To the editor: Your article on new scientific interventions to address global climate issues opens with the questionable claim that direct air capture to sequester atmospheric carbon dioxide represents perhaps one of “the world’s best hopes for combating climate change.”
And yet you quickly point out that it would take 1 million facilities like the initial plant now operating in San Joaquin County to make a meaningful impact on global carbon levels. Is that a viable strategy?
We will need to pursue multiple options to attack the climate challenge, but this and other flashy new concepts are far less effective and far more costly than the direct approach of reducing man-made carbon emissions through elimination of fossil fuel usage.
It’s essential that our policymakers keep this direct approach as our primary focus, with the use of a carbon tax to incentivize electrification across all industries, and a dividend program to return the revenue to the citizenry.
Chad Edwards, Altadena
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To the editor: It is true that there is no technological silver bullet to fight climate change. This battle requires a silver buckshot approach, scattering pellets in a wide array.
We first need to reduce our respective carbon footprints by diminishing the amount of fossil fuels used in many areas of our society. We then need to remove the carbon dioxide we’ve already emitted from our atmosphere. As a reminder, carbon emissions can linger in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, so there is quite a buildup that needs to be addressed.
There is a bill in the California Legislature that takes a method-agnostic approach to removing carbon. Senate Bill 308 directs the California Air Resources Board to establish technology-neutral rules ensuring that any negative emissions (carbon removed) counted toward meeting our targets are of high quality and avoid harmful side effects.
Let’s hope a bill such as this, when passed, moves the carbon-removal process along appropriately and quickly.
Jonathan Light, Laguna Niguel
