es. However, both the First World and the developing world have already shown an unwillingness to make dramatic reductions in carbon burning. Other strategies must therefore be explored.
As the I.P.C.C. report underscores, the climate emergency we face in this century is real. If social, political, and economic stresses mean that the world will not likely make the reductions necessary to avoid this emergency by mid-century, we need to explore every other possible technical means to do so. Carbon capture from the atmosphere may not be practical in the end. But exploring possibilities like it with the same kind energy that we are devoting to extracting fossil fuels should be an ethical global imperative, given everything we now know about humanity’s impact on our climate.
Lawrence Krauss is the Director of the Origins Project at Arizona State University, which recently sponsored a high-level workshop on climate change. He is also Chair of the Board of Sponsors of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Photograph by Horacio Salinas.