As more carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, the urgency is growing for safe and sustainable methods to remove this main greenhouse gas from the air to limit the impact of climate change. 

Synopsis: Every first and third Sunday of the month, The Straits Times analyses the beat of the changing environment, from biodiversity conservation to climate change.

CO2 is the main greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. We can’t see it, we can’t smell it but we can definitely feel its growing impacts as the planet heats up with devastating consequences. And every year, it keeps accumulating. 

Human activity is producing about 40 billion tonnes of CO2 a year. That’s mainly from burning fossil fuels and deforestation. 

To fight climate change, we not only need to slash CO2 emissions, we would also need to remove billions of tonnes that our human activities had earlier emitted into the atmosphere. 

And that means dramatically scaling up carbon dioxide removal technologies. We’ll never reach the Paris Agreement’s climate targets by 2050 unless we remove at least four times more CO2 from the atmosphere every year than we do at present.

That’s the conclusion of a major study on carbon dioxide removal released in June 2024. 

So what exactly is carbon dioxide removal, or CDR? And what is needed to really get investment pumping?

In this episode, ST's climate change editor David Fogarty hosts one of the lead authors of the report, Gregory Nemet, a Professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s La Follette School of Public Affairs in the United States.  Greg studies the process of technological change and the ways in which public policy can affect it.

Highlights of conversation (click/tap above):

1:44 How does carbon dioxide removal (CDR) help in the fight against climate change?

3:12 The difference between CDR and carbon capture and storage (CCS)

4:58 Main findings from the recently published global report on CDR 

7:58 Examples of the different types of CDR 

11:43 What are the costs?

19:55 What are the environmental risks from CDR? How to ensure scaled-up methods can be sustainable?

Produced by: David Fogarty ([email protected]), Ernest Luis & Hadyu Rahim

Edited by: Hadyu Rahim

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