Geoengineering

There are effectively three strategies to managing climate change. The first approach is to decarbonize the economy through market-based regulations. The second and third methods fall under geoengineering and involve sequestering carbon directly from the environment to offset emissions, and reducing the solar energy that is converted to heat through albedo alterations. The time lag between carbon emissions and carbon regulation presents an opportunity for geoengineering because if strong regulations are not enacted soon the remaining 1,000 gigatons of CO₂ budget will be used up. Carbon dioxide removal techniques remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and convert it into different chemical compounds that do not have global warming potential. In direct air capture methods, carbon dioxide is filtered from the atmosphere and later sequestered. The clean coal effort has yielded several promising methods for scrubbing carbon from smoke stacks as well as directly from the atmosphere.