Should we capture carbon dioxide from the air?

Answering this question requires some context. Extracting carbon dioxide from the air, a concept called direct air capture (DAC), is no longer an unusual idea but an emerging sector poised for rapid commercial growth. In Iceland this May, the Swiss company Climeworks started up the world's first industrial-scale DAC plant. It has been designed to suck 36,000 metric tons (t) of CO 2 from the air each year (see our story on page 24). Many people—including the founders of Climeworks—are convinced that DAC will be an essential lever in preventing runaway climate change. To be effective, the technology needs to scale up so that it is extracting about 10 Gt of CO 2 annually from the atmosphere by 2050, Climeworks' co-CEO Jan Wurzbacher says. That increase would require another 277,778 plants operating at the scale of the one in Iceland. Climeworks uses amine compounds in open containers to adsorb CO