Last week, carbon dioxide amounts in the Earth's atmosphere reached past 400 parts per million, according to Mauna Loa Observatory. This is the highest its been since humanity's beginning. ASU's Origins Project director Lawrence Krauss says mitigating climate change will need more than reducing emissions; we need to extract carbon that's already in the atmosphere.
Krauss writes in a Slate Magazine Future Tense article:
"Though there could be huge advantages to directly extracting carbon dioxide from our atmosphere instead of from its source, there has been almost no R&D funding to explore making it a reality. Meanwhile, literally hundreds of billions of dollars have been put into subsidies for fossil fuel exploration and production."