<em>The Weekly Planet</em>: Why a Political Philosopher Is Thinking About Carbon Removal
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Until a few years ago, the idea that humanity could suck carbon pollution out of the atmosphere at an industrial scale was deemed implausible, if not impossible. The technology didn’t exist to do it, and even if it did, scrubbing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere posed such huge thermodynamic problems that the endeavor seemed prohibitively expensive.
For this reason, the possibility that we might one day use technology to address the root cause of climate change seemed like science fiction—and possibly science denial.
Then, in 2018, two things changed. First, in June, the Harvard professor David Keith and his colleagues argued that they had dramatically reduced the cost of capturing carbon dioxide from the air. Their method wouldn’t by itself resolve climate change, but in time, it could help address some of the hardest-to-decarbonize activities.
The second change came in October, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that the
