Often enough, “somewhere else” means sending the carbon back into the earth to push out more fossil fuels - a scheme known as “enhanced oil recovery” currently employed at the Petra Nova coal plant in Texas, one of just two large-scale carbon-capture plants in the world. These technologies - which remain expensive and underdeveloped - capture carbon from a plant’s waste gas stream, stick it in a pipeline, and send it somewhere else. It originated in the fossil fuel industry, which has developed a family of technologies for mopping up carbon emissions at fossil fuel power plants collectively known as carbon capture, utilization, and storage, or CCUS. Technologies for pulling carbon from the air are still quite new, but the idea behind them isn’t. And yet none of the candidates calling for so-called negative emissions technology took the opportunity to talk about it during CNN’s 7-hour climate crisis forum last week. But only three of the top ten candidates - Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, and Andrew Yang - are explicitly calling to invest in technology that does the exact same thing, despite the fact that many experts believe limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) depends on it. Many of the contenders support using natural carbon sinks, like soils and forests, to suck more carbon out of the atmosphere, according to climate plans the Democratic candidates have released over the last few months. The leading Democrats running for the White House, however, don’t seem so sure. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the National Academies of Sciences, and scores of researchers around the world agree on this fact: To prevent dangerous levels of climate change, it’s likely that humanity will need to start pulling carbon out of the air. It is republished here as part of Rolling Stone’s partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
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