“Does decarbonization still have a future?” was the subject of a talk at the London School of Economics this year.
Though the answer was yes, there is a future, it was not a layup. The talk and Q&A that followed showed just how much the debate about emissions and regulations has changed since Donald Trump was reelected president after one term out of office.
The presenter, Mark Blyth, is an economist at Brown University. He has a generally green point of view. Yet his outlook is tempered by some knowledge about how markets work and respond to political incentives.
Blyth concluded that a lot of green policy is at least temporarily reversible. Still, he held out hope that the world will see gains anyway in cutting down carbon usage. These gains will come courtesy of great-power competition and moves that most regulators do not see coming.
The Brown economist pointed to the expansion of solar power in Pakistan as one unexpected success. The war in Ukraine created shortages, which spiked fuel prices.
That made the country’s gas-powered grid too expensive on top of it already being too unreliable for many. So Pakistanis bought a great number of Chinese-manufactured solar panels and installed them.
Now, roughly 20% of Pakistanis live off the grid, powering their businesses with the sun. The government has started begging them to come back, Blyth said.
Many Ways to Capture Carbon
There are two basic approaches to cutting down on the spread of carbon in the air. One approach, which the climate regulation debate had mostly revolved around to this point, is to cut down on emissions. Another approach is to find ways to pull more carbon out of the air itself.
There are a variety of carbon capture technologies, though not every aspect of these is immediately identifiable as a technology. On the low-tech end are solutions like creating natural carbon sinks with forests, green spaces and farmland that uses certain practices.
“Enhanced rock weathering” is a relatively new carbon capture farming technology. Certain rocks such as basalt are crushed and then spread over crop soil. This cuts down on the acidification of the soil, pulls more carbon out of the air and eventually locks much of that carbon away in the world’s oceans.
Then there are other technologies that look like technology, including mechanically filtering air to remove carbon and then burying it in the earth. Different strategies are being experimented with to either pull more carbon out of the oceans or make the seas better at absorbing carbon.
How Much to Capture?
The price of capturing carbon varies greatly by technology. Adam Baylin-Stern and Niels Berghout, former analysts for the International Energy Agency, pointed out that there is no single cost for carbon capture at this point.
For instance, it might cost $15–$25 per tonne of CO2 captured as part of producing ethanol or processing natural gas or $40–$120 per tonne of CO2 to capture carbon from processes such as mixing cement or generating electricity.
“Some CO2 capture technologies are commercially available now, while others are still in development, and this further contributes to the large range in costs”, Baylin-Stern and Berghout explained.
New technologies are more expensive, because research, development and refinement are costly. For promising solutions, that dynamic often changes over time, attracting investment and driving the innovation closer to financial viability via mass production.
More Capture Coming
The Bonn Climate Change Conference under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was held this June. Reporting from the conference, Noora Al Amer observed the conversation “shifting from whether carbon management belongs in climate strategies to how implementation actually happens”.
Al Amer is a representative of the Global CCS Institute, with CCS standing for carbon capture and storage. Institutional members supporting the think tank’s work include several governments that do not always play well together: Australia, China, Japan, Saudi Arabia, the UK and the US.
Among other things, the Global CCS Institute puts out a detailed report every year called Global Status of CCS. The most recent edition, in 2025, foresaw a future with a lot more carbon being captured, on a compounding basis.
“As of 28 July, 77 commercial CCS projects are in operation with a combined capture capacity of 64 million tonnes per annum (Mtpa)”, wrote the think tank’s CEO Jarad Daniels. “Importantly, an additional 44 Mtpa of capture capacity is currently under construction, meaning operating capacity is set to increase by nearly 70% in the coming years as these projects come online”.
As carbon capture technology scales up, its popularity is likely to spread. That is because it holds out the hope of achieving many of the green climate goals, but with very little of the pain.