(Bloomberg) -- The battle against climate change, so far, has focused on cutting carbon emissions into the atmosphere.
Ernest Moniz is focusing on the carbon that's already there.
The former U.S. energy secretary under President Barack Obama is calling for a 10-year, $10.7 billion federal effort to develop techniques to extract carbon dioxide from the air and lock it away. The world, he says, can't avoid dangerous levels of warming without it.
“We need to face the reality that meeting the Paris Agreement objective of limiting global warming to below 2 degrees Celsius will require taking carbon out of the atmosphere at massive scale,” Moniz said in a statement. “The good news is that there are a surprisingly large number of promising pathways.”
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The Energy Futures Initiative, a nonprofit Moniz founded, issued a detailed blueprint for the effort Tuesday, coinciding with Climate Week. The effort would bring together 10 federal agencies to fund research into a portfolio of ideas to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and either use it -- in products such as fuel or cement -- or store it in soil, plants, ocean sediments and underground reservoirs.
The report's authors acknowledge that some of the ideas would likely face opposition, including tweaking the genes of plants so they absorb more CO2. But that may not be the biggest problem.
The effort would need a determined and steady push from the White House, they note, while President Donald Trump has instead worked to undo the climate change programs that Obama and Moniz put in place.
To contact the reporter on this story: David R. Baker in San Francisco at dbaker116@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Lynn Doan at ldoan6@bloomberg.net, Will Wade, Carlos Caminada
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