Serious about Climate Means Serious about Carbon

This week, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) will release a report on the feasibility of stabilizing global warming at 1.5 degrees Celsius warming — an ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement.
Spoiler alert: It ain’t pretty.
The Earth has already warmed more than 1 degree. Although there’s uncertainty when we’ll blow past 1.5 degrees, most scholars put the range at 3 to 8 years — before my kids graduate high school. The Mercator Climate Center in Germany believes we already blew past that milestone last month. A climate-stable world might be in the rear-view mirror.
While earnest advocates work to draw attention to this urgent challenge, one of our best options for addressing this threat has been curiously absent from the conversation: carbon management.
Carbon management goes right to the source to stop emissions, generally through carbon capture and storage (CCS), an innovative technology that scrubs CO2 emissions from industrial sources and injects them deep underground.
This technology has stirred concerns in some corners, but we’ve been doing it for decades at commercial scale. Increasingly, carbon management also includes the conversion of CO2 into useful products like cement, plastics, fuel, and carbon fiber. Recent advancements in the technology also include drawing CO2 from the air and oceans – what’s known as carbon harvesting or carbon removal.
The IPCC report is likely to argue that large-scale carbon management is required to achieve a stable climate, a sentiment reflected by other leading institutions such as the International Energy Agency, the World Economic Forum, MIT,  Stanford, and Columbia University. These institutions argue that a lot of carbon management is needed now to achieve 2 degrees Celsius, and a whole lot will be needed to reach 1.5 degrees Celsius.
But carbon management struggles due to misconceptions, especially CCS, which is often called unsafe and untested. Critics describe it as a failure, with billions in public funding resulting in a handful of unsuccessful projects.
These arguments are essentially untrue. Eighteen large facilities around the world, including two at coal power plants, currently capture and store 30 million tons of CO2 each year, some more having done so for almost two decades.
While some argue that the costs of carbon management are too high, they have dropped by more than 50 percent over the past 10 years, much like the declines enjoyed by renewable energy sources.