Undoing Injustice: The Future of Direct Air Capture Technology
By Purab Seth
According to the Our World In Data graph (pictured above) of global historical CO2 emissions contribution, the global north has a burgeoning lead over the global south in terms of past CO2 emissions. Now, as large countries in the global south, such as India and China, attempt to develop and use more energy, the west needs to not just provide these countries with cheap renewable energy technology (which, to their credit, they have) but also make up for their past emissions by pulling back the carbon they have previously pumped into the air. India expanded energy use to give 700 million people access to daytime electricity between 2008 and 2018. Developments like these will increase the carbon output of these countries but they are still crucial for their development. To contend with climate change in this world of increasing emissions from the global south, developed countries must use direct air capture to help meet the climate goals of our world. The unique ability of direct air capture to undo historical emissions is what makes it one of the most important pathways to achieve climate justice.
There are two main obstacles facing direct air capture at the moment.
First, cost. According to David Keith, professor of applied physics at Harvard and expert in carbon technologies, the cost of removing 1 ton of CO2 from the air will decrease from ~$1000 to $300-$425 in 2030. This staggering cost makes capture an extremely high investment and also more expensive than reforestation (which is around $50 but works in a delayed time frame). If direct air capture does become significantly cheaper over the course of this decade (similar to how the cost of solar decreased beyond expectations), developed countries heavily invest in doing justice to the global south by creating large-scale direct air capture facilities.
The second obstacle faced by this emerging technology is politics. Before 2021, government funds for direct air capture were limited to a few million meant only for R&D. However, the Biden administration’s 1 trillion dollar infrastructure bill allocated roughly $3.5 billion to building four different direct air capture facilities in the US and furthering R&D. While this bill has received general criticism in the US, the specific allocation of funds to direct air capture has also received scrutiny in the media from big outlets such as TIME. There is also a general resentment of development of renewable energy and climate-related technologies. Political uncertainty in the US could lead to future administrations either, in the best case, not expand further on capture projects (although that would still be bad because the government would not meet the $8 billion dollar investment required, according to Carbon180), or, in the worst case, cancel or defund these projects altogether.
The road ahead for direct air capture is uncertain, its costs may never be low enough to feasibly implement. However, it is certain that the west must immediately invest in this technology, the same way they did in solar, to discover its true potential and limit. Direct air capture potentially offers the west a unique chance to undo our faults, and for the sake of billions in the global south, the west must take this chance.