Four factors to consider in the race to solve the climate crisis, including how to scale up a tool called negative emissions and why the oceans can only help so much.
Global emissions reach about 40 billion tons each year. Such a massive number can be hard to conceptualize, but chemical engineer Jennifer Wilcox offers some context: Approximately 10 billion of these come from the transportation sector alone.
“To remove or avoid a quarter of our annual emissions, pretty much every airplane flight, every automobile, all of that would have to stop altogether,” says Wilcox, a professor at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts, and a visiting scholar at Penn’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. “No driving, no flying period.”
Such a dramatic change isn’t likely anytime soon. And generally speaking, Wilcox says no single solution will actually solve the climate crisis. “There’s no silver bullet,” she says.
The oceans and certain land features naturally absorb about half of the atmosphere’s carbon. But beyond that organic help, there remains a huge amount to contend with, something Wilcox and other scientists have been addressing with a concept called negative emissions.
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