Climeworks’ Mammoth plant in Iceland, which began operations in May 2024. The plant removes carbon dioxide with direct air capture — one of the methods examined in APS’ latest report.
Topics: Applied Physics, Climate Change, Global Warming, Green Tech
Anthropologists believe our ancestors first used fire as a tool nearly two million years ago. Eventually, fire became a necessity for cooking and warmth. Then, 4,000 years ago, dwellers in modern-day northern China discovered a black rock that burned better than wood: coal.
Today, we mine and consume an estimated 8.8 billion metric tons (tons) of coal every year, among other fossil fuels, releasing into Earth’s atmosphere billions of tons of carbon that had been locked away in Earth’s crust for hundreds of millions of years. That carbon dioxide, we now know, is blanketing our planet — trapping heat, supercharging hurricanes and heat waves, and melting vast expanses of sea ice and glaciers.
As countries race to drive their annual greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050, some are contemplating a different question: What can we do about the 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide we’ve already added to our atmosphere?
On Jan. 27, APS released a new report, “Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Removal: A Physical Science Perspective,” that aims to answer this question. The four authors of the report — which was commissioned by the APS Panel on Public Affairs — are Washington Taylor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Jonathan Wurtele of the University of California, Berkeley, APS Past President Bob Rosner of the University of Chicago, and APS President-elect Brad Marston of Brown University.
The report summarizes the current state of available carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies and outlines recommendations for policymakers. Above all, the report emphasizes that in most cases, cutting current carbon emissions is easier and less costly than large-scale, engineered carbon dioxide removal efforts may ever be.
The daunting physics of carbon removal, American Physical Society, Liz Boatman
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