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Mary Yap has spent the last year and a half trying to get farmers to fall in love with basalt. The volcanic rock is chock full of nutrients, captured as its crystal structure forms from cooling magma, and can make soil less acidic. In that way it’s like limestone, which farmers often use to improve their soil. It’s a little more finicky to apply, and certainly less familiar. But basalt also comes with an important side benefit: It can naturally capture carbon from the atmosphere.

Yap’s pitch is part of a decades-long effort to scale up that natural weathering process and prove that it can lock carbon away for long enough to make a different to the climate. “The bottleneck is getting farmers to want to do this,” Yap says.

Enlarge / A sign against a proposed carbon dioxide pipeline outside a home in New Liberty, Iowa, on June 4, 2023. (credit: Bloomberg via Getty Images )

A company backed by BlackRock has abandoned plans to build a 1,300-mile pipeline across the US Midwest to collect and store carbon emissions from the corn ethanol industry following opposition from landowners and some environmental campaigners.

Navigator CO₂ on Friday said developing its carbon capture and storage (CCS) project called Heartland Greenway had been “challenging” because of the unpredictable nature of regulatory and government processes in South Dakota and Iowa.

Navigator’s decision to scrap its flagship $3.1 billion project—one of the biggest of its kind in the US—is a blow for a fledgling industry that is an important part of President Joe Biden’s climate strategy. CCS projects attempt to lock carbon underground for decades, preventing it from adding to heat-trapping gasses in the atmosphere.

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On Friday, the US Department of Energy announced that it chose the first two sites to host facilities that will pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and permanently store it underground. The sites in Louisiana and Texas will be funded by money set aside in the bipartisan infrastructure bill that was passed early in President Biden's term in office. They represent a major step for the US, as they're not linked to a specific source of carbon emissions, and the CO ₂ they capture won't be used for extracting fossil fuels.

They also represent a major step globally, as each facility is expected to have 250 times the capacity of the largest currently in operation.

In the long-term, it's hoped that these facilities will operate as a service to reverse a century of unchecked carbon emissions. The danger, however, is that they'll eventually be used to offset ongoing emissions and provide a rationale for the continued use of fossil fuels.

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Synthetic fuel promises to put gasoline back in our future. Motorsport will be using it in 2026, and European Union law is using it as a stay of execution for the combustion engine. Advertising promises that a future without fossil fuels doesn't need to be one without gasoline. But burning petrochemicals, wherever they come from, is still burning petrochemicals, and synthetic fuels come at a cost their supporters aren't talking about.

We live in perilous times. The annual Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report has become blunter with every edition. The sixth, published this March , described the steps we need to take to "secure a livable future." Not a good future filled with an abundance of resources and biodiversity, just a survivable one. We're in this situation because we've spent the better part of two centuries digging up fossil fuels and burning them, putting carbon and other greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere and causing significant global warming.

But even though there's a domino effect to climate change—drought breeds drought as the land cooks and water seeps into the sea, for instance—mathematically, there is still time to act.

Enlarge / The tank on the right is one of a half-dozen in which carbon dioxide is separated from other gasses by a compression/decompression cycle. (credit: John Timmer)

Global emissions have continued to burn through the carbon budget, meaning each year brings us closer to having put enough CO ₂ in the atmosphere that we'll be committed to over 2°C of warming. That makes developing carbon-capture technology essential, both to bring atmospheric levels down after we overshoot and to offset emissions from any industries we struggle to decarbonize.

But so far, little progress has been made toward carbon capture beyond a limited number of demonstration projects. That situation is beginning to change, though, as some commercial ventures start to either find uses for the carbon dioxide or offer removal as a service for companies with internal emissions goals. And the Biden administration recently announced its intention to fund several large capture facilities.

But I recently visited a very different carbon-capture facility, one that's small enough to occupy the equivalent of a handful of parking spaces in the basement of a New York City apartment tower. Thanks to a local law, it's likely to be the first of many. CarbonQuest, the company that installed it, already has commitments from several more buildings, and New York City's law is structured so that the inducement to install similar systems will grow over time.

Enlarge / Environmental activists rally for accountability for fossil fuel companies outside of New York Supreme Court on October 22, 2019 in New York City. (credit: Drew Angerer / Getty Images)

ExxonMobil has been the prime target of activists and politicians angered by the oil industry’s efforts to block action on climate change. Now, newly disclosed documents confirm that the oil company’s reputational woes have extended into the industry itself and threatened to derail Exxon’s biggest climate proposal to date.

