Carbon Time Machine

Abstract

The politics of multilateral emissions treaties are pathological. To succeed, such treaties must overcome: (1) the free-rider problem in the international sphere; (2) domestic constituencies that favor the production and sale of fossil fuels, the most important of which is often the general public; (3) resentment from developing nations asked to sacrifice their growth to mitigate the historic emissions of wealthy countries; (4) an increasingly hostile national security environment; and (5) a skeptical Republican Party, which often leads the most important country for global cooperation. It is no surprise, then, that a 2021 study of 36 countries representing 80 percent of the world’s emissions found that only one country—Gambia—had made commitments in line with the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. That temperature is the accepted, if somewhat arbitrary, tipping point after which the most serious and likely irreversible effects of warming will emerge. We currently sit at 1.1 degrees above such levels, and every year the average atmospheric carbon dioxide level increases like clockwork. Tick tock. Indeed, despite the economic drag from the COVID-19 pandemic, we humans released 36.8 billion tons of carbon in 2022 due to energy combustion and industrial processes—the highest ever annual level. The global community should seek out and prioritize climate change policies with more feasible political foundations. One such solution may exist: capturing carbon directly out of the air. “Air capture” uses alkaline sorbents that bond naturally with the acidic carbon dioxide present in all air found anywhere on Earth. The carbon can then be stored safely by, for example, converting it into rock. Air capture is a carbon time machine. It can erase past emissions and turn back the clock. Tock tick. For this reason, the International Panel on Climate