There’s a Better Answer Than Electric Cars

Erich Sixt, chairman and chief executive officer of the Pullach, Germany-based global car rental company that bears his family’s name, recently described electric cars as a “costly political error” given their still inferior range, long charging times and the huge investment necessary to expand the charging infrastructure. It may have been a self-serving statement (renters don’t like them), but he may also well be right: If a paper published on Thursday correctly estimates the cost of extracting carbon dioxide from the air, regulators could do better to concentrate on that technology rather than on forcing vehicle electrification.

Carbon Engineering is a company co-founded by Harvard physicist David Keith and funded, among others, by Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Since 2015, the firm has been running a CO2 extraction plant in Canada, testing out a technology that was until recently rejected as too costly. Keith and his collaborators, who wrote the paper, have used an independent cost assessment to calculate that using the process they developed allows the capture of a metric ton of carbon dioxide at the cost of $94 to $232, depending on variable costs such as the price of natural gas. (Since energy is used in the process, about 0.9 tons of CO2 is actually removed from the atmosphere with each ton captured).