Welcome to Zero. I am Akshad Rati. This week, kick-starting carbon removal.

Akshatt, when I started at Zero, one of the first things that I remember having no idea about was carbon removal.

Because in my mind, it seemed to be this very futuristic, far-fetched kind of fever dream of a technology.

And maybe even a way to avoid thinking about very hard, real questions about how to actually reduce emissions in the first place.

Hi, Maitha Lee.

I can see why you think it's sci-fi because it's like undoing climate change.

And, you know, that seems like a big thing.

Honestly, I don't think carbon removal is that sci-fi.

At the end of the day, it's carbon dioxide, a gas that we have studied for hundreds of years

that the industry has captured for decades.

I became a climate journalist writing about a technology called carbon capture.

That does exactly

that. It takes CO2 from smokestacks and compresses it and puts it deep underground.

But if it's so simple, why are we not already harnessing this?

Because it's really expensive. And it's expensive because you have to think about carbon removal differently from carbon capture.

In a smokestack, there's about 10% of all gases is carbon dioxide.

So, say, one red M&M in 10 blue M&Ms.

But in the atmosphere, it's at 400 parts per million,

which is roughly four red M&Ms in 10,000

blue M&Ms. Separating just those four out of that mixture of 10,000 blue is a very energy

intensive and does expensive process. Is that also why some of the solutions, when people talk about carbon removal, seem so

creative? Yeah, now that this has been worked on for a few years, there are all kinds of crazy

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