Gernot Wagner, a climate economist at Columbia Business School at Columbia University, said this is the “moral hazard” of direct air capture — removing carbon from the atmosphere could be utilized by the oil and gas industry to continue polluting.
“It does not mean that the underlying technology is not a good thing,” said Wagner. Direct air capture “decreases emissions, but in the long run also extends the life of any one particular coal plant or gas plant.”
In 2023, Occidental Petroleum Corporation purchased the direct air capture company, Carbon Engineering Ltd, for $1.1 billion. In a news release, Occidental CEO Vicki Hollub said, “Together, Occidental and Carbon Engineering can accelerate plans to globally deploy (the) technology at a climate-relevant scale and make (it) the preferred solution for businesses seeking to remove their hard-to-abate emissions.”
China’s Solar PV installations dropped 85 percent in June after a planned subsidy phase-out. But far from a retreat from renewables, the country's energy policy reforms reflect an increasingly mature and competitive solar industry.
If political conditions in the United States and elsewhere require a rebranding of technologies formerly known as “climate tech,” so be it. The larger economic, technological, and geopolitical forces propelling everyone toward cleaner energy remain as strong as ever.
