A new report from the UN Environment Program concludes that global average temperatures will soon be 1.5 degrees Celsius warmer than they were in preindustrial times. The need to keep warming at or below that threshold has animated climate activists worldwide for nearly two decades, and that ambition was inscribed into the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015. Within just a few years we’ll blow right past it, or, in more technical language, “overshoot.” Without significant changes, warming looks poised to continue on toward 2.6 degrees above preindustrial times. The upshot in the UNEP report is the same as virtually every UN climate report in recent memory: Things are bad and getting worse; we aren’t going fast enough to meet our targets; there’s still hope.
This mixed-bag sentiment is basically true. There is no point at which it makes sense to give up on trying to mitigate climate change. The more greenhouse gasses are deposited into the air, the warmer and the worse it will get. The case for keeping the 1.5 Celsius target alive, however, looks increasingly far-fetched. The more optimistic possibility explored by UNEP researchers involves approaching that 1.5 Celsius goal “from above,” i.e. rapidly cutting carbon dioxide emissions enough to limit warming through 2100 to just 1.8 degrees Celsius. The world would then have to achieve not just “net-zero” but “net-negative” emissions by steadily removing enormous amount of excess carbon dioxide.
Somewhat unhelpfully, outlets covering the report have framed an argument climate scientists have been making for years—that ambitious mitigation requires large-scale carbon dioxide removal, or CDR—as the starting gun for entry into some new stage of the climate problem. “Climate Goals Missed, U.N. Says World Must Now Remove Carbon,” the New York Times headline blares over an otherwise informative piece. Similarly in the Associated Press: “Global warming will exceed limit, U.N. says in a report that maps path to get back below danger zone.”
This type of headline misses the point. As is made clear by the tens of thousands who have died in heat waves, landslides, and floods this summer, we are already in the danger zone, and we will spend the rest of our lives there. And as the report emphasizes, “there are no good outcomes above 1.5°C,” and the path to getting back to that level is extraordinarily long and uncertain.
A paper published last month by Hugh Daigle and Arvind Ravikumar underlines just how ambitious—even fantastical—the prospect of getting back to 1.5°C is. UNEP notes that stabilizing temperatures at that level after passing it would require capturing between 15 and 24 gigatonnes of CO2 per year in 2100. That’s a far cry from how much carbon we’re able to remove at the moment. Currently, total carbon dioxide removal amounts to just 2.2 GtCO2 per year. Nearly all of that—99.95 percent—is accomplished through so-called conventional methods of carbon removal, like tree planting and forest management, which have been mired in controversy. Even without the governance scandals plaguing them, these methods have their limits, UNEP notes. “It would take over 100 years of afforestation and forest management at the current scale, and zero residual CO2 emissions, to bring warming back by 0.1°C,” the report’s authors warn, adding that “evidence remains insufficient that such approaches alone can deliver net-zero let alone net-negative CO2 emissions at the global scale.” More simply put, the world is not close to zeroing out CO2 emissions. Relying only on tree-planting and -saving to capture carbon would mean covering enormous chunks of the world in forests that take years to start absorbing meaningful amounts of carbon after being planted—and can always burn down.
Enter “engineered” and “novel” CDR. The years since the Paris Agreement have seen enthusiastic interest from Houston to Silicon Valley in these more sci-fi-style means of getting to net zero. These tend to appeal greatly to industry. Back when fossil fuel executives were feeling pressured to talk about rising temperatures, they rallied around carbon capture, utilization, and sequestration as a key climate solution—and a means of keeping their business models intact. Oxy CEO Vicky Hollub may have put her company’s interest in these technologies best in 2023: “This gives our industry a license to continue to operate for the 60, 70, 80 years that I think it’s going to be very much needed.”
The models scientists use to study climate change—especially those that see warming eventually stabilize at 1.5C—lean heavily on the assumption that these projects will expand massively after 2050, especially. In real life, engineered and novel CDR remains extremely limited. Daigle and Ravikumar examined all 28 permanent geological carbon storage projects worldwide that either are or were operational. There are several ways to capture carbon, whether directly from industrial activities—like concrete production that releases CO2 as a byproduct, and gas-fired power plants—or from the atmosphere via a process known as direct air capture.
Climate models tend to treat the considerable limits of these technologies as economic: If you can bring down the price per ton of carbon dioxide captured, producers will be able to achieve economies of scale and those technologies will proliferate. As Ravikumar told me, however, the models “are not based on physical principles,” but on cost optimization. “That assumption that the deployment of a technology is simply a function of its cost breaks down when you look at very new technologies” like carbon capture and storage, “where you have not reached the stage of building a thousand copies of the same thing.” In other words, the models take for granted that if carbon removal gets cheap enough, it will be deployed at scale. But that’s not the situation at all.
This is in large part because every carbon capture and sequestration project is different. However carbon is captured, it needs to be stored in order to make a difference for climate efforts. Relatively small amounts of carbon can be used. A number of startups, for instance, inject captured carbon into things like soft drinks; some are working toward storing it in building materials. But the kind of mass-scale sequestration outlined in climate models will likely rely largely on injecting carbon deep underground, whether into saline aquifers or depleted oil and gas deposits. Ravikumar likens these to big, irregular sponges that need to be soaked using straws rather than underground tanks that can be neatly filled up and sealed off. The success of such projects depends on a number of site-specific factors: how deep injection wells need to be; the rate at which the carbon is injected and how much pressure is used; the permeability of the ground; and the space available. “Every project is unique,” he said. “The idea that you just scale it up and costs go down is not really true.”
