This is Scott Amyx with today’s Climate Change Flash Briefing.
One of my favorite activities is to walk in a forest. Something about being in nature among trees is so rejuvenating. The air is clean and all your worries simply disappear.
So when it comes to climate change, don’t you wish having cleaner air was as simple as planting more trees? Unfortunately, we are spewing CO2 faster than our planet can absorb.
So what technologies can combat climate change?
One idea is called Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage. Essentially, it involves growing certain crops that can absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and then burning them at power stations to create energy, while capturing the CO2 when they are burned and then safely storing them underground. This process is considered carbon negative in theory.
But there are issues. To make a dent in global emissions, we would need land that’s bigger than India to grow these crops. That’s land that would not be available for growing food or trees for absorbing CO2. Then there’s the question of how much water is needed, and how much carbon is released by converting land for growing these crops.
Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage along with tree planting sound great but hard to implement in scale.
We need a better solution.
Stay tuned next time to find out how scattering dust in the atmosphere might reduce global warming.
