The removal of CO2 excess from the troposphere needs to be prioritized and begun immediately. The technology is available, it needs funding without question.
By Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Jeffrey Long, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and also a professor in UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry
Human activity is now leading to the equivalent of 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide emitted into the atmosphere each year, putting us on track to increase the planet’s temperature by 1.5 degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels by 2040. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), we must limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the most dangerous impacts of climate change.
Increasingly, scientists are recognizing that negative emissions technologies (NETs) to remove and sequester carbon dioxide from the atmosphere will be an essential component in the strategy to mitigate climate change. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), a multidisciplinary Department of Energy research lab, is pursuing a portfolio of negative emissions technologies and related research. These range from geological and terrestrial sequestration, to conversion to bioproducts, to thermal reactors for hydrogen fuels.
A promising technology under development for NETs is carbon capture using a material called a MOF, or metal-organic framework. Jeffrey Long, a senior scientist in Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division and also a professor in UC Berkeley’s College of Chemistry, has been working with this unique material for a number of years....
