Return on Investments in Climate Technologies

As co-author of this article, Dr. Siegmar Pohl discusses whether the enhanced 2018 U.S. tax credit made emission negative carbon capture technologies viable. Climate technologies have long been frowned upon as not being financially viable and as scientifically risky. Climate technologies aim at halting climate change, for example, by producing ‘‘negative missions'' by way of carbon dioxide reduction and capturing. This paradigm may have begun to shift. In their 2014 report on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) found that almost all of the more than 100 scenarios it studied to keep the increase of the planet's temperature under 2 degrees Celsius involved negative emissions.