This week’s Nature has a feature on air capture by Nicola Jones (as well as two other features on climate change). Here is an excerpt:

“Nobody doubts it’s technically feasible,” says [Columbia University's] Frank Zeman, now director of the Center for Metropolitan Sustainability at the New York Institute of Technology. Increasingly it looks like air capture will be needed. Efforts to limit CO2 emissions will need to be strengthened massively if they are to keep concentrations from reaching dangerous levels, so there may be little choice but to remove some of the CO2 already in the air (see page 1091) or cool the planet in other ways (see page 1097). “Without having something that is carbon negative, the possibility of avoiding high levels of CO2 is basically zero,” says Peter Eisenberger, former director of the Lamont–Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University and co-founder of the air-capture company Global Thermostat.

The article cites my work on air capture as well, and if you came here looking for my paper, you can find it here. Here is one of the things I said in the article:

Such a scenario is within the realm of possibility, but it demands an increase in energy production just at a time when we should be trying to break our energy addiction. For some, that’s a critical problem. Every dollar spent on air capture instead of shifting to renewables is “a long-term loss to society”, says Mark Jacobson of Stanford University in California. His concern is that researching a ‘get out of jail free’ card for climate change would provide an excuse to continue unabated emissions.

That worry is voiced by many, but it is also dismissed by many. “For some people there’s concern that if there’s hope that air capture will work, it reduces the incentive to reduce emissions,” says Pielke. “That makes as much sense as saying we shouldn’t have open heart surgery because it stops people from lowering their cholesterol. We need both.”

No one argues that air capture is a cure-all. Eisenberger sees it as a necessary bridge to get us more painlessly to our goal of a renewable energy economy. Despite the ‘reasonable’ price tag of air capture, it is still cheaper, and more sensible, to capture large-industry pollutants at source and to reduce energy use. “Air capture would be a back-stop technology to fill in the gap between what we can achieve and what our goals are,” says Pielke.