The number that gets thrown around to dismiss tech CDR goes like this: forests and soils remove roughly 10 gigatonnes of CO₂ per year. Direct air capture removes about 1.3 million tonnes. That’s less than 0.02% of what natural systems do. So why bother?

The people making this argument have the data right and the logic backwards.

Natural carbon sinks doing 10 gigatonnes of work annually isn’t an argument against tech CDR — it’s a testament to how much biological infrastructure we’ve built up over millions of years, and a reminder of how catastrophically we’re undermining it. Net deforestation continues. The Amazon has regions that have flipped from carbon sink to carbon source. The 2023 fire season in Canada alone released more than a billion tonnes of CO₂. These aren’t anomalies; they’re a trend.

Natural systems are doing heroic work under pressure. They’re not a stable baseline we can plan around — they’re a stressed asset.

Tech CDR, at 1.3 million tonnes today, isn’t trying to replace forests. It’s building the infrastructure that exists when natural sinks fail — or when we need removal capacity that scales faster than ecosystems can grow. A forest planted today takes decades to reach its carbon storage potential. A DAC facility under construction today can be operational in 2-3 years. These aren’t substitutes; they operate on different timescales with different risk profiles.

The scale comparison also obscures where tech CDR is in its development curve. Solar power in 2005 was a rounding error on global electricity capacity. The argument “why bother with solar when coal does 99% of the work” would have been wrong then for the same reason the natural-vs-tech framing is wrong now: it mistakes current scale for future trajectory.

The actual argument for urgency runs the other direction from what critics intend. If natural sinks are already removing 10 gigatonnes per year and we’re still accumulating CO₂ in the atmosphere, that tells you something important about the scale of the problem. We’re emitting roughly 37 gigatonnes annually. Natural sinks remove about 10. The math requires everything working together — preserved natural systems, accelerated reforestation, and tech CDR scaled by orders of magnitude.

We need both. The gigatonne gap doesn’t argue against DAC. It argues against complacency about any of it.