Audio long read: Three ways to cool Earth by pulling carbon from the sky
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Did you know that foreign investors are quietly funding lawsuits in American courts through a practice called third-party litigation funding? Shadowy overseas funders are paying to sue American companies in our courts, and they don't pay a dime in U.S. taxes if there is an award or settlement. They profit tax-free from our legal system, while U.S. companies are tied up in court and American families pay the price to the tune of $5,000 a year.

But there is a solution. A new proposal before Congress would close this loophole and ensure these foreign investors pay taxes, just like the actual plaintiffs have to. It's a common sense move that discourages frivolous and abusive lawsuits and redirects resources back into American jobs, innovation, and growth. Only President Trump and congressional Republicans can deliver this win for America.

and hold these foreign investors accountable. Contact your lawmakers today and demand they take a stand to end foreign-funded litigation abuse.

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This is an audio long read from Nature. In this episode, three ways to cool Earth by pulling carbon from the sky. Written by Geoff Tollefson and read by me, Benjamin Thompson. Sometime in the next several months, a team of US scientists plans to pour a solution of antacid into the waves off the coast of Massachusetts.

Using boats, buoys and autonomous gliders, the scientists will track changes in water chemistry that should allow this tiny patch of the Atlantic Ocean to absorb more carbon dioxide from the sky than it normally would. The $10 million US experiment, dubbed Loch Ness, aims to test one prominent strategy to reverse global warming by removing CO2 from the atmosphere.

Doing so will be neither cheap nor easy. But with the world looking likely to blow past the temperature targets laid out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, a growing number of scientists and policy specialists say that carbon removal will be necessary later this century if humanity is to achieve its long-term climate goals.

Governments, utility companies and hundreds of start-up organisations around the globe are now investing billions of dollars into carbon removal strategies that take three broad approaches. Sucking carbon directly from the air, altering the oceans to absorb more carbon than normal and enhancing carbon removal on land.

In the United States, for example, companies are planning to build several large-scale direct air capture facilities that scrub CO2 out of thin air. And in Europe, power companies are developing a strategy that captures carbon emissions from bioenergy plants that burn wood chips, straw and other plant-based materials. The captured CO2 will then be pumped into the ground beneath the North Sea.

Many companies are already selling voluntary carbon removal credits to organisations such as Microsoft and Google to help them meet their climate commitments. By some estimates, the world might need to remove more than 6 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year by mid-century to meet its long-term climate goals.

If such approaches succeed, these technologies could help many nations and corporations to meet their climate commitments, and help the world to halt global warming. But the carbon removal industry faces stiff headwinds, owing in part to a lack of international standards for technologies and formal commitments by governments. Another major hurdle is a political sea change under US President Donald Trump.

The United States had been the largest government backer of research and development for carbon removal technologies, but Trump is now scaling back climate and clean energy investments. Most importantly, say researchers, there are also scientific questions about whether the budding market for carbon removal and the technologies can live up to the hype.

This is where academic research projects such as Loch Ness come into play, as a way to test carbon removal strategies in real-world settings. Although the basic science behind this type of ocean experiment is sound, researchers aren't sure how it will work in practice.

The details matter, says Adam Subash, a geochemist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts, who is heading up the four-year Loch Ness Project. There's all sorts of activity in the private sector, Subash says, and it's really critical that the science keeps pace.

The cheapest way to draw carbon out of the atmosphere is to grow more forests. But trees are not necessarily a permanent solution, because they might be cut down or burn in fires, which are a growing threat. Many scientists and industrialists therefore focus on more permanent and more expensive solutions.

The simplest method is industrial-scale direct air capture. But it's also the most expensive, costing in the region of $600 to $1,000 per tonne of CO2, which is roughly 10 times higher than the price of carbon credits on the European Union Emissions Trading System.

What will become the world's largest direct air capture facility is expected to start operations later this year in West Texas as a joint operation between two companies, Houston-based Occidental Petroleum and Carbon Engineering in Squamish, Canada. The consortium plans to bury the 500,000 tonnes of CO2 captured each year underground.

