: Holiday Gifts That Actually Fight Climate Change #WorldNEWS If you’re stuck on what to buy as Christmas gifts this year, a Swiss start-up has a suggestion: some carbon dioxide. Climeworks AG

Holiday Gifts That Actually Fight Climate Change #WorldNEWS
If you’re stuck on what to buy as Christmas gifts this year, a Swiss start-up has a suggestion: some carbon dioxide.
Climeworks AG owns the world’s largest direct-air carbon capture facility, in Iceland, where dozens of machines suck in air and filter out the CO2, so it can be stored permanently underground and prevented from contributing to global warming. For 85 euros (about ), Climeworks will remove and store 85kg of CO2. You’ll be emailed a gift certificate to send to your loved one, helping them assuage their guilt over flying across the country, eating a lot of meat or other carbon-intensive activities they plan to engage in over the holidays. The company calls it “the world’s most sustainable gift. ”
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But while 85kg might sound like a reasonable amount of CO2, U. S. per capita greenhouse gas emissions are around 16 metric tons a year. That means you’d be removing only around 0. 5% of the carbon your giftee put into the atmosphere this year. Removing all 16 metric tons would cost you ,073. And if a lot of people wanted to do that, Climeworks would run out of gift cards pretty quickly: their plant can capture 4,000 metric tons of CO2 per year—or the annual emissions of 250 Americans.
So, does gifting a few kilos of CO2 really help the climate? In the long run, it arguably does. Experts say that carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology will form a small, but crucial, part of the climate fight. And the burgeoning CCS industry needs money to grow so it can reduce costs and make it possible to remove meaningful amounts of CO2. (Gift certificates bought now will help pay for Climeworks to build new plants—the actual CO2 removal you order will happen within five years, the company says. )
In any case, Climeworks’ sustainable Christmas gift idea is likely better than most, says Julio Friedmann, a carbon capture expert at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. “A lot of people want to undo the damage they cause through their emissions and this is a valid, verified way of doing it,” he says. “Fundamentally, Climeworks will do what they say theyre doing. ”

Halldor Kolbeins—AFP/Getty ImagesClimeworks factory near Reykjavik on October 11, 2021.
Trying to give a gift that helps rather than harms the climate is a greenwashing minefield: from unnecessary “eco-friendly” gadgets that your friends and family won’t use, whose production emits greenhouse gases, to less credible carbon offsetting schemes, which lack robust design and monitoring. It’s probably fair to say, as most climate experts I’ve consulted do, that the most sustainable thing to give at Christmas is nothing at all.