Sucking out the warmth

Here’s a simple solution to global warming: vacuum carbon dioxide out of the air. Klaus Lackner, a physicist at Columbia University, said placing enough carbon filters around the planet could reel the world’s atmosphere back toward the 18th century, like a climatic time machine.

After a decade of work, his shower-sized prototype whirs away inside a warehouse in Tucson, Arizona, each day capturing about 10 pounds of the heat-trapping greenhouse gas as air wafts through it.

Only a few billion tons to go.
In the battle against global warming, technology has long been seen as the ultimate saviour, but Lackner’s machine is a clunky reminder of how distant that dream is. He estimates that sucking up the current stream of emissions would require about 67 million boxcar-sized filters at a cost of trillions of dollars a year. The orchards of filters would have to be powered by complexes of new nuclear plants, dams, solar farms or other clean-energy sources to avoid adding more pollution to the atmosphere.

But while the science of dialing back the planet’s thermostat is straightforward, the execution is fabulously expensive, complex and grandiose on a mindboggling scale. “Nobody doubts it is possible to take CO2 out of the air,” said David Keith, a professor of engineering and economics at the University of Calgary in Canada and one of several scientists around the world working on the problem. “The issue is, ‘What does it cost?’”

Some policy experts contend that blind faith in technology is a harmful distraction from the hard sacrifices needed to control global warming. “The temptation is to say, ‘Let’s get John Wayne on horseback or Bill Gates ... and solve this problem,’” said Dale Jamieson, director of environmental studies at New York University.

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