Klaus Lackner of Columbia University thinks he's onto a fix for climate change. His machine, which processes ambient air and removes the the carbon dioxide from it, could be a handy technological fix to the alarming increase in greenhouse gas emissions that are troubling climate scientists and governments around the world.
Lackner says he will build a prototype within two years that will capture a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere every day, around the equivalent of the emissions resulting from a flight from London to New York per passenger. Building farms of his machines could strip millions of tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere every day, which could make a dent in balancing out the world's emissions.
Quite co-incidentally last week, Peter Harper of the Centre for Alternative Technology called for the world's scientists to come together to develop an emergency technology very similar to Lackner's idea. His argument was that sucking CO2 from the atmosphere would put off dangerous climate change long enough for economies to invest in cleaner energy.
Lackner's is not the only techno-fix. Our technology colleagues have just featured a host of geoengineering devices being worked on by so-called "ecohackers".
They include the usual suspects such as seeding the ocean with iron to encourage the growth of phytoplankton, which would soak up CO2 as it grows. There is also the fanciful: launching reflectors into space to sit between the Earth and the Sun to prevent our star's rays from reaching us.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change identified 450 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere as the threshold of dangerous climate change - the point where feedback effects would take hold and the Earth passes several points of no return.
With CO2 levels now at more than 380ppm and climbing (more than 40% higher than at the start of the Industrial revolution), should we take every opportunity we can get to cut the gas from the atmosphere, however implausible or wacky? Or does focusing on technological solutions divert attention away from what the real solution of cutting our energy use (and therefore emissions) in the first place?
