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Negative emissions technology needed to head off climate change

The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine is calling on the US government to launch a concerted effort to develop new and improved negative emissions technologies to remove and sequester CO₂ directly from the air. The panel concludes that these technologies, which involve chemical processes to capture carbon dioxide from the air, are economically viable and crucial to mitigate the threat of climate change.
‘We can now say that there is a high probability that we can produce a viable way to do direct air capture at something like $100 (£77) per tonne of CO₂ or less,’ says Stephen Pacala, an ecology and evolutionary biology professor at Princeton University who chaired the committee that wrote the report. ‘We would then reach the capacities that the world would need to achieve the climate goals that are embedded in the Paris agreement and elsewhere,’ he tells Chemistry World. ‘It would also provide a way to continue to use fossil fuels, but without a climate impact – you could offset those carbon emissions.’