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The world is full of wonders and mysteries that often surpass our imagination. Within this spectrum of enigmas, lie the realm of magical yet activities. These activities, often tinged with a touch of enchantment, captivate our minds and transport us to extraordinary realms beyond the ordinary. One such magical yet activity is stargazing. As the sun sets and darkness blankets the sky, a whole new world glimmers above. Gazing up at the stars and constellations has an otherworldly quality that transports us to a dreamlike state.

Gazing up at the stars and constellations has an otherworldly quality that transports us to a dreamlike state. The twinkling stars, so far yet so close, ignite a sense of wonder and fascination. With each shooting star that streaks across the night sky, we make wishes and hope for the realization of our wildest dreams.

Another weapon to fight climate change? Put carbon back where we found it

Getting to zero carbon emissions won’t save the world. We’ll have to also remove carbon from the air—a massive undertaking unlike anything we’ve ever done.

Scientists monitor a mesocosm—an experimental enclosure—off the coast of Norway to see how seawater absorbs carbon dioxide from alkaline materials. “The question is, can we significantly speed up that natural process?” says project leader Ulf Riebesell.

Over the past few centuries, we have dug, chopped, burned, drilled, pumped, stripped, forged, flared, lit, launched, driven, and flown our way to adding 2.4 trillion metric tons of carbon dioxide to Earth’s atmosphere.

That’s as much CO₂ as would be emitted annually by 522 billion cars, or 65 cars per person living today.

On a lonely, lunar-like valley 20 miles outside of Reykjavík, Iceland, Edda Aradóttir is on a mission to put it back where it came from.

She’s returning a tiny bit of it today but much, much more of it in the years ahead. In sending CO₂ deep beneath the surface of the planet, she’s aiming to reverse one of the most consequential acts of human history: the unearthing of massive amounts of subterranean carbon as fossil fuels, the lifeblood of modern civilization but now its bane as well.

A light attached to a drone illuminates a geodesic aluminum igloo on a massive lava field near Reykjavík in this composite image. Inside, the Icelandic company Carbfix is turning captured carbon dioxide into stone—considered a gold standard for CO2 sequestration, since it’s essentially permanent storage.

She doesn’t have much time. Nor do the rest of us. The extreme weather and record-hot temperatures from climate change are already here—and virtually certain to get worse.

Inside an aluminum igloo on this patch of volcanic dirt, Aradóttir—a chemical and reservoir engineer who is chief executive officer of an Icelandic company called Carbfix—shows me how captured CO₂ is mixed with water, then fed through an elaborate system of pipes that course downward 2,500 feet or so. There, the dissolved carbon dioxide meets porous basalt, creating a stippling of cream-colored speckles in the igneous rock below.

She hands me a sample core to inspect. All those dots and stripes represent an ambition that is simple but breathtakingly audacious, because minuscule as the amount may be, this particular bit of CO₂—plucked from the air, mineralized, and turned to stone—is no longer heating up our planet.

Vaxa Technologies uses carbon emissions from the Hellisheiði power plant near Reykjavík, Iceland, to help grow microalgae for use as food or supplements. Aquaculture that absorbs CO2 could be a significant step toward decreasing the enormous carbon footprint of food production.

Scientists and entrepreneurs like Aradóttir are embarking on ambitious—and sometimes controversial—projects to remove carbon dioxide from ambient air and lock it away. In Arizona, an engineering professor shows me his “mechanical tree,” a single one of which he says may someday be able to do the work of a thousand regular trees in capturing and storing CO₂. In Australia, a leading oceanographer tells me that seaweed is salvation, if only we’d help it grow in giant aqua-gardens of kelp and wakame that could harbor billions of tons of carbon dioxide. Atop a university building in Zürich, an Uruguayan inventor with a gleam in his eye presents me with a small vial of fuel made from nothing but sunlight and air. That may be the most intriguing of all the forms of carbon capture I’ve come across, as it suggests we may one day be able to harness carbon in a continuous virtuous cycle of zero-emission energy. Maybe. One day.

