Before carbon capture can clean atmosphere at scale, one bottleneck may decide whether it succeeds

In 2024, global average temperatures exceeded 1.5o C above pre-industrial levels for the first time. This threshold was set as an aspirational limit by the 2015 Paris Agreement and was considered a line beyond which the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and human vulnerability become stark. Crossing this threshold is a signal that reducing emissions alone will not be enough. Increasingly, scientists, engineers, and policymakers around the globe agree that we will need to actively pull carbon dioxide (CO2) out of the atmosphere to help reduce the impacts of this pollutant.