![]() ![]() “It becomes carbon removal” – as opposed to mitigation – “if you’re removing the carbon just from the ambient air,” Buck says. Buck’s hope is that this technology could advance and be used not just for mitigating carbon emissions, but for removing carbon. This is a carbon mitigation technique that has proved efficient in reducing emissions at an industrial scale, and it has been in use for decades, meaning that the safety and science of the technique are well understood. “There’s a lot of new research about how to get carbon dioxide to turn into rock quicker once you inject it” underground, Buck says. And new techniques may make geological carbon capture safer. But scientists have learned from that experience, and technologies exist to keep underground carbon in place. There are risks to injecting large amounts of carbon into rock Buck laments the under-regulated “wild west atmosphere” of fracking, which caused earthquakes in some parts of the US. You keep monitoring it, to make sure it stays where you want it to be.” Then you inject underground, into a cavern, and keep it there, under the rock, for a very long time. “You could outfit, well, scrubbers basically, on a factory, and these collect carbon dioxide. ![]() Buck points to a carbon mitigation strategy called geological carbon capture, which is already widely used to reduce the emissions of heavily polluting industries. Carbon removal can also be accomplished with industrial technologies. “You don’t want a wildfire to wipe out these removals that you’ve been banking on, right?” Massive reforestation efforts could go up in smoke.īut land-based solutions are not the only option. “A lot of land-based approaches are vulnerable to climate change itself,” Buck explains. And there are other risks to relying too heavily on land-based techniques. To plant enough trees to soak up enough carbon to sufficiently cool our planet, we would have to fundamentally change the way we use land in ways that would make our economy and many of our lives unrecognizable. Other strategies include storing carbon in wetlands, ocean iron fertilization, or different approaches involving rock weathering.īut land-based solutions, though a helpful beginning, probably won’t be enough, Buck says. Changing agricultural practices can be used to store more carbon in the dirt. She points to other kinds of land-based climate interventions that show promise. “Land-based solutions are really important, especially in the next decade or so, because they can be implemented quickly – and we know how to plant forests,” Buck says. The simplest form of geoengineering is the kind of carbon removal many of us learned about in school: planting trees. “If people on the environmental left – people who care about climate change – just reject all of these approaches out of hand, then we lose the ability to shape them, which would be a grave mistake,” she says. But Buck argues that climate engineering is coming whether we like it or not. The idea of deliberately altering the climate can be frightening and distasteful, including to many environmentalists. It’s this massive cleanup operation that we need to undertake this century.” The challenge isn’t just cutting emissions.” The second challenge is “removing the carbon that’s up there. “We have emitted so much, and now we have so much legacy carbon. How much? “Hundreds of billions of tons,” Buck says. It’s clear that we need to remove some amount of carbon from the atmosphere.” Adaptation needs far more support than it’s getting. “We’re in a climate crisis,” she tells me. The two main types of geoengineering are carbon engineering, which aims to suck carbon out of the atmosphere, and solar engineering, which aims to reflect solar energy away from Earth. ![]() Geoengineering refers to any number of ways that humans can change our climate through interventions. The pace of climate change, and the insufficiency of humanity’s current response, have effectively already made the choice for us: mankind will have to engage in some kind of “geoengineering” – an umbrella term for various methods of intentional, planetary-scale climate intervention – whether we like it or not. Zooming with me from Buffalo, New York, where she’s a professor of environment at the University of Buffalo, Buck is blunt in her assessment. This is the question posed by Holly Jean Buck in her 2019 book, After Geoengineering: Climate Tragedy, Repair, and Restoration. ![]()
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