What these efforts have in common is that they are geared in the long run to drag downward a number that climate experts agree holds the key to the health of the planet. That number is the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, which for thousands of years had held stable at or a bit below 280 parts per million, until the industrial revolution kicked off in the middle of the 19th century. Today this critical number stands at some 420 parts per million—in other words, the percentage of CO₂ in the atmosphere has risen roughly 50 percent since 1850. As it rises, the added carbon traps heat, causing the Earth to warm to increasingly dangerous levels. Carbon-capture proponents say that their work—to capture the main driver of climate change, radically scaled up in coming decades—will help bring this number down.

But what all these efforts also have in common is that to their many detractors, the very idea of sucking all this carbon out of the air is a diversion from the far more urgent task of radically cutting carbon dioxide emissions to begin with.

More than 500 environmental groups, for instance, have signed a petition urging U.S. and Canadian leaders to “abandon the dirty, dangerous myth of CCS,” or carbon capture and storage, a major form of carbon removal. The petition blasts the concept as “a dangerous distraction driven by the same big polluters who created the climate emergency,” a reference to plans announced by ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other traditional oil giants to jump into the carbon-capture business. It is enraging, critics say, that the forces most responsible for getting us into this global mess now stand to profit from promises that they can clean it up.

With cooling towers each large enough to hold London’s Big Ben tower inside, the United Kingdom’s mammoth Drax Power Station is transitioning from burning coal to relying on biomass wood pellets. Eventually, says its parent company, the Yorkshire facility will capture CO2 from smokestack emissions and route it to giant storage reservoirs under the North Sea. But critics question whether Drax’s burning of “renewable” wood, mainly from North American forests, is any better for the environment than burning coal.

The term “moral hazard,” the idea that people will continue to take risks if they believe they’re shielded from the consequences, comes up often in this debate. If policymakers, not to mention average people, start thinking that maybe we have a magic solution for all this troublesome CO₂, perhaps they’ll start worrying less about the oil, gas, and coal we keep extracting from the Earth. But carbon-removal advocates say we desperately need to do both things at once: cut future emissions and reverse the impacts of what we’ve already emitted.

“It’s very clear to me that this is a solution to the problem, even if it’s not the solution,” Aradóttir says. “Basically, we are going to have to do this on top of everything else the world must do to decarbonize all the energy we use.”

Or, as Matthew Warnken, chair of an Australian company, Corporate Carbon, put it to me: “People ask me all the time, ‘Wow, is this a silver bullet for the problem of climate change?’ And I say no, it’s not. But it is silver buckshot—and we’re going to need it.”

Warnken’s assertion stems from projections by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that any realistic pathway to dealing with the climate emergency must include carbon removal on a vast scale. To keep global temperature from increasing above a critical threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) over preindustrial levels will require achieving carbon neutrality and removing as much as 12 billion metric tons of CO₂ annually by mid-century.

That is a staggering challenge: We add three times that much in greenhouse gas emissions in a single year.

An employee at the U.K.’s Drax power plant holds wood pellets, now the principal source of the facility’s biomass-to-energy production. A shovel once used to load coal—the plant’s previous energy source—looms in the background.

Iceland’s birch forests had been reduced to one percent of the nation’s land area by the middle of the 20th century. Now, because trees store carbon, the Icelandic Forest Service is encouraging their growth. The most recent tree census found that woodlands like these in southwest Iceland have doubled to cover some 2 percent of the country.

Nearly all CO₂ now sequestered comes from nature and conventional nature-based solutions like planting trees and changing farming practices to improve soil’s carbon retention. For now, whiz-bang technology like the “direct air capture” plant that traps the carbon dioxide Carbfix shoots underground in Iceland counts for just 0.1 percent of CO₂ removal.

Planting and tilling will not be enough to address this crisis, says the IPCC, especially since they could take up land and water needed to grow food. Yet the technology of carbon removal remains inordinately expensive and unproven at any kind of mass scale, even though the basic concept has been around for a while. Like cold fusion or green hydrogen, it is a moon shot that has never really gotten off the launchpad.

But now the industry has begun attracting serious money, which those involved say will propel the research and development needed to bring down the cost of direct air capture and other forms of carbon removal. Climeworks, the Swiss company that runs the CO₂-trapping plant in Iceland in conjunction with Carbfix, secured $650 million from investment firms earlier this year, the largest such private investment the burgeoning industry has seen so far. The company’s corporate customers—including Microsoft, JPMorgan Chase, and the payment systems firm Stripe—are eager to purchase verified “offsets” that enable them to claim they’re operating their businesses on a carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative basis.

Climeworks’ co-founder, Jan Wurzbacher, says direct-air-capture technology will plummet in price, just as the cost of solar panels and wind turbines has dropped in recent years. Built in modular units, each the size of a standard shipping container, his company’s devices can be widely transported by ship, rail, or truck and fit together as neatly as Lego blocks at their final destination.

Climeworks’ direct-air-capture plant in Iceland—the largest such facility in the world—removes 4,000 metric tons of CO2 from the atmosphere each year. That’s equivalent to annual emissions from some 500 homes—not much now but groundwork for the future.

“This is very doable, from a practical point of view, to get to a point where you are really helping to address the problem,” explains Wurzbacher, a German-born mechanical engineer who came to Switzerland as a college student and stayed put.

“There is no reason you could not build hundreds of thousands, millions, of these units. Now, is there a moral hazard? Maybe. But what can we do about that? Maybe 20 years ago it was an either-or proposition. But now it’s a both-and. It’s an all-hands situation.”

Wurzbacher’s goals for how much carbon his company will remove by direct air capture are bold. One megaton annually, or a million metric tons, by 2030; 100 megatons by 2040; by 2050, one gigaton—a billion metric tons—a year. At today’s prices, Climeworks’ annual revenue would be more than double that of Apple. But Wurzbacher says the comparison is not apt, because he expects the costs per metric ton of cleaning the air to drop precipitously.

Climeworks’ Iceland facility, the world’s first commercial carbon dioxide–removal plant, uses a system of giant fans and filters to trap the CO₂, all powered by geothermal heat, a fact that serves to highlight one of the technology’s limitations, at least in its current state. Direct-air-capture projects must run on clean renewable power—otherwise they would wind up emitting almost as much carbon as they remove from the atmosphere.

An offshore rig called the Transocean Enabler drills injection wells more than a mile below the North Sea, creating a network of subsea reservoirs able to absorb 1.5 million metric tons of CO2 annually, equivalent to the emissions of about 320,000 cars.

With a mop of brown hair and a restless air giving him an early-Beatles vibe that belies his 40 years, Wurzbacher personifies the youthful optimism common to many carbon-removal start-ups. Perhaps a bit of the impishness, as well. Speaking in London a few years ago, Wurzbacher threw several 10-pound trash bags on the stage to illustrate a point. Dumping his trash wherever he wanted would be the easiest and cheapest way to deal with it, he told the crowd, but society long ago decided it would be inappropriate, so we pay more to collect and dispose of it properly. Greenhouse gases should be no different, he concluded, except that humanity has generally allowed these emissions to go untaxed, unmitigated, and unpunished.

Now, there is a value to removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere: Like any other product in the market, it’s what individual consumers and corporations are willing to pay. And some polluters are willing to spend big. Anytime you hear of a major airline pledging to become “carbon-neutral” by 2030 or 2040, it’s certainly not expecting that its jet engines will magically stop emitting CO₂ by that date. Instead, it’s planning to buy carbon offsets from companies like Climeworks and Carbfix.

But as important as that money is for spurring R & D, it’s a minute fraction of what would ultimately be needed to make a genuine difference in reversing or at least slowing climate change. That figure would likely be measured in the trillions of dollars, amounting to one of the largest industrial undertakings in all of history. In the words of the science fiction author-philosopher Kim Stanley Robinson, reclaiming our carbon emissions from the air around us will amount to nothing less than a “civilizational project.”

Pound for pound, kelp and other seaweeds hold more CO2 than trees. Camila Jaber, a Mexican free diver, explores the immense kelp forest off Argentina’s Tierra del Fuego during a 2022 expedition to determine whether Patagonia’s underwater macroalgal forests can be amplified into one of the most significant carbon sinks on the planet.

Deep in the outback of Australia, 12 hours north of Adelaide along a road that turns into a red ocher dirt track as it wends into one of the least densely populated areas of the world, lies an enormous natural gas field known as Moomba. By the time the road reaches its terminus, at the edge of the gas field, general services run out: Moomba doesn’t welcome outsiders without permission.

What Moomba and the rest of the massive outback do offer, Julian Turecek assures me with expansive enthusiasm, is perfect conditions for operating tens of thousands of solar-powered modules that can trap carbon dioxide and lock it away in the crevices under the dusty earth.

“Sun, space, and storage!” explains Turecek. “Australia has all of those in abundance.”

Backed with contracts ultimately funded by Stripe and the parent companies of Facebook and Google, Turecek’s enterprise is developing the modules in a Brisbane laboratory and plans to begin installing them next year at Moomba. The business, Aspira DAC, is a unit of Corporate Carbon, an Australian firm that sells credits for certified carbon removal from the atmosphere.

Each unit is roughly the shape and size of a two-person tent, with two solar panels measuring six and a half feet in either direction forming the sides. The panels power a fan that blows air across a polymer honeycomb-like device that filters CO₂, cycling through a 20-minute period of absorbing the gas, followed by a 10-minute de-absorption process that releases the CO₂ into a collection system. The units are equipped with enough battery power to run through the night, as long as there’s been adequate sunshine to power the batteries. In the broiling outback, that’s generally not a problem, Turecek says.

“We think there will ultimately be hundreds of thousands of these, in different remote parts of Australia,” says Rohan Gillespie, managing director of Southern Green Gas, a renewable energy start-up that’s building the units in conjunction with Aspira DAC. “There could be a million or two.” Each module can capture a total of two metric tons of CO₂. (A metric ton, also known as a tonne, is about 2,200 pounds, or 10 percent more than a standard U.S. ton.)

Interestingly, one thing carbon removal clearly has going for it is that it can be done anywhere on Earth: Carbon dioxide is just as usefully sequestered in the outback as it would be in, say, car-dependent Los Angeles. That’s because the gas disperses so quickly and thoroughly in the atmosphere that its concentrations are generally uniform across the globe.

Australia is something of a pioneer in research into carbon removal, with ample government support, although not entirely for altruistic reasons. Conservative prime minister Scott Morrison, who led the country from 2018 to 2022, pledged to make Australia a world leader in the technology, which he said would help it achieve “net-zero” status by 2050. But the nation is also the world’s biggest exporter of coal, and Morrison expressed no interest in decreasing its role in supplying China, India, and other parts of the developing world with as much of the energy source as they wanted. Nor did Australia move on from coal as its chief source of domestic electricity.

In that sense, Morrison’s policy illustrated precisely the moral hazard environmentalists warn against: relying on carbon removal as a way to avoid or delay the transition to clean energy from dirtier, carbon-rich sources like coal, oil, and gas. The more moderate government that replaced Morrison’s last year is equally enthusiastic about carbon capture although also somewhat more bullish on green energy jobs replacing those in the coal industry.

Iceland’s birch forests had been reduced to one percent of the nation’s land area by the middle of the 20th century. Now, because trees store carbon, the Icelandic Forest Service is encouraging their growth. The most recent tree census found that woodlands like these in southwest Iceland have doubled to cover some 2 percent of the country.

Another magical yet activity is exploring ancient ruins. As we walk amidst the remnants of ancient civilizations, a mystical aura surrounds us. The worn-out stones and crumbling structures hold within them the stories of bygone eras. The whispers of history swirl around us, reminding us of a time long gone. The echoes of footsteps of once-thriving civilizations can be faintly heard, transporting us to a world of mystery and intrigue. Additionally, the act of storytelling is a magical yet activity that has been a part of human culture for centuries. When we gather around a fire or sit in a circle, listening to tales that transport us to imaginary worlds, it feels as though we are under a spell. The power of words and imagination weaves a tapestry of emotions and images, immersing us in a realm that exists only within the confines of our minds. Stories have the ability to ignite our imaginations, taking us on adventures that are as real as they are fictional. Lastly, the act of meditation can also be considered a magical yet activity. When we close our eyes and focus our minds, we enter a state of deep relaxation and inner calm. In this stillness, we tap into the depths of our subconscious and connect with a higher plane of existence. Meditation opens up a portal to a world beyond the physical, allowing us to explore the vast and intricate landscapes within ourselves. This practice can be transformative, leading us to a heightened sense of self-awareness and spiritual growth. In conclusion, the world is full of magical yet activities that transport us to realms beyond our everyday reality. Whether it is gazing at the stars, exploring ancient ruins, listening to captivating stories, or practicing meditation, these activities have a mystical quality that captivates and enchants us. They remind us that there is more to life than what meets the eye, and encourage us to embrace the unknown and let our imaginations soar..

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