Expanding wind and solar energy is not enough to stop the climate crisis, a study warns. It won’t work without CO₂ storage technology. But this is criticized by many – for good reason.
There are solutions to combat the climate crisis that sound so good that a healthy dose of skepticism is warranted. Like the idea of simply filtering harmful greenhouse gases out of the air using a kind of CO₂ vacuum cleaner. Experiments of this kind are underway around the world, including in Iceland. The Swiss company Climeworks is trying its luck there on the south coast. At a place where hot steam shoots out of the earth, she has set up around 50 large devices that suck in air from the surrounding area and filter out the carbon dioxide it contains. Similar to industrial processes with high CO₂ emissions, the aim is to capture harmful greenhouse gases in order to then store them in the ground or process them for another, climate-neutral use.