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Marketplace All-in-One

The promises and risks of carbon capture

Marketplace All-in-One

Marketplace

News, Business

4.51.4K Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2023

⏱️ 25 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today we’re talking about another potential tool in the climate solutions toolbox: carbon capture.

The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law put $12 billion toward the tech, which promises to take carbon emissions straight from the air and store them underground. But there are concerns that supporting the fledgling industry could backfire.

On the show today, Inside Climate News’ Nicholas Kusnetz explains the ins and outs of carbon capture and the challenges of making it work on a scale big enough to be meaningful. Plus, how investing in the tech could prolong dependence on fossil fuels.

Then, studios want to own actors’ digital likenesses forever, and that’s a sticking point for SAG-AFTRA in the actors strike. We’ll get into what this has to do with trends in the generative AI industry. And, some news about former President Donald Trump’s net worth that made us say, “Huh?”

Later, we’ll hear from listeners about hydrogen fuel cell cars and shower design flaws. Plus, what a listener got wrong about the climate crisis.

Here’s everything we talked about today:

    We want to hear your answer to the Make Me Smart question. You can reach us at makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.

    Transcript

    Click on a timestamp to play from that location

    0:00.0

    Hello, I'm Kimberly Adams.

    0:05.0

    Hello, I'm Kimberly Adams.

    0:08.0

    Welcome back to Make Me Smart, where none of us is as smart as all of us.

    0:11.0

    I'm Kyle Resdahl.

    0:12.0

    Thanks for joining us on this Tuesday.

    0:13.4

    Seven November is the date, one show on topic. The topic du jour is

    0:17.8

    climate solutions, our continuing series. Today, carbon capture. Right, carbon capture is often touted as this potential way to address the climate crisis

    0:28.0

    by basically sucking the carbon in the air and storing it underground.

    0:32.0

    And the Biden administration recently put over a billion dollars

    0:36.0

    towards carbon capture projects.

    0:37.8

    So what we want to know is how this tech actually works

    0:41.0

    and whether it is a real viable solution. So here to make us smart

    0:45.9

    about this is Nick Kuznets, a staff writer at Inside Climate News. Welcome to

    0:50.1

    the show. Hi, thank you for having me.

    0:53.6

    So first off, describe carbon capture and how it actually works, please.

    1:00.2

    So there are two kind of overlapping fields here. One is traditionally called carbon capture,

    1:06.0

    and that's about taking carbon dioxide out of smoke stack pollution.

    1:10.6

    Then the other is a somewhat newer field called carbon removal and that's looking at

    1:16.1

    pulling carbon dioxide straight out of the atmosphere. So that carbon removal there's a

    1:22.3

    whole host of ways you can do that including planting trees.

    1:25.3

    But some of them are using some of the same technologies as carbon capture.

    1:30.3

    And so for both of those it's about isolating carbon dioxide CO2 and then

    ...

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