We need a massive carbon removal industry. What will it take to scale it up?
A small but growing number of companies are focused on carbon removal through various approaches. But this type of technology will have to radically grow.
At a startup in San Francisco, a team of engineers is building a system for capturing CO2 from the air using rocks—a solution that could eventually be cheap enough to operate on a large scale and begin to chip away at the 2.4 trillion tons of carbon dioxide (and counting) that humans have dumped into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution.