From typhoons to wildfires, as the visible impacts of climate change mount, calls for mitigation through carbon drawdown are escalating. Environmentalists and many climatologists are urging steps to enhance biological methods of carbon drawdown and sequestration. Market actors seeing avenues for profit have launched ventures in mechanical–chemical carbon dioxide removal (CDR), seeking government support for their methods. Governments are responding. Given the strong, if often unremarked, momentum of demands for public subsidy of these commercial methods, on what cogent bases can elected lea...

As Guy Routh explained forty years ago in his magisterial book, The Origin of Economic Ideas, economics has preposterous origins. Since the time of Adam Smith, the new academic discipline was linked through the emerging class of merchants and manufacturers to the rich and powerful in general, and fulfilled the ideological role of presenting the emerging capitalist system as the best of all possible worlds.

New research from Stanford University professor Mark Z. Jacobson questions the climate and health benefits of carbon capture technology against simply switching to renewable energy sources like wind and solar. Carbon capture technology is premised on two possible approaches to reducing climate

Once seen as cost-prohibitive, pulling carbon dioxide out of air could become feasible thanks to a growing secondary market.