VACUUM UP THIS MESS

Just in time for the announcement that April 2024 was the hottest April on record: an amazing story on the efforts to clean up Earth’s air. Iceland has plugged in a giant plant to suck carbon out of the air instead of belching it into the air and our nostrils.

It’s not the first “direct air capture” plant that’s opened in Iceland, but it’s the biggest. It’s called Mammoth for a reason. The images on CNN show its vacuums all stacked and lined up, pulling in the atmosphere and scrubbing it clean. (Power supplied by Iceland’s geothermal energy, so the plant is not putting carbon in the air while it’s taking it out.)

This tech isn’t new, but it’s getting bigger and less expensive. Mammoth’s efforts can pull 36,000 tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year, according to CNN. Which sounds like a lot. But admittedly isn’t. That’s the equivalent of parking 7,800 gaspowered cars every year.

But the Mammoth plant isn’t the only one online. Similar plants are being built elsewhere. If everything is bigger in Texas, and it can be, then note that a Texas plant under construction hopes to pull 500,000 tons of carbon a year, which is a much bigger deal.

The carbon is then put back into the ground. It could become rock at that point, and the carbon would be sequestered forever.

Of course, there is opposition. And you might be surprised where it comes from.

Climate advocates worry — they always worry — that these vacuum plants will “distract” government types and maybe voters from policies that will do environmental good more in line with their timelines. And if these plants are only taking a fraction of the carbon out of the air today, then the technology “is fraught with uncertainties and ecological risks,” according to one environmental lawyer quoted in the story.

And, of course, vacuum plants are expensive. Not every country has access to Iceland’s underground geothermal energy.

So give up on it and print more Take Public Transit posters?

Let’s not.

If lived experience means anything, and it does, we’ll guess that these plants will become less expensive, or at least more efficient to build, as more go up and familiarity with the tech increases.

Not every country can run these plants with undersea volcano steam. But as environmentalists will tell you, each year renewables take a bigger part of the energy pie.

These plants only take a fraction of the carbon out of the air. Which might seem to suggest we need more of them, not fewer. As far as distractions, we think the people and their representatives can cheer for a baseball team and a football team at the same time. Many of us do every September and October.

One would think that the global warming problem would need to be attacked from many sides: through conservation, renewables, nuclear, and even with giant vacuum plants sucking carbon out of the air and putting it back in the ground from whence it came. We wouldn’t pooh-pooh this effort.

Once people thought that nuclear energy would never work at scale.