Last month the world’s top climate scientists delivered a sobering warning. Their mammoth report to the UN boiled down to one message: act now, before the climate breakdown becomes unstoppable. The report says extreme weather has forced millions of people from their homes and devastated food supplies.
Oil and gas emissions are at a record high. The UN report calls for drastic cuts in fossil fuels. But if our old technologies got us into this mess, can new ones get us out? Among politicians, corporations and billionaires, one new technology is gaining traction. It’s called direct air capture that vacuums carbon dioxide out of thin air and locks it away underground. Sound like science fiction? We thought so too until we went to Iceland to see the world’s first commercial Direct Air Capture plant in operation.
Here on a frigid plain near the Arctic Circle, worries about an overheating planet seem far away. Yet tiny Iceland has put itself on the front line, with a new kind of machine that will fight climate change by sucking carbon dioxide out of the air. This is ORCA — the first commercial direct air capture plant on earth.
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Source: CBS News