The group is also developing a second facility as part of a direct air capture hub that received a $600 million grant commitment from the U.S. Department of Energy, or the DOE, under former President Joe Biden in 2023.

Another $600 million commitment from the DOE went to a second air capture hub in Louisiana, which features a pair of facilities that will use technology from Heirloom Carbon Technologies, a firm in Brisbane, California, and a Swiss company called Climeworks, based in Zurich, that operates what is currently the world's largest direct air capture facility in Iceland.

Both of the DOE hubs will pump the carbon they extract from the atmosphere underground. With funding from an infrastructure law passed by Congress in 2021, the DOE had planned to invest another $2.3 billion in other air capture projects. But since Trump took office, the DOE has frozen funding for that program, including money committed to the plants in Texas and Louisiana.

It remains unclear whether or when the agency will fulfill even its existing grant commitments, which many specialists fear will threaten the viability of both hubs. We don't actually know whether the Trump administration will honor these contracts, even though they are legally binding, says a person who worked in carbon removal at the DOE before being fired alongside roughly 2,000 other probationary employees in February.

It puts a lot of these projects in a really risky place, says the former DOE employee, who declined to be named because of concerns over potential retribution. Others fear that the Trump administration will take further steps that slow advances in this area, such as freezing funding that was set aside for the purchase of carbon removal credits on behalf of the US government.

There are also concerns that the administration could dismantle an interagency effort dubbed the Carbon Negative Shot, which aims to scale up technologies and reduce the cost of carbon removal to below $100 per tonne by 2032.

The government could have played an important part in advancing research and development, as well as promoting the creation of common standards for an industry that currently operates like the Wild West, says Will Burns, co-director of the Institute for Carbon Removal Law and Policy at American University in Washington, D.C. But those efforts, quote, are being swept away, end quote, by the new administration, adds Burns.

The DOE did not respond to a request to comment from Nature. One project that seems to be moving forwards for now is Loch Ness, which has received support through a $24 million public-private research program coordinated by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA.

In August, assuming that the final permits come through, Subhash and his team will release a solution containing 50 tonnes of sodium hydroxide, which is not used as an antacid for humans, alongside an inert tracer dye roughly 60 kilometres off the coast of Provincetown, Massachusetts. The researchers will then monitor the solution as it disperses, reducing the acidity of seawater and enabling it to absorb more CO2 from the atmosphere.

In theory, Subhash says, the biological effects will mostly be minor and positive. But monitoring during the experiment should help the team to assess potential impacts on shell-building organisms, such as phytoplankton and diatoms. Studies using computer modelling suggest that during the week-long field experiment, the researchers should be able to measure how much CO2 is absorbed by the ocean as a result of their intervention.

If the team can show that it is possible to monitor and quantify how much extra CO2 is absorbed, the potential for scaling up is significant. With even a small increase in alkalinity, Subhash says, coastal countries around the world could collectively extract 1 billion tonnes of CO2 from the atmosphere each year, which is roughly equivalent to the annual carbon emissions from Japan, and is about 3% of global emissions.

Cost estimates vary widely for approaches that depend on altering ocean chemistry to absorb carbon, but most suggest they are likely to be cheaper than direct air capture. Loch Ness is just one of 17 projects funded through the NOAA research program, and so far those efforts are all moving forwards.

Other NOAA projects focus on a variety of methods to absorb CO2 in the oceans, including fertilising the water with iron to grow more phytoplankton and farming seaweed. The programme intentionally took a diverse approach, testing various options. We're not at a point yet where we can put together our knowledge and say which methods work at scale, says a former government employee familiar with the effort.

They declined to be named because they were fired as part of mass layoffs by the Trump administration and fear retaliation. Similar efforts to remove carbon are moving forwards on land. Many scientists and entrepreneurs around the world are investigating ways to piggyback on the agricultural industry and help croplands to absorb and store more carbon.

This includes projects that create a carbon-rich material known as biochar, made by converting plant matter into a charcoal-like substance that can enhance soils and keep carbon from returning to the atmosphere for long periods. Others are experimenting with the application of silicate-rich minerals, such as basalt, to agricultural fields.

