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Global leaders are banking on tech advances to solve climate change.

One leading idea is to capture carbon pollution from the air and then bury it underground forever.

It may sound practical.

There is no conceivable way it can work.

For more than 40 years, oil companies have been funding research at prestigious universities into climate change “solutions” that would not require the public to stop using oil and gas. Among their favored fixes is carbon capture and storage.

An investigation by ProPublica and Drilled has found that boosters of CCS have ignored evidence of the technology’s limitations, or overstated its potential, and convinced the world it could be effective.

They’ve promoted this idea despite the fact that for CCS to work at the scale now envisioned, the world would need to devote almost unimaginable resources. Even if that were done, it might still prove impossible to trap so much carbon dioxide inside the earth.

Optimism has reigned, however, because small tests have worked and because slow global response to climate change has left few other options.

In 2008, the International Energy Agency projected that to stave off dangerous levels of warming, we would have to be burying around 1.6 billion tons, or 1,600 megatons, of CO2 per year by 2025.

Since then, its optimistic projections have continued. But deployment of the technology has never come close to those ambitions.

Right now, globally, we’re permanently burying less CO2 than a single large power plant can emit in a year.

Some experts point to the CO2 that gets pumped into the ground to help extract oil as proof CCS works. But that process, called enhanced oil recovery, isn’t designed to function the same way and isn’t monitored as stringently.

Global leaders are betting on carbon capture working now more than ever.

The models used in the latest United Nations assessment presume the technology succeeds.

IEA representatives and U.N. modelers say their projections reflect what the world has to do to achieve its goals of averting extreme warming.

To make CCS work, we would need to capture CO2 pollution in four ways:

Trap it from smoke stacks.

Absorb it from the air with fast-growing grasses or trees, then capture it from those plants when they are burned for fuel.

Scrub it from the air, often using giant fans.

Then we would pump all of it into porous rock deep beneath the earth’s surface.

The U.N. analysis now suggests that countries must inject 6 billion tons of CO2 underground each year by the middle of the century.

Getting 6 billion tons of CO2 a year out of the atmosphere, though, is a daunting task.

Imagine the neighborhoods and parks........

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