Despite the efforts of delegates at this month’s climate summit in Glasgow, the world is still careening toward potentially catastrophic levels of global warming. Now, some countries and corporations are turning to new technologies to pull carbon out of the air.
Today, the US Department of Energy (DOE) announced a bold new plan to make those technologies, called carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies, cost-effective and scalable with the launch of a new “Carbon Negative Shot” initiative. Through this initiative, the agency seeks to bring the cost of CDR down dramatically this decade — to less than $100 a ton — so that it can be deployed at a big enough scale to remove “gigatons,” or billions of tons, of carbon dioxide from the…