Economics is one reason we aren't further along with carbon capture technology. One professor suggests it's "useless" if the world won't put a price on carbon.
|
Scooped by
Richard Platt
onto Low Power Heads Up Display February 3, 2021 4:32 AM
|
Elon Musk is going to pay $100 million towards a prize to come up with the best carbon capture technology. The richest person in the world’s tweet brings attention to an often-overlooked technology that has been around since the 1970s but has mostly been relegated to niche corners of the energy community. “Mr. Musk’s announcement reflects a maturation in the private sector around climate change and investment,” Julio Friedmann, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, “As in the past, Mr. Musk’s announcement has shaken up the gumball machine.” - While trees and other plants can remove some carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, most climate change experts agree we can’t plant enough, fast enough, to do the job alone. - Carbon capture technology has been around for decades, and is used to strip carbon out of factory emissions as well as remove carbon that’s already in the air. - But it’s expensive, and until the cost of releasing carbon into the air rises, there’s little economic incentive to use it.