After years of increasing ambition, global climate pledges have quieted down under the weight of geopolitical conflict and economic friction emanating from south of the border. Yet the physical reality of climate change hasn't stalled: We are no longer working to avoid a dangerous climate overshoot; we are living in it.

This shouldn’t be news. Scientists have known this day was coming for years, and in 2018 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) first explicitly incorporated carbon dioxide removal (CDR) into its global pathways, recognizing that reducing emissions as fast as possible was no longer enough. We are past the point of asking whether carbon removal is necessary to avoid the worst human and economic costs of climate change. The only question now is whether we will build the industry fast enough to contain the overshoot we are already living through.

Removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere isn't a silver bullet. It can't replace rapid decarbonization of our energy systems or fix ecosystems overnight. But treating CDR as an alternative to mitigation fundamentally misunderstands the moment we are in — the legacy of years of inaction is already in the........

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