Somebody's got to clean up all this gross carbon

It’s one thing to reduce your carbon footprint going forward. If the world’s biggest carbon dioxide polluters ever get around to decreasing their emissions, they will have no time to celebrate. In order to halt - or even reverse - climate change, the international community will have to invest in methods of carbon dioxide removal, whether by capturing and storing excess carbon from the atmosphere with engineering solutions or by supplementing natural carbon sinks like oceans and rainforests.

It’s a dizzying political, scientific, and engineering problem where the costs - and the stakes - are about as high as they come. Heidi Lim from California’s CarboCulture startup just put out an exhaustive review of where we stand on carbon removal as a species and what comes next in research and advocacy. I highly recommend her take as a starting point for anyone else who’s started seeing starving polar bears in their nightmares.