A while back we prepped our readers to get ready for air capture. This article from a New Jersey newspaper, the Star-Ledger, describes how one air capture technology is progressing and how different interests are already taking political positions on its merits:

Klaus Lackner’s invention has been called many things — a wind scrubber, a synthetic tree, a carbon vacuum, even a giant fly swatter.

The energy guru, inventor and professor at Columbia University prefers to call it an “air extractor.” By any name, however, Lackner predicts that the giant machines he is building will one day stop global warming in its tracks.

After three years of intensive experiments, Lackner and scientists at Global Research Technologies LLC, in Arizona, have produced a working model of the device, which can sop up carbon dioxide, the dreaded greenhouse gas, from the atmosphere.

“Look, it’s one arrow in the quiver,” said Lackner, reached by telephone. “This begins to offer a solution to an overwhelming problem.”

Others were more expansive.

“This significant achievement holds incredible promise in the fight against climate change,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia. “The world may, sooner rather than later, have an important tool in this fight.”

Here is one reaction to the technology:

“There’s no magic bullet to save us from the problem of global warming,” said Kert Davies, an energy expert for Greenpeace USA in Washington, D.C. Removing greenhouse gases so readily will not encourage people to develop alternate, renewable technologies, he said, and strive for energy efficiency.

Such techno-fixes also miss the point of the environmental degradation brought on by the use of fossil fuels, he said.

Carbon scrubbers won’t stop oil spills, habitat-destroying strip mining and ozone, he said. “It’s like having cancer and putting a Band-Aid on it,” he added.

Besides, Davies said, the devices, which will in principle be larger than the prototype, will be eyesores. “Can you imagine thousands of acres of giant fly swatters across the land?”

If reducing fossil fuels is not really about carbon dioxde, as the Greenpeace spokesman suggests but also about many other benefits, then why shouldn’t these benefits play a more central role in energy policy debates? And being so quick to abandon the carbon dioxide argument is not an effective strategy for compelling action on carbon dioxide. Greenpeace has come out in favor of wind power and the required acres of windmills across the land. This is hard to square with CO2-removal technologies as eyesores, unless one recognizes that the aesthetics of a technology appear to be a function of its political role.

I have no idea if Professor Lackner’s ideas will prove to have technical merit or not. However, I do believe that all options should be on the table, and we should resist efforts to limit choice prematurely.