Natural vs. Tech CDR: Scale Today vs. Scale Tomorrow
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. ...