approach to look at how much climate mitigation can come from existing forests worldwide. The team estimated an upper carbon limit by modeling what would happen if all direct forest management, including all harvesting for wood and fiber products, were to stop. Even under this unrealistic scenario, however, the world’s forest carbon store increased by just 15%, with the added amount only enough to offset about 4 years’ worth of current human emissions.
The good news about DAC is that we know how to do it, since the basic chemistry for capturing carbon dioxide is already established from existing carbon capture and storage operations, which already profitably collect carbon dioxide from smokestacks at natural gas power plants and ethanol, fertilizer, and hydrogen manufacturing facilities.