There are physical limits on the infrastructure and space available for sequestering carbon. An influential study outlining ways for just the United States to achieve net-zero emissions indicates that the country will need to capture and store 2.5 Gt per year—a relatively low level that mainly accounts for industrial processes that don’t have readily available zero-carbon alternatives, like steel and concrete production. The biggest project Daigle and Ravikumar looked at was Shell’s Gorgon Plant in Australia, which faced numerous engineering challenges in capturing emissions from one of the world’s largest liquified natural gas terminals. That facility currently captures and sequesters just 0.4 megatonnes (Mt) of carbon per year—far less than the 3.5 Mt Shell projected when operations began in 2019. The projects Daigle and Ravikumar studied hit 59 percent of their projected injection rates on average; the mean amount of carbon captured at commercial-scale projects was only 0.19 Mt per year. To reach even the modest quantities of carbon capture entailed in the Net-Zero America study would mean building 250 Gorgon-scale facilities in the United States every year between now and 2050.
At this rate, the outlook is nothing if not grim: “Achieving even the lower end” of sequestration entailed in somewhat less ambitious mitigation scenarios, Daigle and Ravikumar write, “would require drilling thousands of wells each year until 2050.” The difficulty of reaching that number becomes obvious, the pair explained, when you consider how many active drilling rigs, both onshore and offshore, existed in the U.S. as of mid-2026: just 581. “The drilling activity alone needed to achieve projected levels of sequestration,” they write, “would be larger than the entire existing oil and gas industry.” (My emphasis.)
The UNEP report outlines capturing between 15 and 24 Gigatonnes of carbon per year in 2100, and is careful not to posit carbon capture as a substitute for reducing actually existing emissions now. The world’s leading climate modelers have also just released a new set of scenarios that will be used to inform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s next assessment report, AR7. These new scenarios—the seventh Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP7—all entail considerable amounts of conventional, engineered, and novel carbon removal. The “low-to-negative” scenario—using lots of CDR and breakneck emissions cuts to limit warming to 1.7 degrees Celsius by 2100—would capture and inject around 1,750 Gt of carbon underground by 2150. Another scenario—where the world reaches net-zero by 2100, and is 2.8 degrees Celsius warmer—would entail storing 800 Gt of carbon underground along the same timeline.
As climate scientist Zeke Hausefather notes in his CMIP7 explainer, “the amount of CDR deployed in these scenarios would require planetary-scale engineering at the cost of trillions of dollars, while many of the engineered CDR approaches are still relatively early-stage technologies.”
Ravikumar was also skeptical of how such massive amounts of carbon could be captured and reliably stored. “Just knowing what we know, these are to me very concerning because you could do anything with a model. But can you actually put these wells in the ground?”
Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is essential for meeting virtually any climate goal. The fact that CDR has received so much breathless hype from fossil fuel and tech executives—who are now major polluters themselves—has made climate activists understandably wary of moral hazard. If companies can argue that some magical new technology will at some point remove all emissions, skeptics argue, they’ll have little incentive to cut them now—and every incentive to sell politicians on unproven solutions. But those same polluters just aren’t doing very much carbon capture, period. And why should they? The White House has made them freer than ever to spew out virtually unlimited greenhouse gas emissions. Whatever momentum there was behind global cooperation on climate has—at least for now—died down. There are simply very few incentives for companies to make even token investments in cutting-edge climate technologies—let alone to tackle expensive and unwieldy engineering challenges.
Like nearly every climate expert I speak with, Ravikumar is eager to see carbon capture and sequestration expand massively, as quickly as possible. Because the equipment and expertise required to sequester carbon is similar to the kinds needed for oil and gas extraction, he says, recent advancements in drilling techniques could be leveraged to put and keep carbon underground. His paper outlines a number of routes for working through the physical and engineering barriers to large-scale carbon capture and sequestration. But while the Department of Energy has been willing to support research into capturing carbon along fairly bipartisan lines, there’s comparatively little support for research into the realities of large-scale sequestration. Ravikumar and Daigle recommend a global database for detailed information from carbon management experiments and pilot studies “to disseminate learnings rapidly and avoid costly mistakes.”
As was the case with fracking—which benefitted from decades of federal research support and tax breaks—making carbon sequestration work at a larger scale will be a matter of public policy rather than corporate curiosity. Compared to the prodigious amounts of oil and gas that fracking has produced, however, there’s comparatively little money to be made putting carbon underground. The pair further recommend that the National Institute of Standards and Technology collaborate with the National Academies and other federal agencies to convene a standing committee for exploring how to more accurately represent carbon management technologies in energy system models.
As Daigle and Ravikumar make clear, the world doesn’t always operate like it does in climate models. If anything, those models’ typically bleak futures can be too optimistic. Among other things, they’re optimistic about how much carbon dioxide can realistically be removed from the air, and about the power of price signals to drive real-world change. Models’ bad-faith interpreters—polluting governments and corporations—leaned on marketing paltry investments in carbon capture and storage to maintain the illusion that the world could have virtually unlimited fossil fuel production and combustion while still keeping warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. They’ve now mostly stopped pretending to care about climate change one way or another; that’s partly why news that surpassing 1.5°C of warming is now imminent and inevitable barely made headlines. Whenever climate politics enters the political mainstream again, let’s hope its latest iteration is more clear-eyed about what futures are still possible, and what’s going to get us there.
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