Take a breather on carbon capture

Atmospheric carbon dioxide — CO2 — is life-enabling, feeding plants that release oxygen, and keeping us warm. The trend is a bit too warm of late, associated with weather extremes, more frequent natural disasters and, eventually, causing heavily inhabited coastlines to flood.

A visit to A visit to Manitoba’s Dystopian Future (Think Tank, Jan. 16) adds to the list of possible effects in a way that focuses the mind, even if speculative.

Another effect was studied in the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Exposure to levels of CO2 at 1,000 parts per million (ppm, by count of molecules) had a small negative impact on cognitive function, and a notable impact at 2,500 ppm. (Other studies and reviews are mixed in terms of conclusions.).

The outside concentration of CO2 is a little over 400 ppm, and rising.

Levels several times higher, such as in the study mentioned above, can occur in homes and buildings where learning and decision-making take place. In hopefully well-ventilated settings, government and business decisions are being made about how to slow CO2 buildup, including direct air capture of carbon, an industrial process that scrubs (captures) CO2 from the air for temporary sequestering.

According to Hope or Hype? (Free Press, Dec. 20, 2025), our government is open to establishing a climate supportive of DAC, with an enterprise called Deep Sky eager to “help save our planet” in a context of having the option to pay for permission to emit CO2 to serve societal needs. Other schemes were highlighted in Made in the shade? (Free Press, Jan. 10).

Evidently entrepreneurs are eager to capitalize.

The sparkly combination of profit and seemingly virtuous enterprise is compelling, it seems.

For direct air capture, this is despite worldwide attempts creating more CO2 than they capture or failing to approach performance targets. On the face, this is unsurprising. Imagine sending all sewage to lakes and rivers, and then sucking up the water through hoses to remove pollutants when vastly diluted and, therefore, the most difficult (energy- and resource-consuming) to do.

Foundational laws of science tell us that there is a net resource and environmental cost to any such undertaking — saving the planet is for the brochures, not the bottom line.

The hose analogy is a bit unfair in that billions of CO2 sources cannot be routed to treatment plants. While not a panacea, electrification has this effect to a degree. Electricity-producing plants — hydro, wind, waves, solar, even fossil-fuelled — have their damaging effects concentrated in fewer locations, increasing the potential efficacy of mitigation. Nevertheless, any electrical energy brought online for or applied to direct air capture, even at its best, would be far more efficiently used for CO2 reduction at source. (Nuclear energy presents immediate and legacy considerations, risks and burdens of a different order.)

There are more effective approaches, so the often-lazy “money would be better spent on…” criticism is appropriate and explained in Why Direct Air Capture Isn’t a Climate Solution for Manitoba, a June 2025 publication by the Climate Action Team Manitoba.

It concludes that “Crucially, investments and infrastructures that are directed to direct air capture come at the expense of cheaper and more reliable mitigation approaches that can be implemented today, such as investing in public transit and active transportation, deep energy retrofits and district heating using ground-source heat pumps in buildings, and reducing agricultural reliance on synthetic fertilizers through an alternative cropping system. Critics writing in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists described DAC investments as incurring a “grave opportunity cost,” arguing: “If we spend (US)$500 to separate one ton of carbon dioxide (from the air), that means that we didn’t spend that (US)$500 elsewhere to avoid 20 tons, or more. Those extra 19 tons will remain in the atmosphere, warming the planet every year for thousands of years.”

At home, millions of small acts, as able, can help — use active transportation or a bus, carpool, shut off AI, place online orders with immense discretion, reduce, reuse, reduce, recycle, reduce, and eat less meat.

And get some fresh air, particularly before making big climate decisions.

Ken Clark, drawing from instinct and training as an engineer on this occasion, writes from Winnipeg.