Last year, Exxon struggled to gain support from its peers when it proposed a cross-industry effort to build a carbon capture and storage hub in Houston, according to documents released by the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, which has been investigating the oil industry. Top executives at Shell, in particular, worried that joining with Exxon would present an “unacceptable risk” to the European oil major’s reputation.

“I am not interested in participating with any advocacy effort led by” Exxon, wrote Krista Johnson, Shell’s head of US government relations, in a July 2021 email to Gretchen Watkins, president of Shell USA. Johnson said their competitor was continuing to draw negative headlines and that “zero companies” were prepared to join an Exxon-led consortium at that time.

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It’s the year 2050, and humanity has made huge progress in decarbonizing. That’s thanks in large part to the negligible price of solar and wind power, which was cratering even back in 2022 . Yet the fossil fuel industry hasn’t just doubled down on making plastics from oil and gas—instead, as the World Economic Forum warned would happen, it has tripled production from 2016 levels. In 2050, humans are churning out trillions of pounds of plastic a year, and in the process emitting the greenhouse gas equivalent of over 600 coal-fired power plants . Three decades from now, we’ve stopped using so much oil and gas as fuel, yet way more of them as plastic.

Back here in 2022, people are trying to head off that nightmare scenario with a much-hyped concept called “bio-based plastics.” The backbones of traditional plastics are chains of carbon derived from fossil fuels. Bioplastics instead use carbon extracted from crops like corn or sugarcane, which is then mixed with other chemicals, like plasticizers, found in traditional plastics. Growing those plants pulls carbon out of the atmosphere, and locks it inside the bioplastic— if it is used for a permanent purpose, like building materials, rather than single-use cups and bags.

Enlarge / In addition to getting faster over the years, F1 cars have also gotten far more efficient. And that's only going to increase in the coming years. (credit: Jared C. Tilton/Getty Images)

When Formula 1 cars take to the track for the first time in 2026 , they'll do so powered by carbon-neutral synthetic fuels, part of the sport's "net zero by 2030" plan. It's a laudable goal, but, I confess, one I've sometimes questioned. After all, most of the carbon emitted during the course of an F1 weekend comes from the same sources as any other popular sport— the teams and fans traveling to and from the event. But after speaking with Pat Symonds, Formula 1's chief technical officer, I may have been missing the forest for the trees.

"In essence, yes, you're quite right. The total carbon footprint of the sport—of scope 1, 2—is just over a quarter million tonnes of CO ₂ equivalent, and the cars on the circuit represent 0.7 percent of that," Symonds explained to me. "So yes, your premise is true. But we try and take a much wider view. And what I think we have in developing a sustainable fuel and putting it in our race cars is an enormous multiplier effect. The 2 billion vehicles that are out there could use this fuel, and then the 400,000 people driving to [the US Grand Prix] isn't a problem," he said.

Formula 1 has changed quite a bit in the years since Liberty Media bought it at the end of 2016 with bigger ideas than simply sucking revenue out. Instead of pretending the Internet never happened, you can now watch races via F1's own streaming service, a service that has markedly improved over the past couple of years. In the US, a move to ESPN saw the sport go commercial-free during the actual races. And, of course, there's the whole Drive to Survive phenomena, which has boosted audiences worldwide—but particularly in North America, which next year will host grands prix in Austin, Texas; Miami; and Las Vegas.

Enlarge / Abundantly growing corn plants in a cornfield against a a sunny blue sky. (credit: Nancybelle Gonzaga Villarroya / Getty )

Tyler Lark, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, grew up among farms, working on a neighbor’s dairy, vaguely aware of the tension between clearing land to grow food and preserving nature. As an engineering student working on water projects in Haiti, he saw an extreme version of that conflict: forests cleared for firewood or to grow crops, producing soil erosion, environmental denudation and worsening poverty. “I think it was that experience that told me, ‘Hey, land use is important,’” he says.

He decided to study how farmers transform landscapes through their collective decisions to plow up grasslands, clear trees or drain wetlands—decisions that lie at the heart of some of the planet’s greatest environmental challenges, and also provoke controversy. Lark carries professional scars from recently stumbling into one of the fiercest of these fights: the debate over growing crops that are used to make fuel for cars and trucks.

About 15 years ago, government incentives helped to launch a biofuel boom in the United States. Ethanol factories now consume about 130 million metric tons of corn every year. It’s about a third of the country’s total corn harvest, and growing that corn requires more than 100,000 square kilometers of land. In addition, more than 4 million metric tons of soybean oil is turned into diesel fuel annually, and that number is growing fast.