From the Earth Institute and my buddy Jeffrey Sachs comes ..
carbon dioxide capture and sequestration? That's mumbo-jumbo for "take the pollution out of the air and store it somewhere". It's an idea, anyway:
"This significant achievement holds incredible promise in the fight against climate change," said Jeffrey D. Sachs, director of The Earth Institute, "and thanks to the ingenuity of GRT and Klaus Lackner, the world may, sooner rather than later, have an important tool in this fight."
A device with an opening of one square meter can extract about 10 tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year. If a single device were to measure 10 meters by 10 meters it could extract 1,000 tons each year. On this scale, one million devices would be required to remove one billion tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. According to the U.K. Treasury’s Stern Review on climate change, the world will need to reduce carbon emissions by 11 billion tons by 2025 in order to maintain a concentration of carbon dioxide at twice pre-industrial levels.
My question is: how much will it cost (environmentally) to manufacture and power these things? Removing 1,000 tons of CO
2 is moot if you're putting most of it back into the environment just to power the thing. Who knows, though. Maybe it's sustainable?