Carbon Removal Is Where EV Tech Was 20 Years Ago — And That’s Exactly Why We Must Act Now.
It’s easy to be cynical about carbon dioxide removal today.
The numbers seem too small.
The science & tech feels too new.
The impact isn’t yet visible at planetary scale.
(image source: From a bloomberg article)
But here’s the thing: Everything transformative once looked implausible and minuscule.
Learning from EV tech
In the early 2000s, electric vehicles were a punchline.
In 2015, the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) projected only 4.7 million battery electric vehicles would exist by 2040.
We crossed that mark in 2020.
And today?
China alone sells nearly 7.7 million battery electric vehicles every year.
Batteries have become the backbone of a global transformation on climate action — powering not just cars, but homes, grids, even planes.
All this happened not because we were already there —
but because people dared to believe we could get there.
💡 Innovation made that possible.
🔬 Science and tech scaled.
📜 Policy amplified it.
💰 Capital accelerated it.
That’s our lesson. And carbon removal is in a similar space.
We’ve scratched the surface — and that’s a start.
If you judged batteries or EVs in 2008 by their cost, performance, or adoption,
you might’ve concluded they’d never succeed.
But behind the scenes, China was building an industrial base,
subsidizing production, training engineers,
and pushing a vision that went against the grain.
And now they lead the world.
CDR today is where batteries were two decades ago:
Promising. Imperfect. Deeply necessary.
Enhanced rock weathering, ocean alkalinity enhancement, biomass-based removal —
all of them are in motion.
All of them are learning.
All of them will need time.
To judge them by today’s impact
is like judging a sapling by the size of its shadow.
Dream it. Build it. — New Beginnings
This reminds me of 2015. I was 13 years old.
The trailer for the new James Bond movie, Spectre, had just released.
The fantasy Bond car could go from 0 to 60 in 3.8 seconds.
Pure fiction. Conjured by a Hollywood writer.
That same year, Tesla launched its Model S P90D with its now-famous “Ludicrous Mode.”
It could go from 0 to 60 mph in just 2.6 seconds.
Reality. Built and scaled against odds.
🌱 What CDR needs now is not fatalism — it needs funding.
🔬 Not cynicism — but scientists, entrepreneurs, and believers.
Because this isn’t about offsets.
It’s about infrastructure — to experiment, learn, and build the scientific rigor to scale.
We’re not building a niche solution.
We’re laying the foundational infrastructure for carbon removal —
to undo climate change, restore degraded lands, and transform agriculture using science and data.
In that vein, I really like Ezra Klein’s book, Abundance.
It captures our philosophy:
Climate action must scale with industry, not against it.
Invention and infrastructure.
Growth and green goals.
They must move in lockstep.
“Abundance is a paradigm shift we need to renew the politics of plenty — and that starts with building the infrastructure and unleashing capital on all climate initiatives.”
— Ezra Klein, Abundance
“...we need to build and invent more of what we need.”
Need. Build. Invent.
The same way policy, capital, and tech gave us cheap solar and ubiquitous batteries,
they can give us carbon removal —
if we back it early, with courage and clarity.
The latest IPCC report states that carbon removal will be necessary in every net-zero scenario,
especially to neutralize hard-to-abate sectors.
That’s not a fringe role.
It’s foundational.
We’ve delivered a fraction of the 3.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide removal we need.
It’s a start.
But let’s not stand at the base of the mountain and declare it unscalable.
Let’s start climbing.