Imagine you have a septic tank that is about to overflow any day. You don’t really want to go to the trouble of cleaning it out. It’s too expensive, too messy, and takes too much time, so instead you just decide to flush less frequently. Maybe you even eat and drink less so you don’t need to use the toilet as often.
Do you think that’s going to keep your septic tank from overflowing?
The atmosphere is like a septic tank in which we have been dumping our industrial waste—carbon dioxide—for over two hundred years. Any day now, it’s going to overflow. We can either cut back on the waste we put into it, or we can clean it up.
The idea of reducing emissions made sense thirty-seven years ago when Carl Sagan implored the world to reduce emissions in his testimony before the U.S. Congress in 1985. At that time, our septic tank was only one-third full. It would take seventy more years to fill it up. If we could have reduced our emission to one-quarter, we would have 280 years for it to fill it up.
Now we have about ten years before it overflows. How much longer are we going to chant the “Reduce the Carbon Footprint” mantra before we start cleaning up the septic tank—our only option to save the planet?
We need to put all our resources into removing carbon from the air using carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technology.
The technology world has changed since 1985. The idea of CDR is only about two decades old. Before that, our only option was to make sure the septic tank didn’t fill up for a few centuries and then let future generations worry about cleaning it.
The truth is that we cannot pass on to our kids the task of cleaning up our waste, no matter how hard we try to reduce our emissions.
According to physicist Klaus Lackner, the originator of most of the ideas on carbon removal, we are doomed without CDR. He put it rather mildly, as scientists often do, in an article in The New Yorker: “I think that we’re in a very uncomfortable situation,” he said. “I would argue that if technologies to pull CO2 out of the environment fail then we’re in deep trouble.”
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has clearly said that we need to reach absolute-zero emissions to stop global warming, which is practically impossible. No matter how hard we try, there will still be some residual emissions that will have to be removed every year to achieve net-zero emissions.
In fact, I would argue that we should completely stop significantly investing in reducing emissions if we do not want to regret having spent trillions of dollars on a job that could have been done for billions of dollars.
Removing emissions is better than reducing emissions.
Even if both options cost the same, it is still better to use CDR. The more money we spend on CDR, the lower the cost of removal will be, because the market size drives progress.
For example, let us calculate whether it is cheaper to replace all one billion gasoline cars with electric cars or to eliminate emissions from gasoline.
One billion passenger cars emit three billion tons of carbon dioxide per year. The U.S. government provides a subsidy of $7,500 to each electric car buyer, which equals $7.5 trillion paid by taxpayers.
Those taxpayers buy the one billion electric cars at a cost of $3,000 more than a gasoline car, which equals $3 trillion.
In total, taxpayers are spending $10.5 trillion to buy one billion cars that reduce emissions.
An important note: If the electricity needed to charge these electric cars is produced by burning fossil fuels, the net reduction in emissions is only two billion tons of carbon dioxide, not the original three billion tons.
For our final calculation, let’s say that the life of each electric car is twenty years, meaning the total reduction in emissions would be forty billion tons.
We would be spending $10.5 trillion to save forty billion tons of emissions. Elon Musk expects the cost of carbon removal to be about $7 per ton to win his XPRIZE, so let’s use that as our base per ton cost for this calculation.
Now let’s calculate the cost of removal of forty billion tons of carbon dioxide from our septic tank.
At $7 per ton, the cost of removing forty billion tons is $7 x 40, which is $280 billion.
Look at the incredible difference in cost:
$280 billion versus $10,500 billion.
This is based on the assumption that the cost of CDR is $7 per ton. This is not going to happen on day one. Every new technology gets cheaper as market size grows.
As an example, see how solar power costs have come down as the volume of shipments grew.
That’s why we need people to help develop a market for CDR. With a huge market, many new startups, such as Running Tide Technologies (a contestant for the XPRIZE), might jump into the market, bringing down the cost per ton.
Ocean alkalinity enhancement is another technology that could achieve a cost of $10 per ton.
If we spent $10.5 trillion on removing carbon instead of spending it on reducing emissions, we could remove 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide!
This is almost the entire amount of carbon dioxide we have emitted for over two hundred years since humans started burning fossil fuels.
The planet would return to its preindustrial carbon levels and become healthy again.
This would mean that we might be able to stop glaciers and Greenland ice sheets from vanishing.
Coral reefs would not go extinct. Vietnam and Bangladesh and other islands and low lying areas of the world would not go under water.
The floods, forest fires, heatwaves, droughts, hurricanes, and tornadoes will be no more destructive than they were before we started burning fossil fuels.
The best part is that we would not need to beg the politicians of 200 countries of the world to tackle global warming.
We could all voluntarily pay CDR companies for carbon removal on our behalf and save the planet.
So, if you really want to help save the planet, sign up with a CDR company such as Climeworks and start paying them for removing carbon on your behalf. Billions of citizens can help develop a huge CDR industry by spending just a few dollars a month on carbon removal.
So, let us stop blaming, shaming, and yelling at the politicians. Let us all put our money where our mouths are. We can save the planet ourselves.