These minerals react with CO2 and water to form stable bicarbonate ions that dissolve and flow into the ocean, or they lock carbon away. A team of researchers led by chemist Matthew Cannon at Stanford University in California is investigating a technique that involves cooking silicate minerals to make them more reactive and speed up the process of carbon uptake when they are spread across agricultural fields.

Cannon says the technique uses half of the energy of a direct air capture plant for a similar amount of carbon removal, while also boosting soil health. And the entire process unfolds over a single growing season. The team is planning a series of field trials in the United States this year. The biggest thing for us is getting buy-in from farmers, Cannon says. The only way to do that is to show them compelling data from the field.

But the strategies with the largest potential for carbon removal could come from agricultural waste, forest debris and, in some cases, purpose-grown crops, which can be converted into long-lived products, such as building materials.

Such techniques could provide the United States with upwards of 800 million tonnes of carbon removal per year, about 17% of the country's annual carbon emissions, at a cost less than $100 per tonne of CO2, according to a comprehensive study of carbon removal potential published in 2023.

The challenge is in working out the logistics and bringing on board everybody from farmers and foresters to transporters and energy producers, says report co-author Sarah Baker, a chemist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, who is now working on similar assessments in Denmark and Australia. Quote, it has to be brought down to the community level, end quote.

Energy companies in Denmark and Sweden are taking a similar approach with a pair of bioenergy plants that are projected to begin operating in the next few years. These plants, which will burn a variety of materials, ranging from straw to wood chips and other forest debris, are projected to capture more than 1.2 million tonnes annually.

It will be a significant step forwards, says Kati Koponen, an energy researcher at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland in Espoo. Quote, we have the technologies, but we will never use them at significant scale, end quote. Koponen led a four-year assessment of carbon removal options that ended last year, with funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme.

One lesson from that work is that Europe will need a portfolio of options in the next few decades if it is to meet its goals of achieving net zero emissions.

One concern that is often raised about carbon removal is that it could give companies and countries an excuse to simply offset their fossil fuel emissions rather than transitioning to truly clean energy. To prevent this, Kopponen and her colleagues also recommended that the EU create separate targets for emissions reduction and carbon removal going forwards.

Another lesson from the EU carbon removal assessment is that it's not just about carbon.

The most common and controversial approach in models analysed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, is to grow crops to fuel bioenergy plants that can capture and sequester carbon underground while producing electricity. Although this can pull CO2 from the air, it also has negative impacts, such as using substantial amounts of freshwater and fertilisers, as well as harming biodiversity.

Scaling up bioenergy-based carbon removal to the levels contemplated by the IPCC will inevitably exacerbate these other problems, says Wolfgang Lucht, an Earth System Scientist at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who led the modelling work for the Horizon 2020 project.

The bottom line is that there are no easy pathways to a future with massive levels of carbon removal, he says. And that means global leaders must hasten efforts to halt emissions now, rather than assume that future generations will clean up the mess. We are really trying really hard not to burden the next generation with the enormous impacts of climate change, says Lucht. We should also not burden them with having to implement planetary-scale carbon removal.

To read more of nature's long-form journalism, head over to nature.com slash news.

Did you know that foreign investors are quietly funding lawsuits in American courts through a practice called third-party litigation funding? Shadowy overseas funders are paying to sue American companies in our courts, and they don't pay a dime in U.S. taxes if there is an award or settlement. They profit tax-free from our legal system, while U.S. companies are tied up in court and American families pay the price to the tune of $5,000 a year.

But there is a solution. A new proposal before Congress would close this loophole and ensure these foreign investors pay taxes, just like the actual plaintiffs have to.

It's a common sense move that discourages frivolous and abusive lawsuits and redirects resources back into American jobs, innovation, and growth. Only President Trump and congressional Republicans can deliver this win for America and hold these foreign investors accountable. Contact your lawmakers today and demand they take a stand to end foreign-funded litigation abuse. If you're a lineman in charge of keeping the lights on,

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