The necessity of negative emission technologies (NETs)/Carbon removal seems undoubtful. Even if we concede best efforts to reduce CO2 emissions, returning to pre-industrial atmospheric CO2 levels will require a reduction of the current CO2 level in the atmosphere – and the oceans, too. Different technologies are competing, and the voluntary carbon offset market offers a wide variety of ways to compensate for your last island trip. While regulatory bodies dispute over criterias in legal frameworks, startups like ceezer.earth and consultants like carboneer.earth provide orientation through a jungle of questioned credibility. And investors eye on shooting stars like climeworks and carbon6 for their promise to bring direct air capturing to an affordable scale, while others like brilliant planet bet on biomass by algae breeding in the desert. But how could such an effort – to clean up the planet – be financed? The calculation pins it down to 6.250 US$ per earthling. How can we pay this price to hand over the world to our kids in the state their grandparents found it – at least measured at CO2 ppm, the impact of the damage done so far still has to be assessed.For discussions about technologies I recommend to look up openaircollective.cc/, featuring their OpenAir carbon removal challenge. They also run webinars and a discord server for the discussion around CR, CDR and biochar.
(For those who get confused: CDR/carbon dioxide removal directly addresses the removal of gaseous CO2 from the atmosphere, CR is often used more blurry and can include a reference to carbon capture – the treatment of carbon not yet released in gaseous form, like creating biochar from biomass and keeping it from getting turned into CO2).