Under the deal, the removals will come from three proposals, including a “direct air capture” plant being built by Occidental Petroleum and a project that would capture carbon pollution from dozens of Midwestern ethanol plants and then pipe the gas hundreds of miles to injection wells for permanent storage underground. “These are no longer hypotheticals,” Cullenward said. In recent years, governments and private financiers have begun devoting billions of dollars to building a carbon removal industry, and the deal announced this week shows that some of these projects are beginning to take shape, said Danny Cullenward, a research fellow at the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University. Many scientists and policy experts say carbon removal will need to comprise around 10 percent of total emissions reductions by mid-century. That feat could be achieved by any range of technologies, however, and also by using natural processes like forest regeneration and protecting undeveloped ecosystems. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said the world will likely need to remove billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air in order to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. See jobsĬarbon dioxide removal-which claims to provide “negative emissions” by sucking carbon already in the air-has quickly become a key piece of global climate efforts, despite large uncertainties about the scale that can be achieved. Please take a look at the new openings in our newsroom. But the deal also highlights how corporate-driven efforts to curb emissions often involve complex and opaque accounting schemes that fail to deliver the benefits they promise while also funding projects that carry their own environmental impacts. It was a major step for a nascent industry that promises to remove climate pollution from the atmosphere. On Wednesday, a company called NextGen, a joint venture between Mitsubishi Corporation and South Pole, one of the world’s largest sellers of carbon credits, said it had arranged one of the largest “advanced purchases” of carbon removal to date. The idea is to join corporate buyers, including insurance and financial giants Swiss Re and UBS, that are looking to meet their net-zero targets with project developers in need of financing. And rather than clear things up, the announcement raised as many questions as it answered, including whether the companies behind it can really achieve the emissions reductions they claim. The removals haven’t happened yet, and the projects that would achieve them haven’t been built. One group looked to fill in some gaps this week, with the announcement of a pledge to buy nearly 200,000 metric tons of “carbon dioxide removal,” greenhouse gas pulled from the sky. Some of the biggest questions lie behind the “net” in net-zero, exactly how, where and when companies will compensate for the climate pollution that they fail to eliminate from their own operations. The open secret behind corporate climate pledges is that many companies don’t know how they will meet them.
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