Squamish startup leads effort to reverse climate change

With news of still-rising global carbon dioxide emissions in the headlines, many in the climate science community fear that humanity is past the point of containing the global average temperature increase to 2 degrees C—or 1.5 C, as specified in the Paris agreement of 2015.

Indeed, as the New Yorker points out, even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change factors some remedial action into its projections—that is, taking some of the carbon already in the atmosphere out of it. Until recently, the only technology option approaching that end was carbon capture and storage: removing emissions from industrial sites and burying them thousands of metres underground. But now half a dozen companies, including Squamish-based Carbon Engineering, are trying something more fundamental: separating atmospheric carbon dioxide into its constituent elements.